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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:35:10

The Truth is a Bomb

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	I'll be home for Christmas.
	You can count on me.
	Please have snow, and mistletoe, and presents under the tree.
	Christmas Eve will find me.
	Where the love light gleams I'll be home for Christmas If only in my dream
	So I guess Merry Christmas to everyone.
	I hope you're doing very well.
	It is the 24th.
	I'm sorry that we would cancel the show.
	I got struck down by a virus.
	And given that I have Norton underwear, that just seems entirely wrong.
	So I was not well, but I'm all better now.
	I hope you're having a great Christmas.
	But frankly, the statistical reality is those of you who aren't dealing with the massive spike in heart attacks that occur the Christmas season are probably not having a great Christmas.
	Christmas is not super great for free thinkers.
	However, that's kind of made up for by the fact that Thanksgiving is also not great for thinkers.
	Valentine's Day, not super great for thinkers.
	Birthdays, you know, we're not in the same place around the sun because the sun has moved.
	You know, we're going on a big corkscrew spiral through space, man.
	That's why time travel couldn't work.
	You go back five years, you're just floating in space.
	But it's not always the best season.
	Now, I say this preface to this story, which I guess is a little sad, or these stories which are a little sad, with the spoiler that it's a very happy ending.
	So, you know, we have no power.
	My whole family was sick.
	Fortunately, not all at the same time.
	And boy, did I ever get a sense of how bad it would be to be sick.
	As a single mom or single dad.
	Holy crap.
	Uh, it would be really rough.
	Unfortunately, my wife and I didn't get sick at the same time, so we could both take care of Izzy.
	But, uh, wow.
	You know, my heart goes out to people in that situation.
	That's the rough stuff.
	But, um, it's still been a fine Christmas, you know, and I haven't had a bad Christmas in probably 12 years, 13 years, I guess, since I last saw my mom.
	But, They were not fun as a kid.
	They were really not fun as a kid.
	There's something really sad about Christmas in that Christmas is a time when dysfunction becomes kind of inexcusable.
	Because a lot of times when families aren't getting along, there's usually some reason for it.
	There's something that's going on that's a problem.
	But Christmas, kind of, the work is set to one side.
	Usually, you know, there's some presents, there's family time, there's food, and there's proximity, right?
	I mean, everybody's in the same house and so on.
	And when things go bad over Christmas, to me, at least when I was a kid, when things went bad over Christmas, and they almost always did, at least, I say almost always because I can't remember a time when they didn't, but there's a kind of desperation For me, around Christmas, or at least it was when I was younger, like I mean a kid.
	I mean, I've been sort of on my own since I was 15, so it's sort of hard to say like when I was, I was still a kid when I was 15, but we got my mom to move out then, so.
	But there was a kind of desperation with Christmas when I was younger, which was that if we can't make it work over Christmas, there's something seriously wrong with the family, and there's no excuse that can really cut it.
	And so, you know, it is a time of togetherness.
	It is a time of closeness.
	To me, there's something vaguely depressing about having a day where you celebrate closeness.
	You know, I don't sort of have a, Mike, let's have a day of friendship every five years, you know, or, you know, let's have an hour of friendship every month.
	That is more a condemnation of the other time than it is an affirmation of that time.
	You know, it's like Valentine's Day.
	Or anniversaries, you know, let's be nice to each other on these days.
	It's like, um, really?
	I mean, that's not, I think, how it's supposed to work.
	But in my family, when I was a kid, our proximity was, would get pretty unbearable for us pretty quickly.
	This is before the days when everyone had their own tablets and computers and 16 TVs and cell phones and all that.
	I mean, you were jammed together like a Mars mission, for God's sakes.
	I mean, you were just face to face.
	And when things went wrong, they just went really badly wrong.
	And they went wrong in a kind of desperate way.
	Like, this should not be happening.
	Because there is that sentimentality around Christmas.
	You know, you have those Long-distance phone call ads back before Skype.
	You know, the granddad is calling his grandson, maybe for the last time.
	And I mean, just all, you know, togetherness.
	And then Christmas music.
	And there's nothing worse than crying to Christmas music.
	That's just a terrible thing.
	And yeah, my mom would get angry about something.
	There'd be something wrong with the meal or someone would have forgotten to pick up something that she felt was important.
	And she'd just get angry and bitchy and bitter and negative.
	And I mean, when people are just dedicated, to that kind of misery.
	When they actually, I believe, take tangible relief in refusing the simple demands of happiness, there's nothing you can do about it.
	There's nothing you can do about it.
	I'd sort of feel like I was trying to prevent a giant Pink Floyd style wall from caving in with my bare hands.
	Some great titanic oceanic tsunami style pressure was on the other side and I'd just be standing there trying to hold this wall.
	And the mortar would give way and the rocks, the bricks would shake and they would all collapse and then eventually I'd have to jump back because all the rocks were falling and the bricks were falling and it damaged me.
	And when things would go bad and there'd be the screaming and the pouting and the slamming of the doors and the sulking and the, you know, my brother and I sitting there at a half-made empty dining room table So broken, we're unable to comfort each other, which was really the story of our childhoods.
	There is something very desperately sad about all of that kind of stuff.
	And Christmas is that time when the standards we should have every day are very vivid to us.
	You know, a lot of days we'll fall short of our standards and we don't kind of notice because that's that hurly-burly of the everyday.
	But a Christmas is a time where there's kind of not really any excuse to fall short of your standards.
	I'm not talking, you know, absolutely perfect standards.
	Nobody has any problems and everybody talks about it.
	I don't mean any of that.
	I just mean the basic, we like each other standards.
	We're having fun together standards.
	And I don't mean like everybody, if everybody was in the same house 365 days a year, it would all be perfect.
	I just mean, you know, for that day or those couple of days where everyone's around, the standards are inescapable.
	And so many families fall short of those standards.
	You know, so many divorces happen right after Christmas.
	Because, you know, the mom or the dad, usually the mom says, well, I don't want to spoil things for Christmas.
	And then the New Year's resolutions come along, which is a great way to make even January something you can self attack for.
	But it is, it is sad.
	Having standards can make you very sad.
	I think that's really what I'm trying to say.
	Having standards for people, which is talk about your feelings, don't act out, don't be petty, don't be immature, don't be bitter, don't be manipulative, be honest, be curious about who I am.
	I'd like to be curious about who you are.
	Let us reason together, let us speak together, let us love under the same roof.
	Christmas is the time when the mask of busyness and the habits of distraction fall away, and the relationships are what they are.
	And to raise standards increases pain.
	It's the old saying from the Bible, he who increases knowledge increases sorrow, and he who increases standards increases disappointment.
	And we do.
	We face that fork in the road.
	Am I going to keep my standards low and avoid disappointment and then never, ever get anything better?
	Or am I going to raise my standards, court disappointment, and maybe get something better?
	Well, I'm the kind of guy that if I'm unjustly imprisoned, I'm getting the tattoos.
	I'm the kind of guy that if I'm unjustly imprisoned, I'm plotting day and night to get out.
	I'm the great escape guy.
	I would suggest to not sit in the prison cell of low standards.
	To not put up with things that are so woefully deficient.
	But to raise your standards.
	Raising your standards opens the locks.
	Raising the standards opens the locks, and then you get all the anxiety of the unfamiliar, all the opportunity of the unfamiliar, all the excitement of the unfamiliar.
	You know, we used to be explorers as a species, now almost all the world is known.
	But better relationships remains the undiscovered country, right?
	The moon beyond the moon.
	The planet on the other side of the sun that we can never see.
	But we can get there.
	You raise your standards.
	If you notice that there's disappointment in your relationships at Christmas, don't self-attack, in my opinion.
	Examine the standards.
	Examine what is missing.
	Talk about what is missing.
	The only thing sadder than a sad house is a sad house where nobody is talking about the sadness.
	Because that is a house that is sealed from change.
	That is a house that might as well be Entombed in ice at the bottom of the deepest well in the world.
	Raise your standards.
	Accept the pain.
	That's how we got out of the caves.
	That's how we got here.
	That's why we're talking to each other.
	Continue to be an explorer of the better.
	Continue to raise your standards.
	Continue to notice deficiencies and don't slide back into habit.
	When the festive season is over, give yourself something to celebrate this Christmas.
	That's it for my introduction.
	Thank you everybody for your patience and let's get to the first caller.
	All right, Skyler, you're up first.
	Go ahead.
	Hi, Stefan.
	Can you hear me?
	I can.
	How are you doing Skyler?
	I'm doing, I'm doing all right, I guess.
	I can't say great, but.
	It's a pleasure to talk to you.
	Technically, you just did say great, but you can't say it honestly.
	I'm sorry?
	Well, you said you can't say great, but you said great.
	So to be annoyingly precise.
	It's compulsive.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It's not, I'm not saying it's healthy.
	I'm just saying that I haven't had a coffee this afternoon.
	So what's on your mind?
	What's, what's got you down?
	Well, I would say the, the intro you just said had to do a lot with it.
	Um, This is the first year.
	I'm 19 years old right now.
	This is the first year I've ever spent Christmas without my family.
	I'm not really moved out, but I've just been kind of, like, lingering at friends' houses.
	And I've been raising my standards with the people I surround myself by.
	But at the same time, sometimes I'll excuse the people that I'm sort of, like, staying with.
	And I'm usually really good about, I think, Of defining my values and living in integrity with them, at least at a conscious level.
	But I'm having a difficulty staying rational when I get into conversations.
	It's like the moment I, I feel anxiety, I become unable to, to, to understand the logic, which brought me to some of the theories that I have that I stand by pretty strongly.
	Like for example, I was talking to my grandmother recently and she asked me if I was going to be home for Christmas.
	And I told her I didn't know and I was talking about how I got into philosophy recently.
	And I just, at that moment, I decided I just need to be very honest.
	I can't say that I was completely honest in this conversation, but I remember at one point I was just shaking and it was like, I just could not think.
	And I was very impressionable to everything she said.
	And it's the same with my mother, especially.
	My mother tries to put guilt on me when I tell her that she should be accountable for something.
	Right.
	And I've been going to therapy, and I think I have some good theories about why it's happening.
	But I was also interested to get your take on it.
	Now, when you say why it's happening, do you mean the shaking, the terror?
	Well, I know that's Probably fear of judgment.
	And probably the reason why... No, sorry, to be technical, hopefully not quite as an annoying fashion, we are not such scaredy cats that judgment makes us afraid.
	I'm sure that there are people in your life, past, present, who don't like you much, right?
	Yes.
	Do they keep you awake at night?
	I'm sure, especially as a child.
	No, but now?
	Not people in the past, no.
	Okay, so you know that there are people in the world who judge you in a negative fashion, right?
	Yes.
	Oh, that Skylar, he's whatever, right?
	You know, like in this Noam Chomsky video I just did, somebody in the comments said, that Steph is so arrogant, right?
	Now, I probably said like a hundred words in the whole interview.
	I was perfectly respectful, perfectly polite, asked him questions, gave him room to give his viewpoint, thanked him for the work that he's done, particularly in analyzing U.S.
	foreign policy, and hung up.
	How you can squeeze arrogance out of that rock is amazing to me, but people just come up with their stuff, right?
	Yeah.
	Or people, and I don't want to make this about me, I'm just sort of telling you what judgment is and how inconsequential it is.
	Somebody else was posting, um, saying, Steph, you gotta post that Gnome Chomsky video, you coward!
	I bet you got totally schooled and you're frantically trying to find some way to edit it to make you look better!
	Well, shh!
	You know, fess up, you coward!
	Post that video!
	Like, sorry, we've had a power failure.
	And, you know, and then there's this whole Reddit thing somebody sent to me, which I read with some amusement, where people are going off on these completely insane crusades, trying to figure out And why I haven't posted the Noam Chomsky video?
	Well, he posted something last week!
	You know, and it's like, yeah, well, we've got some stuff in the pipe, but you know, before I got sick, I recorded a whole bunch of stuff cause I didn't know when I was going to be able to record again.
	So, and you know, you know, people make a lot of stupid noises out of their mouth pipes, right?
	Yes.
	So what I'm pointing out is judgment is not a technically accurate enough term And when you are talking about a fear as central, which I completely understand, as central as the truth terror that you experienced, saying that you're afraid of judgment, I think is not accurate, because there's lots of judgment that occurs in the world that probably doesn't bother you much.
	Like, do you know that there are a couple hundred million Muslims who believe that you're going to hell?
	Yes.
	Not to mention a couple hundred million Christians, right?
	I definitely know that.
	You're going to hell, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	So, does that keep you awake at night?
	Um, I would not say so.
	So, there's lots of people who judge you, lots of people who judge you negatively, lots of people who are drooling at the prospect of you burning in hellfire forever with Satan shitting hot lava on your nutsack from here to eternity, and it doesn't bother you that much, right?
	No.
	So, if it's not judgment, what is it?
	And I'm not saying it's not judgment, but it's not just judgment, right?
	Hmm.
	Maybe I'm afraid of feeling like I'm crazy.
	Or psychological neglect?
	So you're afraid of feeling like you're crazy?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Well, to be more precise, again, to be more precise... I'm afraid that I'm not... I'm not capable... Wait, I don't want to get too many statements in a row.
	To be more precise, it's not that you're afraid of feeling crazy, I think you're afraid of someone thinking that you're crazy in a way that transfers to you.
	Again, we want to be really precise about that.
	Can you repeat that?
	It's not like if you say, well, I think I'm afraid of feeling crazy, that's not enough.
	You don't look at the Bible and feel evil, right?
	Yes.
	I do not.
	Even though, if not, you've rejected, I assume you're an atheist or whatever, right?
	So it's not that you're afraid of feeling crazy, you're afraid of being in close contact with someone who will think that you're crazy in a way that transfers to you.
	Okay.
	Does that make sense?
	So that I might believe it.
	Like if I say someone in India has a cold, are you scared?
	No.
	If I say that the guy you're about to get in the elevator with has a cold and has just sneezed, are you scared?
	Cautious, yeah.
	Yeah, because his cold can transfer to you.
	The guy's cold in India can't, right?
	Yes.
	So, again, we're just trying to be really precise here so that we can figure out what the issue is, because if it's something as intangible as being judged or feeling crazy, that's going to follow you everywhere, right?
	Yes.
	I mean, like, with all people.
	With all people everywhere, right?
	Because there will always be people who will judge you negatively.
	Yes, it's true.
	Right.
	The only people who may not judge you negatively are for three minutes after you're dead.
	Minute four.
	You know, I'll make a video about you and whatever.
	So to be really precise, right, if I say that guy in the elevator has a cold and he just sneezed, you're like, I'm not getting in the elevator.
	And then you're not scared of getting a cold in that moment, right?
	Because you've taken some actions to not become infected, right?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So we're starting to get a little bit more precise.
	So you were talking to your grandmother.
	And you wanted to tell the truth about what you thought.
	Yes.
	And what that is, is the truth about who you are.
	Right?
	What we think and who we are, not separate things.
	Philosophy is identity.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	You're not saying, I have an idea about the ancient prehistoric continent called Pangaea.
	Or, you know, I have an idea about what Avatar 2 is going to be about, right?
	You have fundamental thoughts about reality, and virtue, and love, and relationships, and gods, and countries, and right?
	Philosophy is not something that you believe.
	Philosophy is not something that you have.
	It is not a discipline you pursue.
	It is who you are.
	And it's not just who you are, it is who everyone is.
	Everyone is made up of philosophy.
	Philosophy is the DNA of the personality.
	Everyone is built from philosophy.
	And when you are speaking the truth about what you really believe, about what you really think, you are going naked into a sword storm for the most part.
	Because you are revealing in a make-or-break moment who you really are.
	You know, there's that old story about a wizard, or the devil, cannot harm you if he doesn't know your name.
	Right?
	So when Bilbo's talking to Smaug the dragon, he says, oh, you seem familiar with my name, but I don't know your name.
	I don't know why Smaug is a ballerina, but anyway.
	And Bilbo doesn't want to give him his name, because if they know your name, they have power over you.
	This is an old voodoo belief, an old superstition, an old magic tradition.
	If they know your name, they have power over you.
	What that means is that if somebody knows what you really care about, if they know your identity, you give them power over you.
	Right?
	Yes.
	Because once they know what you really care about, they can either help you or they can fuck you up in truly demonic ways.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	The greatest trust exercise in the world is speaking the true depths of what you care to the people in your life.
	That is revealing yourself with no armor, with no pretense, with no mask, with no defense.
	And you are passing enormous power into the hands of those around you.
	And if you ever want to find out somebody's true nature, give them power over you.
	Give them power over you and see how they handle it.
	But you are giving them your true name.
	You are giving them the keys to the kingdom of you.
	Uh-huh.
	Does that make any sense?
	It makes a lot of sense.
	It's – even if I want to make myself vulnerable to people, it's still very difficult for me to even think –
	It's like all the long-term memories I've made and all the rationalizations I've made about things that let me stand by my values just disappear and I feel disoriented whenever I am challenged.
	Well, okay, but you have to be, again, and this is tricky stuff, but you have to be very precise.
	The really important thing about understanding relationships is to slow everything down.
	You're trying to see how a baseball player hits a ball at the top leagues with no slowdown in the camera, right?
	You can't.
	Blink, gone, right?
	So the important thing with relationships is to slow down and to recognize that we, particularly for people who were around us when we were children, we have a desperate, perfectly natural, biologically healthy desire to please them.
	Which means, if someone in our family desperately does not want us to talk about something, what will we feel?
	Anxiety.
	Yeah.
	We will feel their terror.
	Our feelings are not within us.
	Our feelings are communal.
	Our feelings are shared.
	So it's really important to figure out which feelings come from you and which feelings come from other people.
	Families have live wires directly into our hearts, and I'm not saying they're consciously pushing buttons or pushing electricity through those live wires, but nonetheless it happens on a continual basis, and we continually mistake our feelings for the desires of others.
	It's called not having boundaries.
	Boundaries are knowing which feelings come from you and your values and which feelings come from other people and their values.
	And by values I don't mean valuable.
	I just mean their preferences.
	So I'll give you a very brief tiny example.
	Okay.
	Let's say that you are an undercover security guard in Walmart and you see Some woman steals something.
	Now, you go up and you clap your hand on her shoulder and you say, ma'am, I just saw you shoplift that item.
	You need to come with me.
	What does she desperately want you to do?
	To not interrogate her.
	Yeah, to let her go.
	It's Christmas.
	I've just done it once.
	It was a mistake.
	I'm so sorry.
	She'll burst into tears.
	She desperately does not want to get caught.
	She doesn't want to suffer the negative consequences of shoplifting, right?
	Yes.
	Now, if you didn't know that it was her feelings that you were processing, you would say, well, what's weird is I have this job to catch a shoplifter, I went up to catch her, and then suddenly I felt terrified of catching her.
	That would be a failure to distinguish between your emotions and the emotions of the thief, right?
	Yes.
	So my question is, why don't you try the story with your grandmother again?
	Take it slowly and try to be precise.
	And I don't mean echo me.
	I mean, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
	But I think that there's good reasons to believe that this may be a useful way to try it.
	Can you try saying the story again, but take it slowly and figure out whose feelings are whose.
	Okay.
	I don't think I was talking to her about philosophy, but I was giving her an intro about how I got into it.
	Okay.
	Hang on a sec.
	So I'm going to be just an annoying coachy guy here and I apologize for that.
	That's fine.
	So what did we say philosophy was?
	It's our own thoughts.
	Who we really are.
	So I was trying to talk to my grandmother about who I really am.
	Right?
	Yes.
	And then what happens?
	What happened in me?
	I avoided certain concepts, like I didn't bring up anarchism or atheism, but I just talked about philosophy in an abstract sense.
	All right, so let's try that again.
	When you say you avoided certain concepts, You falsified and withheld who you really are.
	I don't mean this in any critical way, but we need to be accurate, right?
	Yes, it's true.
	So you falsified and withheld what was really important to you with your grandmother.
	Yes.
	And then what happened?
	I...
	in the cup with me or with her?
	Well, what happened sort of objectively?
	Oh, you said you felt shaky, right?
	That in the beginning of the conversation.
	I started the conversation calling her, telling her that I felt a lot of anxiety.
	Okay, and what did she say when you said you felt a lot of anxiety?
	She showed concern.
	She asked me why.
	And I told her that I didn't want to lie to her and I wanted to have an honest conversation with her.
	Right.
	And what did she say to that?
	She says, I really want you to be honest with me.
	Okay.
	And did you believe her?
	Um, I believed it.
	To, not completely, no.
	Right.
	I mean, who's going to say, no, I want you to continue being dishonest with me, right?
	Yes, it's true.
	You know, I mean, unless Bill Clinton is coaching you for testimony in courtroom, that's not going to be happening, right?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	You're too young to get that joke.
	Sorry about that.
	You're going to read some early Ann Coulter.
	Anyway, so most people, when They hear the word honesty, at a conscious level they kind of know what it means, but at an unconscious level they really know what it means.
	You know that we live in a society of coercion, that there are no gods, that family is not automatic virtue, that respect must be earned, that the non-aggression principle is universal, that spanking is immoral, like all the stuff we talk about here, everybody knows that deep down.
	Otherwise, more people would be surprised by the truth.
	But what happens is, the moment you start speaking any essential truth about who you are, the vast majority of people in your life will be like, holy fuck, is he actually doing that?
	Shields up, Captain!
	Stop!
	Reject!
	But, I cannot tell him to stop talking.
	I cannot tell him to stop talking, because that would be to be conscious of the fact that I don't want to know who he is, I don't want to know the truth, I don't want to unplug.
	from the Matrix.
	So I must create huge resistance within him to speaking the truth so that I'm not exposed to the truth and I'm also not exposed to my unwillingness to be exposed to the truth.
	Yes.
	So people will say, yes, I do want to hear the truth.
	And then when you begin to speak it, their resistance forms in your mind.
	You know, One of the most common myths is magic, right?
	And magic is the idea that words and gestures can change matter.
	Now first of all of it, it's true.
	Words and gestures can transfer massive amounts of resources by redefining theft as taxation, right?
	Government as order, right?
	The market has waged slavery.
	I mean, so magic is very real.
	Magic is very true.
	And it's primitively expressed in dragon fire, right?
	That the dragon can breathe fire and destroy things.
	Well, words can destroy things.
	The fundamental power in the world is language.
	It's words.
	That is the most fundamental power.
	And spells are kind of, so that's, you know, in Dungeons and Dragons, you sound pretty cool to have played that.
	Dungeons and Dragons, they have like cones of silence or silence spells or whatever and they have invisibility spells and fireballs and all this kind of cool stuff, but these myths are common throughout the world.
	That words can change matter and that words, there's charm animal, there's charm person, there's turn friends into frenemies and enemies into pancakes or whatever it is, right?
	But it's the idea that words can change reality and words can silence people.
	And words, in other words spells, are combat.
	Right?
	And this is a very serious metaphor.
	Magic is very serious.
	Because words are the most fundamental power.
	Because laws are words.
	And laws are the physics of evil.
	Because they are opinions with guns.
	And the silence that you feel around people who you wish to reveal yourself with is a kind of an inhibiting magic.
	It's like somebody can cast a spell that makes your heart race and your mouth close.
	And this is a very real phenomenon.
	I think that if you were to hook up someone about to reveal the truth of themselves to a resistant family, I think you would see about the greatest neurological stimulation that it's possible to have for a human being who's not in the process of being directly struck by lightning.
	Wow.
	It makes a lot of sense.
	So, you were Afraid of the truth, but the reality is that you, this is, we just go back to empiricism, are you afraid of the truth?
	When you hear the truth in philosophy shows like this or wherever you get your truth, does it freak you out?
	Occasionally.
	More like I'm in awe.
	Yeah, it's exciting, right?
	It's scary, it's exciting, but you're not like... Exhilarating.
	It's not like you picked up a rock that's boiling hot and you're like, fuck, I'm not doing that again, right?
	Yeah.
	You want to juggle this lava.
	Yeah, I get it.
	I get it.
	So you are not scared of the truth.
	So when you feel fear on the brink of expressing the truth, that fear cannot be you.
	You know, we fundamentally are not afraid of ourselves.
	This is a great secret.
	We are fundamentally not afraid of ourselves, and even more fundamentally, we will never attack ourselves.
	You know, I don't wake up in the middle of the night with my hand strangling me.
	I don't wake up in the middle of the night with my fist punching my nose.
	You know, I don't go for a run and kick myself in the leg.
	I don't self-attack physically.
	We're not born to do that.
	That's not what our limbs are for.
	Reference the pre-show chat for what our limbs are for.
	No, but that's not what we're for, right?
	And we only self-attack that which is bad for us.
	Like, I'm glad that my immune system caught this virus and I hope it frankly tortured it before it buffed it because it was really nasty.
	And I hope it tortured it enough that its descendants will never go near anyone bald again.
	That would be excellent.
	But So we don't self-attack and we don't fear the truth.
	Because to fear the truth would be to fear ourselves.
	We fear other people and their attack.
	We are not cowards.
	We do not fear an airplane flying overhead.
	We fear attack.
	And we fear rejection from our clan.
	Because that's a basic survival mechanism, right?
	When you lose your clan in the Stone Age, you're kind of alone, nobody guards you while you sleep, and if you're a woman, in particular, you're toast, right?
	Yeah.
	So we fear attack, and we fear abandonment, because these are both the same thing.
	Attack and ostracism are both the same thing.
	Yes.
	For the children.
	Right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And there's not much we can do about that because that's just like saying, "I don't want to feel hungry." I don't want to have sexual desire.
	I mean, that's just not how it works.
	It's not how we're built, right?
	We have to accept the primacy of that which served us biologically throughout our development.
	I mean, you can try and get rid of that stuff, but that's a chaotic religious quest, right?
	It's trying to turn your body into a ghost and your mind into dogma.
	That's just not going to happen.
	Yeah.
	Now, your grandmother is Double matriarch, right?
	She's mom plus mom, right?
	Actually, um, my stepfather's mom.
	Oh, I think I may have lost the thread a little there.
	And how, sorry, how old were you when your stepfather came into your life?
	Um, I was, I think three years old.
	So biologically it's the same deal for you, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, as far as you're, um, it's one of the, I'm feeling some anxiety actually bringing this up now.
	Um, that's one of the reasons why I have stopped visiting my mom.
	I actually haven't even talked to him since I started listening to your podcast about in April.
	I read Real Time Relationships.
	I probably read that back in April.
	And it's changed my whole perception of everything, all the relationships I've had.
	But I'm just terrified to talk to him.
	And it's because of like this past abuse.
	And I can't even think about bringing it up to her and telling her that's the reason why.
	That's one of the reasons.
	Right.
	And what's the worst case scenario?
	What is the worst case scenario that could happen?
	She's gonna get really angry and say you're lying or do what my mom does and say like, he's done so many great things for you.
	You're being selfish, ungrateful.
	Oh.
	So your concern, your fear, is that your parents will side... sorry, your grandmother and your mom might side with the abuser, right?
	Yeah.
	One of the abusers.
	They're all implicated, right?
	They're all adults.
	Yes.
	And what empirical reason would you have to believe that's not the case?
	I don't I don't.
	I'm not going to try and talk you out of your fear.
	I don't believe in that at all.
	I think fear is a goddamn healthy response.
	I think fear is essential.
	I think all of our emotions are essential.
	So I'm not one of these, well, what's your worst case scenario?
	Well, so what if that happens?
	So don't worry about it.
	I'm not that guy.
	Maybe that's the best mental health practices.
	I don't know.
	I'm not a professional.
	This is just what I think.
	This is what I've experienced.
	This is what I've seen.
	I certainly don't have any proof I could, like solid proof I could say.
	You have proof.
	Yes, you have proof that we are empiricists.
	No, you have proof that they side with abusers.
	How do you know?
	Because they minimize things.
	Well, you said you're 19, right?
	Yes.
	He came into your life when you were 13, right?
	So for 16 odd years.
	I meant three years old.
	Sorry.
	It's three, three.
	Sorry.
	You said three.
	Sorry.
	I'm getting my digits all off.
	So for, for 16 years, Odd, whatever, give or take.
	And I actually moved away when I was in 8th grade to live with my father and my mom.
	Okay, so you experienced this abuse for some years and did any of the adults in your life do anything about it?
	I remember it was really bad when I was in kindergarten, first grade.
	I was really afraid to talk to my mom about it.
	Cause I didn't know if he would tell her and then when I was alone with him again, he might start screaming at me.
	And I just, for a while I was minimizing it, but I was one time I was really putting it into proportion.
	I remember this thought I had a daydream I had as a child during this time.
	And I remember like he would just go in these screaming fits in my face and spitting and screaming in my face and I would dissociate and But I, the reason why I know it was so bad is because I remember having this thought of my escape plan and how I, if he got too angry, I would just go next door and like bang on the neighbor's door to have him save me.
	I didn't know if he was going to hurt me, but he just seemed so out of control.
	I didn't know if, if I told my mom, it would like cross the line and then it would result to physical abuse or whatever, but I was terrified of him.
	Of course you were.
	I mean, imagine having, you were, you said three or four, is that right?
	At this time I was in kindergarten or first grade.
	That's a four or five?
	Five or six.
	Four or five, six.
	I don't know.
	My daughter's not into those things, so I don't know.
	But yeah, so imagine a guy 30 or 40 feet tall right now screaming in your face.
	You didn't know, a giant, if he was going to rip your head off or throw you across the room or something, right?
	You would be in mortal fear of your life.
	Of course.
	I mean, any man who screams at children, I mean, it's so Ridiculous.
	Sympathetic.
	I don't even know what to say.
	Other than I'm incredibly sorry that you experienced anything like that in any way shape or form.
	That is unbelievably wretched to experience as a child.
	It continually stopped right when I became bigger.
	Yeah.
	Slowed down.
	Dampered off.
	Yeah.
	No, I get it.
	When the power begins to diminish, a miraculous amount of self-control can occur.
	How heroic.
	I mean, I almost have more respect for abusers who just keep going.
	Because then at least they, they, in a weird way, they, they say they can't stop, you know, like the abusers who like hit you in front of a cop or something.
	I almost have more respect for that.
	Anyway, there's not neither here nor there, but Do you know if he screamed at anyone else in the household?
	Probably my mother.
	I don't really remember that well but actually I do have a memory.
	I remember one time my mom and them were like fighting and I just was a kid and I walked upstairs and I didn't really I remember I didn't really know how to make sense of what was going on but their doorway to the room was open And I was just looking in the room and they're just yelling at each other.
	I'm just like staring at them.
	They see me staring at them.
	And my mom just said like, stop arguing.
	He's right there.
	Oh yeah.
	Because you shouldn't hear any screaming, right?
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	Well, I'm, I've been incredibly sorry.
	I'm incredibly sorry.
	Now, if you were to, is this part of what you wanted to talk about with your grandmother?
	Um, yeah.
	And it's not, it's not only my grandmother.
	It's, I guess the most important thing is my mother, but I can't, I couldn't even think about telling her at the time.
	Yeah, I can understand that.
	And what about since?
	Especially telling my grandmother how my mom has reacted and ignored it and how I haven't talked to my stepdad.
	I just, everything I've told you, I couldn't even think about telling her all these things.
	Was it scary to tell me?
	It was not.
	I mean, I'm shaking right now, but it's just emotional.
	I'm not afraid to tell you now.
	Right.
	And do you know one of the reasons why it's not scary to tell me?
	Because I know you're virtuous?
	Yes, and that's... I appreciate you saying that, but I would say that the main reason is that You will not be attacked by my guilty conscience.
	Self-attack is the scar tissue of other people's guilty conscience.
	Okay.
	Can you elaborate?
	I'm just enjoying somebody saying that to me.
	Normally people are like, your videos are so long.
	Anyway.
	Um, well, Does it cost me anything for you to tell me that you were abused as a child?
	Like emotionally on for your part?
	Well, I mean, does it, am I, am I guilty?
	Am I responsible for it?
	Did I do it?
	Did I fail to prevent it?
	Did I even know you?
	No.
	So in terms of my conscience, it costs me nothing.
	I'm obviously not happy to hear it and I'm glad that you're telling me and I'm very sorry that it happened as you can imagine.
	But it does not cost me to hear you tell me that you were abused as a child.
	I don't self-attack because you were abused as a child.
	Yes.
	If I were your father and you told me that I abused you as a child That would be a very different situation, right?
	If I was telling him this, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, if I were your father, right, then it would be a very different situation.
	Yes.
	Because I would feel completely terrible, down in my core of cores, I would feel completely terrible about what I had done.
	Now, I would have had a history of, when I felt bad, becoming abusive.
	So when people begin to self-attack, and they can't handle it, or won't handle it, they turn that attack on other people.
	And they typically turn their attack on children, because other people have the fucking right to leave them.
	Which is why children generally get more abused than wives, and why wives got more abused before they had the legal right to leave.
	More, right?
	Suicidality and depression went down for women when they had the right to leave their marriages.
	Wow.
	So because children can't leave, then all the powerless little shits in the world who can't handle their own fucking self-aggression turn on children like a bunch of pussy-ass cowards and shit all over the children rather than deal with their own crap.
	And it's cowardly and it's contemptible and it's revolting and it's disgusting.
	Holy shit.
	And it's preventable.
	Go ahead.
	It is extremely cowardly.
	It's disgusting.
	I mean, Jesus, a four-year-old, a five-year-old, are you kidding me?
	How'd you feel about some big fight where... I actually have to bring this up also.
	I remember one time I was in the shower and I was thinking about it and I just thought about my little brother who's about, I think, five years old right now.
	And then I thought about his height and about the height of my stepfather.
	My little brother doesn't live with him.
	He actually lives with my stepdad or my mom or my dad and stepmom.
	So he lives in my house that I live in right now.
	But I was just thinking about what I would do if I came up and saw him screaming at him like he screamed at me.
	And the thought just made me furious.
	Like I wanted to call him and start Just screaming at him, like just full of lungs screaming.
	Yep.
	And I had all these violent fantasies and I was just so angry and I didn't know how to handle it.
	Well, I think you did handle it just right.
	I hope you accepted the violent fantasies.
	I hope that you obviously didn't go and hit anyone with a bat, but you accepted them as valid expressions of violated and outraged toddlerhood.
	Yeah.
	My daughter has been very clear to me.
	me.
	My daughter has said to me repeatedly, if you are ever mean to me, I will never listen to you again.
	And she's right.
	I say, that's absolutely correct.
	I said, if I make a mistake, I hope you will accept an apology.
	But no, if I'm repeatedly mean to you, you should not listen to me.
	I mean, I don't think I've not been mean to her once, and I've never seen her be mean to anyone either.
	But yeah, no, she's very clear.
	Because occasionally we see kids being mistreated.
	Occasionally I will talk to the parents, but if my daughter's there I won't.
	And we talk about it.
	I don't want her to have that stuff go unremarked upon in her life.
	Because children listen and observe everything.
	And they most observe the lessons that are obvious but are not taught.
	And so she needs to understand that we are different from a lot of families.
	I have something to interject a few.
	No, go ahead.
	Like at this moment, as I'm talking to this, talking this over, it feels real.
	I feel the emotions to it.
	These events, they, they, they feel, they feel like they happened.
	But when I'm getting in these conversations with my mother, she'll say one word or she'll say something that will, she has this ability to, where I feel, Like I'm almost lying about it.
	Like I'm just making it up and I almost believe it.
	Yes, but that's not you.
	That's her lying to herself.
	But why is it that I don't have confidence in my own perceptions?
	Well, I guess for the same reason that if you've been hit by a train once, you don't like to linger on the train tracks, do you?
	No.
	Right?
	If you've been through years of abuse, Your body, if you're going to put yourself in a situation of re-abuse, your body is going to tell you not to.
	It's called post-traumatic stress disorder, technically.
	I don't know what the hell it is in terms of medical or psychological stuff, but it is being reactivated by the similar experiences.
	It's why vets are not very comfortable around fireworks, right?
	Because it reminds them.
	of the traumatic experiences.
	And you trying to assert your needs with your parents is a reactivation of the traumatic moment, right?
	And your body is saying, no, no, no, no, no.
	We are not putting that fucking fork into the socket again.
	Because last time we could see our own fucking forearm bone.
	Right?
	Yes.
	We have a pretty useful part of our body which says, don't Don't put yourself in very harmful situations.
	Your body is always scanning for that stuff, right?
	I mean, I knew a woman who had terrible burns on her back from a cooking accident when she was a little girl.
	I make sure Isabella is not even in the room when I have to move hot water off the stove.
	So, our bodies don't want to put us back in destructive situations.
	Right?
	And does that have the capacity to inhibit certain cognition?
	Yeah, I mean it's called dissociation.
	It's what happens to people who are being tortured.
	They dissociate.
	Right?
	Their brains leave their body, so to speak.
	They refuse.
	They are no longer in the body because the body is a source of pain.
	And so we disconnect.
	When the body is being used to hurt us, we in a sense manner disconnect from the body.
	Right?
	I remember that sensation.
	Very detailed.
	Right.
	Right.
	And so, your body is telling you that you are putting yourself into a situation of abuse.
	Now, is the body 100% right?
	No.
	You know, I don't, I mean, I don't think it's worth bucking the odds myself, you know?
	You know, maybe that bubbling water is just happy.
	Maybe there is a magic spell that makes it look like that.
	You know, maybe that dog turd is actually a piece of cunningly shaped chocolate.
	You know, I don't play those odds, you know?
	Yeah.
	You know, maybe, maybe that truck ahead of me is a giant hologram that I can just drive through that's been put there by space aliens.
	You know, I just, I don't play those odds.
	You know, I just don't.
	You know, maybe this, maybe this batshit crazy woman is going to get hit by lightning tomorrow and be perfectly sane.
	I don't play those odds.
	Right?
	I don't play the lottery.
	And that's a hell of a lot more chance than bad people turn it good.
	Yeah.
	So you listen to your body.
	Now, I mean, I was told my whole life, this is the kind of funny thing, right?
	You know, don't just listen to your body.
	It's all we hear, right?
	Oh, you want to eat chocolate, have broccoli or whatever, right?
	Well, you want to have sex, but no means no.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	I think that's all good stuff.
	So it doesn't mean we have to be a slave to the body.
	We negotiate with the body, right?
	The body has its input.
	The mind has its input.
	And sometimes, right?
	So there are people who are in car accidents who need to drive again.
	And they need to go through progressive desensitization, and they need to go back and learn how to drive again, and learn how to concentrate.
	So the body is trying to be helpful, but that doesn't mean the body is to be dictatorial.
	It means that you can still make value decisions that go against what your body's immediate sense is saying about what's dangerous and what's not, right?
	People become lion tamers.
	You know, I pick up snakes because my daughter likes them.
	I do not like snakes.
	My daughter loves Bugs and creepy crawlies of every kind.
	I do not, but I pick them up because it makes her happy and it's a fine thing to get over, I guess, right?
	My wife is not a huge fan of handling slimy frogs, despite the fact that the one she kissed turned into me.
	But yeah, so she's not a huge fan of those things, but you know, she does it, you know, so you can override the body, right?
	Yes.
	But you negotiate.
	You don't just sort of say, body, shut up.
	I'm doing it anyway.
	I mean, it'll just screw you up some other way, right?
	But you don't let the body dictate any more than you let any other part of you.
	You don't let your tongue dictate what you eat, right?
	And you don't let your desire for calorie conservation determine whether you work out or not and all that kind of stuff, right?
	And you don't become an ascetic and deny yourself all bodily pleasures.
	You negotiate.
	It's all It's all part of the ecosystem.
	You negotiate with the body, with the unconscious, with the desires, with the desire for immediate gratification, at war with the deferral of gratification.
	These are all things, and once we learn to negotiate with ourselves, we'll be able to negotiate as a society and we won't need a central governing authority, right?
	The need to negotiate with the self is fundamental to the growth of anarchism.
	Because society is a reflection of the personality, and if there's dictatorship in the personality, there will be dictatorship in society, there will be dictatorship in religion, there will be dictatorship in schools, there will be dictatorship in universities, and there will be dictatorship in parenting.
	We must learn to negotiate with ourselves.
	All aspects of identity have a seat at the table.
	There is nothing within you that is harmful to you.
	There is nothing within you that is harmful to you.
	Everybody gets a seat at the table and everything gets hammered out.
	That way, you avoid the resentment and exclusion of aspects of the self that lead to self-attack, and if left untended and un-listened to long enough, will lead inevitably to the attack on others, which replicate the cycle.
	I'm just kind of mulling that over.
	So, this is the level of complexity, sorry, this is the level of complexity, this is the amazing part about the unconscious and the body.
	You didn't know much of any of this consciously, right?
	Of the connection?
	Of all of the stuff we're talking about over the last hour, right?
	No.
	Now, how much did your body instantaneously process and provide you intense biological feedback on?
	Through this conversation?
	No, before you had this conversation, when you were talking to your grandmother.
	Well, it started out very intense, and then it kind of leveled out, and then I kind of just dissociated from the conversation.
	So if you slow it down, right, and go back, and I'm not saying you have to do this now, if you slow it down and go back you will realize how much information is being given to you by your unconscious.
	How much your unconscious gets everything that we're talking about here and gets it thousands of times faster than the conscious mind.
	The unconscious and the body is an essential aspect of philosophy.
	You know, talk about this mind-body dichotomy, it's complete bullshit.
	The mind, the unconscious, and the body all work together in the pursuit of truth and virtue and in the protection of the self, of the body.
	Now we are in a situation which has choice our bodies are not developed for.
	You know, why do we love sugar?
	Because we had to eat fruit in order to not get scurvy and rickets and shit like that.
	We were drawn towards fruit and, you know, honey and sugar are concentrated energy sources which were great for hunting and portable and all that.
	So we grew up because fruit was hard to get and seasonal and we had to store it up for the winter and all that kind of crap.
	And, you know, honey got the bees.
	So, oh, it's my dating life.
	But anyway.
	But now sugar is everywhere, right?
	And bread was hard to get, now bread is everywhere.
	Our bodies are not designed for the level of choice that we have now, so we need extra concentration from philosophy.
	Similarly, we are now in a post-tribal society.
	You know, in history, the way we were developed, the tribe was just the fucking people around you when you were born.
	Hey, who's around the birthing fireplace doing some god-awful thing to a chicken?
	Hey!
	That's your tribe, right?
	And that's all you get, right?
	We get to choose our tribe, the same way we get to choose to stuff our faces with 40 pounds of sugar a day if we want.
	And so we were designed to have this allegiance to those around us, to bond with those around us, in the same way that we were designed to go and pursue sugar.
	Now, it's not always that healthy to go pursue sugar all the time, and it sure as shit is not that healthy to just continue to bond with everyone around you, no matter how good or bad they are.
	We have choice now, which is why we so desperately need philosophy.
	Didn't need a whole lot of nutrition in the Middle Ages.
	Not a lot of diet books in the Middle Ages.
	The diet was, what can we eat?
	Okay, that's our diet.
	What food do we have?
	Okay, that's our diet.
	You didn't need a lot of, let's make sure we balance our proteins with our fats, with our carbs, with our anaconda beaks or whatever the hell people are eating these days, right?
	I'm waiting for Kevin to tell me that anacondas don't have beaks.
	Let's just wait for that.
	Just kidding.
	So, we need nutrition because we have increased choice, right?
	There was not a lot of career counseling in the Middle Ages.
	There's not a lot of career counseling in the Hindu caste system in India.
	Hey, you want to know what you're doing with your life?
	What did your dad do with his life?
	Well, there you go.
	That's it, right?
	And so now we need career counseling.
	Now we need nutrition.
	Now we need to figure out who the hell we're going to get married to.
	Who do we get married to in the past?
	Hey, who can give me three cows?
	You're getting married to that woman and her family, right?
	Yes.
	So what I'm trying to tell you is that one of the reasons for the necessity and success of this show is that I'm telling people we are now in a post-tribal society.
	That doesn't mean that your family is bad.
	And let's not, you know, for those who like reducing the stuff to defensive cliches, I mean, just point it out.
	Doesn't mean your family is bad any more than sugar is bad.
	But it does mean that the automatic bonding we have with families is no longer necessary for survival.
	In the same way that for a woman, subjugation to the material power and wealth of a man is no longer necessary for survival.
	And this gives women freedom.
	Women are no longer economically dependent upon men and therefore women have freedom.
	Fantastic.
	I was told that my whole childhood and youth.
	Love it.
	Liberate the ladies.
	It sounds all kinds of fantastic.
	But now we can choose our tribe.
	Now when women can choose to get married or not, when women can choose to stay married or not, the quality of marriage has to increase in order for it to become enticing.
	It's kind of gone the other way.
	Now it becomes kind of dangerous for men to get married, but it's a topic for another show.
	We've talked about it before.
	Now we need to increase the virtue of the family.
	How do we increase the virtue of the family?
	We increase the virtue of the family the same way we increase the virtue of everything else.
	We make it choice-based, we make it voluntary, we make it value-based.
	The voluntary family is the very definition of what is needed to grow virtue in a post-tribal society.
	You have a natural bond with your family which comes out of our evolution.
	I fully understand that.
	I think that's a fine thing.
	And even if I didn't, who cares?
	That's like saying people shouldn't like chocolate.
	They do.
	Right?
	Even people who are allergic to chocolate will choose the itch for the taste, right?
	Sometimes.
	But the reality is that we live in a post-tribal society.
	We can choose our tribe.
	With the internet that has increased many times over.
	This show would have been impossible prior to the internet because it's only through the internet that the post-tribal society is possible.
	How many people are in the chat room here?
	How many people are listening to this who will never meet each other physically and would never have even known of their existence?
	I would never have known of Michael DeMarco's existence without this show.
	And now he is my umbilical cord to the world of nutrition, food, and sunlight.
	So.
	So, I fully understand your desire to conform to your tribe.
	That's perfectly healthy and perfectly natural.
	It's as natural as our desire for sugar.
	Doesn't mean that you have to obey it, doesn't mean that you have to disobey it.
	But we are in a post-tribal society.
	The ramifications of that are, thank fucking God, because once we are in a post-tribal society, we can be, within a generation or two, in a post-nation society, in a post-status society, in a post-religious society, which means Oh yay!
	Environmental protection, no more war, no more child abuse, and a paradise, and a standard of living, and an increase in human joy that we can only glimpse from time to time down here in the dungeons of the present.
	Does that help?
	Yeah.
	It's kind of heroic.
	It is!
	Look, your struggles are heroic.
	You know, in the past, to change the world, you had to risk getting burned at the stake.
	Right?
	You had to risk being imprisoned.
	You had to risk what Winston Smith did in 1984.
	Kevin just mentioned in the chat room, freedom is the freedom to say that 2 plus 2 equals 4.
	From that all else follows.
	Yes, freedom is the freedom to state the truth.
	Adult relationships are voluntary.
	Oh, the trouble I got in years ago for saying that simple truth.
	Hey, adult relationships are voluntary.
	Nobody seemed to have a huge problem when we talked about that in terms of marriage, parent-child relationship.
	Well, it is the truth.
	There is no law that says you have to see your family, there is no law that bars you from seeing your family of origin.
	But I will tell you this, I will tell you this, that the family of the future will be corrupted by an unfixed family of the past.
	Right?
	Yes.
	The reason that my miserable Christmas childhood stories have a happy ending is that I have the family and friendships of my dreams now.
	And I have the community and occupation of my dreams now.
	And I could not have that with the family of my past.
	That would have been completely and totally and utterly impossible.
	Yes.
	But sorry, you were going to say?
	So I remember one point you brought up in Real Time Relationships was that you should become vulnerable to people around you and just see how they respond.
	You also mentioned it in this conversation.
	Right.
	But how do I get, how do I become vulnerable when I get flight or flight responses?
	Oh, well, you know that.
	Oh, I love this playing dumb.
	Oh, my friend, you know the answer to that.
	I am having the flight or flight response because I am being... No, you say, I'm terrified at the moment.
	My hands are shaking.
	I'm incredibly terrified to say what I'm saying.
	You don't, I mean, all you have to do is, you said it in the title, Real Time Relationships, that's about telling what you feel in the moment to the people you're talking with.
	It's a beautiful book.
	Thank you.
	But that's, I mean, you just I told my mom that I had a conversation with her once.
	chat room remember to slow down yes don't be rushed all that is rushed is defensive you know if you ever had somebody try and sell you something that was kind of shady they're always talking a mile a minute oh wait right no they're always talking really fast and baffling confusing don't listen you know don't let people speed you up but sorry go ahead yeah i told my mom that i got in a conversation with her once it was a big mistake to do it over text but i um
	i told her how I was terrified to talk to her.
	And she said, are you terrified of me?
	And I just, I mean, that would be a conclusion if I said that I'm terrified of her.
	I don't really know exactly why I'm terrified.
	How did she say it?
	It was over text.
	Yeah, that's the trouble with text.
	You can't get context, right?
	90% of communication is nonverbal, right?
	And that's even if it's you talking to someone.
	One time I called her and told her I felt the emotion was contempt.
	Oh, towards her?
	No, I just said I feel like contempt.
	I started to talk.
	I didn't even really start the conversation.
	I didn't finish my point, but I was telling her that I'm having this difficulty where when I talk to you, I feel really agitated the next day after we have a conversation.
	I pretty much the same issue that I called you about, but this was several months ago.
	I was trying to tell her how I get this disorientation and how I feel like it used to be.
	I used to feel really irritated and hopeless.
	Like everything was out to get me.
	Like I'd be really irritated by the most, the smallest things.
	And I started thinking about things that are irrelevant to the moment.
	About like what I'm going to do in my future career.
	How I'm going to be successful.
	How am I going to survive?
	How am I going to find love?
	And all these things just like build up.
	And I become really disoriented and almost agitated and kind of self-attack.
	And I was just starting to tell her how I felt contempt.
	Which is the best way to describe the emotion I felt.
	I think it is the best way to describe it.
	And she just started yelling at me.
	Yeah.
	And... What was she saying?
	I... I don't even know what she was saying.
	Like, you have no rights, or how dare you, or all the usual shit that defensive people say.
	Yeah.
	I actually didn't... I don't know if this was a mistake at the time.
	Who are you to, how dare you, you have no rights, and it's all just outraged noise.
	Look, I'm sorry, I want you to finish your point, then I'd like to finish my point, and then I do have to move on to other callers, but I want you to finish your point if you want to go ahead.
	I think that was the end of my point.
	I kind of lost my train of thought.
	Let me just, sorry about that, but let me just tell you the two kinds of people that will be in your world.
	I would suggest getting it down, getting it down to one at some point, but these are the two kinds of people who are going to be in your life.
	The truth does not arrive in A package neatly tied up with a bow.
	The truth does not arrive like an email.
	The truth does not arrive like a strippogram.
	The truth arrives like a asteroid, or a wrecking ball, or a geyser, or an earthquake.
	The truth arrives in a way that is intense.
	Intense.
	For just about everyone.
	Now there are two kinds of people, right?
	There are two kinds of people in the world.
	There are the kinds of people who when the truth comes they are terrified and excited and thrilled and anxious and curious.
	And what they do is the truth comes like a hurricane through the cell block and they begin to suspect that their cell doors were never locked.
	And they're terrified to go out but they can't stand to stay.
	Now there are other people, when the truth comes, it comes like somebody rolling a grenade into a locked cell.
	They will do almost anything to put it out or prevent it from coming back in, or to kick it somewhere, or to get it as far away from them as possible, because the truth will destroy them.
	There are times when you set yourself up so far against the truth, that the only truth about you that's left is that the truth will undo you.
	The only reality that is left to you is that you are unreal.
	If you have built your identity on control, on manipulation, on the abuse of children, on bullying, on theft, on predation, then the only truth about you is that the truth will annihilate you.
	The truth arrives in some people's lives, in all too many people's lives, as a soul-ending, heart-rending, catastrophic supernova from which there can be no recovery.
	Do you mean, like, later in life?
	Or... Well, whenever... Whenever it's too late?
	Whenever somebody tells the truth!
	And their whole game is to stay away from the truth.
	How often does the thief think about the policeman?
	Continuously.
	Continuously, exactly.
	How often does evil think about the truth?
	How to avoid it?
	How to disarm it?
	How to control it?
	How to suppress it?
	How to imprison it?
	How to frighten it?
	How to chill it?
	How to kill it?
	Logically, it would be its whole existence.
	Yes.
	And it starts as a kind of avocation, like I just want to steer clear of it, like I'm red-headed and it's a sunny day and I don't have sunscreen.
	And then eventually you just become adapted to the underground.
	You become a cave fish.
	You become someone who, like a vampire, the light destroys, right?
	You live off others like a vampire.
	You can't see your reflection.
	You have no mirror that will shine you back.
	You have no identity.
	You can only come out at night and you live among the dead and you feed off the living and light destroys you, right?
	Yes.
	Except they're not mythical creatures.
	They just invented a story to distract us and have us look over at the myth rather than the reality of how many surround us.
	So, the truth is a bomb.
	Do not doubt that for a moment.
	There is really nothing that is going to be more powerful in your life than telling the truth.
	Nothing more terrifying, nothing more liberating.
	Nothing more upsetting and rewarding.
	There's nothing that's going to make people hate you more or love you more than telling the truth.
	So that's how I know who's corrupt and who's virtuous.
	I just tell the truth.
	I was told as a kid, tell the truth or the skies fall.
	And I made the mistake of listening, right?
	Yeah.
	You took it seriously.
	Yeah, I took it seriously.
	Sorry, there's one other last point that I wanted to make, which is, you have the mirror neurons that allow you to process the feelings that other people are experiencing, which will put you at a severe disadvantage among people who do not share this ability that you have.
	Right?
	One of the reasons why bad people succeed in the world is that good people have the weakness of empathy without the strength of philosophy.
	And empathy among people who do not have empathy is a weakness because you are sensitive to what bad people want and they are not sensitive to what you want and therefore evil conforms to good like water being poured into a tortuous jug.
	Empathy without philosophy is doomed to self-destruction, is doomed to conformity with evil, until evil runs the world and destroys the world.
	And so you feel other people's view of the truth is a grenade, and you don't want to pull the pin out, and I completely understand that.
	They, I would argue, do not feel your desire for the truth.
	and are willing to help you pull the pin out.
	You feel their needs.
	I don't think they feel your needs, which puts you at a big disadvantage without philosophy.
	So that's something to remember and to mull over.
	here.
	You want to be in relationships, whether it's with your family, if they can be helped in the long run, wherever, whatever, you want to be in relationships where your empathy is an asset, not a liability.
	Where people value you for your empathy because they have empathy to bring to you.
	Because sure as sunrise, if you are the only empathetic person in the room, you'll be fucked every time.
	Because you will end up conforming to the predatory needs of others who only view your desires as a crop to be harvested, as livestock to be culled.
	And I have such a goal to give empathetic people some spine, some strength, and some balls.
	I I have, you are an incredible guy.
	I'm telling you that straight up.
	This is my grenade into your cell.
	You are an incredible guy.
	Thank you.
	You're 19 for God's sakes.
	You are 19.
	You have more truth in your inhalation between words than I had in a whole year of babbling at the age of 19.
	You are an incredible guy.
	And I don't want that amazing capacity that you have for empathy, for reflection, for courage, for truth, for virtue, for philosophy, for values, for identity, for connection, for love.
	I don't want that to be squandered at the clawed feet of the predatory.
	Do not cast your pearls before swine.
	Elevate them or find a better place for your jewelry.
	Without philosophy, good is screwed. - Good.
	You know, we ain't gonna save the world with bombs or guns or, I mean, we can't out-breathe the idiots.
	We sure as hell can't make them smarter.
	But if you have empathy and you have philosophy, you have an amazing strength.
	I think if you have empathy without philosophy, exploitation is the quicksand.
	Because you want to please people.
	You want people to be happy.
	You want to be nice to people.
	That's part of being empathetic.
	But that means because you have empathy, you must be incredibly specific in your evaluations and judgments of people in your life.
	You know, if you are going to kiss everyone, you cannot hang out at a leper colony.
	You must be among the clean-lipped.
	So, was that helpful?
	I certainly appreciate it.
	I hope it was not a massive dominance-fest of my language, but I really wanted to get a bunch of stuff across, because I know you've got the intellectual bandwidth to handle it, and what an amazing life you can have with great principles.
	No, it's a very powerful conversation.
	I feel a lot of motivation, a lot of more.
	I don't know, I'm kind of a little overwhelmed, but I feel like I can make something incredible out of my time here.
	Oh, you can, you can, you can, you can.
	It's really exciting.
	It should be.
	It should be.
	It's an incredible opportunity.
	This is the new world.
	This is the new world of the post-tribal society and we can be at the foundation of a world that is as unbelievable to us now as now is to the Dark Ages.
	I genuinely and completely believe that.
	But we need to link empathy with philosophy.
	We get those two together.
	We are absolutely unstoppable.
	So, I think you're going to have an incredible life.
	Thank you so much, so much for your call, Skyler.
	It was great.
	Thank you very much.
	It means a lot to me.
	Thank you.
	All right, Todd.
	You're up next, Todd.
	Go ahead.
	Hello, Stefan.
	Hello.
	I'd like to thank you for taking today to fill in me and probably some of the other callers that weren't able to enjoy the show this Sunday.
	It is my pleasure.
	Thank you for calling in.
	So a little bit about me.
	I'm 20 years old.
	I'm still living with my parents and I'm a college student.
	And I spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of my challenges and I feel like I've traced a lot of them down to some form of letting fear run my life.
	And that's something that I feel very challenged how to overcome.
	I feel like you would like to interject.
	You are very good at body language.
	Very good.
	Do you have any idea what I might be grrring about?
	I feel like Nanny McPhee.
	Not exactly.
	All right.
	Do you remember how you phrased fear in your life?
	Running my life?
	You said letting fear run your life.
	Because I know there are ways that I can overcome it.
	Well, where did it come from?
	Because when you say letting fear, that is a valueless statement.
	I don't mean it has no value, I mean it has no values, like there's no evaluation of where the fear came from.
	So to give an example, I spent a very large portion of my life going largely based on bullying and harassment.
	And, uh, I feel like it left a little bit of a hole in my social skill development and I have a lot of challenges.
	All right.
	A little bit?
	A pretty big smoking hole.
	Okay.
	So you gotta, I don't want to be correcting you and being annoying guy.
	So, you know, this is the place where you could just tell me like it is, right?
	You don't have to hedge, you don't have to minimize, you don't, I mean, Let me do the hyperinflation of my forehead.
	But you don't have to do any of that stuff, right?
	If you tell me that you suffered a lot of social problems in school, then that doesn't leave a little hole, right?
	So it was a pretty horrifying experience and there were a lot of days that I just didn't want to get out of bed because I didn't see the point.
	But I've spent so long without having friends or contacting people, I'm finding it really hard to Relate with peers and communicate with people again.
	And why were you bullied, do you think?
	And please don't tell me this is anything about you, like I was this or I was that, but what circumstances conspired to end up with you in these crosshairs and unable to move or defend or change it?
	Well, if I had to take a shot at it, I would say that I moved to the town where I spent most of my life so far in about Third grade, and it was a very clicky town.
	Big click, and I guess I just wasn't in it.
	So you moved?
	I moved a lot when I was younger.
	Several times, about every year or so.
	Okay.
	Why did you move so much?
	First time I moved was because my brother came along and we needed to upsize.
	Next time we moved was because my father needed to go work in another state.
	We moved back to this again and then moved again a year later.
	And was it a small town that you were moving to?
	Did all the kids know each other and you were the new kid?
	It was kind of a suburban town, maybe not... smaller.
	Okay, so it wasn't like there was like 20 kids in the whole town and they'd all known each other, right?
	Yeah.
	Now let me ask you a question.
	Do you think if you were an extremely pretty girl that the same thing would have happened?
	I think that's unlikely.
	I think that's very unlikely.
	Trust me, whenever a new kid was coming to my class in school, the teacher would say, there's a new child coming in today, you know, and, you know, all the guys, boys, you know, even then we were interested in girls, right?
	At least most of us were like, Oh, I hope it's a girl.
	I hope she's pretty.
	You know, cause we were shallow idiots with no values.
	Right.
	And when the girls came in and one of the girls came in, I mean, gorgeous.
	And, boy, she wasn't teased at all.
	In fact, you know, she dropped a pen and, you know, there were five pens coming back at her, right?
	So your cause is not correct, right?
	Like, if a pretty girl smokes, does she have any less or more chance of getting lung cancer?
	I would think more.
	Much more.
	Than an ugly girl?
	Oh, I thought you meant smoking as compared to not smoking.
	No, no.
	So if a pretty girl and an ugly girl smoke, which one is more likely to get lung cancer?
	Neither.
	Right.
	So that's causal and the prettiness has nothing to do with it, right?
	So then you've got an accurate cause, right?
	Whereas if you say it's the moving and I was the new kid, but it wouldn't apply if you were the pretty girl, then the moving and the new kid is not the cause.
	You understand?
	I understand.
	I've never really been certain of what the cause was of how all of this started.
	That's just my best guess.
	Right.
	Now, it's not a very self-critical guess, and I don't mean that in a critical manner.
	What I mean is that you have a hypothesis about something that's very important to you, but you have not put it through the ringer of being skeptical of that hypothesis, right?
	Right, so if I said, well, the reason that I'm successful as a podcaster is because I have a British accent, sort of.
	Right?
	Then everybody who would have a British accent would be successful as a podcaster, right?
	Even if it sounded all kind of cockney!
	Right?
	So, that would not be the case.
	So, when you have a theory about things, you need to be critical, obviously, of that theory.
	And if you have a theory about why you are the way you are, you have to be extra special.
	With sauce on top and cherry pie on the side, skeptical, right?
	Because that's very slippery stuff, right?
	I understand. - I understand.
	Are you okay?
	Yeah, I understand.
	I'm just... I'm not sure how I would...
	I'm not sure how we would apply that to... Oh, no, I understand that.
	I understand that.
	I'm just, you know, I don't want, I don't want people to call into this show and feel better and then have no idea what to do next.
	I'm always trying to provide principles by which, right, the learning can continue, so to speak.
	Right.
	And I appreciate you calling in.
	This is a very courageous topic to talk about.
	Thank you.
	Right.
	So this is hard.
	You know, for guys in particular, I'm going to say, it's really hard to talk about being teased and bullied.
	I was teased a lot, not too much in school, but by my brother.
	And it's a nasty, ugly experience.
	And so I really, really sympathize and appreciate you talking about this.
	But I really want to make sure that if we're going to talk about causes, you know, we get the right one, if we can.
	Okay.
	On a scale of 1 to 100, where would you rate your intelligence?
	I would like to think it was 75.
	Without hopefully sounding pompous.
	It's so funny, eh?
	We're always told to dream big, and then the moment we're asked the question, and look, I feel the same way too, right?
	Well, I don't, I don't want to be 100% right.
	Because the moment you say that you're good at something, then a lot of people will try and tear you down, right?
	That's just naturally the way people are.
	So you would say that you're in the top 25% of human intelligence?
	I would like to think so.
	I think that, well, I've always scored very well in a lot of Math and science tests, standardized tests.
	Okay, and where do you score in those?
	In what percentile do you score?
	Usually the top 80s and 90s.
	I mean, I remember there's a, in my state, there's a standardized test that I got.
	So top 10 to 15 percent, right?
	Yeah.
	I remember, you know, a standardized test that we do in this state that I got one of the highest ones in the school.
	Okay, so you're in the top couple of percentage points.
	And look, if you listen to this show, this show is not for people of average intelligence.
	Now, that doesn't mean the people of average intelligence who've got a lot of wisdom, right?
	In other words, they're integrated with their body and they trust their instincts because you get a lot of horsepower from that stuff, as I was talking about with Skyler.
	But this is not the show for people of average intelligence.
	If you listen to this show, you're just not of average intelligence.
	It just doesn't work, right?
	And so, there's a couple of reasons that I'm asking that, which I'll get to over the course of the conversation.
	Now, did you talk to your parents about being bullied and excluded?
	I did.
	I had a, more specifically with my mother, a lot of conversations about it.
	And what happened?
	To be honest, it was more of Me venting and describing what was bothering me.
	I don't feel like much actionable came out of those conversations.
	When you feel that much actionable came out, I'm not sure if you're hedging again.
	Okay.
	Like you did with the intelligence thing and like you did with the whole about the social skills.
	Did so some actionable or none?
	I was given some generic advice about trying to be more outgoing, but not much more than that.
	Right.
	Okay, so if you have an obesity problem and somebody says, just try and eat better, it's not that they're really dug into the solution, right?
	Yeah.
	And what form did the bullying take?
	A lot of verbal harassment.
	Like what?
	Being called names, things like that.
	People would call me a loser.
	People would call me a faggot.
	On a side note, I'm straight, so I'm not sure where a lot of these comments would come from.
	People would... Oh, I don't think the faggot thing comes from an objective evaluation of your sexual preferences, right?
	And there was also ostracism, which I feel like the isolation for me was one of the hardest things.
	What people would say wasn't as much Didn't feel like it did as much damage as what people wouldn't say, what people wouldn't do, what people would do to particularly avoid interacting with me.
	That was difficult.
	And then the other things, having people steal things.
	All the petty harassments that make you Uncertain and discombobulated, always off-key, offset, always scanning your environment, right?
	For danger or for threat or for ostracism, never comfortable in your own skin and never feeling at ease, always wondering where the next, you know, shit-poo is coming from, right?
	I remember one of the, uh, it's a little more difficult, but one of the worst, one of the worst things was, uh, someone, I don't know who it was, decided to make up a rumor that I was gonna bring a gun to school.
	A complete work of fiction.
	The police, they searched my locker, they came, they searched my home, they held me for hours and refused to let me speak to my parents or a lawyer.
	They made it absolutely miserable.
	People would, following this, use social media to turn this into a big event to further make my life miserable.
	There was Facebook pages filled with death threats and threats of attack on me and this.
	No one of any authority, the police, the school, they wouldn't They wouldn't do anything about these recorded, legitimate, in-your-face threats, but they would make my life such a living hell over a rumor.
	I guess that leads into another thing, another topic I was considering bringing up.
	Well, hang on.
	I don't want to get rid of your other topic.
	I'm happy to bookmark this.
	I just don't want to let this pass unremarked.
	So if you want to go into your other topic, I just don't want to leave this one behind because it's huge.
	But go ahead.
	So I was just going to bring up on a note, because I feel like there's a good place to bring up that.
	You know, one of the other things I have an issue with is I have this fear of authority of all forms, you know, like I don't I don't know if it's an irrational fear, but this fear, like some, you know, maybe police will come and just attack me or my family, because in some ways it's it's happened before.
	You know, how old were you when that Well, that particular one I described was early high school.
	So maybe 14, 15 kind of thing.
	14, 15 around there.
	Holy fuck.
	Oh man.
	Oh, Todd.
	My God.
	That is beyond horrendous.
	I mean, that's one of the worst.
	I mean, the whole thing is horrendous, but that's one of the worst bullying stories I've ever heard.
	And I've heard some, but that is just astonishing.
	I mean, unbelievably malevolent.
	I'm incredibly sorry.
	I mean, how unbelievably terrifying.
	How unbelievably terrifying.
	You don't know what the hell is going to happen to you, whether you're going to be charged or not.
	You can't talk to a lawyer.
	You've got police berating you.
	And then, and then not only does nothing, did anything bad happen to the people who started the rumor?
	No, we can't find those people.
	it's hard to find people, right?
	Did they ever find the people who started the rumor?
	I don't know if they found the people who started the rumor, but, uh, you know, when people use their real names on Facebook, it couldn't have been hard to find the people who made death threats on Facebook pages.
	I found them.
	Right.
	Right.
	So nothing bad happened except to the victim.
	That's what it looks like.
	Well, that's tragically common.
	And, um, you know, your, your fear of authority?
	No, it's not irrational.
	My God, you were exposed to the full brunt of authority.
	That anyone could call it an airstrike on your whole fucking life.
	And you were the only one to suffer negative consequences that went far beyond the moment.
	You know, death threats are not fun.
	I can tell you.
	Death threats are not fun.
	I get it.
	I get it.
	And I am incredibly sorry.
	Now, I do have one question that's burning in my brain.
	Okay.
	Uh, what, what, what were mommy and daddy up to after this?
	My, my parents, um, as soon as they were able to, to help, which was, um, you know, a couple hours after it started, when they finally figured out, Hey, he didn't come home from school.
	What's going on.
	Um, just a couple hours later, they, they, they came right down and, uh, You know, I remember actually the moment of being assured, sitting in the principal's office with the police standing behind me.
	I remember hearing my father screaming at someone in the office, asking where his son was.
	And I remember, it was for the first time in hours, feeling some relief.
	But they, you know, they talked to me, they... Talked to you?
	you.
	Sorry, what did they do?
	Other than experience.
	express that they were, you know, they felt bad for me and that they were angry and wanted to do anything.
	They offered to help me if I wanted to pursue charges against the school.
	They made that offer.
	I declined.
	They did.
	Are you kidding me?
	Are you kidding me?
	The school requested because because they couldn't guarantee my safety that I take at least a week off I'm not sure if that was the real reason, but that's what they said.
	But a week later, I was back, and that's where I finished up the next two and a half, three years.
	I'm just going to tell you.
	I'm just gonna tell you.
	I'm not your parents.
	I, you know, I don't know, but I cannot, in the life of me, for the life of me, imagine any situation wherein I would send my daughter back to a school where this had occurred and where death threats had occurred.
	I mean, you move town, you move counties, you move states, you move fucking countries.
	I'm trying to follow something here and maybe I'm missing something obvious, but Help me to understand.
	What would you do if this was your son?
	If it was my son, I would... If I was able to move him, I'd like to think I would.
	But we know that they could move you.
	You already told me they could move you.
	Sorry, I'm not yelling at you.
	But you already told me they could move you, right?
	Why?
	Because they already moved you a couple of times when you were a little kid.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	So.
	Let me understand.
	Fill in the gaps for me.
	Help me find the reindeer heart of compassion.
	I only feel the horns.
	Maybe it might not seem like much, but it did feel like it was a lot of help to me to have someone to talk to about it.
	I'm not saying it wasn't.
	I'm glad they talked to you about it.
	I can't understand why you went back to the school.
	I mean, they knew you were being tormented.
	They knew you were being called a loser and a faggot.
	You knew that you were being ostracized, having things stolen from you.
	And then someone said that you were bringing a gun to a school.
	I mean, let me play out a scenario for you about how dangerous that shit can be, which I'm sure you're aware of.
	Somebody calls in and says, Oh, you know, Todd is bringing a gun to school.
	And then there's some officer there who sees you, who screams at you, And you panic and reach into your pocket to pull out a cell phone.
	And what happens?
	I would probably get shot.
	you could get fucking shot.
	And you have to go back into the school knowing there are people walking the halls who've made death threats against you or...
	Or likely.
	And, or, there are people for sure in the halls who started these rumors.
	I assume it was people in the school.
	I mean, who else would even know to bother to, right?
	I think that'd be a reasonable assumption.
	Right.
	So, on... If your parents had said that you were going to move, or homeschooled or not have to go back to that school, how would you have felt at the time?
	I would have felt ecstatic.
	It felt like an opportunity to kind of try again.
	Right.
	Right.
	And so, Todd, the reason that you were bullied is because you did not have parental protection.
	See, the bullies know that children cut off from parents, children without parental protection, are about the most vulnerable people in the world.
	See, if you have some friend who's just in the neighborhood and that friend is a jerk, you don't play with him, right?
	Yeah.
	But children, they're all herd together in these little gulags, right?
	They're all herded together.
	They have to go.
	They can't get out.
	They have to be there all day.
	They have to go to the fucking cafeteria.
	They have to go to the washrooms.
	They have to have their lockers.
	Their lockers are next to people they can't leave.
	It is a prison.
	In so many ways, right?
	This is why voluntarism is so hard for people to understand.
	It's not just the family, the bad families at least.
	Fucking schools are nightmares.
	School is a nightmare.
	And it's a nightmare even for just... I wasn't particularly bullied in school.
	I got into a couple of conflicts and one guy told me I was dead and nothing ever really came of it.
	I never got into any fights.
	But my god, I mean, what happened to you, top to bottom all around, is psychological warfare.
	Unfortunately, I wasn't in very many physical altercations.
	They were pretty rare.
	Well, I would have submitted that those would probably have actually been better.
	Those are over with very fast.
	Yeah, they're over and you get some grudging respect, right?
	And the bullies won't pick on you so much.
	And look, I'm not saying you should have fought.
	I mean, I'm not saying that at all.
	What I'm saying is that it's the ongoing endless psychological torture That really fucks with your brain and with your body.
	Because we have a fight-or-flight mechanism, which is supposed to get us out of danger, or get us to fight, or whatever.
	It's supposed to end the danger.
	It's a short burst of adrenaline that is supposed to get things resolved pretty quickly, right?
	The problem with this sort of environment is that your fight-or-flight mechanism is always activated, right?
	That's really bad for your health!
	I saw a lot of doctors concerning digestive health issues.
	I don't get it.
	You know, I heard all kinds of hypotheses from cancer to gallbladder, but you know, it seems like the consensus was on stress was actually causing a lot of physical health issues.
	It does.
	It does.
	My hair was falling out a little bit.
	I have plenty of it, so it's not like you could notice, but my hair was falling out.
	The problem with my stomach was that the acid was even burning and flattening the early parts of my intestines.
	It would cause a lot of pain.
	There was a lot of physical health problems.
	And how was your sleep?
	It was hard to sleep.
	The fight or flight mechanism needs to be disengaged for a good night's sleep, right?
	You don't want to doze off running from a jaguar, right?
	Even now, sometimes it feels like I need to lay down for several hours to mentally be prepared to sleep.
	Right.
	And do you have any siblings?
	I have one younger brother.
	Was he teased as well?
	Not that I'm aware of.
	I mean, everyone doesn't get along with some people here and there.
	You know, probably a normal amount.
	I'm incredibly sorry.
	I'm incredibly sorry for this whole experience.
	I can only tell you that I don't understand.
	The whole philosophy of parenting in our culture is people say I would do anything for my kids.
	I don't know if that was true in your family, whether people say that or not.
	That's generally what people say.
	And we as a society, oh, children of the future will do anything for our kids, right?
	I mean, I don't know, was that your parents' philosophy?
	If they ever expressed it?
	I don't remember hearing it expressed in a way like that.
	And what was your parents' philosophy of parenting?
	I talk about this with my daughter all the time.
	I want her to know what my standards and values are so that she can call me for deviations.
	Call me on deviations from the standards.
	My web provider has a 99.9% uptime guarantee so that I can call them if it ever goes to 99.98 or something like that.
	a 99.9% uptime guarantee so that I can call them if it ever goes to 99.98 or something like that.
	And what's more important, my relationship with my daughter or my website hosting relationship?
	So I'm constantly telling my daughter what my standards of parenting are, and my standards of friendship, my standards of love, relationships, I talk about it with my friends, so that they know what my standards are, and can call me on deviations.
	So my question is, did your parents ever talk to you about their standards of parenting, right?
	They never explicitly expressed it, but I think I could probably deduce it.
	And what would you deduce?
	And if I had to do that, I would say, That they felt like their responsibility was to prepare me for a financially successful future.
	And it seems like there was a lot of emphasis on, you know, being able to get a good, well-paying job, being able to, you know, get into a good college.
	And did your parents have good, well-paying jobs?
	Yeah.
	Oh, so they had choices?
	Yeah.
	So, why couldn't you go to private school?
	Please tell me this wasn't a private school!
	It was a public school.
	It was a public school, yeah.
	So, why wouldn't they take you... I mean, if they had all this money, right?
	And why wouldn't they... Did they both work?
	At the time, yes.
	Right, but back then, did they both have reasonably well-paying jobs?
	Yeah.
	So, what was your Growth, what was their growth?
	Like 100, 150, 90?
	If I had to take a guess, I'd say 170 to, from 170 to 200.
	Okay.
	So 170 to 200, which puts them in the top one or 2% of income earners, right?
	I don't know what the distribution of that would look like.
	It's pretty high.
	Maybe that's for an individual, but for a family, they're certainly in the top 5%.
	But no, that would be the family.
	The family, yeah, the family income, I get it.
	So a private school, I don't know, what, 10k a year?
	12k a year?
	I didn't look into it.
	I don't know what they would cost.
	But it's, you know, something like that.
	So what's that?
	Certainly less than 10% of the gross income, right?
	Yeah.
	So what the fuck did they have to buy that was so important that you had to go back to school with death threats where a cop might have pulled a gun on you?
	What were they saving for?
	I don't understand.
	Was there like desperate heart emergencies that you needed the heart of a unicorn imported from Aldebaran?
	I mean, what were they spending their money on?
	Money wasn't tight.
	I could say that.
	I don't know what... So why did you have to go back to the school?
	I guess the answer... I'm not yelling at you.
	I'm really trying to understand.
	I'm passionate about this.
	I'm wildly open to the fact that I may be missing something important.
	Maybe there's people in the chat room who've been listening with better attention who can tell me what I'm missing.
	Why did you have to go back to the school?
	Considering that, I didn't have to.
	Well, for me, I did.
	Legally, you have to go to a school.
	Are you from the States?
	Yeah.
	Why do you legally have to go to a school?
	I believe it's 12 years of required education.
	No, no.
	You don't have to go to a school.
	You don't have to go to a school.
	You can be homeschooled.
	You can be unschooled.
	There's no requirement whatsoever that you have to go to a school, let alone a government school.
	Excuse my ignorance then.
	Oh no, there's no reason you wouldn't know that.
	I mean, you don't have kids, right?
	And you weren't presented it as a choice, right?
	So your father was willing to move because he wanted to make more money or have a better job.
	Is that right?
	Yeah.
	Okay, so your father, to improve his mere material circumstances and the quality of his career, perhaps, was willing to move, but he was not willing to either fund your private school or to move for the sake of your psychological torture.
	And I'm guessing that if your fucking doctors said that it was stress-related, that he would probably have saved quite a bit of money on doctor's bills, and he would have more than paid for the private school.
	Just in that sense, right?
	Maybe not necessarily not willing.
	Maybe just didn't think it was the best option.
	Didn't think?
	Well, of course he didn't think it was the best option because he didn't do it.
	That's not the question.
	The question is why?
	I don't know why.
	I don't know what their reason was.
	I'm trying to denormalize this for you.
	Am I having any luck?
	And I'm not trying to say, oh, your father is the devil.
	What I'm trying to say is that I'm trying to give you another person's reaction to the story because it's pretty outrageous that you would send your kids back to that specific hellhole.
	And I actually never, uh, I never thought about why they never, why they didn't send me to, uh, to a different school.
	I didn't think about it.
	Or a private school.
	Right?
	Okay, so you didn't want to go back to school.
	See, this is everything that you're telling me, right?
	You obviously did not want to go back to school.
	I did not.
	Did you tell your parents you did not want to go back to school?
	Yeah.
	And what did they say?
	Actually, I very specifically remember telling them that, and my mom remembers this very vividly, I know that, that I actually didn't want to wake up.
	When I went to sleep that night, which was, actually it wasn't that night, it went into tomorrow, the police were there past midnight, that I didn't want to wake up.
	Right.
	Which is a veiled feeling of suicidality, right?
	Not that you were going to do anything, but you would be happy to not be alive, right?
	Or you'd be better off to not be alive?
	Well, it may have looked like that then, but in hindsight, I feel like part of that is behind me.
	No, no, listen.
	I'm not trying to say that's a bad thing.
	I'm not trying to say that you're some kind of danger to yourself.
	I'm not trying to say any of that.
	I'm simply saying that if I heard that from someone, I would be happy.
	Sorry, what was the specific thing you said?
	So, the specific thing I said was, you know, I would I didn't want to wake up.
	But when you say, better off not being around, I'm trying to clarify, do you mean from now looking back, or do you mean in that very moment?
	No, at the time you were saying, I don't want to wake up tomorrow.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	So that is a desire in the moment, and I'm not saying, right, I don't know, right, I don't believe it, right?
	You're saying that non-existence is a preference.
	In that moment.
	And I can totally understand that.
	Maybe non-existence, just not having to be exposed to that.
	I guess maybe hoping that... Not waking up is non-existence, right?
	What do we say to people who die in their sleep?
	Didn't wake up.
	Wake up.
	And I'm not trying to say you were suicidal, like you're going to jump off a bridge or I'm not trying to say that at all.
	What I'm saying is that you were clearly saying to your parents That life had become unbearable.
	Yeah.
	Which, my God, you're in your mid-teens, you've got death threats, you've got cops yelling at you, you've got ostracism, you've got teasing, bullying, people stealing from you, and so on.
	Like, my God, of course, that to me makes perfect sense.
	It's tragic, it's horrible, but it makes perfect sense.
	And for me, the hard part was at a time when I was starting to make more friends again, and that really pushed everyone away.
	Well, and it probably was not accidental that at the very time that you were making more friends, this threat gets called in, right?
	But what I really wanted to get to was that I think one of my major barriers to Getting my social life where I'd like it to be and, you know, having friends, being able to have that experience is the fear of getting invested.
	Well, no, no.
	Sorry.
	And before we get onto that, though, I still just want to finish this part, if that's all right with you.
	That's fine.
	If you're not comfortable talking about it.
	Okay.
	So what did your mom say when you said that you would prefer to not wake up in the morning?
	I don't remember her exact words, but she was really upsetting.
	I could tell that she was trying not to cry, and that she said everything would be okay.
	And I actually went to bed while the police were still there talking to my parents, so she went down to finish up with them.
	So you focused on her upset?
	You had just been accused of bringing a gun to school.
	You had the police yelling at you, no access to parents or a lawyer.
	I don't know if you'd seen any of the social media stuff at this point, but you were focused on your mother being upset.
	I wouldn't say focused on.
	I observed it.
	I recognized it.
	But at the moment, I... Was your mother focused on you being upset?
	Yeah.
	How?
	Did she ask you more questions?
	Not in the moment.
	It was clear that I was mentally exhausted.
	I mean, we're talking 14, 15 hours after this whole thing started.
	Yes, but you were mentally exhausted, but you were in a state where you could not rest until you'd had some connection and some sense of protection, right?
	Yeah.
	Well, she didn't ask me questions, but I felt grateful for it because I wanted just to take a break from it.
	All right.
	Well, I mean, look, I'm not going to try and talk you out of it if you feel that your parents acted appropriately.
	This is not a two and two make four thing that I can inflict on you, so to speak.
	I don't think they did at all.
	And the reason that that's important is that if you cannot figure out the cause of your bullying, then you will look for it forever.
	Everywhere.
	And you will be expecting it forever.
	Everywhere.
	Right?
	I do wish there were more things they would do.
	Some of the details are hard to remember, because I've tried very hard to put it behind me, and it's something that just won't go away.
	To this day, I mean, I can't think about it or talk about it without shaking and sweating.
	Some of the details I lose because I try so hard not to think about it, to push it behind me.
	But there's some details that are very, very, very vivid.
	And my mother's response to me saying that is just one of those details that's very vividly just stuck.
	Right.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, obviously, first and foremost, none of this had anything to do with you.
	None of this was your fault.
	None of this had anything to do with you in any way, shape, or form.
	The bullies always want to make you feel that it's about you, but it's not.
	No, I really appreciate hearing that, because I haven't heard that very many times.
	Well, that's essential.
	Then I will say it again.
	I mean, the faggot thing is, it just comes out of Judeo-Christian prejudice.
	You know, you call someone in ancient Greece a faggot, they're like, yeah.
	To me, it had nothing to do with what they said.
	It was just everything about how they said it and their willingness to say it.
	The exact words are nothing.
	It's that they were doing it, you know?
	It's the viciousness.
	It's the hatred.
	It's being surrounded by predators of your own species.
	These people are cannibals.
	They emotionally eat their own kind.
	We're all big neofrontal cortex bipeds, right?
	And they are emotional cannibals of their own tribe.
	And it is vicious, and it is brutal, and it is part of what public school is for.
	It used to be more formalized, like in boarding school, the prefects or the older Kids get power over the younger kids so they brutalize them so that you can raise the disposable males to oppress the savages, quote, savages in foreign countries and so on.
	So it used to be more formalized, the hazing rituals and so on.
	And now the powers that be rely upon the lost boys, the broken boys, the budding sociopaths to traumatize the other children.
	They all have to be herded in together, so that we can all traumatize each other, so we can remain afraid of each other, and look to people in authority to protect us.
	And you got all the trauma, and you didn't even get to maintain the illusion that people in authority were there to protect you.
	Your parents?
	No.
	The school?
	No.
	Facebook?
	No.
	Police?
	No.
	So you got all the trauma, which is supposed to give you the delusion of protection, or the need for protection.
	You got all the trauma, and no capacity to maintain the delusion that anyone was there to protect you.
	And how the hell are you supposed to move in a world filled with such people, where you don't know who's worse?
	The kids around you?
	The school administrators?
	The people at the social media sites?
	Or... the police?
	How are you supposed to move in this world?
	I mean, God!
	Hey, I've got some really hungry sharks in my swimming pool.
	Feel like swimming?
	No thanks.
	So, yeah, when you said you allow, that's why I stopped you at the beginning, you said you allow fear to dictate your life.
	You don't allow anything, Todd.
	It was done unto you.
	It was done unto you.
	You know, if somebody breaks my arm and it goes into a cast, And I say, well, I allow that cast to dictate my arm movement.
	Is that a sensible statement?
	Not really.
	No, because that protection is there for a damn good reason, right?
	If I'm in a war and I see some sharpshooter up on a bell tower and I take the long way around and I say, well, I'm just allowing my fear to dictate my fear. well, I'm just allowing my fear to dictate my fear.
	My path.
	Is that a sensible statement?
	No.
	That's rational caution, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	I don't want to get shot.
	I want my arm to heal.
	You went through such endless, multifaceted traumas, right?
	The school, the administrators, the social media, the police, your parents, at least I would argue.
	Multifaceted traumas.
	which were all astoundingly isolating.
	Can you hear?
	Oh, I can't hear him.
	I can hear, I just wanted to... Okay, sorry.
	I just wanted to... Okay, no, sorry, do you... Go ahead.
	I actually wanted to take a... I'm muting my mic for a second so I can take a moment to thank the people in the chat room, you know.
	Oh, okay.
	Sorry, no problem.
	You just went quiet.
	We've had a couple of Skype calls, don't worry about it.
	So this is multifaceted, right?
	Your peers, your principals, your teachers, your parents, your police, the whole of society was not only forcing you to be in this environment, the government was forcing you to be there, at least that's what you thought until this conversation.
	The whole of society was united in putting you into this incredibly traumatic environment.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	How are you supposed to trust society?
	And that's actually one of the... another thing that is a barrier for me.
	I have a really hard time trusting people.
	No kidding!
	You have...
	Very good reasons to not trust people.
	You say, again, you're personalizing it.
	Like, I'm letting this run me.
	I have a hard time trusting people.
	Like, you have some fault.
	Like, there's some deficiency.
	Like, if you were a better person, you'd be able to trust this world that did this to you.
	No.
	No.
	That is not a rational response.
	A rational response to what you went through, in my opinion, is Society can be extremely dangerous.
	For years.
	And if you don't protect yourself nobody's gonna do it for you.
	And there are times when you cannot protect yourself and you cannot rely on anyone to do it for you.
	And you must get up like some mechanical zombie And march off into the withering fire of social scorn and ostracism and attack and indifference from authority like some poor young colony soldier climbing up over the fence into the machine gun fire at Gallipoli in the First World War.
	That is your task.
	Get up every day, mechanically put one foot in front of the other, walking into a known and inescapable hell.
	And there is no escape and there is no comfort.
	And the best that you can hope for is a few kind words and a pat on the head and absolutely zero alteration in anything tangible, practical or useful.
	And that whole world and that whole environment tempts you into such a bottomless well of nihilism and hatred and contempt and self-attack that I can certainly understand why there would feel times… In that endless march, under a blazing sun, with no hope, no future, no water, no palm trees, no shade, to say, you know what?
	If tomorrow didn't come, I think I'd be okay with that.
	And I'm trying to tell you that this was not inevitable, that there were things that your parents could have done
	There certainly were things that the school could have done, though I'm certainly not surprised that they didn't do them.
	And there certainly were things that the school administrators could have done.
	But I am certainly not surprised that they didn't do them.
	What profit is there in the police in chasing down people on Facebook or other social media sites who make these kinds of threats?
	Do they make any money from it?
	No.
	They make money shaking down drug dealers and they make money getting tickets and they make money giving fines out to people and you know safe stuff that's easy and profitable right?
	Now if you were in a private school and receiving this kind of treatment the negative publicity would be very bad for them and they would be compelled to jump into action if not through virtue at least to protect Their revenue stream, right?
	But the public schools, I mean, how do they, right?
	How do they suffer if a kid gets bullied?
	They get paid either way.
	It's just, it's a hassle and an inconvenience.
	And if you find the bullies, you confront the bullies, you know sure as Sherlock that those bullies, the bully kids are going to have mean ass parents who are going to make your life, well, let's just say somewhat less enjoyable, right?
	So what incentive would they have?
	I mean, it's so weird, and I just want to sort of point this out.
	I just really want to point this out.
	I'm going to do a whole show on this, so I'll just mention it really briefly, I promise, which is, the weird thing is, the only people who suffer any negative consequences in school are the children.
	You know how insane that is?
	The teachers who don't teach, I mean, you can't even get, you can't even fire teachers who rape their students.
	You got to put them in these weird little rubber rooms where they just sit there collecting play, paying, playing cards.
	Jesus Christ.
	I mean, Rob Ford, fucking crack smoking mayor, making random death threats and so on.
	He can't get fired.
	He's still out there pontificating.
	Ooh, he had some of his power stripped.
	Ooh.
	So he has less work to do, but still gets paid.
	Whoa.
	That's a huge punishment.
	The only people who suffer any negative consequences in the entire school system are the children.
	If that doesn't tell you everything about how fucked up and bullying the school system is, nothing will.
	Children don't study.
	Oh my goodness, they've got an F. They don't get passed.
	They don't maybe even get to advance a grade.
	Only people who suffer any negative consequences in the entire school system are the children.
	So what that means is the school system completely believes in negative consequences, just not for adults, you see.
	Only for children.
	I wonder what the difference could be.
	Anyway.
	So, I am incredibly sorry about what you happened, but there is a world of people out there that you can trust, but before that you have to get how wrong it was that you could not trust.
	You don't start looking for better food until you get that the food you have is crap.
	I mean, I don't look for food better than the best meal I've ever tasted, because that's pretty damn great.
	But if the best meal I ever tasted was lightly salted, watery, Polish-ass cabbage soup, and then somebody gave me a piece of cheesecake, I'd be like, oh my God, this is what good tasting food is supposed to be all about.
	Now, I may still need to choose the cabbage soup, but at least I know that it's not the best tasting food there is.
	So that's why I'm always telling people, up your standards, up your standards.
	That's how I started on the show.
	Up your standards.
	I'm sorry to say, my friend, it was not inevitable that you were abandoned to this hellscape of psychological warfare.
	Your parents were damn well capable of moving.
	Your parents damn well could afford to have you tutored, homeschooled, unschooled in a private school, or even just move to a different public school.
	But they didn't.
	And that was a truly shitty, irresponsible, bad, abusive decision.
	Sorry, I just have to say it.
	It's my opinion.
	I'm not going to tell you I can prove this to you in some syllogistic fashion.
	But I sure as hell hope that if and when you have children, that this never happens to your children, or if for some reason it did, that you would move heaven and earth to get them to safety.
	And stop at nothing.
	And pay any price and bear any burden to get them to safety.
	Your parents cared about your safety, they took you to all these doctors, right?
	So, why couldn't they?
	I don't have the answer as to why they didn't move you.
	I think it's a conversation you should have with them, and I think it's a damn forthright conversation you should have with them.
	Because if they wanted you to be economically productive, I don't see how subjecting you to years of psychological torture was really the way to go about it.
	Only they had the power to change your circumstances and your environment. - Good.
	The police didn't.
	The school didn't.
	Your friends wouldn't.
	Your enemies wouldn't.
	Only your parents had the power to change your environment.
	And they did not.
	And they could have.
	They had the means.
	They had the resources.
	They had the mobility.
	They'd already moved before.
	Maybe they chose their comfort over your happiness.
	Maybe they had shitty childhood experiences that they didn't deal with that they ended up re-inflicting on you.
	I don't know.
	I'm not talking to them.
	But I would certainly suggest that you do.
	And your comment about the cheesecake reminded me of when I decided I wanted to choose this topic to call in.
	I actually met a very nice girl, and I met her friends, and I noticed them all, you know, sitting around, talking, laughing, playing games, and I thought to myself, you know, I want that.
	That's something I haven't had, being a part of something like that, and I want it.
	That's when I really started to try to understand, what can I really do to get there?
	or what are my barriers?
	Right.
	and And has it been helpful?
	It has been, but this has given me a piece of it, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it, but I still feel like there's a piece in the middle.
	And when I thought about it, I really decided it seems like my barriers come from two main places.
	One of them is that I have a So you're really going to sit on this toadstool and not budge, right?
	I mentioned before, I have a fear of being emotionally invested with people.
	So you're really going to sit on this toadstool and not budge, right?
	I mean this with all love and respect, because you're back to saying that you have deficiencies, right?
	I'm not sure how I'm saying that I have deficiencies.
	I have difficulty trusting people, I have difficulty relating to people and so on, right?
	But I know I have difficulty, so I know I don't relate to people because I haven't had a lot of that experience because my opportunities to have those experiences were taken from me rather violently.
	No, no, I don't speak Mandarin because I've never studied Mandarin.
	That's different from being beaten half to death with a box of Mandarin books.
	Right?
	It's not that you didn't have.
	You had lots of social exposure.
	You were at school all day long.
	You've had tons of social exposure.
	It was just really, really, really horrible.
	I guess I'm just not sure how else to word it.
	That's how I've always thought of it.
	I'm scared of dangerous people.
	I am legitimately and rationally scared of some really dangerous people in this world, which I have had near universal exposure to.
	Who are the people that you have met that you have told me about?
	Number one, the sadists.
	Number two, the people who cover for the sadists and enable the sadists and do nothing about the sadists.
	Is there a third category I'm not aware of?
	In the anecdote about high school, no, there aren't any others.
	No, there are no others.
	And it wasn't like you were with 20 kids and one adult.
	Hundreds of kids, dozens of adults, parents, extended family, you name it, right?
	A brother?
	No one helped you!
	You don't have a problem.
	You have a rational reaction to a fucking psychotic universe you were in.
	You don't have a problem.
	The world inflicted a problem.
	So what I'd like to do is figure out how to keep those problems from continuing to do damage and...
	And find good people out there.
	That's easy.
	That's easy and hard.
	If you want to change your reaction to a stimuli, the first thing you must do is change the stimuli.
	If you're holding something that's burning your hand, what's the first thing you have to do?
	Let it go.
	Exactly.
	Ow, I don't like being burned.
	I better drop this.
	Hopefully not on my foot, right?
	And for me, my way of doing that was to, for a long period of time, give up on trying to have social connections with people.
	Sure.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	And for me, it's, if I can use an analogy here, it's like I, you know, I burned down these rusted, broken social bridges.
	And it's been so long since I've built a social bridge or maintained a social bridge that I'm not sure how to start building them again.
	You are talking in a very healing term, but I would suggest that there's probably a little bit of lava you need to cross over first.
	And I'll just give you a tiny scenario.
	Again, this is something you need to talk about with your parents, and I would definitely talk about this with a therapist too, it's my opinion, but if my daughter falls into a lion cage and gets mauled, do I have any right to put her back in that lion cage?
	No.
	If my daughter says, I think I would rather die than go back in that lion cage, do I have any fucking right to put her back in that lion cage?
	Especially not.
	If my daughter has complained that she keeps going back into that lion cage, that I keep putting her back in that lion cage, and I keep saying, well, that's tough.
	You know, you have to learn how to get along better with the lions, you see?
	We'll rub a little bit less marinade on your legs and we'll give you maybe an old umbrella and you can maybe open and close that a little and see if that will help with the lion cage and nothing works and every day she gets mauled.
	At what point do you think my daughter can get pissed at me?
	At the immediate moment that you tell her she can go back in.
	And you know you're not doing that, right?
	That I'm not doing what?
	You know you're not doing that, right?
	That I'm not getting angry?
	Angry.
	At your parents.
	I realize that.
	Do you?
	Because you've done a lot of defending.
	And excusing.
	And minimizing.
	and you've not said one negative word about them.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Which means, and this is why you keep criticizing yourself, however obliquely, it means you're turning your anger upon yourself, which is why you're still at risk of getting bullied.
	All who self-attack invite bullying, right?
	Most people cannot resist the urge to dominate others if others start self-attacking.
	Self-attacking is this big red flag.
	And the way that we solve self-attack is to get angry at the legitimate targets.
	There's no other way that I know of or that I can imagine.
	It doesn't mean I'm right.
	It's just what I think.
	Right?
	Your parents put you back in this situation when they could have very easily not done so.
	Your parents kept you in this situation for years when they could very easily have not done so.
	You said to your mother, I am in danger of not wanting to live because of what happens in school.
	And what does she say?
	go back off you go Go on back to the death threats.
	Go on back to the cops with guns.
	Go on back to the administrators who don't do anything.
	Off you go.
	Here's your backpack.
	Here's your lunch.
	Off you go.
	She's sending you to prison.
	You don't even have sentence.
	You're not even convicted.
	She's sending you off to prison.
	I mean, fuck me, does that not piss you off at all?
	It does now.
	I've never... I've never thought about it like that before.
	Tell me how I'm wrong.
	I'm welcome to be corrected.
	Did she not send you back to where you were being psychologically tortured With death threats and people calling the airstrike in of armed fucking cops on your ass.
	And she said, off you go, time to go back.
	You're not wrong.
	That's insane.
	And they both did.
	And, you know, after this conversation, I'm going to have a discussion about this.
	OK, if you think it's going to be a discussion, I think that's great.
	I think it might be a little bit more of a monologue, but that's completely up to you.
	That is a failure to protect.
	You said, do you know, if my daughter ever said to me, I don't want to get up in the morning, there is nothing that I would not do, nothing that I would not change, no sacrifice that I would not make to keep her safe and have her get up as happy as she does every morning.
	Because that's my job.
	Because she did not ask to be in my family.
	She did not ask to be in this world, or this culture, or this environment.
	And if she ever told me, at the age of 14, or any age, that she might not want to get up in the morning, we would be up all night talking about whatever was going on.
	And I would make absolutely sure that whatever was provoking this problem was dealt with in a way that made her feel as safe as an angel and sleep as tight as a baby.
	I would not put her back into the den of psychotics where she was going to face theft, ostracism, verbal abuse, death threats.
	Are you kidding me?
	Are you fucking kidding me?
	I'd like to tell you I am, but that's...
	That's what happened. - Okay.
	And I would like to have never made that speech.
	But if you want to feel safe in this world, you need to know where the danger is.
	And it was nobody's fundamental job but your parents to keep you safe, and they failed.
	They had the means, they had the mobility, they had the intelligence, they had the capacity, and there's some parenting choices that are tough.
	I get that.
	I get there are some parenting, you're a single mom, public school, there are parenting choices that are tough.
	I get that.
	This is not one of them.
	They already moved you for their convenience, Why couldn't they move you so you'd feel like getting up in the morning?
	Obviously because they preferred you to go back to school. - Yeah.
	The question that your future hinges on is why?
	And do not let up until you get the ring of truth.
	I think one of the slightly depressing irony, okay, very depressing ironies, is that half a year after I got out of that high school, we moved.
	Right.
	Well, maybe your parents liked watching you getting bullied.
	I don't know.
	Maybe they preferred it because their sad I have no idea.
	Honestly, I don't know.
	I mean, anything could be true.
	But it is something you really need to find out.
	Maybe there was some fantastic reason that I can't imagine.
	But you don't know the reason.
	And you need to know that reason.
	You don't know why you were unsafe.
	Which means you cannot feel safe.
	If you don't know where the tiger is, everything looks like a tiger.
	Or sounds like one, right?
	I'm anticipating you, excuse my language, calling bullshit on this, but I...
	I have a sneaking suspicion that if I do, when I dig for that reason, the answer I get might be something along the lines of, we didn't know you really wanted or needed to leave that much.
	Which would be ridiculous.
	You know, I think pretty much when you've got death threats and cops claiming that they didn't know you were wanting to leave, is not an answer that I would accept.
	And look, let's say that they're lying, in which case that's really horrible because you're asking to understand something essential about your childhood and they're lying to you, which is so close to inexcusable I don't even know what to say about it.
	But let's say they're completely right.
	Let's say that they can, with all honesty, with all honesty, say to you, my goodness, We genuinely and truthfully had no idea that you didn't want to go back to school.
	Then I would have to ask if they were paying attention.
	Because I don't think it would have been that hard to see.
	Well, it's their job to know.
	They're your parents.
	Like, would any court... Like, my child breaks his leg, or her leg, and I don't take her to the hospital, or to the doctor.
	I didn't know!
	That she needed medical attention.
	I didn't know that she was in pain.
	I didn't know her leg was broken.
	Right?
	Did she come to you and say her leg was broken?
	Yes.
	Then you knew.
	Well, I didn't really know that it was bad.
	Well, then you're not actually competent to be a parent because you're functionally retarded.
	Right?
	Like, if you don't know enough to know that when your child has been yelled at by cops for half a day, And the cops have been at your house till after midnight, and the death threats, and then if you genuinely don't know that about your child, then you are psychotic.
	It means that you have absolutely no sense of the emotional reality of anyone around you in any way whatsoever.
	So either they would be lying, or They would have a complete incapacity to process the emotional reality of any other human beings, even after having known them for 13 or 14 years and being in conversation, even when that person says, I don't want to get up in the morning.
	I don't know which is worse, but neither of them is good.
	But hopefully they will be open to exploring why, how did this multi-year catastrophe that resulted in significant damage to your personality.
	How did this happen on their watch?
	That's a question they'll have to answer.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Well, sadly they don't have to.
	It's not a court of law, but I hope that they will certainly explore it with you.
	And thank you, thank you again.
	I didn't do one more caller, but I really, really want to thank you.
	What an incredible topic to bring up.
	I mean, you don't know how common this is.
	I think that you're probably a little bit more on the extreme end for a lot of people, but it is a ridiculously, tragically common situation for people to have these kinds of horrible experiences in schools.
	I'm incredibly sorry how it happened to you.
	I, I'm incredibly sorry that your parents didn't take any particular action to get you to a safer environment or to even a remotely safe environment.
	And, um, I really, really wish you the best of luck in dealing with this.
	You are an absolute victim.
	It takes a, you know, for people who don't call in, you know, you sometimes see comments on the videos.
	Oh, this guy was like this, you know, it just call in.
	You know, just, hey, if it's easy or if you think it's easy, just call in.
	What the listeners do in this show is really hard.
	It takes a lot of guts.
	It takes a lot of courage.
	It takes a lot of resolution.
	And it takes a lot of staying with a very vivid emotional and intellectual experience.
	And I really wanted to thank you for that.
	It's a real privilege.
	I mean, for a guy who doesn't trust, holy shit, you trusted me.
	And I hope it paid off.
	I mean, this conversation has been very valuable to me.
	Thank you for the time.
	And, you know, thanks for being able to take my call today.
	Maybe last week wasn't how you planned on spending Christmas Eve, but I'm glad to be able to To be able to talk through this, and thank you for everyone in the chat room.
	I appreciate your comments and your support.
	There are some other questions I have, so I can call another day.
	You're welcome, anytime.
	I'd like that.
	Thank you, guys.
	Yeah, do drop me a line if you can, let me know how it goes with the folks.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you so much again.
	All right, see ya.
	All right, David, you're up next.
	Go ahead, David.
	Hello?
	Hi, David.
	Hey, how's it going, Stephan?
	It is going well.
	How are you doing?
	Good, good.
	Just to start off, I guess I wanted to say that watching you work with philosophy and reason is like watching an athlete of the top order.
	Um, and, uh, it's truly, really enjoyable for me.
	So thank you.
	Thank you.
	Uh, all right.
	So, uh, I was going to talk, uh, also along the lines of, uh, kind of social issues.
	Uh, and the police also plays a part in my story, but, uh, besides that it's pretty different.
	So I think it's still interesting.
	Oh, listen, don't, uh, don't worry about any of that.
	You just tell me what you want to talk about.
	Don't worry about what people talked about before.
	So go for it.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, so, um, basically, um, so in my case, um, uh, you know, I mean, sure.
	I went through, uh, elementary school and there were bullies there and things like that, but I got through it pretty well.
	Um, and by the time, so interestingly, At about the age of 12 or 13, a physical sort of deformity showed up in my chest called a pigeon chest, or pectus carinatum.
	Is that where it sinks in?
	No, the reverse.
	Oh, it pushes out?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	And I mean, there are worse cases, but mine was pretty, pretty significant.
	Um, you know, it led me to, uh, to, uh, hunch all the time and, uh, and so on and so forth.
	And there was some teasing, but I think, uh, luckily, uh, my parents, uh, sent me to a relatively alternative school, uh, when I started, uh, junior high.
	So, uh, so basically the thing was despite having this deformity and this, despite being a generally kind of philosophically oriented child,
	By the time I was 17, I not only had a large community of friends, which I trusted pretty well, and a best friend, which was really a very major part of my life, and we were really like a team and everything and trusted each other a lot, you know, just really like Kind of invested in one another.
	And I also had a girlfriend, which was, uh, which we were very, very, very close together.
	At that point, we were already together for, uh, over two years and, you know, we spent a whole lot of time together and she was, she, she, she is intelligent and creative and, uh, and beautiful and, you know, and, and for, for somebody, you know, kind of, I don't know, like, you know, when, when I was in elementary school, at least, I felt like I was, you know, I was a geek and I didn't have a very high esteem for myself.
	And then here I was at the age of 17 and doing pretty well in social situations, particularly considering kind of, I don't know... Are you cooking an omelette while talking to me?
	I'm just trying to figure out what you're doing in the background there.
	No, just sitting on my bed.
	I hear like a...
	Like you're scraping something?
	Oh, yeah.
	OK, I need you to sit on your hands and focus on the conversation.
	Otherwise, we're going to have to call in an Adderall airstrike.
	All right, here we go.
	I just organized a little table for myself so I'm not in direct contact with my computer.
	Thank you.
	OK, so basically what I was saying is, so anyway, considering the circumstances, I was in a pretty good state it seemed, and then at that age I decided to have an operation to straighten out my chest, you know, because despite the fact that everything was okay, you know, a lot of people were telling me, you know, why you shouldn't do that, you know, just for the sake of aesthetics or whatever, but I decided I wanted to.
	I felt like it was kind of bothering me and I decided to take care of that.
	And then, okay, so at that point, a kind of spiral began.
	I don't know how significant this is, but for starters, the day after my operation, not like right after my operation, you know, it was an operation in the chest, so it's very painful.
	I was given morphine, and it took them quite a while to figure out that That it wasn't working on me and I was feeling all the pain in my chest to the level that I wasn't breathing.
	So the whole event started off very traumatically.
	And then I went on to, you know, they figured out a different pain reliever or whatever.
	Anyway, so...
	Uh, so throughout the next week or two, you know, I had pretty regularly, I had friends visiting me.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Is there running water anywhere near your microphone?
	Oh my god.
	No.
	Uh... No, there isn't.
	Okay.
	Sorry.
	Must be just noise then.
	Okay.
	Go ahead.
	I'm really sorry.
	I didn't realize it was that bad.
	Oh, it's fine.
	It's fine.
	Go ahead.
	Okay.
	Um... So... So anyway, so, um...
	And then about a week or two, I don't know, maybe a month, I was there for about a month, so maybe like two or three weeks into me being there and my friends were visiting me all the time and everything seemed to be alright, I don't exactly remember what the circumstances that this was told to me.
	Oh God, I don't even remember who told me.
	But basically, I was told by either my girlfriend or my best friend that they had gotten sexual to a certain degree during that period.
	While you were in hospital recovering from an operation?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Ooh, classy.
	At least they told you when you were chock full of morphine, but oh man, that sucks.
	I'm sorry to hear that.
	Yeah, I mean, I don't think it happened on the day that I, you know, sold morphine.
	But, you know, anyway, so I don't, you know, I mean, that alone, as you can understand, I mean, there are plenty of things that are worse than that.
	But that alone is quite a tough experience.
	But I mean, that was when I was 17.
	I'm 24 now.
	And kind of that led into a pretty dark place.
	So, at this point, I was... I mean, that was really tough for me.
	I was physically in the gutter.
	I could hardly walk.
	At least for the first while there, I was on a wheelchair because, you know, my chest couldn't support me or whatever.
	And then suddenly this, you know, emotionally, you know, getting devastated, I had actually Uh, recently before that, uh, left, um, I I'm, I'm in Israel.
	We have, uh, these two educational systems, uh, kind of, uh, internal and external.
	So, uh, in external education system, you only have to, you know, fill in the final exams.
	You don't have to go to school.
	So I had recently left to get together with, uh, my best friend at the time we had together left our.
	High school and went to external education.
	So that had happened recently before the operation.
	And then so I was in this situation and I kind of made the decision that I would stick, that I would kind of forgive her and not him.
	At that point, which I guess is typical to, uh, sorry, you made a, you got to turn down your speakers a bit, but you made the decision that you were going to forgive her.
	Uh, yes.
	I don't quite understand that.
	Well, maybe not the decision.
	I mean, sorry, what I mean by that is, did you do something to earn your forgiveness, or how do you just make a decision to do that?
	I mean, forgiveness is not like toothpaste, you just squeeze it out of the tube and there it is, right?
	It's like a very deep emotional experience.
	Like, you can't just sort of decide to love someone, right?
	And you can't just find someone who's not, you know, physically attractive and say, well, I'm going to find them physically attractive and you can't choose to like food that you hate.
	Like deep emotional experiences, I don't think you can choose them.
	I think forgiveness is a very deep emotional experience.
	I don't know that you can choose it.
	I'm happy to hear if that happened or how it happened, but I'm not sure when you say.
	It's like saying, well, I chose to fall in love with this random person on the subway or whatever.
	I mean, I just don't think you can Choose that love, I think, is something that's earned and I think forgiveness is too.
	Yeah, yeah, no, you're absolutely correct.
	And that's kind of, you know, with time, I kind of learned that.
	So, OK, so to be precise, I didn't I didn't choose to forgive her.
	I kind of basically I decided that if I was going to give up on both of them at the same time while going through all this, Um, I kind of figured that I would be in a much more difficult situation.
	These were definitely the two most important people in my life.
	And I was already going through a very difficult, uh, kind of experience.
	So I, I, you know, I made the, I mean, going through all that, it was hard to make a really sound rational decision, but sort of the one that I made was that I can't, you know, just keep on living with these two people in my life after they had just done this.
	So I kind of chose to stick with her.
	You chose to stick with who?
	With my girlfriend rather than my best friend.
	Okay.
	Why did you have to stick with either of them?
	Because I felt like, I mean, they were very important in my life to the point that they were my kind of primary...
	I couldn't imagine the possibility of being alone, and I didn't have any friends that were close to me to that level.
	I mean, at that particular spot, it's not that I wasn't ever used to being alone in my life, but in that particular place where I was post-operation, post-changing schools, which is also a social environment, it's not even changing schools.
	Okay, sorry, did you believe that this was the first time they became sexually involved?
	Yes, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Wow.
	That's, you know, from two people who kind of betrayed you, that yes, absolutely, they're honest seems like a very, a very certain statement.
	How do you know?
	Oh, sorry.
	Sorry.
	I'll actually, I believe them that it's the first time that they were with each other.
	She had been in situations that weren't overtly sexual, but had sexual undertones with other people throughout the time that we were together.
	And how long, sorry to interrupt, how long do you think that they had been attracted to each other before something sexual happened?
	So, I will point out that this is all, this whole, our conversation right now is in the context of over the years since then i've you know kind of confronted them about this stuff i've received uh... apologies and explanations and excuses and uh... uh... you know uh... recuperate uh... what's the word You know, they gave things in return, kind of, to try to show.
	Wow, I am encountering the classic Hebraic filibuster, I think you said you're from Israel, right?
	I'm trying to ask simple questions and you're giving me these, like, multi-year answers, right?
	Yeah, OK.
	So my question is, how long do you think that they had been attracted to each other before they acted on it?
	I've sort of...
	From Okay, I'll just give the final... I got the impression, it felt to me like my operation was a trigger to some emotional stuff amongst them that brought this to occur.
	By the way, the hospital that I was in is in a different city from where we all live.
	About an hour and a half's drive away.
	And none of us had cards.
	So they started supporting one another the way that they were, you know, kind of they compensated, not that I'm excusing them or anything like that, just kind of my analysis of the situation.
	They started compensating for the lack of me in their lives with each other throughout those weeks that I was in the hospital.
	Um, and that's kind of, and from what I understand from them, and at this point I do believe them, they, I mean they didn't They didn't actually go very far sexually.
	Oh my god, just before I tear out what's remaining of my hair, I'm afraid you're going to have to get to a question.
	I just can't do it.
	I say that out of respect.
	I want to make sure that I continue paying attention to what you're saying, but I don't know what you're talking about and I don't know what the question is.
	So if you can get to a question, I would be forever in your debt.
	Absolutely, absolutely.
	I was just trying to build the context.
	Well, basically at this point, so I, yeah, absolutely.
	There was no way that I was going to, you know, fill out this whole context of this whole story.
	But anyway, I'm at a point in my life right now where I feel like I have no significant social bonds and I'm losing them still.
	And my best friend now actually is The guy who was my best friend then.
	So I guess the question is... I mean, I've gone through a whole process of reconciliation with him and, you know, I mean, that's perfect.
	I guess, you know, I'm also kind of... I'm in a state of... It feels to me like every social interaction with new people kind of starts off really well Until the point where it kind of feels like I might actually really get to know them.
	And then I sort of shut down and withdraw.
	And I'm in the process of trying to figure out how I can deal with that.
	And why do you think that's occurring?
	So, I mean, I think that I, uh, I think that, uh, you know, I mean, so, so the thing is after this, I'm going to not tell the whole story, but a few pointers after this, also the people who became my friends.
	No, no, no, no story.
	No story.
	No story.
	Sorry.
	Do you, do you have, do you have a clock?
	Do you have a clock in the room?
	Yeah, sure.
	Okay.
	Does it have a second hand?
	Well, I got the seconds of the Skype conversation.
	Okay, fantastic.
	All right.
	I would like you, just as a challenge, to give me an answer as to why you think this is occurring with no context in 30 seconds or less.
	Okay.
	Well, my trust in true bonds with other human beings has been shattered and Still haven't repaired it.
	Okay, well, sorry, that's not correct.
	I'm sorry to interrupt you.
	No, your trust has not been shattered because you've chosen to stay in contact with these people, right?
	True.
	So, they... well, I think you said you were 17, is that right?
	And you're now 23?
	24.
	24, okay.
	So, seven years ago or so, Between six and eight years ago, your girlfriend slept around on you with your best friend, right?
	Yes.
	Well, they didn't sleep together, but they... Okay, but they had sexual interaction, right?
	Yes.
	You know, the two of them at a kumquat, whatever it is, right?
	And then you kept these people in your life, and so what was done... No, it was done unto you seven years ago.
	You have been doing it to yourself ever since by having them still in your life, right?
	Well, I ejected both of them out of my life for a while.
	Okay, don't quibble with me.
	I can't have a chat with you if you quibble with me about everything.
	They're in your life, right?
	Yes.
	You invited them back into your life, right?
	Absolutely.
	Okay, so from that moment on, they are not doing it to you.
	You were doing it to yourself.
	Mm-hmm.
	You understand?
	Okay.
	Right, so if I go to a restaurant and I have a shitty meal, I can complain about that meal, right?
	Yes.
	If I go back to that restaurant and I keep getting shitty meals, at what point is it no longer rational for me to complain about my shitty meals at that restaurant?
	Well, I hope this is not quibbling, but they haven't done anything like that since or before.
	Then your trust has not been shattered, because they've prepared it and they've showed you that they can do better, and then I'm not sure what you're saying when you say your trust has been shattered.
	Like, if the restaurant is now serving great meals, then complaining about one shitty meal seven years ago seems silly, right?
	Um, that's correct.
	However, uh, uh, later, uh, a year or two later, I also got betrayed by a number of my friends who turned me into the police, uh, for smoking pot with them.
	And as a result, I had, I wanted to get that there, but I, I, then I realized that I was going on too long, but So, it kind of was a... Why did you, sorry, why did your friends turn you into the police?
	Well, they were all turning each other in, but... Oh, was one of them caught and then they just started informing?
	Yeah, well, yeah, that happens here regularly.
	But it kind of, it stopped with me, because I chose not to... Well, various things also, I wasn't going to the army... Okay, so, sorry, just to be sort of clear, I mean, that's not quite the same as a betrayal, right?
	That's right.
	That's right.
	It's just that within... Because, I mean, they've got a gun to their head, so to speak, right?
	Yeah, I guess you could say so.
	Well, that's not a good say-so.
	I mean, they're in the hands of the police and the police is offering them a reduced sentence in return for informing, right?
	Yeah, I guess they were just kind of... they behave...
	They could have handled it in a different way that wouldn't have resulted in that, but I guess you, yeah, all right.
	I'll definitely... Well, I mean, for sure, but I mean, you could have not smoked pot, right?
	I mean, if it's illegal, then you, you're always taking that chance, right?
	And if you, you know, you could be at a pot party, like this is, this is what is alarming about drugs.
	I'm saying this, you know, to the less Cheech and Chong enabled listeners, but if you're at a party and there are drugs, if there's a bust or if somebody gets caught later, They're just going to start informing.
	And if you're at that party and they know who you are, there is a reason, even if you never touched the stuff, there is a reasonable chance that you're just going to get fingered as somebody who was there smoking or dealing.
	And in fact, if you are the dealer, you're much less likely in some ways.
	And in some cases to get fingered to the cops, because you're kind of dangerous because you're a drug dealer.
	Right.
	And I don't mean all drug dealers are dangerous, but they would rather The cops sweep up someone who's not possibly part of a crime syndicate or who has vengeful brothers or who is a criminal element already.
	So if you're even at a party where a lot of drugs or even some drugs are being used, if somebody gets caught or somebody gets grabbed, even if you are completely clean, you can get... it is a risky, risky business to get involved in.
	Yeah, that's true, and obviously my perspective has changed since.
	This wasn't kind of in a party scenario, this was kind of more in the scenario of I had two or three friends with whom I was smoking regularly and they kind of got informed from some other people and then I got... So the bottom line being that, you know, these were like the friends that I got after the whole operation event and they were my, you know, two or three, you know, very closest friends at that time and then that relationship sort of ended up
	It ended up that they kind of in cahoots with each other in a way, right?
	I guess, but you're right.
	Okay, so I think the only thing that I can suggest is it sounds to me like you have some doubts about your ability to choose good situations and good friendships, right?
	I mean, you're with this girl, you said she was wonderful, she was great, she was lovely, and then she has a sexual interaction with your best friend while you're in the hospital.
	After an operation.
	This does not gel together.
	I'm just going to tell you straight.
	The moment someone tells me that this woman was great, wonderful, and nice, and then this happened while I was in the hospital, I'm an empiricist.
	I don't care what you say about the woman, I only care about what she does.
	What she did was really shitty.
	Right?
	I assumed that you were in a monogamous relationship, you were in the hospital, and she... I mean, and with your friend!
	For God's sakes, I mean, talk about screwing you two ways from Sundays, or rather not, right?
	Yes.
	Which is that you're in hospital, you've got to recover, and now, not only has she betrayed you, but now she's fucked up your relationship with your best friend, right?
	Absolutely.
	That is the actions of a sublimely cruel bitch, and a supremely irresponsible asshole on the part of your friend, right?
	That's one of the worst things that you can do to someone that doesn't involve Shooting them in the knee, right?
	Right, but I'm assuming you're not suggesting, or are you, that it is unforgivable, you know, under certain circumstances?
	Well, forgiveness is like money, you don't just fling it in the street, right?
	I don't know.
	I mean, I don't even know if I'd bother trying to forgive someone who did something that to me because, especially if they're 17, you know, maybe if they went to years of therapy and it was such an incredible friendship, but of course it was, but you're still, you were still describing this woman to me as great and wonderful when you were first introducing her to me, right?
	Well, I was, I was introducing like up to that point.
	Yeah.
	See, this is what you don't get.
	There is no such thing as up to that point.
	He was a really nice guy until he strangled that hobo.
	Yes.
	Right?
	Yes.
	Does that make sense?
	Of course.
	He was a really shitty pilot until he landed that plane perfectly, right?
	No.
	He was really terrible at piano until that concert at Carnegie Hall, right?
	There is no until or until that point, right?
	Everything is a progression.
	Everything is linear.
	If you were brutally honest and had a really great memory, you could look back and you could find the problems much earlier.
	People aren't just great and then they suddenly turn bad.
	Or they're not great and then they're suddenly disloyal.
	It's all there in the beginning.
	It's all there in the beginning.
	That's not just my opinion.
	This is pretty well established.
	There are always markers.
	There are always signs.
	You need to learn.
	How to read them.
	But the problem is, which you already told me, is that you're afraid of being alone.
	And because if you're afraid of being alone, then you will always make compromises to be with people.
	And then you will always regret that you didn't learn how to be alone.
	Learning how to be alone is called having standards.
	There is no starving man who's going to be fussy about the food you give him, and there's no people who have great difficulty being alone who are going to end up with quality relationships.
	I'm sorry, it's just a fact.
	Beggars can't be choosers.
	And if you feel a need to be with people, then you will be with people and will not be in a capacity to judge whether they're good for you or not, whether they're honorable, decent people.
	And then you'll end up with this repetitive junk food kind of relationships.
	Tastes good in the moment, puts an extra ass on your ass.
	Right?
	So learning how to be alone, learning how to not, and a lot of not A lot of not being alone has to do with vanity, not being comfortable being alone.
	And the reason that I think that you have some vanity is because you told me about how great your girlfriend was, which is in fact telling me how great you are.
	Whenever someone says, oh my girlfriend is so great, my girlfriend is so great, she's so wonderful, she's so loving, I know that they're giving me third-hand adjectives about themselves.
	Doesn't mean they're wrong.
	I think my wife is wonderful and I say so repeatedly.
	But I think I'm wonderful too, right?
	I don't ascribe a virtue to my wife or to my friends that I don't believe I possess myself, because that would be a kind of theft.
	Well, my wife is wonderful and perfect and virtuous, but I'm pretty crummy.
	Well, then she's not wonderful and virtuous, because then why would she be with someone who's pretty crummy?
	I'm a great husband, I'm a great father, I'm a great friend.
	And so, if you have vanity, Then you are very concerned with people's opinions about you.
	If you're very concerned with people's opinions about you, then if you go through a time of diminished friendships or no dating or whatever, then you're afraid that people are going to say, why doesn't he have any friends?
	Why doesn't he have a girlfriend?
	And that judging people who are walking the road less traveled is exactly how shitty people keep people trapped in shitty relationships.
	Or subpar relationships, if you want to put it that way.
	And so, if you can be comfortable and confident with who you are, then you can begin to choose your friends rather than needing your friends out of a fear of being alone.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Okay, so, I mean, that's very true.
	Certainly.
	I mean, I feel like I even have a degree of vanity that's kind of, well, I guess that's kind of what you're saying, but that's left over since that time.
	Like, you know, before that operation, I was kind of at a peak of my self-image, and now kind of my image doesn't fit with that, but I'm still kind of hanging on to the image that I had then, which is a long time ago, so that's kind of messed up.
	Yeah, look, you have to look at approval like a very dangerous drug.
	There is nothing wrong with morphine when you need pain killers, right?
	Except for me.
	It is not a good drug to use habitually.
	Other people's approval is a very dangerous drug.
	It should be a class A substance, highly regulated by philosophers, only doled out for donations.
	Just kidding.
	Please donate.
	fdrural.com forward slash donate.
	But we are dependent upon other people's approval.
	That is very important to us.
	I'm not this Atomic Ayn Rand guy who, you know, we can all just completely judge ourselves for ourselves, by ourselves.
	Yes.
	And about ourselves, we do need the approval of other people.
	And what that means is that we really need good people in our life.
	You know, I used to be punished for being myself.
	Now I am reprimanded for not being myself.
	Right?
	So in my old relationships, in the old me, with my family and friends from childhood and so on, I actually had a dream about one of them.
	But in those relationships, like the first caller, when I was honest, I would be rejected.
	Now, when I'm not honest, I am remonstrated.
	I am corrected.
	Not in a harsh or hostile way, but if I'm not particularly honest.
	And what you need is the echo chamber of virtue, not of need.
	Yeah.
	Just, so I'm kind of wondering, like, from my perspective now, I feel like over the past few years, I mean, maybe kind of in and out, but for a large part of all of that, I've been fairly, but for a large part of all of that, I've been fairly, fairly kind of isolated through my rejection participating in social interaction and things like that.
	I mean, like I said, nowadays the situation is that I don't follow through into relationships because that I'm, you know, well... I'm sorry, I think we're kind of missing the elephant in the room.
	Did you say you were in Israel?
	Yeah.
	And are you Jewish?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, so...
	That's kind of an elephant in the room when it comes to conformity and approval, isn't it?
	I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it does seem to be a fairly, you know, heavily inflicted cultural, religious, social, nationalistic, whatever you name it, kind of thing, right?
	I mean, there's not a lot of road less traveled in Judaism, right?
	Road less traveled?
	Sorry, what do you mean by that?
	Yeah, I mean, individualism and Judaism don't exactly go hand in hand, right?
	And I'm not picking on Judaism.
	I mean, this is true for all these sort of collective concepts, right?
	Individualism and partisanism don't go hand in hand.
	I understand entirely.
	However, saying that I'm Jewish in Israel is not too different than somebody who, you know, I mean, I'm not religious.
	So, I mean, I did go to a religious elementary school.
	Are you a practicing Jew?
	I know that there's practicing Jews who are not religious, I'm fully aware of that.
	There are a lot of atheist Jews, I'm fully aware of that.
	An atheist Jew was one of my biggest influencers, which was Ayn Rand.
	So I fully accept and understand all of that.
	But it is, you know, it's a cultural tradition, it is a familial tradition, it is a community tradition, and it certainly is a pretty nationalistic tradition, however I guess relatively short, in the world of nations.
	But what I'm saying is that real individualism and collective cultural concepts do not go hand-in-hand, right?
	Yeah, but just what I want to say, and I'd definitely be happy to get further into the topic of Judaism.
	I think I could talk a lot about that, but just that, I mean, I've been to America, and I don't see that Israel is necessarily all that much more fascistic.
	And the religion, I mean, being a secular Jew, in fact, secularism in Israel is a little bit more kind of independent from religion, if I can say so.
	Like, being an atheist is less of an oddity here, actually.
	No, I understand that.
	And again, I fully accept that.
	But Judaism and philosophy, let's just put it in those dark terms, would not go hand in hand, right?
	Let me put it to you this way.
	Is there such a thing as Jewish science?
	No.
	Is there such a thing as Christian science?
	No.
	And there's no such thing as Christian math or Muslim geography or anything like that, because these things are factual, right?
	There's no such thing as Aryan logic, you know?
	And so, to me, individualism is free thought in the pursuit of reason and evidence.
	That's philosophy.
	And so there's no such thing as Jewish philosophy.
	There's ex post facto justification for Jewish cultural precepts, but there's no such thing as Jewish philosophy.
	That would be like saying Rastafarian arithmetic.
	It just doesn't make any sense.
	And this is my definitions, right?
	I think there's some validity to it.
	But if philosophy is the purpose of this show, and if philosophy is, as I would argue, individuation and therefore connection with other people in reality, then the degree to which Judaism is informing your thinking is the degree to which you are not able to be philosophical.
	Okay.
	I just want to point out, as far as the connection between Judaism and philosophy, I would say you're correct.
	Just as far as Judaism and individualism, I will point out that individualism is a little bit more compatible with Judaism than with the other monotheistic religions from my experience, simply because
	In Judaism, there is some sort of an acceptance, there is something more of this kind of every, this attitude regarding every person can read into the Bible from their point of view.
	So, for instance, my father, okay, I'm just going to give a little preface.
	My father is a rabbi, actually.
	Uh, however, he is kind of reform conservative.
	Me becoming an atheist at the age of 13 was no big deal.
	You know...
	Right.
	So, just sort of... And in that sense, you know, again, to be fair, in that sense Judaism, I don't know how to put it, I would say Judaism is more flexible than Christianity.
	Yes.
	Because you can be an atheistic Jew, but you cannot be an atheistic Christian.
	But you can also... And of course, you know, in the extreme medieval religions with which Israel is surrounded, you know, obviously I'd much rather live in Israel than any of the countries surrounding, you know, much more individualistic than Islam without any, you know, there's not even anything, you know, not even on the same planet.
	So I certainly, you know, I'm not sort of, but I don't want to compare Judaism to the other religions or other cultural practices.
	But in terms of philosophy, right, then it's certainly more scope for individualism, but I still would say the philosophy would be even more, right?
	Well, so have you ever read into the Talmud a little bit?
	You know, I don't read much fiction lately.
	It's mostly non-fiction that I read for my show.
	I like fiction a lot, and I think fairy tales are great, but I just honestly don't read a lot of it these days.
	Alright, I understand.
	However, the reason I ask that, and not necessarily that, and not the Old Testament
	is that in a way the Talmud is a little bit more like a uh... kind of uh... it's more of a lawyer's uh... kind of text uh... over a uh... you know i mean there are some stories in there but uh... but to the to the most part it's it's a very very strange structure i mean they they kind of uh... try to affect logical reasoning like you said a post facto uh... kind of uh... reconciliation but you know they'll take
	semantics in the Bible and they'll try to construct and build, you know, like take the Bible as fact and then build logically on top of that.
	Of course, the result is insane and that's why you get people like ultra-Orthodox Jews who are, you know, I actually live nearby a lot of ultra-Orthodox Jews, which are lovely people, but they live in a wacky, wacky kind of way of life, no doubt, which is as a result of this...
	But you'll notice ultra-Orthodox Jews... Well, look, I mean, look, they may be lovely people, but I'm just not sure.
	I'm never really sure about the degree to which they can inflict some of that stuff on their kids.
	I mean, the kids don't choose it, right?
	That's always the problem.
	Absolutely.
	But just as far as religions go, I mean, and these are obviously the most extreme kind of on the religious side when it comes to Jews, and the range is incredible.
	But, I mean, for example, you know that they all wear black and white, for instance, right?
	So, this is not, it doesn't say in the Bible, wear black and white, but, or for instance, all the rules of kosher.
	In the Bible, it doesn't have all those rules down, but they kind of take, for example, you know, how there's Jews don't mix milk and, well, you know, religious Jews, right, don't mix milk and meat.
	Um, at all, to the point they don't, they don't use the same cutlery.
	They, you know, it has to go through a process.
	You have to wait eight hours between if you eat milk and if you eat meat.
	Um, but the fact is that in the Bible, all it says is, um, don't eat a cow, uh, sorry, a calf in its mother's milk.
	That's it regarding that topic.
	And then they kind of structured on top of that, they tried to figure out how can, you know, take that as an absolute rule of morality.
	How can we avoid obstructing that at all costs?
	And building on top of that, they came up with all these wacky rules, which is what happens when you try to apply logic to a bad foundation.
	I don't exactly remember why I was getting into explaining... Oh, right, regarding the relationship... No, you were talking about the degree to which some of the Jewish texts do help in terms of rational argument.
	I fully accept that.
	I used to be a debater.
	You know, you'd be able to tell the Jewish kids across the way, and if you go up to debate, it's like, oh, he's Jewish, I better bring my A-game.
	Because, you know, there's a lot of discussion around the Jewish tables, a lot of logical challenges, a lot of, I mean, the Jewish IQ is off the charts, right?
	I mean, as a general sort of biological group, it's like 120 on average or 125 or something like that.
	And so, I mean, that's all fantastic.
	And actually, this is long before I learned that I had some sort of Jewish background, too.
	So yeah, I fully accept that, you know, great logical training and this and that and the other.
	Of course, yeah, it does go kind of wacky sometimes, as these things tend to in times, but still, it is reasoning within the context of a religious or cultural tradition that is not quite the same That's what I would call individuation.
	And again, this is not particular to Judaism, and I would argue, you know, if I had to choose a religion, I think I would probably go there, because I'd like to have a religion where I didn't have to believe in God.
	I think that would be excellent, that would be great.
	But still, you know, relative to philosophy, it's quite a distance.
	Excuse my French, but thank God that we don't have to do that in this day and age.
	Pick a religion.
	But I actually will point out, regarding kind of my problems in life, I mean, I feel like, Whatever you might have heard about Jewish IQ, you know, I still here in Israel have the same problem throughout my life that, you know, I meet people and they want a small talk about football and I want to kind of, you know, have some discussion and that's no fun.
	It's like that here too.
	But I will point out that regarding myself individually, I would wonder if you have experience with this.
	I mean, and I've been told this by my friends that also That I use rationality to just kind of sometimes just mess up my life.
	And maybe it's not rationality in that sense, but kind of, I don't know, overthinking.
	Kind of to bury myself in, like, I guess I use it sometimes to avoid action.
	I don't exactly know.
	You must have encountered this kind of thing.
	You know, when you were young.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, it's the Hamlet thing, right?
	I mean, we reason ourselves in and out of things in order to avoid actions, right?
	And the fact that there's a lot of small talk in a geographically concentrated area with a very wide divergence of absolutist beliefs is not too surprising.
	The same thing is true of England to some degree as well, right?
	A lot of wide variety of beliefs and you're not supposed to talk about anything because you might set people off, right?
	So it's not... I don't think that's an IQ thing.
	I think that's just a concentration of semi-rational or irrational absolutes.
	It's one of the things that bugs me about culture and religion is a scientist can talk to a scientist usually without much offense, right?
	Assuming there's not a huge amount of government money at stake, climate science, but I will say that scientists, mathematicians, they can talk to each other without offense.
	Geographers, historians, it gets a little bit more upsetting, right?
	It can get a little bit more contentious, but that's because history is fundamentally another kind of religion, which I'll talk about another time.
	So where there is a lot of concentration of irrational absolutes, people are cut off from talking to each other because it's not that people will disagree with each other, it's that they'll disagree with each other with no objective way of resolving those disputes.
	The scientists have an objective way of resolving their disputes, the scientific method and mathematicians have it and so on.
	Even logicians have it to a large degree.
	But where there are disagreements that are essential and important, where there's no objective methodology for resolving those disputes, people tend to dance around a lot and waste their lives on small talk, which I think is sad, right?
	Well, if I may, I just want to relate this a little bit to kind of my life.
	So, right, I said that there's that friend that, you know, he's a very important part of my life again.
	And amongst other things, He's one of the only people that I can really have that kind of relationship with regarding honesty and intellectuality and, you know, I mean, you know, kind of somebody who doesn't mind hearing me ramble and can respond well.
	And, you know, kind of our, you know, if there's a male competitiveness thing going on, then it's more about who's got the facts behind it.
	And, you know, I don't, that's something that I feel like I need in my life.
	And if I don't have that, I start kind of, you know, then the whole over-rationalizing thing becomes a serious problem because I get no feedback.
	Right.
	No, I get that for sure.
	I think it's interesting how our conversation has, I think, become much more relaxed and connected since we started talking about Judaism.
	Well, yeah, it's a topic that I'm very... I mean, it's not good or bad, it's just an interesting thing to notice, right?
	And I think that's an important thing.
	I think it is a topic to wrestle with.
	I mean, all beliefs that are cultural are anathema to philosophy, as they are to science.
	And sorry, there is a correction, because I said, is that you used to ask, is there such a thing as Christian science?
	And I said, no, which is true.
	But there is such a thing called Christian science, which is all the crazy fundamentalists trying to prove that Noah could stuff an ark up his ass or whatever the hell they're trying to prove.
	There is no such thing as Christian science, but there is a superstition, a superstitious strain of Christianity called Christian science.
	Which is kind of nonsense.
	But anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
	There's such a thing as Jewish science in the sense of various Jews of varying degrees of confidence, trying to be Jewish supremacists by pointing out this guy's Jewish, that guy's Jewish.
	Jewish science is a brand, like they say, Israeli high-tech, you know?
	I think that Adam Sandler's in charge of that, if I remember right.
	And that still, I tell you, I mean, I don't think it's, maybe it's not hugely relevant, but that still does blow my mind when I find about people who are Jewish who I never would have imagined.
	And that also reminds me that there's no stereotype that's ever worth pursuing.
	Oh, I didn't know the guy was Jewish.
	What does it matter?
	And why wouldn't you know?
	Like, is he supposed to look some way?
	Anyways, just sort of pointing out.
	Well, you know, I just got to point out really with that whole, like, I mean, I've been through that place in my life.
	I got to point out.
	of kind of Jewish supremacism.
	I did have a girlfriend who for a while who was from a Muslim Arab background and she was just a magnificent artist and you know I admire her to this day.
	She never kind of betrayed me like that for sure.
	So she helped me kind of you know change my point of view on the The fact is, I mean, there are a lot of theories regarding why it is that Jews are, you know, so prominent in a lot of fields.
	And amongst those, I mean, but you can't ignore the fact that Israel is different.
	And the Jewish population in Israel is not quite as spectacular.
	And I think there's a lot of kind of I don't know.
	There's a lot of history involved in what brought Jews to the... I mean, in that regard, I'm very much an environmentalist.
	Oh, you mean like sort of the Jews in the West are more of a self-selecting group?
	Like, you know, the smartest wanted the most opportunity and that kind of stuff?
	Is that sort of the argument?
	No, no, no.
	I think more in the sense of... I mean, like you often say that, you know, if children were raised in a different way, then they would be more intelligent.
	Yeah?
	Yes.
	So, I mean, I see plenty of, you know, my parents are Anglo-Saxons, not actually Americans, but, you know, and I know a whole community of people like that.
	So a lot of these people, you're talking about people who, you know, their grandfather was, you know, it's true about me too, you know, but their grandparents were very, you know, they invented something or started something or, you know, they're important in academia or whatever.
	and I think that's a good thing.
	And now, you know, two generations later, kind of having, you know, grown up and developed in this in Israel, which is not the healthiest environment for a lot of reasons, not the least of which, which is a very militaristic society in which using, you which is a very militaristic society in which using, you know, the idea of force is completely common, specifically when, you know, half the people go to the army.
	So, so, you know, two generations later, you know, and you're facing somebody who whose family across the sea are incredibly important.
	But over here, they, you know, they're kind of, you know, choosing between, you know, buying a marshmallow and a Mars bar.
	And that's like the difficult decisions of their lives and like what they consider complicated.
	Yeah, I mean, I think that as far as differences in intelligence goes, I know that there are some arguments that there are genetic differences for intelligence among various communities.
	I obviously have no expertise to judge that, but I do know that the Jewish law, and I know that's like a whole ecosystem, but the Jewish approach is to Not go so much with the rebellious son put to death by stoning, the deuterotomy stuff, but is more focused on
	I think the Talmud says you can punish a student with a leather shoelace, and you can't hit grown children.
	For me, I think a lot of it has to do with less aggressive forms of child raising, obviously great literacy, and of course the fact that Jews weren't allowed to own property for a lot of human history meant that they were really focused on human capital, which is lawyers, doctors, accountants, and so on, right?
	Apparently that whole not allowed to own property thing is not, it's not so black and white.
	Uh, apparently it's, I don't exactly know the facts, but it doesn't exactly end there, but they just weren't allowed at those times.
	But, uh, I just wanted to point out as far as, I mean, so I'm the youngest of four.
	I'm the youngest son of four, four children.
	And the amazing thing is that the first stories in the Bible after, you know, the Garden of Eden and all that, you know, beginning with Abraham, for four generations, the four generations of the founding fathers, so to speak, right?
	Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and then Jacob's son, Joseph, right?
	So the four most important individuals were all the youngest son, They were all, they were all not the strongest.
	I like where you're going with this.
	I feel, I feel my, my strength growing.
	Go on.
	I'm the youngest son, but go on.
	Oh, there you go.
	There you go.
	And, and, you know, and there's, and there's, you know, a very interesting part of all that is that there's a lot of, uh, they take a lot into the topic of, uh, uh, sibling rivalry.
	I mean, like, seriously, like, say, the reason that Joseph ended up in Egypt is because that his siblings were jealous of him because he was the favorite son and all that, so they sold him to slavery.
	And then he ended up in Egypt.
	So, you know, there's this whole thing about, and then he got rich, you know, kind of the entrepreneurial thing going on there, and then his siblings had the To apologize to him.
	I mean, I know for myself and kind of as the youngest son and also kind of the most intelligent and with the most kind of, you know, I've always had like, you know, every one of my siblings have, you know, kind of taken a different direction in life.
	And I've dabbled in everything that each one of them has done.
	Obviously, I'm not as good as they are because they've dedicated their lives to it, but kind of
	There has been this thing of, you know, kind of being aware of sibling rivalry, and it's actually, like, I really learned directly from the Bible as an atheist, but this still resonated with me that if I'm more successful than my brother, it's going to have more impact than if I'm just more successful than somebody else randomly, you know what I mean?
	Right, right.
	Well, I certainly appreciate your call, and I'm glad we got to talk about this topic.
	It is, of course, I think, a very interesting topic, and it is a very exciting challenge.
	Lots of opportunities growing up Jewish, of course, lots of challenges as well.
	I think, yeah, it is one of the most ambivalent, I think, cultural disciplines around, in that there are a lot of advantages.
	I think there are limitations, of course, you know, as a sort of blank slate philosopher guy, at least as I try to strive.
	There are challenges that are insurmountable in culturally transmitted traditions that are not susceptible to reason and evidence, but I certainly always appreciate being able to chat about the topic, and I really do appreciate you calling in.
	I hope that our conversation was, if not necessarily useful, at least enjoyable.
	Well, you're always enjoyable, Stefan.
	Really, thank you for all your work.
	You are most welcome, and I hope it works out.
	I just really, really urge people, this is the sort of, raise your standards seems to be, and it is an annoying thing to hear from anyone else, because, well, my standards are at 100 and you people need to bring them up to my standards.
	Listen, I struggle with raising standards all the time.
	I struggle with raising standards all the time.
	Because purity is suicide, right?
	Yeah.
	Nobody is beyond sin except the dead.
	And so we want to raise our standards, but not to the point where we can't be with anyone, leave alone ourselves.
	So I don't really like that particular approach to things.
	And so, yeah, but I think keep edging them up.
	We can't really have higher standards for others than we do for ourselves.
	And if we compromise for others, we will end up, I think, a little decayed ourselves.
	So I really appreciate that topic.
	It was very helpful that I managed to shoot Yeah, perhaps I should have figured myself out more exactly what my question is on the personal thing, and instead just called and said, I'd like to talk about Judaism.
	What do you think about it?
	Well, I think you're certainly welcome to talk about it at any time, and I also invite our Muslim and Christian friends and the Zoroastrian guy.
	Maybe there's more than one, I don't know.
	Any religion that birthed Freddie Mercury, I want to join.
	I've got to tell you that the Jews have some fantastic singers.
	You know, I kind of remember this guy now.
	Mandy Patinkin.
	Haven't heard that man sing?
	Oh, it's like an angel weeping in your ear.
	It's fantastic.
	All right.
	Thank you so much, Stefan.
	You are very welcome.
	Have a great night, my friend.
	All right.
	And I believe as we close in on the midnight hour, look at that.
	A three-caller show under four hours.
	We are going to call that a Christmas miracle.
	So have yourselves a great, great Christmas, everyone, whether you're alone or not.
	You have the company of all good-minded, thoughtful, and intelligent people.
	Reach out to others.
	Do not assume that everyone has somewhere else to go and see.
	Get together in coffee shops, get together with all the Jews at the Chinese restaurants on Christmas, and make sure that you stay in contact with other people in the community.
	If you would like to help out the show, as always, your donations are gratefully, gratefully accepted.
	fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
	I hugely appreciate that as well.
	Thank you to the people who give me feedback in the chat room.
	That really helps.
	I do try and keep my eye on it to the degree that I can do that and still remain focused on the listeners, but your feedback really, really means a lot to me.
	I really, really appreciate that.
	Okay, so I will see you once more before the end of the year and I'm looking forward to it as always.

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