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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:45:51

Using Self-Defense Against Government?

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	I guess we'll get started.
	Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii I think that's the way we want to go.
	With the Philosoraptors, I think that's the way to go.
	And it's primitive, but with amazing CGI.
	So thanks so much, Mike.
	Thanks, everybody, for joining me on this Saturday night.
	I appreciate those of you who've taken time off from ecstasy parties, crack dens, and, say, cocaine off the belly of hookers to spend a few hours in the pursuit, dare I say the hot pursuit, of philosophy.
	Self-knowledge, wisdom, and virtue.
	So, Mike, who have we got first?
	All right.
	Alec is up first today.
	Go ahead, Alec.
	Hello.
	Thanks for having me.
	How are you doing?
	I'm doing well.
	How are you?
	Good.
	I feel your name is incomplete.
	Why?
	Because it's Alec.
	It's like why your parents couldn't afford the X or the S at the end.
	Anyway, what's on your mind?
	Alright, so long story short, I'm a junior at a high school in North Carolina.
	And we were assigned a research paper for my AP English 3 class.
	And the topic I chose was, would a free society be better than and answer the problems of the state?
	So essentially justify anarchy and abolition of the state.
	I'm sorry, hang on a sec.
	I just, I missed that.
	Give me your proposition again.
	Would a free society be better than and answer the problems of a state?
	Would a free society be better than and answer the problems of a state?
	That's not a very clear way of putting it.
	So basically you're saying, would we be better off without a state?
	Yes.
	So one of the sources she said we could use was we could interview someone.
	And I know you're very accredited in this field, so I thought that there'd be no one better to help me understand and help my class understand and all that.
	Well, yeah, I don't know about accredited, but hopefully I can come up with a few useful things.
	But I'm sure that my alma mater is still looking at ways to shed my degree.
	But let's go with the questions.
	All right.
	So just to start off, what do you think are some of the key problems with the state?
	And this can be like philosophical, like the initiation of force, obviously, or it can be more practical, like you can talk about specific governments like the inefficiency of the American welfare state or anything like that?
	Well, inefficiency is a very tough word, because what is inefficient for one organism or person is actually quite efficient for another, right?
	So for the people on the receiving end, of say the minimum wage, it's very efficient.
	They get paid more than they would have otherwise gotten paid.
	For the people who are on the paying end, it's not so efficient.
	Or for the people who don't get jobs because of the minimum wage, it's not.
	So efficiency is a really tough word because it implies sort of one universal standard that the welfare state deviates from, and it's not that way at all.
	You know, one of the great challenges of talking about society is that we're just so used to talking about it in a central planning kind of way.
	You know, like there's a fair price, there's a living wage, there's a minimum standard of living, there's all of this kind of stuff.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	People take on voluntary poverty all the time.
	You know, right when I left a six-figure income as a software executive, you know, for the next 18 months I made like nine bucks because I was writing novels.
	You know, my income collapsed.
	Was I a victim?
	No.
	The people I forced to read my novels were victims, technically speaking.
	So I sort of rejected it.
	The main problem, and I know this sounds a little obtuse, but I don't want to be very clear about this, the main problem with the state is the corruption of language.
	Because when we say the state, all we mean is a monopoly on violence.
	And once you define the state properly, then you answer the question just in the definition, right?
	I mean, it's like that old Confucius saying that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.
	The state has invented language to describe itself.
	You know, if you ever go on a dating website and someone describes himself as, you know, tall, dark and handsome, six-pack abs and great hair, you know, but there's no photo, right?
	Then he's just describing himself and the absence of photo would lead you to be somewhat suspicious about the accuracy of these adjectives he's describing himself, right?
	Because he's describing himself and it's like everyone's resume.
	Nobody talks about, you know, the time they screamed at their boss or got fired or, you know, stole a candy bar from a store or whatever, right?
	They just, they describe themselves.
	And as a hiring manager, I mean, I was very clear that doesn't mean that they're lying.
	It just means that it's a pretty selective group of adjectives and a pretty selective, and it's the cherry picking goes on all over the place and religion and so on.
	So the language of the state uses is language invented by the state.
	So what does the state provide?
	Law and order.
	Are you against law?
	Are you against order?
	Anarchy is chaos and madness and disorder and blah blah blah, right?
	Nothing to do with the state wars that have been consuming mankind for the past few thousand years, which is actually, is real anarchy.
	And so it's the corruption of language that is a huge problem.
	People say, well, am I for or against raising taxes?
	On who?
	Well, am I for or against an expansion of violence in society?
	That's what it really comes down to.
	Like the word slave, originally, was just slave.
	It was, you know, it would mean, I guess, like made.
	There was no particular negative connotation to it.
	And it's through the actions of the abolitionists and so on, and the word slave became a negative word.
	And so we saw the state and this and that.
	It's just using the language that the government has developed to describe itself.
	Language is the real matrix and language is just another government program designed to shield its victims from the reality of the system that they inhabit, right?
	Like the Soviet gulags were called labor camps, re-education camps.
	I mean, it's all nonsense.
	To me, it's all just around the definition.
	Now, as far as efficiency goes, I think that we can generally understand that that which is anti-rational cannot last in a rational universe, right?
	I mean, if the universe is rational, which I think science is fairly well established that it is, then things which are anti-rational cannot flourish in a rational universe, which is why we know that crazy people don't do well
	Except in politics, as you can see from the recent murderous, drunken, beluga-style rampagings of our good friend Rob Ford, the mayor of Durham, Toronto, smoking crack and threatening to kill people and suck out their eyeballs with a straw, and how he could take down Mike Tyson, which I guess he could if he was dropped from a medium height on the poor man.
	So it all doesn't work.
	If you have an engineer who is anti-rational, then his bridges are not going to last.
	They're certainly not going to be efficient.
	If he thinks gravity repels rather than attracts, then nothing he builds is going to ever last.
	It's going to make any sense, right?
	So the monopoly on violence is anti-rational because it creates a separate group of human beings.
	And that group of human beings has the moral right and obligation to initiate the use of force, which, according to the laws that they pass, is specifically disallowed for every human being, including themselves, but you never can talk about that exception.
	Right?
	So I can't go around with a gun getting money for my kids' education, but through the state people can if they want.
	In fact, they must.
	So it's really the corruption of language that is the worst thing.
	And when you come across a statist, You're coming across someone, you're talking with someone whose humanity, whose soul, whose capacity for thought, whose capacity for critical thinking in particular has simply been destroyed by words.
	The Patriot Act, the Affordable Care and Health Act or whatever it is, right?
	I mean, are you against affordable care?
	Are you against welfare?
	Are you against national defense?
	Are you against care for the aged?
	I mean, the state owns all of these words, and therefore you can't have a rational discussion about it in any way, shape, or form, until you sort of attack the language.
	So if the state is a monopoly on violence, then we're basically saying, does a monopoly on violence that always escalates and grows work in society?
	Well, obviously it does.
	The Mafia works for people in the Mafia, and the people who sell to the Mafia, and the people who depend on the Mafia, and the kids of the Mafia bosses, and so on, right?
	It works for them, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
	Is it good?
	Of course it's not good.
	And if it's not good, but we think it's efficient, then we're saying that immorality is a good thing.
	In other words, that evil is good.
	And again, anybody who can say that with a straight face is beyond the hope of philosophy.
	Does that help at all?
	Yeah, I think so.
	That kind of gets to when I first started doing my research, I was kind of
	Confused on how exactly I wanted to tackle this subject so I was wondering if you had any advice on formatting the paper like maybe Well, you don't have to I mean you can simply take the word of the people who run the government right Barack Obama says that the government is the agency of violence and George Washington says that the government is an agency of coercion and I think it was Chairman Mao who said that political power
	grows out of the barrel of a gun.
	And this is not controversial among those who speak honestly and openly.
	I mean, people don't hear it because it's something that people don't want to deal with, right?
	I mean, they don't want to believe that they're in this bloody fishbowl of entrails, particularly the unborn's economic entrails.
	They just don't want to, you know, they don't want to believe that.
	And so they don't listen to the people who openly tell them.
	that the state is a monopoly on violence.
	And so simply getting people to understand that taxation is theft and the state is a monopoly on violence, that we cannot have separate moral categories for things.
	And the funny thing is, you know, I mean, people get upset with me from here to eternity, but I'm simply repeating what I was told as a child.
	This is what is so amazing.
	It's the power of propaganda.
	It's just, it's incredible.
	It's so astoundingly beautiful, the way that it works.
	I mean, it's an evil kind of beautiful, you know, it's like the devil with a six pack and whatever, right?
	But it's amazing because I was told to not have separate moral categories for people.
	Don't look at women as inferior.
	Don't look at minorities.
	as inferior, don't look at people as superior.
	We have only one type of rule, only one rule for people.
	That's what I was told.
	Don't be prejudiced.
	Don't create separate moral categories for people.
	I'm like, okay, sounds good.
	Sounds good.
	Okay.
	So I won't create separate moral categories for women and minorities.
	And whoever, right?
	Fantastic.
	Okay, so I'm not going to create separate moral categories.
	And so therefore, the state is immoral, because the state is creating a separate moral category for some people who on the other side of political power can do whatever the hell they want at gunpoint.
	And I just like, okay, well, I mean, but I was told the whole time not to create separate moral categories.
	Now, if society wishes to revisit that question with me and say, well, okay, I guess we should have mentioned this thing about the state.
	You know, that you have to have separate moral categories for the state.
	Well, then people can say that.
	They can say, oops, I'm sorry, we misled you in your education.
	We told you don't create separate moral categories.
	We forgot to mention the state.
	And of course, that's interesting, right?
	It's interesting that they would forget to mention that little detail, that little tidbit.
	Because of course, I'm supposed to participate in a democracy.
	This is what I believed as a child and as a teenager, that I'm supposed to participate In a democracy.
	But if nobody ever tells me what the fuck a government really is, how the hell am I supposed to participate in it?
	You know, it's like, Alec, I need you to join for glumdy dum.
	And you better figure out how to positively affect for glumdy dum.
	And getting involved and making your opinions known about de-dum-de-dum in phle-dum-de-dum is absolutely essential.
	And it is a mark of good civic and positive moral duty for you to do so.
	You basically say, Steph, what the fuck are you talking about?
	I'm talking about phle-dum-de-dum.
	Right?
	I mean, how can I be more, should I say it louder or phle-dum-de-dum?
	Right.
	So nobody ever told me what the state was, but they told me that it was my duty to get involved.
	To vote, to read the news, to listen to politicians, to get up on the facts and read about the issues and so on.
	So the fact that they neglected to tell me that I needed to create a separate moral category for the state because it was able to do the opposite of what everyone else to do is clear why they wouldn't say that, right?
	It's clear why they wouldn't say that because they can't say that.
	They just, they tell you to get involved in evil without ever telling you that it's evil.
	Of course, right?
	Of course evil would do that.
	I mean, that's natural, right?
	So as far as, you know, sort of practical steps, well, these are just basic moral questions.
	So people in the state can print money, they can start wars, they can borrow on the unborn, they can make rules as they see fit, they can use force, they can do all of these things.
	And nobody else can.
	So do we have two separate moral categories or what?
	And then people say, well yes, but you see, everybody agrees to this and therefore it's not the imposition of force.
	And of course, that's like saying the woman agrees to have sex and therefore it's not rape.
	Okay, well if the woman is agreeing to have sex, then why do you need the knife at her throat?
	In other words, if everyone agrees with the state, then why does the state need all these guns and prisons and all this kind of stuff, right?
	It's because a significant number of people disagree with the state and what it's doing.
	I mean, we know for a fact, people say, well, you should obey Obamacare because that's the law of the land.
	First of all, that's an argument that was fought ferociously against after the Nazi disaster, right?
	People said, well, it was the law for me to go and kill all these Jews and gays and whatever it was, right?
	Well, that's no excuse.
	There's a moral consideration that goes above the mere position of positive law above you.
	But people just weren't honest with me at all about what the state was.
	They say, don't have any separate moral categories.
	I believe that.
	And I sort of thought about it more and more.
	It's like, okay, well, so no separate moral categories.
	And people just react with horror that I was, you know, I said, well, how the hell was I supposed to Deal with this – participate in the system in a positive way if nobody actually ever told me what it was.
	And when I clearly name what it is, they recoil in horror.
	So what the hell are you people thinking of, right?
	So it's an agency of coercion.
	All laws are generally what people don't want.
	And by that, I mean laws outside of the bans on rape and murder, assault and theft.
	But we know that people don't want Obamacare because they have to be forced to do it.
	In the same way we know it's rape if the woman is forced to have sex.
	I mean that is the very definition of we know she doesn't want to do it because she had to be forced to do it.
	So whatever the government forces people to do, if it's the initiation of force, right?
	Whatever the government forces people to do is exactly what they don't want to do.
	The government represents the will of the people.
	Nonsense!
	The free market represents the will of the people and it's complicated, it's fragmentary.
	There are hundreds of cell phone companies, just to point out one tiny example.
	There's no one perfect cell phone for everyone, and there's no one perfect health care plan for everyone, and there's no one perfect government law for everyone, and so on.
	So I would simply approach it from, well, first of all, we have to admit that it is an agency of violence.
	We have to admit that we have two separate moral categories that are completely in opposition, both inhabited by human beings.
	Riddle me this, Batman.
	How the hell do we get ourself out of that logical conundrum?
	Well, you can't.
	And it doesn't take more than about five minutes thought to really get it.
	But of course the power of resistance and tribalism and delusion and propaganda are very strong.
	And so okay well if we are going to allow for separate moral categories that's a very dangerous proposition to make.
	That there are some human beings who can do X and that's moral and there are other human beings who can do the exact opposite of X and that is moral.
	Well that process Where can it logically stop?
	It can't.
	There's an old saying, I think it came out of the Glorious Revolution in England, and the saying is this, treason doth never prosper.
	What's the reason?
	Why, if it prosper, none dare correlate to treason.
	Right?
	Which means that to overthrow the king is a treasonous action, and treason never wins.
	Because the moment it wings and you have a new king nobody can call it treason anymore because they'll get killed.
	And this is you know it's treason to rebel against the king unless you succeed in which case it's not treason because you're the new king and you'll kill anyone who calls a treasonous.
	And this is the kind of flipped out kaleidoscopic brain frack moral nonsense that is pushed forward as some sort of consistent ideology.
	The effect that this has on people's brains It's like foot binding in ancient China or neck elongation in certain African tribes.
	I mean it's just so destructive to people's brains to have this double think.
	People think it's this eerie weird O'Brien versus Winston Smith thing that goes on in 1984.
	It's complete nonsense.
	I mean the double think is us looking at This completely insane system that we have right now where human beings inhabit completely opposite and oppositional moral universes and yet we claim there's one rule for everyone and any disparities can never be described.
	I mean this is just so just keep pointing out these facts that are not in dispute.
	Does that help at all?
	Yeah, that actually helped more than I thought it would.
	I'm going through, I'm like, no way.
	No way is this going to help me.
	No, you're fine.
	But I think the biggest problem I'm going to have is painting the picture of how an anarchist society would work day to day, like criminal.
	When I talk about this with people at my school, they always talk about how will criminal justice be carried out and things like that.
	Well, you know what you can do?
	What you can do is do a little something like this.
	It's sophistry, but it's helpful sophistry, so I hope it'll help.
	Say, well, the way that I think it should work in a free society is that I think that like 95% of people should never be tried.
	Like they should never ever get a chance to present their case to a jury of their peers.
	And I think the way that it should work is the, you know, the private Enforcement agencies or the DROs or whatever.
	What they should do is they should kidnap people and they should say, unless you confess, we're going to lock you in this dungeon full of like rapists and murderers.
	We're going to lock you in this dungeon for like 20 years.
	Now, if you confess though, you know, you can get out in like five years.
	And people are so terrified of the 20 years, they just take the five years and only like 5% of people end up actually Trying to proclaim their innocence or trying to prove that they're innocent and nobody knows who's guilty or innocent.
	They just take these plea bargains.
	I think that's the ideal system.
	And what would people say?
	I think they'd be generally pretty aghast and horrified.
	They'd say, well what are you fuckers defending this shit for now?
	Because this is exactly how it works in the current system.
	95% of people never get a chance to present.
	case to a jury of their peers.
	They're terrified by prosecutors and DAs into taking lesser pleas because they're threatened with insane prison sentences.
	And they're also told that if they turn in other people, then they'll also get a reduced sentence.
	So they go and turn in other people in like drug drinks and shit like that.
	They go and turn in other people and then those people are threatened with insane sentences and then they plea down to something which is like, well, I didn't do it but I mean I'm not risking 20 years.
	And they're also told that if they go to trial and they're found guilty, that it's going to be even worse because the judge is going to be pissed at them for wasting the judge's time or the court's time and so on.
	So this is like – because there's this weird thing where people say, well, how will a free society possibly possibly provide the wonderfully efficient and effective and government services that we now enjoy.
	How are you going to replicate my little dung heap hut?
	It's like a tongue twister.
	How are you going to replicate that and my smoky little stove that causes my eyes to water?
	How are you going to replicate my bed of old Lice-infested straw and my two square meals of half a bowl of porridge every day.
	How is a free society going to replicate that wonderful existence that I have?
	You know, as a prosecutor of the states who was found guilty of withholding information, of lying to the court, lying to the jury, A guy's wife was murdered, and this prosecutor withheld evidence that exonerated him, got the guy sentenced to 25 years in jail.
	Imagine, your wife is murdered, you're already horrified enough, you go to the police, and then you get sentenced to 25 years.
	Because the prosecutor withheld evidence and lied to the court.
	So this was found out, the guy was let out of prison after 25 years.
	In the meantime, the lawyer that the prosecutor had been promoted to A judgeship.
	What sentence do you think he received?
	Nothing.
	No, normally he would receive a promotion.
	This is normally what happens.
	He actually received 10 days in jail.
	And this is just one of, I'm sure, dozens if not hundreds of cases where They hit their numbers and they are agents of justice and virtue by lying and withholding it.
	There's no competition.
	It's all corrupt.
	It's all corrupt.
	And this guy blows away, this is the only, I mean, this is just one of the ones they've identified, blows away 25 years of this guy's life.
	And in return, he receives a 10 day sentence.
	And this is what people are currently defending.
	You know, how?
	Will we possibly have a system that good in a free society with competition?
	How are we going to recreate the Soviet fucking gulag work camps in a free society?
	How are we going to have Concentration camps in a free society.
	Don't make no mistake that the prison system is a concentration camp system.
	There are more people in American jails as a proportion of the population than there ever was in Soviet gulags under Stalin and in many ways their conditions are a lot worse in American prisons.
	I mean they're stacking them up like cordwood in three strikes and you're out states like California.
	Read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
	There's none of that stuff.
	I mean, he has a shitty life, don't get me wrong, but there's none of the stuff that goes on in American jails.
	And this guy was in Soviet work camp for 10 years, the writer.
	And these are constant.
	So people are saying, well, how will we have Concentration camps where judges get kickbacks for sending people to prison and prosecutors get promotions for sending people to prison by threatening them with insane sentencing.
	How are we going to have these rape-filled, soul-crushing concentration camps and this incredible system?
	of truly murderous and truly criminal injustices that occur to people thousands of times every single day.
	Just in America, it happens all over the world, but we're just talking about America for now.
	How can we possibly replicate this system in a free society?
	How will a free society approach the glory of this platonic style of idealized justice?
	Well, my God!
	My God!
	If we come anywhere close to it, a free society has been a complete failure.
	Free society is all about prevention.
	Free society is all about prevention.
	Look, you just tell people, or play this to them, that violence is easier to prevent than polio.
	Violence is easier to prevent than the bubonic plague.
	Violence is easier to prevent than smallpox.
	The causes of violence in society are so ridiculously well known and so ridiculously well hidden from the general public.
	And you just need to look up Elizabeth Gershoff, they need to look up Alison Gopnik, they need to look up Alice Munro, sorry, not, I can't remember her name now.
	Drama of the Gifted Child.
	They need to look up these, Alice Miller, thanks, they need to, Alice Munro, short story writer, not so But the causes of violence in here, it's so ridiculously well known.
	All we need to do is stop beating, hitting, torturing, terrifying, harming, proselytizing, indoctrinating, and religiously screwing up children.
	I mean, it's incredibly easy.
	And I mean, I'm doing this whole thing as a father.
	It's incredibly easy.
	I mean, I'm not saying that it's, you know, snappy fingers or all that kind of stuff, right?
	It's easy to know the cause.
	It's a little harder to administer the cure or the prevention.
	But in a free society, everybody gets that children who are treated harshly, children who are raped or spanked or beaten or yelled at or ignored or abandoned or traumatized or stuffed full of lies and terrors and hells and gods and damnation and judgment and patriotism and war mongering and so on.
	Everybody gets that any parents who do this are going to be releasing a fairly dangerous person on society.
	I mean, if you see a man regularly kicking and starving his dog, knowing that that dog is then going to roam around the neighborhood while your child is out playing, what are you going to do?
	You're going to do something.
	We're going to do something.
	And people just haven't made this connection yet.
	I'm working hard to make it and I'm one of many other people Thanks Michael Goldfield.
	Many people who are trying to make this point aware but say well how are we going to deal with criminals in a free society?
	I mean very easily.
	I mean smallpox and polio were just terrifying, malignant, destructive diseases up until the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, I guess 1950s for polio because FDR still, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in a wheelchair because of polio.
	And now we don't say.
	You know, it's like saying, how will the society of the 21st century deal with the incredible medical costs and burdens of polio?
	It's like, well, it's not going to be a problem.
	They say, oh, that's just wishful thinking.
	But we already know what the inoculation of violence is.
	How will society deal with rapists and murderers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Well, how do you deal with the bubonic plague?
	You don't.
	Because it's cured.
	But right now we have no agency, no group, no aggregate that has any profit in healing the causes of human violence.
	In fact we have massive profits in the inculcation and spread of human violence.
	If there was no violence we wouldn't need a state.
	All the power-hungry sociopaths in the world would have to end up trying to rip people off by selling used lotters in a back parking lot in the ascent to nowhere.
	They wouldn't be put on stamps and parading around abruptly filling German crowds as happened to Obama in a couple of years between speeches.
	And, you know, for a tiny instance, you know, that a public school gets $400 extra every year for every child they get, they're able to diagnose with ADHD.
	I mean it's insane and parents get additional money.
	They get social security and disability benefits for their children.
	If they're on welfare and they can prove that their child has a mental disorder, then oh look at that!
	The school profits, the pharmacology, the pharmaceutical companies, they profit, the psychiatrists profit, the parents are well paid for it and so on.
	You know that the children are just crops that we mutilate for money.
	This is what it's become.
	I mean, most people aren't aware of this kind of stuff, of course, because, I mean, you know, they put the concentration camps out of sight of any morally sensitive people and opened the gates of hell for all those who wish to flay and torture for shits and giggles.
	But that is the system.
	I mean, the idea that we can say, well, how will a free society possibly provide benefits to the wonderful degree that a state society does?
	I would just ask them what they know about the existing system and what virtues they see in it.
	So, you'll have to excuse me, but essentially what you were saying was that a free society would end the cycle of violence and therefore we wouldn't have to deal with things like punishing violent criminals?
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, what is the standard?
	What is the standard protocol for children?
	Children, they do what you think is right or you punish them.
	Right?
	Yes.
	How would an anarchist society go about administering that punishment though?
	So it's like saying, Steph, how are you going to go about punishing your child?
	Well, I'm not.
	I don't.
	I mean, people used to say this.
	I mean, how are you going to go about disciplining your wife?
	How are you going to ensure that your wife says exactly what you say?
	How are you going to effect your will on your wife?
	People don't usually say that anymore, right?
	Because we can understand that it's not the way it should be.
	So yeah, like asking how is a free society going to replicate the status society's functions is literally like saying to me, how are you going to replicate your abusive childhood on your child?
	Well, no.
	No, no, no, no.
	That's not the point.
	The point is to grow out of it.
	The point is to leave it behind, to break the cycle.
	I don't, I don't punish and never have and never will punish my child.
	We reason, we challenge, we explore, we are curious, we have fun with disagreements and conflicts and so on.
	I don't punish her.
	How will a society, a free society, you know, arrest people, threaten them with outlandish sentences in order to get them to confess to something that isn't even a crime so that they can be thrown in rape rooms, have their lives destroyed and be spat out as an almost certain recidivist?
	Well, no.
	Society won't do that.
	There won't be prisons and jails and these ridiculous predatory courts and profits in the human slave trafficking of criminality.
	It won't be the case in a free society.
	Yeah, I think that makes much more sense to me.
	Thank you.
	I'm sorry, I'm not as versed with this as you.
	Oh gosh, don't be silly.
	I mean, why would you be?
	You probably have a life to lead that isn't this, right?
	This is my life.
	So yeah, no.
	No, it's just I discovered your show over the summer and I think it's been very formative and I'm really happy I discovered it.
	So I want to thank you.
	Oh, I'm very happy.
	I'm very happy you discovered it too.
	And good for you for bringing it to the attention of others.
	All right.
	Now, listen, we've got a bunch of callers.
	I'm happy to slip another quick question in.
	I do want to make sure that we get to the other corners.
	All right.
	Yeah.
	One more quick question.
	It's kind of unrelated.
	I'm also on my school's newspaper, and I think my teacher would be really stoked if I wrote an article about this interview.
	So do you think I could just ask a quick personal question?
	Sure.
	So how did you get involved with things like Free Domain Radio and advocacy and things like that?
	And what drove you towards your anarchy?
	I mean, it's just that relentless bugaboo of critical thinkers, which is consistency.
	I am, you know, Socrates had his, what he called his demon, or daemon, his nagging conscience that would bother him if he was doing something wrong.
	Inconsistency, it drives me kind of batty.
	It drives me kind of, like, it sticks in my craw.
	Like, I remember when I was a kid.
	I was in, let's see, I was 12 or something.
	And I had a girlfriend who was 11.
	You know what that meant, was holding hands and stuff, right?
	And her family took me to lunch.
	And there was a, I had a nice lunch.
	And then they brought those, you know, those candies that they have like these, they're these little individual wrappers.
	They have the red and white hard striped candies that they give you because, you know, you might want to replace the good taste of a meal with the foul, medicinal, grandmotherly taste of the horrible candies.
	But I was a sugar slave then as now.
	And so I popped it and I was – naturally somebody asked me a question and I started talking and I swallowed the hard candy.
	And man, I could feel like the trace of my entire innards, like every particular corner and crevice that it went down my 12-year-old frame.
	I could feel it bending every corner and turning.
	It's like, whoa, mama, I think I'm gonna give birth to four kitten candies.
	And an inconsistency It kind of does the same thing to my brain that hot candy did to my stomach and intestines and esophagus.
	It just sticks there.
	It's uncomfortable.
	It bothers me.
	And you just have to, you know, let it bother you and then act on that bothering you, knowing that it's really important to be consistent.
	And it's not hard to notice that everything that is really positive and enjoyable and Wealth enhancing and prosperity enhancing tends to be the least coercive elements.
	I mean, it's not that hard to look at, say, the Soviet Union and say, well, what went wrong?
	Well, the government dictated the economy.
	Okay.
	So the government interfered with price and supply and demand and so on.
	And prevented Say's Law from even coming into effect by denying and destroying so many potential industries.
	Okay, so the government interfered with price and supply and demand.
	And therefore, the economy fell apart.
	Yeah, I can understand that.
	I can understand that.
	So that's not that hard a principle to figure out, right?
	So when the government interferes with price and supply and demand, wealth is lost and innovation is, you know.
	And we all understand that.
	I mean, when you interfere with a woman's free choice of lovemaking, you don't generally expect really positive things to come out of that, right?
	And so it's not that hard to figure out that that principles over that failed.
	Fascism failed.
	Why did it fail?
	Fascism failed because it interfered with price and supply and demand.
	All of which are sort of different ways of saying the same thing, which is that money is an expression of desire.
	Okay, and then what happened with National Socialism?
	Well, it interfered with price.
	You sort of get the pattern.
	It's just this interference with price.
	Okay, well, Western economies get more and more screwed up.
	Well, what's the government doing?
	Well, it's interfering with price and supply and demand on a continual basis.
	Economists have got a great term for it called rent-seeking, which is that you're looking to gain additional Profit, so to speak, or at least money from having the government screw around with competitors and all that kind of stuff.
	Tilt the rules in your favor.
	I mean, what is special interest pleading or lobbying the government?
	It's just bribing the referee.
	That's all it is.
	Just pass some rules in my favor.
	Make some calls in my favor.
	That's illegal in sports.
	Where the fuck is it not illegal in politics?
	Because if it was illegal in politics, there'd be no politics.
	Because if you couldn't supply favors to people, why would they care what you said?
	If you couldn't enforce your will on people, why would you care what they said?
	I mean, unless they just really make an effort to make themselves really compelling in communicating and so on.
	According to Plato, Socrates, or Jesus or whatever, if he even existed, was just these amazing communicators, or at least what they have, what's been handed down and refined.
	Why would you care what Barack Obama or George Bush or Hillary Clinton or Clarence Thomas, why would you care about what these people say?
	They're off doing their thing.
	You're doing your thing.
	Maybe if they wrote a great novel, you'd read it because it was cool or something.
	Or maybe if they made a fun TV show or, I don't know, maybe if Clarence Thomas set himself fire twerking upside down over a glass table, you'd watch it.
	I don't know.
	But, I mean, I assume the twerking works with those robes.
	I can't imagine giving those black tea cozies that's got much on underneath, right?
	Why would you care?
	Well, you only care because they can use the power of the state to grant you favors.
	That's all.
	It's the only reason you care.
	So there'd be no politics unless the government could screw some people and benefit other people.
	So if it's bad in sports to bribe the referee, how is it good in politics?
	Anyway, so, I mean, it's funny because, you know, Congress holds hearings on doping in sports, you know, it's performance enhancing.
	It's like, But you are prestige enhancing by violence.
	I mean, isn't that a lot less destructive than some guy taking some steroids?
	Anyway, but it's just consistency drives you nuts and you just keep, you've got to keep working at it.
	And my therapist said of a guy, a playwright, he's dead now, doesn't really matter who he is, that he said, you know, you've got this little square acre of creativity, just keep plowing the same thing back and forward.
	You plant a couple of different crops, just plow it back and forth, back and forth the same way over and over and over again until you get something that really works.
	And that's the way it is.
	I've got a little small area of philosophy that I really like to really work on.
	You know, ethics, consistency and so on.
	I mean, it's big in the world, but you know, it's kind of small and you know, I don't do a lot of work on the analytics, synthetic dichotomy and shit like that, right?
	And you just, you keep plowing that same little square back and forth, back and forth until it really all starts to fit together and work and make sense together.
	And if it doesn't bother you, To be inconsistent, which is really what propaganda is designed to numb you to the discomfort of inconsistency.
	If it doesn't bother you, then philosophy is not any particular interest.
	Just if it bothers you like it bothers me, then you'll try and stride to the forefront of human thought and drag everyone kicking and screaming or cheering behind.
	All right.
	Does that make sense?
	Okay.
	Well, let me know how it goes.
	And do thank your teacher for me for letting you pursue this topic.
	It's very encouraging to hear.
	And Mike, who do we have up next?
	All right.
	Phil, you're next.
	Go ahead, Phil.
	Hi, Steph.
	Can you hear me?
	I can.
	Go ahead, Phil.
	Awesome.
	So my question is this.
	I've listened to your show for about two years.
	Without interruption, I would.
	You must be exhausted and really, really have to pee.
	Thank you.
	I do do that.
	I was wondering, so there's two things that kind of seem to be contradictory about your philosophy to me.
	My philosophy?
	Okay, okay, I know what you mean.
	I know what you mean.
	You may mean that I have not served philosophy well by making contradictory arguments, but please don't personify it to me, because if it's my philosophy, then it ain't philosophy.
	That's like me saying, you're science.
	It's like, no, no, no.
	If it's science, it's not mine.
	Okay, I gotcha.
	I gotcha.
	I'm sorry.
	It's just what we're used to, but I just have to be annoying about that.
	So go ahead.
	So my question is this.
	You seem to be an advocate of self-defense, but you also seem to suggest that the government is coercion.
	Would you agree with both of those things?
	and arcane property rights.
	So my question is this.
	You seem to be advocate of self-defense, but you also seem to suggest that the government is coercion.
	Would you agree with both of those things?
	No, absolutely not.
	I would certainly not say that I'm an advocate of self-defense at all.
	I mean, an advocate is not a philosophical position, right?
	Well, I mean, you think it's moral to be – to use self-defense.
	Would you agree with that?
	Well, that again is not particularly precise, and I'm sorry for that, but morality is a word that is used – everyone thinks they're moral.
	Hitler thought he was moral, right?
	So it doesn't really explain much.
	I would say, and I'm sorry to be so annoyingly precise, but I would say that self-defense is the only logically consistent approach to the problem of coercion, right?
	And the state is coercion.
	The state is coercion.
	In other words, it's the initiation of force, but of course it is just one manifestation.
	There is public initiation of force and there's private initiation of force as well.
	So, would you advocate using self-defense against the state?
	Would I advocate using self-defense against the state?
	Yes.
	Do you think it's moral, or do you think it's universally preferable, or however you want to phrase that in my question?
	Oh, no.
	No, because you can't say that self-defense is universally preferable.
	Because then universally preferable is what everyone must do at all times under all circumstances, right?
	Which is something like respect property rights or not rape or that kind of stuff, right?
	Well, you guys can be in a room and – Hang on.
	Self-defense can't be UPB because self-defense requires a specific set of circumstances which are pretty rare.
	In other words, the initiation – the use of force against you.
	Right.
	But the government is the initial force.
	Well, no, absolutely.
	But in terms of like immediate self-defense.
	So if you don't pay your taxes and the cops come and... Right.
	Would I have the right to use self-defense in such a situation?
	I can't say that it's universally preferable to do it.
	Self-defense is an option, but you cannot logically enforce it, right?
	Because then somebody, you say, well, you should resist force.
	And if you don't resist force, I'm going to shoot you.
	Because that's what universally preferable behavior leads you to, right?
	Which is, you can't...
	You can't say that self-defense is morally obligatory.
	In other words, you must exercise it.
	It's an option, right?
	I mean, if someone comes up to – let me ask you this question.
	So if somebody comes up to you tonight in an alley and sticks a gun in your ribs and says, give me a dollar, what should you do?
	Well, if it's universal to use self-defense… No, no, no.
	Forget about the moral argument for a sec.
	What would you do?
	I'd probably just give him a dollar because I don't have a gun on me.
	But if I had a gun on me, I'd be more than happy to shoot him.
	Well, would you really take that risk?
	If he's willing to kill me over a dollar, yes, absolutely.
	No, listen.
	The guy's got a gun in your ribs.
	And he says, give me a dollar.
	Would you try and draw your own?
	He's already got the gun.
	All he has to do is pull the trigger, right?
	Well, would you really take that risk?
	I might.
	I don't know.
	I mean, I've never had that happen before.
	Do you have children?
	No.
	Okay, if you had a wife and you had five children, and you were the earner and your wife was a stay-at-home wife, would you take that risk for a dollar?
	Probably not.
	Can you think of any circumstances where a dollar would be worth that risk?
	Probably not.
	Come on.
	I mean, I know you're saying probably, but I'm not trying to corner you or anything like that.
	I'm just pointing out that there are circumstances under which you will hand over the money.
	and not exercise the right of self-defense, and that is, obviously, it's not immoral.
	The immorality is in... I mean, what I'd probably do is I'd give him a dollar, and then we'd turn his back to go away and shoot him in the back.
	I mean, that's what I would do, and then take my dollar back.
	I mean, what the heck?
	Why not?
	I mean, he's a murderer!
	Hang on.
	Are you telling me you'd really shoot a guy over a dollar?
	No!
	I'm telling you I would shoot a guy for threatening my life.
	That's what I would shoot a guy for, threatening my life.
	If he's willing to put a gun on my ribs to take a dollar, I would give him the dollar, and then when he starts walking away, I would shoot him.
	Because if he's willing to threat my life over a dollar, I'd be willing to kill the guy.
	Wouldn't you?
	Me?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	Look, I would do a lot to avoid shooting someone.
	Yeah, I would avoid shooting people too.
	I mean, I don't own a gun.
	I don't own a knife.
	Well, I mean, I have knives in my house, but you know what I mean?
	I don't carry a knife on me when I go outside.
	Have you ever acted in self-defense?
	No, I've never acted in self-defense.
	But if I wanted to, if I thought it was moral for me to do so, I would.
	See, against the government, I argue that you don't have the moral right to use self-defense.
	Against thieves, you have the moral right to use self-defense.
	That would be my argument.
	Why don't you have the moral right to use self-defense against the state?
	Because the state is the agency which is prescribed to defend my rights and my privileges to live, in my view.
	That's a whole other argument.
	I think that you're a tough-talking guy, to be frank.
	I'm not sure that you've really thought empathetically or emotionally through the consequences of blowing someone away.
	and having that, in a sense, ghost in your brain for the rest of your life, and I think that's interesting.
	Can you tell me a little bit about your childhood?
	Sure.
	My parents raised me pretty peacefully.
	My mother was very kind and considerate.
	When I was growing up, I was spanked maybe four times for acting severely out.
	My father is a computer programmer, and he works pretty much five days a week, eight hours a day.
	When I was a child, he was away most of the time while I was growing up, and of course I grew up in a public school, so maybe the state has reprogrammed me to think, ah, I love the state, but no.
	I'm in favor of basically minarchism, like minimal government.
	I think you need some government.
	I'm not fully convinced that it can do with no government.
	You understand that you gave me like 20 seconds on your childhood and then you went back to abstract arguments, so just bear with me for a second or two.
	So you say that your mother was a kite?
	Yeah.
	And how did that manifest itself?
	For example, she would give us hugs.
	She would kiss us on the cheek.
	She would, you know, if me and my brother got into a fight, and we tended to fight quite a bit, and I think it was because my parents fought with each other quite a bit sometimes.
	I mean, it was... But no, if we got into a fight, she would break us up.
	She would kindly, you know, say, hey, you guys kind of need to be in your own rooms for the moment.
	And, you know, she'd give us timeouts if we got into a fight, you know, she'd just break us up and put us in our own rooms, make sure, you know, we weren't hurting each other for a little bit, and then she'd say, okay, now you apologize to your brother, and then she'd get my brother to apologize to me, and then, you know, she'd let us play together again, that sort of thing.
	And what did your parents fight about?
	Um, I'm not entirely sure.
	I don't know quite, I mean, I don't have that specific memory of what they fought about.
	I just remember them yelling at each other several times throughout my childhood.
	Okay.
	All right.
	All right.
	Well, I do believe that you have the moral right to defend yourself.
	Right.
	I don't believe that it's required, obviously.
	And I don't believe that it's really a good thing or a useful or a helpful thing to act in a suicidal manner.
	That's just death by I mean, you can't possibly fight the state.
	I think it's basically just suicide to do it.
	Well, I think if everybody did it at once, I think it would end the state, personally.
	I mean, the state couldn't handle everybody else.
	Oh, but so what?
	I mean, that doesn't mean anything, right?
	I mean, that's like saying, well, I can't drive tonight because everybody might be on the exact same highway that I want to go on.
	Well, that's not the way life works, right?
	I'm not going to go grocery shopping because everybody might have already cleaned out the grocery store.
	Could it happen theoretically that everyone goes grocery shopping on the same day?
	It certainly could.
	Does it ever happen?
	Absolutely not.
	So, I mean, that's – yeah, if nobody paid any taxes, the state, blah-di-blah-di-blah, but that's not going to happen, right?
	Right.
	I agree with you.
	It's just that I don't want to support an agency of coercion, yet I don't want to have to initiate the use of force, yet you say that – I'm saying I'm kind of in a deadlock with you, I feel.
	I want to support your theory, but I'm not sure I'm quite there yet because I feel like I either have to support the state, which is supporting coercion, or I advocate my right to self-defense, but I don't want to do that either.
	You know what I'm saying?
	So where does that leave me?
	Hang on.
	I don't know what you're saying.
	So you don't want to support the state as an agency of coercion.
	All right.
	Fair enough.
	And then what's the other thing that's a problem?
	I don't want to use self-defense against the state.
	I don't understand how that follows.
	Oh, so you don't want to support the state as coercion, but you don't want to act in self-defense against the state.
	Right.
	Well, if you are kidnapped, let me take a silly example, right?
	So if you're kidnapped, and you kind of like where you are, and they say, listen, And you're a doctor, and you have to go and save, put eyedrops in these kids' eyes, because it will save them from blindness or whatever, right?
	Right.
	Well, to me, OK, well, put the eyedrops in the kids' eyes, save them from blindness.
	You can say, well, I was kidnapped, and I'm going to run out of here, and then the kids just stay blind, and you're dead.
	Right?
	So there's a huge amount of good that we can do in the world.
	That is much more important than trying to fight the state which you can't win, right?
	Okay.
	It's not like I either support the state or I have to go out in a hail of gunfire.
	I mean, that's just not rational.
	It's not positive.
	It's not productive.
	It's not – I mean, I would undermine – it's just suicidal, right?
	Right.
	I mean, just go do good in the world.
	Live like the state doesn't exist and pay them off and go and enlighten people.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Thank you, sir.
	That's pretty much my only question.
	Okay.
	Good for you.
	All right.
	Next.
	All right, Jesse, you're up.
	Go ahead, Jesse.
	Oh, is it your girl I wish I had?
	I think it is.
	All right.
	What's up, my friend?
	No, not quite.
	So, how are you doing, stuff?
	I'm Will.
	How are you doing?
	Hey, Stephan.
	I've only got one question for you, and this question pertains to me directly.
	My question is, how does someone find motivation in their life?
	Motivation to do things, to accomplish things?
	That's a tough question.
	That's good.
	How does someone find motivation?
	Well, you know, it's a tough question for me, so maybe you can help me out with that.
	No, it's a great question.
	I hugely appreciate you bringing it up.
	And it's a very brave question, right?
	I mean, so good for you.
	So tell me a little bit more about where the question's coming from.
	Okay.
	Well, I've been unemployed since January 1st of this year.
	And I was unemployed by choice and due to medical reasons.
	And after I left my last job, I felt that I needed to take a break from working and to take time for myself.
	And so I intended to take like three to four months off from working before returning to the workforce.
	Well, also, you know, during this time, I was dealing with a lower back issue that became a problem back in 2007 and between April and May of this year.
	It went from being a bulging disc to a herniated disc that required surgery.
	So, I was pretty much disabled because the condition prevented me from doing even the simplest of tasks, such as sitting or even standing.
	I mean, it was just really painful.
	Eventually, I had the surgery done last September and still technically in recovery.
	But basically, during this whole time, through the course of the year, I feel like I've accomplished nothing.
	I don't want to say that my medical condition was a reason as to why I've basically become sedentary, because that's exactly what my life is right now.
	It's completely sedentary.
	During my initial time off, I became a shut-in earlier this year and basically refused to even leave the house unless I absolutely had to.
	Sometimes I even starved myself because it meant having to leave the house for groceries.
	And I couldn't find the motivation to do that.
	I don't do things like laundry when it needs to be done.
	I don't do the dishes.
	They just pile up in the sink until I've got Mount St.
	Helens sitting in the sink, and then I have to do something about it.
	And there are things I should be doing for my professional development, too, that I'm not doing.
	And I know I should be doing these things.
	The way that it will work with me is that I would tell myself, OK, I should be doing X thing towards working towards my professional development.
	And so I might take like one step towards accomplishing that goal.
	But after that one step, I don't proceed.
	So to give you an example, I work in the IT field by trade, and I kept telling myself this year that at some point I should take some time out to retrain myself and get some industry certifications in related fields.
	So I went out and purchased some study materials, but as soon as the study materials arrived, they've basically been sitting in the bookshelf, and I haven't touched them since.
	Yeah, and this is completely contrary to how I used to be, how my life used to be up until about 2007.
	2007 is a pretty important year for me, and there may be some details there that might help explain.
	Some things about how I got to the point where I am.
	But, you know, I used to be a very active and engaged person in my professional, social, and recreational life.
	I used to be a go-getter.
	Working 60-hour weeks was nothing to me.
	It was enjoyable and satisfying.
	You know, and I was really highly active in my social circles.
	Every weekend I was out doing something.
	You know, going camping, going fishing.
	I was a really active person.
	But all that just...
	So basically I kind of sort of injured it on the job.
	I was lifting something at work and it caused one of the discs in my lower back to bulge.
	Basically, it was putting a good amount of pressure on my nerves and just causing me a good amount of pain, but I was able to deal with that by going through physical therapy, avoiding the surgery options, the non-invasive options up until earlier this year where it just completely herniated, so it was no longer bulging.
	It was just completely herniated.
	And it's like I said earlier, I had surgery for that, finally, in September.
	But it was really debilitating, once it became fully herniated.
	And what's the prognosis?
	You said that you're still in recovery?
	It's been over a year, is that right?
	No, no, no.
	The surgery was in September, past September.
	Oh, it's this September, okay.
	And when are you expected to be back on your feet, so to speak?
	Technically, my surgeon said I should give it about 8 to 12 weeks before I go back to being the way that I was before, so I'm still in that window.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So yeah, that's basically it.
	That's my question.
	There probably are some details I'm leaving out, but if you feel like you need more information out of me, I'd be more than happy to answer any questions.
	Yeah, again, I'm no expert, but my understanding is that a particular crisis tends to reveal underlying personality or psychological problems.
	It doesn't create them, but it reveals them, if that makes sense.
	So if there was something about your life and your profession that you didn't really like, With the momentum of projects and paychecks and bug checking and releasing and, you know, if in that whirlwind, you never really had time to stop and say, do I even like this as a whole, this precious minutes and days of my life?
	Going into this area, right?
	And so what's happened is when you, like you have a habit where you see a movie, And it's, you know, it's loud, it's noisy, there are cars flying through, helium blimps on fire and shit like that.
	And the next day, like, you know, you're like, you're watching, it's like, wow, that's pretty intense or whatever.
	And like, you never think about it again.
	Because in the moment, they've kind of got your attention.
	But it leaves no impression afterwards.
	And so I guess my question would be, I mean, first and foremost, I mean, being away from, I mean, the IT field is like constantly snorting cocaine-laced lattes because it changes so frequently.
	The clients are insane.
	I mean, I hate to say that, but it's true.
	Yeah, I wouldn't build it.
	I wouldn't give an architect and say, go build me this house.
	Here's all the designs.
	And then when the house was 80% done, say, I want to change half of it and then be upset if he said it was going to delay or cost more.
	But this is constant in IT, because it's kind of this digital blah, blah, blah.
	People don't understand that it's more complex than a house.
	And it has, you know, in terms of testing, you mean the platforms and the I mean, the amount of stuff you've got to test is insane.
	And people, the customers and business managers either don't understand it or don't take enough time to tell customers this, but it's like, okay, we are now starting to build your house.
	This cannot change.
	It cannot change now.
	If you start to change it now, It's going to cost you about 10 times longer and 10 times more money.
	That's not a number pulled out of my ass.
	That's fairly statistically true.
	Late in the game changes of software are 10 times longer than stuff you figure out early on, if it needs to change.
	You know, like this right before this healthcare.gov portal rolled out, the government just suddenly changed their mind and said, well, now we need everyone to register.
	Before they can see any prices, obviously, because they wanted to keep the prices hidden and all that, right?
	And you can't do that.
	I mean, it's literally like saying when the house is about to be sold, well, now we want another floor.
	It's like, well, I guess we could go and lift up the roof and like, but it's going to take six months and it's going to cost you half a million dollars.
	You can't just say we want another floor at the end.
	Or we want a different shape of windows or whatever.
	So anyway, I don't want to sort of rant about my own history, but clients are insane.
	And because IT is populated with a lot of very intellectually smart, but socially unconfident people, clients get away with killing projects and then blame IT, right?
	By constantly changing their minds, by not doing all the work up front.
	And they get all these promises and all that because, you know, all that stuff, right?
	It's a lot of inexperience and a lot of emotional immaturity in IT, which is one of the reasons why it is both creative and destructive at the same time.
	But when you're out of that hurly-burly and that chaos and that workaholism and that panic and that, right?
	I mean maybe you're just looking at it and saying, holy crap.
	I'm not sure I want to go back in.
	Yeah, so basically you're saying that conditions are constantly changing and that it requires more effort to keep moving on, to grow and develop?
	That's what you got out of me.
	I just want to make sure.
	Yeah, I was just trying to.
	A lot of the things that you were saying just echoes, you know, frustration that I definitely had working in the IT field.
	I've been working in the IT field for, gosh, I don't know.
	Over maybe 15, maybe a little bit over 15 years.
	But I think really what the issue was for me, and everything that you said is completely valid and accurate.
	I mean, it's accurate to a T. But I think the problem that I had going back to 2007 was that I basically just stopped caring.
	And I stopped caring about my job, about the company I was working for, because I kind of learned this lesson that no matter how hard you work, no matter how long you work, no matter how much money you save the company, no matter no matter how long you work, no matter how much money you save the company, no matter how innovative you are, you just get slighted constantly if you don't subscribe to office politics,
	And, and, Those are two things I was never really good at.
	I felt like I was just constantly being beat down by my employers, working 60-70 hours a week, and then basically not seeing any appreciation or rewards for taking on additional responsibility for going above and beyond.
	And that was completely contrary, and that was actually the reason why I had left my previous employer, because I was working for another IT company before them, and I made the conscious decision that, hey, I feel like I'm not being appreciated here, so I really need to move on and find an environment that's more results-oriented, and it's conducive to, or has some sort of reward system based off of results.
	And then I ended up with the company that I most recently left, and it just seemed like that, once again, the company as a whole, the management, the upper management, the executives and stuff, they were not concerned about results or quality of results.
	They were just more concerned about who's kissing my butt right now, and I've been I've been slighted and I've been overlooked for advancement multiple times as a result of politicking.
	I think you're trying to unconsciously sell me a bill of goods here and I don't mean this with any disrespect and I could be wrong but I think that you're telling me like I'm not good at politics, I'm all about the job and you've got this kind of contempt for management and a contempt for All of this kind of stuff, right?
	And you obviously feel that it's a positive thing to not be good at this stuff, right?
	And I'm not trying to, you know, tell you that you're wrong, or, you know, maybe you're entirely right.
	But I think that you're trying to sell me a bill of goods.
	And I could be wrong.
	But let me sort of explore it, with your permission.
	Can I give you an example?
	No, no, listen, I've worked in the IT field for 15 years.
	You don't have to Tell me about politics and stuff like that.
	I'll tell you a story about my daughter.
	Sometimes, I think like everyone, I don't listen as well as I should.
	It's usually pretty rare.
	I usually sit down eye contact when she's talking to me about stuff and I interrupt her if I don't understand stuff and make sure I really I didn't want to do that nodding, smiling.
	Uh-huh.
	Uh-huh.
	Well, that's interesting.
	Oh, wow.
	You know, that kind of stuff that sort of people do or whatever.
	And so my daughter is really used to being listened to.
	And this evening, there was a boy who was four and a half and my daughter, I guess, almost five.
	And the boy asked her, Oh, she said, I have these, she's got these toy kitties that she just adores, right?
	And she says, I have these kitties.
	I have these three kitties here, three kitties around.
	And he said, what color are they?
	And she started describing her kitties to him.
	And he's four, and maybe not used to talking and being listened to much.
	And his eyes started wandering all over the room, and so on.
	And she sort of stopped She waved her hand and she said, you asked me a question.
	I'm trying to tell you something.
	I really need you to pay attention to me.
	And I could see it was a little startled.
	You know, that's very direct, right?
	And if you find yourself in repetitive situations where you're being overlooked and taken for granted and exploited, let's say, which I'm perfectly willing to accept that you are, Then blaming it on politics and all of that I think is not the first place to look, right?
	I don't know if you've listened to the show before or many times, where do I think the first place to look is?
	Well, I think you're suggesting that the first place I should be looking is towards myself.
	No.
	No, okay.
	Towards your childhood environment.
	Oh, towards my childhood environment.
	So did you The things that you experienced with your bosses, did you experience anything even kind of similar when you were growing up as a kid?
	Let's see, that's going to be a little tough because I've had a ton of bosses over the years.
	There's got to be some common threads though, right?
	I mean, if this is something that's showing up in your professional life quite a bit.
	Well, you know, My last position, my immediate supervisor who was my manager, he and I had a pretty contentious relationship, but I feel like it was a healthy contentious relationship because at the end of the day, we still respected one another both professionally and personally.
	We would have differing opinions.
	Maybe, perhaps, sometimes I, you know, felt like that.
	He didn't take concerns that I had into consideration, which I would say is analogous to, you know, a lot of things, you know, how my relationship was with my parents, you know, when I was a child.
	But I don't necessarily think that, or I don't know if there is a direct correlation there.
	Okay, well, tell me where the similarities are.
	Well, I suppose, you know, as I was saying earlier, that one of the similarities could be that if I have something to say and I don't get my way, then I probably feel like that I'm not being listened to.
	Sorry, and who was that in your family?
	That would be my mother.
	Okay, so your mother would express her what she wanted and if she didn't get what she wanted she would feel that she wasn't being listened to, is that right?
	No, no, just the opposite.
	Maybe I misunderstood what you wanted from me, but I was saying from the perspective that if I express something to my mother and I wasn't satisfied with the results Does that make sense?
	then what would happen if you weren't satisfied with the results?
	Nothing really.
	I mean, I would just kind of just accept it and move on.
	But, you know, internally, emotionally, I mean, it wasn't good for the psyche because it... No, let me try it again because it's too vague.
	The reason I tell the story about my daughter is my daughter is used to being listened to and so she's very assertive when she's not being listened to because it's out of the ordinary and it's something that needs to be corrected, right?
	Does that make sense?
	Okay.
	So if you have a situation where after working the IT field for a number of years You are working 60, 70 hours a week, you're not being appreciated and so on, right?
	There's something in your history that makes that something that you're willing to live with and not stand up against.
	I think definitely, definitely there's some mental conditioning that caused me to accept that.
	Okay, so when you were a kid, did you feel appreciated and respected and that your contributions to your parents and to your family life were very valuable?
	No, absolutely not.
	Okay, so do you see the kind of thing that I'm sort of trying to make the connection to, right?
	Right, yeah.
	I understand the parallel that you're drawing there.
	Oh, you're such an IT guy.
	You're such an IT guy.
	I can draw a line from here to there and I believe I could graph it in Excel if you just give me three or four minutes.
	I don't mean that in any negative way.
	I'm an IT guy too, so I don't mean that in any negative way.
	So tell me how or in which way you didn't feel that you got sufficient or reasonable appreciation when you were a child.
	When I was a child?
	My...
	You know, I grew up with both my mother and my father, but essentially the structure was a single parent home, though, because my father was always gone.
	He was in the military, so he was always on one of the corners of the earth.
	You know, I could go, you know, three years and not see him, you know, because he's over there.
	Three years?
	Yeah.
	What do you mean?
	There was a couple of stretches where we haven't seen him for four years at a time.
	Because he would be stationed somewhere in the world.
	I don't know exactly where.
	Look, I'm not an army guy.
	I don't think the army can just take a father for four years.
	No, no, that did happen.
	That did happen.
	That happened on a couple occasions.
	No, no, no.
	I'm not saying you're lying.
	Listen, I'm not saying you're lying at all.
	I just don't think that's just because he was in the army.
	I mean, people from Iraq get to go home, and they're in the middle of a war for God's sakes, right?
	Okay, so I think I can fill that in a little bit then.
	One of the things that was going on was that my mother was tired of the constant moving around.
	So there was actually one instance I know for certain where we could have gone to Germany, but she opted out of it because she didn't want to subject me and my sister to pulling us out of a school, going to some foreign land and reinserting us back into the school system there.
	Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
	Oh, here comes another bill of goods.
	All right.
	I'm going to challenge you on that.
	And, you know, maybe I'm wrong, but what did you want?
	In terms of whether or not... Would you have liked to go and spend time with your father?
	Well, sure.
	I mean, definitely.
	Okay, so then your mother didn't do it for you.
	Definitely she probably – There's a little bit more of a selfish aspect to it for herself.
	In her instance, I don't blame her, because when she came to this country, she was an immigrant.
	I didn't use the word blame, and now you're going to start to defend her.
	I'm simply pointing out that this is not This is not helpful, right?
	Because we're just mapping something here, right?
	And if you want to talk about motivation, don't start defending the stuff that may be contributing to your lack of motivation, because then it's just pointless, right?
	Okay.
	Again, this is not criticism, it's not blame, but if you say to me, well, my mother had this story about how it wouldn't be good for us kids to move, right?
	I say, well, did you want to move?
	Would you have liked to have moved to spend time with your dad, right?
	Because you get this is completely screwed up to have a dad gone, you said, I think, once for three years, once for four years.
	But that's insane.
	Right?
	Sure.
	I agree.
	And it's not what you wanted, right?
	No, no, not at all.
	I assume your dad wasn't some, you know, drunken wife beating monster, right?
	No, but I mean, he had his demons too, just like anybody else.
	Okay, so we got minimizing.
	And what were his demons that everyone has?
	Well, I kind of meant it as a generalization that everyone probably has some kind of problem or another, but during that time he had a couple of addictions.
	One of them was gambling and, you know, things associated to that.
	So, I mean, other than that, you know, he was... Wait, so he was a gambling addict?
	Yeah, he was addicted to gambling.
	And what would that mean?
	Was he addicted to the point where your finances got screwed up?
	Yeah, so he basically ruined the family's finances as a result of his gambling.
	Do you feel that this is common?
	I don't feel like that this particular addiction is necessarily common.
	I was just kind of, the only thing I was... Hang on, do you think that lots of people, you said that like everyone, right?
	In other words, you're saying that he was kind of like everyone else, right?
	And the reason that I'm stopping on this point is because this is important, because if you say, my father was a biped like everyone else, then, you know, mostly true, right?
	I mean, we all tend to at least start off as bipeds, right?
	Right.
	But if you say, well, my father had a family-destroying addiction, just like everyone else, that's not true, right?
	Right.
	Okay, so I won't be making any excuses for him then.
	Well, I'm just pointing out that you're attempting to manage my responses to what you're saying.
	Oh, okay.
	And the funny thing is that you complain about people playing politics, and you are trying to condition my responses to what you're saying.
	You're playing politics with me.
	You're putting spin on almost everything.
	You'll hear this when you listen to the show.
	You're giving me spin on almost everything that you're saying.
	And I don't say this with any sense of negativity or blame or anything like that.
	I'm simply pointing out a fact.
	When you listen back to this, you're not giving me facts.
	You're giving me spin.
	And that's politics incarnate.
	Okay, I think I understand, but what my intention was was just to kind of add a little bit more detail.
	No, no, no.
	This is not what your intention.
	That may have been your conscious intention, but your unconscious intention was to prevent criticism of your parents and to manage my responses, right?
	I said, would you have rather spent time with your dad?
	You said yes.
	And I said, I assume your dad wasn't some drunken monster, right?
	You said he had his demons like everyone does.
	Right?
	Right.
	Which means that to criticize a person for a characteristic common to everyone is irrational, right?
	It's like saying you're short because you're not 11 feet tall, right?
	Well nobody's 11 feet tall, right?
	So everyone's under 11 and therefore you can't call someone short for being under 11 foot, right?
	Does that make sense?
	Family destroying addictions is not everyone, right?
	Parents who are married but live in opposite corners of the world for half your childhood is not common.
	And I can guarantee you that's not the Army's fault.
	That's something, I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, I can't remember who it was.
	Maybe it was Richard Branson, right?
	He was in some bad marriage and he's like, you know, he's like this cocky adventurer guy and he's like, I'm going to go into a hot air balloon and I'm going to spend six months sailing around the world and I'm an adventurer and so on.
	And there was some comedian who said, yeah, okay, so we get it.
	You don't like your wife, so you're going to go off for six months in a hot air balloon around the world.
	But it's not because you're an adventurer, it's because you don't like your wife, right?
	Why is he gone for four years?
	Because he didn't want to be home, right?
	What you're saying is correct.
	But I think it was, and I'm not trying to spin this anymore, but I really think that there definitely was an issue with the marriage, and it was my mother who didn't want to be with him, and not necessarily my father not wanting to be with us.
	Well, see, but then you are spinning it, right?
	Because you're giving me an overly simplistic Notion, right?
	Which is that if your mother doesn't want to be with your father, I assume it's because your father has some negative characteristics that your mother wants changed.
	I assume one of those would be the gambling, right?
	Okay, so it's not that your mother just didn't want to be with your father, it's that your father wasn't willing to take the effort and the necessary steps to solve the gambling problem.
	Did you see what I mean?
	It's sort of like when people say, well, my mother didn't want to have sex with my father because my father was 300 pounds.
	It's like, no, your father also didn't want to have sex with your mother, otherwise he would have lost the 300 pounds, right?
	Or at least some portion of it, right?
	Right.
	Right.
	So if your mother said, well, I don't want to be with your father because your father is a gambling addict.
	Well, no, your father didn't want to be with your mother and the gambling addiction was kind of the excuse.
	Because if he'd really wanted to be with her, he would have solved the gambling problem, right?
	There's Gamblers Anonymous, there's therapies that can help.
	There's, you know, it's not like a demonic possession, right?
	Okay, I think, yeah, I get what you're saying.
	So, give me an example from your childhood, if you'd be so very kind, and I appreciate your patience with this.
	Give me an example from your childhood when you had a preference that went against the preferences of your parents where they acceded to you.
	So long ago, I just can't really know one particular example comes to mind immediately.
	Well, there was one confrontation that we had when I was in high school where... Excuse me.
	I've got to get something to drink here.
	There was a confrontation that we had in high school.
	Do not drink a roulette wheel because you have a family history of – anyway, go on. - There was a confrontation I had with my mother in high school where I wanted to play high school sports and she tried to overrule me and I didn't much care for her opinion so I went ahead and did it anyway.
	And did she later admit that she was incorrect?
	No.
	What happened is I ended up getting injured.
	I broke my arm playing football and in her mind that just reaffirmed her position.
	Does she think there's any relationship between that and hurting your back?
	I just don't know where you're trying to go with this.
	Oh, not trying to go.
	I'm just, I mean, because people, I mean, back injuries and knee injuries and obviously brain injuries are not uncommon among people who've played a lot of football, right?
	So I'm just wondering if your mom has ever mentioned whether she thought that that might be related to you playing high school sports.
	It doesn't matter.
	I was just, I was just curious.
	It gets a little confusing there, though, because I basically don't speak to my parents anymore.
	So she didn't have the opportunity to comment about that.
	And why don't you speak to your parents anymore?
	Well, you know, we've had a really, really rocky relationship, you know, when I was growing up.
	Well, I mean, it was abusive.
	It was an extremely abusive environment.
	And basically what I did is, you know, as soon as I was old enough, I just, you know, I got out of town as fast as I could and basically almost didn't look back.
	And I'm very sorry for the abusive nature, of course.
	I mean, it's terrible, but in what way was it abusive?
	You know, physical and mental.
	From your mom or from both?
	Both from my mother, and my father on the other hand, I would say that his abuse was more mental, because he just never really got involved.
	In what?
	In my life.
	Oh, in anything?
	Not just like discipline or something, but in anything?
	Yeah, including discipline.
	He didn't get involved with disciplining me.
	He never took interest in Anything I was doing, things I was doing in my life, never really asked, you know, what was going on in school.
	I mean, he was completely, I mean, he was there, but he wasn't there.
	Right.
	Right.
	I'm so sorry.
	And how was the discipline from your mother?
	How was that enforced?
	Early on it was spankings, to be honest about it.
	I mean, there were beatings and they came pretty much daily.
	Daily?
	Do you mean like with implements?
	Sure, implements.
	She rarely ever used just her hand, you know, whatever was within reach.
	She would grab it at the time, shoe, flyswatter, you know, whatever was available.
	And then not only did it, you know, was it just physical abuse, but there was also torture involved.
	She would have me perform some maneuvers that were kind of torturous.
	So like, I would have to, you know, march up and down the stairs, you know, with my hands over the air, like I'm a prisoner of war, and I would have to do that for hours, you know, on and things like that.
	And then, and then, oh, so I mean, pretty, I mean, genuinely consciously sadistic stuff, not just like explosive temper stuff, which is terrifying enough.
	But there's sort of a conscious sadism and control going on at the same time.
	Sure, it was calculated.
	She had her impulsive moments, but there was also calculated punishments as well.
	Wow.
	I'm so sorry.
	I mean, that's just... I mean, I've heard these stories for years, and I'm never immune to the horror of what is described.
	I'm so sorry.
	I mean, that's just sickening.
	Monstrous.
	And you say you would get beaten with implements sometimes every day.
	Yeah, it was practically every day.
	It was a daily thing.
	What was the excuse?
	I mean, what was the cover story?
	Like, what would you do that this would even be on the table?
	You know, till this day, I don't even know Exactly what I have done in each situation that provoked her into going into a tirade and then expressing it physically on me.
	But, you know, after after each beating, you know, she would, you know, break down and sob.
	She would say things like, oh, I didn't want to do that, but you made me so angry.
	And I'm just sitting there thinking, well, what did I do to make you so angry?
	You know, and, you know, she would never she never communicated that point to me.
	You know, so it's like whatever it was I did now to make her angry.
	I'm probably going to do it again because I don't know what it is that I And you know why she couldn't tell you what it was, right?
	Because she didn't know.
	No, because if she tells you what you did that made her angry, then you just don't do that, right?
	And then she can't get angry at you.
	Right.
	The purpose is to unload the abuse, the toxicity of the personality, the evil of the personality.
	The point is to unload it on the child.
	I mean there's some excuse as to why you're doing it.
	But the sadist takes pleasure at hurting people and there's no one easier to hurt, more exquisitely delicious from the sadist point of view, to hurt than a child.
	Child can't leave.
	Dad, he can go to the fucking ass end of Afghanistan for four years, right?
	He can get out.
	Children, they're stuck with you, man.
	I mean they are stuck with you no matter how black hearted your soul is.
	They're just stuck.
	And so you can't tell the child what the child did, because that way the child will not self attack.
	I'm sorry, I'm not being clear.
	So if I say to you, if you don't get a cup of water, I won't beat you.
	And then you don't get a cup of water.
	And then you leave your shoes in the front hallway.
	And I say, well, I beat you because you left your shoes.
	If you don't leave your shoes in the front, like at some point, you're going to say to me, well, you give me a list of all the rules and I'll follow those.
	Right.
	And then I'm going to give you, let's say I give you a list of all the rules.
	And then I just keep adding news.
	At some point, you're going to figure out that I'm just, I just need to beat you.
	Like, I just, I want to beat you.
	I like to beat you.
	And the, the bullshit of, You did something that made me angry.
	It's adding additional sadism to additional sadism.
	So I beat you, which unburdens me of the poisonous rage and self-hatred that I have, and then I make you march up and down the stairs, which gives me a sense of control and allows me to erase your personality as mine was erased and I never resurrected it, so I have to now kind of kill your spirit and all that.
	You know, cherry on the whipped cream on the cake of evil.
	I get you to think that it's your fault because you did something.
	Right?
	So I'm crying.
	You made me so angry that.
	Right?
	Because if you get that your parent is just beating you because they're a fucking sadist, then you don't take any personal ownership of it.
	Like, I don't think I offended a lion that scratches me.
	Right?
	If I stick my hand in a shark tank and the shark bites my finger off, I don't sit there and say, well, I did something wrong.
	Well, yeah, I did something wrong.
	I put my hand in a shark tank, but the shark can't say, well, I did this because I didn't, you know, because you looked at me funny or you spoke to me disrespectfully, or you did something wrong or bad or naughty.
	Most rules, I genuinely, most rules which allow parents to punish children, I mean, the parent gets the pleasure Grim though it is of punishing a child, and then the child blames himself for the punishment, which is extra delicious for the sadist.
	So she can't tell you why she hit you, because then you wouldn't do that.
	But then she'd still hit you, and then you'd ask why, and she'd give you something else.
	And eventually, and probably it wouldn't take more than about a week, you'd figure out that she's just some crazy sadistic bitch who likes to hit you.
	And then you'd have no self-attack anymore.
	You're just like, well, I'm stuck in this house with a dangerous predator.
	There's no one who's going to help me, but at least I'm not going to self-attack and think I did something wrong.
	Does that make any sense?
	It makes perfect sense.
	It does.
	Yeah.
	I think I follow you, but you know, I should also throw in there that, you know, the physical abuse did stop.
	About the time I became a teenager.
	And do you know why it stopped?
	Oh, I know exactly why it stopped, because she realized I can fight back.
	Right.
	So what does that tell you about your mother and her ability to control her temper?
	Well, she was never in control of her temper or her emotions.
	Are you kidding me?
	It tells you the exact opposite.
	Sorry, this isn't even philosophy, this is just empiricism, right?
	Okay.
	So, when you had the ability to fight back, was she magically able to start controlling her temper and stop hitting you?
	No.
	Oh, you told me she stopped hitting you when you became a teenager.
	Well, okay, I don't think I'm understanding here.
	Okay, did she stop hitting you when you became a teenager?
	Yes.
	Did she have the capacity to stop hitting you at any time?
	Of course she did.
	Yeah, I was going to say of course she did.
	No, listen, if your mom was an epileptic, right, then she wouldn't stop having seizures when you became a teenager.
	Because epilepsy is involuntary, right?
	Right.
	If your mom is short, she doesn't suddenly become tall when you're a teenager, right?
	Right.
	So what it means is that when the situation changed to the point where she could be a recipient of the kind of physical harm that she was inflicting on you, then she suddenly was able to stop.
	So she could have stopped at any time, if there was enough of incentive.
	Now your pain, your agony, your fear, the destruction of your original personality, well that clearly wasn't enough of an incentive for her to stop, right?
	Right.
	But the fact that you might hit her back, Well, suddenly, she's found it wonderfully able to stop hitting you, right?
	Yeah, she definitely had incentive at that time.
	Right, so it meant that she was never out of control when you were a child.
	Her temper never got the better of her, because the moment you became big enough, guess what?
	Her temper never got the better of her again.
	Well, around that time when the physical abuse stopped, that's when the mental abuse really kicked in into overdrive.
	I get it.
	I mean, naturally that would happen, right?
	Yeah.
	As a teenager you become more susceptible to verbal abuse because, I mean, you're becoming more social, you become more tribal dependent, and so, right, this is why bullying becomes so toxic when you're a teenager, because, especially if you've got a shaky identity, Then it becomes really problematic.
	Language becomes really problematic in a way that physical abuse is less, right?
	Yeah.
	You can fight back against physical abuse as a teenager, but you can't fight back against verbal abuse.
	So it does tend to, if you've got a sadist around, it tends to go from one to the other in, you know, physical abuse goes down and verbal abuse goes up, right?
	Yes.
	Right.
	So motivation.
	Now you're an IT guy, so I'm going to stop asking questions.
	I'm going to give you something.
	And listen, I only laugh and in no way with any insensitivity towards your childhood, right?
	This is a horror show.
	This is hell on earth.
	This is a house of evil.
	I don't think that's even my opinion.
	I think what your mother did was, she's a criminal.
	It's illegal.
	And so, motivation.
	What is motivation?
	Motivation is having a desire and believing that you have the capacity to achieve that desire.
	Right?
	I mean, When Freddie Mercury died, I'd love to be the new frontman for Queen.
	Don't have the voice.
	Like to sing?
	Don't have the voice.
	Don't even have 20% of the voice, right?
	And so I had a desire, but I was not thwarted by anybody in my capacity to achieve that desire.
	If I wanted to go and become a ballet dancer, well, I'm 47 years old, it's not going to happen, right?
	When you grow up in a situation of intense and demonic abuse and abandonment, we haven't even talked much about your dad, the abandonment in many ways is even worse.
	So we can Perhaps talk about that another time but when you grow up with violence, violence is so particularly debilitating because especially when it's random sadistic violence, random from the point of view of a child in that you don't know what causes it because you kind of know what causes it.
	You knew your mom's a sadist or whatever you want to call it, right?
	Evil in her parenting.
	But as a child you really can't process that.
	You have to cling on to some sense of efficacy, some sense of control over your environment.
	So you have to sort of believe, okay, well, if I don't do this, it will be better.
	If I do that, if I bring my mom breakfast in bed, it'll be better.
	If I clean up the house, it'll be better, right?
	My brother tried this, and my mother was a terrible abuser.
	And my brother was like, well, if we clean up the house, if we make our beds, if we, you know, basically, he would get really upset.
	And I I wasn't that way inclined.
	It doesn't matter.
	It doesn't matter.
	It's not because the house is messy.
	There is nothing in a messy house that makes people hit children.
	Nothing.
	The desk bunnies don't gather together and enter your arm and make it move in destructive ways on the tender flesh of children.
	Nothing.
	And again, I'm just listening to what society told me, right?
	Society told me that no woman can dress so provocatively that she deserves rape.
	And no child can act in such a manner that he deserves hitting, right?
	I was told don't blame the victim.
	I believed it.
	I believe it.
	And if you are in the grip of a sadist as a child, if you are under the reigning fists of a sadist as a child, Then your capacity to have a desire and feel capable of achieving it is broken.
	I don't mean to say irretrievably, but in its natural state it is broken.
	Because between you and your desire, let alone you and your achievement, is violence and sadism and physical, mental and emotional control and destruction.
	You cannot be an architect during a time of bombing, right?
	When in Dresden, and not a lot of architects in 1944, in the thousand plane bombing raid on Dresden in Germany, who would, you know, maybe after the war, but when things are being destroyed, you cannot plan for creation.
	You cannot plan at all.
	You're just surviving.
	So it's like there are not a lot of entrepreneurs in a centrally planned society because they cannot predict or control whether they're going to get the resources or be able to keep the resources or whether the plans are going to come to fruition.
	This also happens even though there are entrepreneurs of a kind in a mixed economy like we have in the West.
	You know, they get government contracts from this administration, they don't know if they're going to get the same support from the next administration, and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	So when there's randomness, we cannot plan.
	When there's violence, we can neither have desires nor any belief in our capacity to achieve them, to achieve those desires, to gain what we want.
	And so I think it's quite a miracle that you did work as hard as you did in the IT field.
	But I think that your back, your body, your unconscious is probably in quite a revolt at the moment and is saying to you there is something very important that we were prevented from keeping.
	And that is our desires and our capacity to achieve them.
	My daughter flies me, used to when she was a baby she would fly me around.
	She literally was like a little pilot, right?
	So she'd see something on a shelf she wanted to grab, she'd reach up with her arms, I'd pick her up, she'd reach that way and she would fly me over to what she wanted to pick up on the shelf.
	I literally felt like a little Cessna.
	So she had a desire, I want something from that shelf.
	She did not have the capacity to get that thing from the shelf herself.
	So she would reach for me and then she would reach for me in the arms or reach to the thing in the arms and I would move her over to where she wanted to be so she could get what she wanted.
	And in that way she was able to get a sense that she could have a desire and she could implement that desire.
	She could achieve her desire.
	And as babies we can only achieve the satisfaction of our needs through the benevolent cooperation of others, right?
	Babies can't feed themselves.
	They can't change themselves.
	They can't bathe themselves.
	They can't do anything other than be ridiculously adorable.
	And a baby is very assertive.
	The baby has, I'm hungry.
	I'm going to cry until I get my food.
	Right?
	I am happy.
	I'm going to smile to further engage the person and to encourage the person in making me happy.
	Right?
	If I did something that I still do this now, If I do something, make a joke that my daughter really likes, she will say, do it again.
	I'll do it again.
	Right?
	If my daughter says something that makes me laugh, she will go back out the room, come back in and do it again so I can laugh again.
	Because she wants to make me happy too.
	And so all the way back to babyhood, it seems unlikely that you were able to sort of fly your benevolent mother Cessna to get what you wanted, that you were able to get your To retain the connection between I want something and I can achieve that want, that goal, that desire.
	Because we're all born helpless and the only way we gain a sense of efficacy is through the cooperation and sensitivity and affection and responsiveness of our parents.
	And it does not sound like you had even a shred of that.
	In fact you probably had the opposite.
	Because sadists around babies are especially dangerous.
	We'll probably never know what happened between you and your mother as a baby but I bet you it's pretty nasty stuff.
	So as far as motivation goes I think you have to go back real deep and real early.
	My guess is that you're not exactly sure what it is that you want out of your life and how to achieve it and I'm incredibly sorry that you didn't get That as a child doesn't mean you can't get it now, but I would go back to that level to try and figure out where my motivation can be regrown.
	Does that make any sense?
	It does.
	I feel like you're speaking to me on a level that, you know, it is starting to make sense to me.
	And that's really where I find myself right now is that I really don't know what it is that I want to do with my life.
	As we're growing, or as I was growing, as I was maturing, we would have these notions or these ideas that, oh hey, maybe I want to go do this, or maybe I want to go do that.
	But right now, it's like, and always in the past, I've always attacked things with, with a great deal of passion until basically I just couldn't milk it anymore.
	It didn't look like anything was going to come from it.
	But right now I'm definitely in this situation where I'm not even sure I have a desire for anything.
	I don't know if I have a passion for anything, not like I, you know, used to years ago.
	And that's really concerning me, because to me it's just not a healthy way to live.
	No, it's not.
	It's not at all.
	And I would suggest that this kind of self-work, where you try and figure out, you know, You had a certain particular momentum that came out of a very, very difficult and malevolent history, being the victim of these kinds of situations, just horrible.
	And you had a kind of momentum, but that momentum usually doesn't last much beyond, I guess for me, it was sort of early middle age.
	I had a lot of momentum until I was in my early thirties.
	And then that momentum kind of fizzled out and then I had to change considerably.
	I mean, I had to go right into my past.
	I had to go to therapy.
	I had to figure out, you know, children from abusive households have personality, personality structures.
	They're not designed to be long lasting because it really imbued, like it's, it's kind of, It's weird for our bodies to be in a highly abusive environment and then live a long time.
	I mean, victims of abuse are not designed to live for a long time.
	We're like those fruit flies that they keep experimenting with genetics on.
	We're not supposed to live for a long time.
	So if we make it past our early 30s, our bodies are like, wait, shit, we're not dead yet?
	We're not starved to death, we didn't die of disease, we didn't have a war, I mean, but we had this horribly abusive environment, so there can't be a lot of resources around, because violence ain't exactly productive.
	So our bodies are like, shit, okay, so we're going to go have a lot of sex, we're going to burn the candle at both ends, we're going to be workaholics, we're going to conform, and then, if we're not dead in our early 30s, our bodies are like, well shit, we can't keep this up.
	I guess we're going to have to change, right?
	Because we were, you know, we're not designed to be a hundred-year light bulb, we're designed to be a comet that burns everyone's retinas and then fades away, right?
	And I would imagine that this happens, with me it was insomnia, with you it's a back injury and so on, but there is, I think, something in your life that says, well, we can't keep doing this thing like we used to.
	Because we got a surprise second half of our life that we weren't expecting and we need something different.
	So my suggestion would be to try and figure out, go into the past, go into history, try and figure out what you can do to go back and in a sense reparent these aspects of yourselves.
	I know that that doesn't make any sense or whatever, but you can read Nathaniel Brandon, you can read John Bradshaw, you can read Alice Miller and people like that, and really get a sense of how screwed up her history was.
	Because you're talking to me about motivation.
	I talked to you about childhood.
	We talked for like 40 minutes before you brought up your child abuse.
	That's the first thing to talk about once you've really processed it.
	So that would be my suggestion.
	I wish I could give you an easy answer.
	But it is a go back and relearn, really – not relearn, really learn for the first time what it means to have motivation that is sustainable and healthy.
	It just isn't.
	So I hope that helps.
	I wish I could give you more on it but I hope that I've at least pointed you in some direction that I think would be helpful.
	I think talking to a therapist if you've got insurance or can't swing it in any way would be absolutely fantastic because this kind of stuff, that's pretty hard shit to process without someone really in your corner on a consistent basis and helping you to make those connections.
	I think the words that you just spoke is resonating with me.
	I just spoke a bunch.
	You mean about the surprise second half of your life or what?
	Well, don't they usually refer to that as a midlife crisis or getting old when you get to that point?
	Yeah, I mean, but it's not a midlife.
	It's a midlife crisis.
	It's a reengineering of abuse personality to non-abuse personality or rather abuse conformity to authenticity.
	It's not a midlife crisis in so far as it's not everyone who has a middle-of-the-life thing goes through that.
	It's just that if you don't die because you had an abusive childhood, if you don't die then your body reorients itself and you know if you survive to puberty your body changes and so on, right?
	It's not a midlife crisis, it's just a way of normalizing it, but I don't think it's common to everyone.
	I don't think my daughter is going to have a midlife crisis, but for those of us who suffered abuse and then made something of ourselves and have some resources and a longer life.
	Well, you know, you can't sustain it, you can't maintain that way of being.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	Well, no, I think the way that I understand what you were saying, what you were suggesting is that I need to retool my roots or retool my childhood, per se, as the way I was parented, or finding some sort of reconciliation with
	with the abuse that I was experiencing and that that abuse directly correlates to, you know, how initially I may have had this fantastic boost of energy of wanting to do something with myself or accomplish things for myself, but then eventually it fizzled out as a result of that specific history.
	So is that pretty much, you know, a good summary of what you were saying?
	Yeah, and I mean, I know it's been a long call, but when you re-listen to it, as I hope that you will, when I said at the beginning that it wasn't about politics, it was about something much deeper, I think we have a possibility that that's a reasonable place to start.
	You might find out that it's entirely about politics and I'm entirely full of shit, but I think it's a possible good place to start because we've come a long way from I'm not good at politics, right?
	You certainly have caused me to think into a different direction.
	I stand by my original assertion that, you know, that there was politic involved, but definitely I feel like that after, you know, well, during the course of this conversation that you've certainly given me something else to look at, and that's something that I can work on.
	All this stuff in the past about office politics, I can't dwell on that.
	That's done.
	But here I have something that I can work at and that's myself.
	Well, fantastic.
	I'm glad that's been helpful and I wish you a very speedy recovery in terms of your back and also from this history and I just really want to leave you with my incredible virtual hug of sympathy for everything that you went through and for what your brother went through as a child.
	I'm sorry, you didn't mention a brother.
	That was a previous caller.
	For everything, did you have siblings?
	I had a sister.
	A sister?
	Yeah.
	Well, Stefan, I appreciate it.
	I appreciate you taking the time to answer my question, and I found the things that you said to be very helpful.
	Good.
	I appreciate that, and thank you, sir, for calling, and best of luck.
	Okay, good luck.
	All right, Mr. M., we have one more?
	There's two more, depending on how long you want to go.
	No, I can't do two, but I'll do one more, unless it's quick.
	Okay, Nate, you're up next.
	Hi, Steph.
	Thanks for taking my call.
	My pleasure.
	Thank you for calling.
	My question is, it's kind of off topic from a lot of the stuff you talk about, but it is, how do I know if I'm paying my boss too much?
	So basically I work for a company and it's very easy to figure out like exactly how much I'm making for the company.
	So is there any like, math that I could do to figure out if I'm making the right amount off of how much I make.
	Aren't you looking for an objective definition of price?
	I mean, who can tell you whether you're paying your boss too much other than you?
	Yeah, that's a good point.
	I guess I feel like I'm paying him too much, but I don't know how much the rent is, I don't know how much the electricity bill is, all that kind of stuff.
	So I don't want to... I mean, I may be wrong in that I'm feeling that I'm not getting enough money from him or making enough money.
	Do you have any sense of... I mean, when I worked at a company once, the programmers felt underpaid.
	And underpaid is kind of a... it's a funny word, you know?
	It's like feeling... saying, I feel underloved.
	It's like, well...
	I mean, if you've got the people in your life who love you, the amount that you're willing to accept, then you're not under loved.
	You're just, that's how much you're loved, right?
	So, what I did was, I sort of sat down with the management team and I said, well, I don't know if they're underpaid or overpaid.
	Honestly, I do know that we have risk of people leaving.
	I also know that it's expensive to, you know, with a mature product in particular, with people who've been around and built it, it's very expensive to get a new programmer in who's going to do anything useful for at least three to six months.
	It's a big deal.
	And there are always projects churning and all that.
	So I said, the best thing to do is get a salary survey, right?
	And so I paid a couple of thousand bucks to get a salary survey, which basically said, here's what people With this amount of experience in this field, in this particular geographical area, this is their pay range.
	And they were low, about 10 to 15 percent.
	So I sort of made the case and built the business plan and so on.
	I ended up getting people some pretty significant raises.
	And so that was good.
	I'm glad that they came to me.
	I'm glad that I was able to make a good case.
	I like getting people more money.
	That's good, because I hate getting new people.
	Hiring people is a pain in the ass.
	Figuring out if they work out is a pain in the ass.
	Figuring out if they're going to stay, they get poached, or they don't work out or something.
	I mean, it's no good.
	So I'm much better than the devil.
	I'm much more for the devil, you know, than some new employee.
	So you can, of course, you don't, I don't think you have to pay that quite as much anymore, but you can try and get a salary survey and say, well, what is, you know, someone with my experience level and so on able to To command.
	Another great way to find out if, you know, if you think you're with a woman, I don't know, let's go real shallow here.
	If you think you can be with a prettier woman, there's a great way to find out.
	What's that?
	You just go find out, I guess.
	You go look around.
	Go ask a prettier woman out, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	You say, well, I'm with a five.
	I bet you I could be with an eight.
	Well, go ask out an eight.
	You can find out, right?
	And so if you feel like you're underpaid at your job, it's a great way to find out, right?
	Which is what?
	Well, go look around.
	Go look around for work.
	I am locked into a no-compete contract, so I don't feel I can legally go work somewhere else.
	Well, I mean, I've had to wrestle with one of those before.
	You just go hire a lawyer.
	I mean, I hate to say, you know, It won't cost you that much and just sort of figure out – I mean they can't prevent you from working for a living, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's been really weird.
	So these non-competes – again, I'm no lawyer, right?
	So non-competes are kind of tricky.
	I mean what they basically – they don't want you to take all their knowledge and go work for a direct competitor but they can't stop you from earning a living, right?
	Right, yeah.
	It's really weird, yeah.
	It seems odd now that I signed it five years ago and it just seems so odd to me now.
	Could I give you some numbers?
	It's very rare that those things can ever be pursued in any meaningful way.
	Again, talk to a lawyer about it, but that's sort of my understanding.
	Okay.
	Can I give you some numbers of what I generated last year and how much I got paid?
	Would that help at all?
	Sure.
	Okay.
	I generated $120,000 in labor and I sold $35,000 in parts and I got paid about $36,000.
	So it just seemed kind of low.
	I mean, it's like around 30%, not even that.
	Yeah, I mean, again, it's been a while.
	I know I've run these kind of calculations before, but – so you made about $35,000 and you generated $150,000, $170,000?
	Yeah, total was $155,000 and I got paid – Right.
	Are you on commission?
	Most of it, well probably half of it is commission and half of it is an hourly wage.
	Right.
	Right.
	Of course, what you could do if you wanted is – and it's weird that you'd have a non-compete to me when you're only making in your 30s.
	But anyway, I mean that's not for me to say.
	But what you could do is you could go to your boss and you could say, I want a higher commission after I go past 150 or 140 or something like that, right?
	Yeah.
	That's not going to affect your salary a lot.
	You can then, of course, make a lot more.
	That's not going to affect their overhead a lot right now, but if you start to make more sales, then it's going to really raise your incentive and they're obviously going to be happy if you make even more than that.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, sure.
	They make more money when I make more money, so I should be getting more of a percentage as the numbers go up.
	Is that kind of fair?
	Well, no, I mean, yeah.
	You're making more money and they're making more money, but what you want to do is make more money, right?
	And you said it was half and half salary and commission?
	Pretty much, yeah.
	It's about half and half.
	Would you be willing to take less salary and more commission?
	Uh, yeah.
	I mean, I just look at the numbers in the end of the year and I don't really care how it adds up.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, I'm a big one for to sit down and talk with people, right?
	To sit down and say, um, I'm not, I'm not satisfied with the compensation system at the moment.
	Have you, you've been working at the same place for five years?
	Yeah, I've been there five years.
	Yeah.
	So why the hell are you still only making 35 after five years?
	Yeah, I mean, it just, the raises just haven't came.
	And I haven't really asked, of course, but I mean, they just... Okay, so why haven't you asked, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, I'm just horrible at that.
	It's not your boss's job to manage your career.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	And I don't know if they would.
	I mean, it's, I mean, I just don't know if they really would pay me more.
	It just seems like they always, like every one of their employees has been underpaid.
	Well, OK, so that tells you something about the kind of people they hire, right?
	What it means is that they hire the kind of people who don't ask for raises, right?
	Yeah.
	And so it means that they're able to pick a particular type of childhood, right?
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	Did you listen to the last call?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I did.
	And?
	Well, so you think it's a... I haven't asked for a raise because of a motivational thing?
	No, a childhood thing.
	Or a childhood thing from a motive, but... Yeah, I mean, I'm just... Yeah, so let me, the reason why I told the story about my daughter and the boy who wasn't paying attention was she basically said in her, this is not what she processed, but this is the emotional experience, she said, well, I am worth paying attention to.
	You're not paying attention to me.
	You asked me a question.
	I'm answering it.
	So you must now pay attention to me.
	She didn't sit there and say, she didn't trail off into silence and then say, I guess I was being really boring.
	No, she said, you asked me a question.
	You're not listening to me.
	I need you to pay attention.
	Okay.
	Right.
	She's four.
	Yeah.
	And that's what she said.
	I'm not paraphrasing it.
	That's exactly what she said.
	So she was direct?
	Yeah.
	She told the boy what she needed.
	And she didn't self-attack and neither did she attack him.
	She didn't say, you're totally rude.
	You asked me a question.
	Now you're looking all over the room.
	You stink.
	And she didn't say, well, I guess I wasn't keeping his attention.
	I must be really boring.
	Right?
	She neither attacked herself nor the other person.
	I've never practiced that with her.
	I've never talked about anything like that with her.
	That's just what she did.
	And this is what I mean when I say I'm learning as much from her as she is from me, right?
	Sure.
	But she just asked for what she wanted.
	Without hostility, without resentment, without any built up hoo-ha and buddy, buddy, buddy, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, and I'm horrible at At asking for raises or confrontation.
	I hate it.
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	No, that's not, that's not accurate.
	Right.
	If I have never studied Mandarin, am I really shitty at Mandarin?
	Ah, okay.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I've never, I've just never done it, I guess.
	No, it's not that you've never done it.
	It's that your natural inclination to do it.
	We're all born assertive, right?
	Babies who are not assertive, they die.
	The non-assertive baby gene is wiped out in less than a generation, right?
	In other words, if a baby sits there and says, well, I am really hungry and if I don't eat, I'm probably going to die, but I really don't want to wake my parents because, you know, they're probably quite tired, so I'll just cross my fingers and hope that I can make it till morning.
	What happens to those genes?
	Yeah, I guess they get stifled.
	They're wiped out.
	Yeah.
	So we understand we are all born assertive and we are all born clearly expressing our needs and preferences without attack, without hostility, right?
	I mean, my daughter cried as a baby, not because she hated us, because she was hungry and we gave her what she needed and she would calm down, right?
	She didn't hold resentment to us, right?
	This is what I need.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	And so, you were not born horrible with this stuff, because nobody is.
	I mean, you show me a baby who doesn't cry when they're hungry, and show you a baby with a severe problem.
	Right?
	Usually physical, right?
	So you weren't born with an inability to ask for a raise, right?
	Right.
	So what happened?
	Well, it was probably stifled, I guess.
	I mean, the... You got these tentative things.
	Dude, you were there.
	I wasn't.
	I mean, I can't tell you.
	In other words, were you able to clearly communicate with your parents about what you wanted?
	It doesn't mean that they agreed.
	I say to my daughter, I say, I want you to tell me what you want.
	It doesn't mean that I'm going to agree with you.
	Yeah, certainly not.
	And it certainly doesn't mean that if we disagree there's any problem.
	But I always want to know what you want.
	Yeah, certainly not.
	I certainly did not feel comfortable doing it.
	And why not?
	Having a difference of opinion.
	I don't know.
	One thing I've always thought is My parents never really reasoned with me.
	They would kind of just tell me what was right, what was wrong.
	My mom's super religious, so, you know, there's no reason.
	You just kind of tell, she'd just tell me what, what God wanted, of course.
	And then I would feel uneasy, disagreeing with her.
	Let me, let me see if I can take a wild stab at the dark here, if you don't mind.
	Sure.
	Was it ever the case that what God wanted miraculously coincided with what your mother wanted?
	Yeah, probably.
	Yeah, I would say that's probably true.
	Hmm.
	Isn't that weird?
	I mean, that your mother's wants would coincide with the wants of an ineffable Being, incomprehensible being, eternal being, incorporeal being, and your mom.
	They just happen to have the same wants.
	I mean, that's the odds of that.
	It's incredible.
	Yeah, I never felt comfortable, like, disagreeing with her.
	I mean, I never really believed in God.
	No, no, because you'd be disagreeing with God!
	Yeah.
	Because if what your mom wants is what God wants, then disagreeing with her is a sin.
	And I did disagree with what God wanted, you know, or what the Bible said a lot of times.
	I thought it was kind of weird.
	Yeah.
	So your mom's opinions had some pretty heavy pinch hitters, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, that's a pretty...
	non-negotiable thing, right?
	I mean, you don't negotiate with God, right?
	Certainly not.
	He's all-knowing.
	He's all good.
	You just don't negotiate with God.
	And so how are you going to negotiate with your mother if your mother agrees with God?
	Yeah, that's a good point.
	I'm not trying to like make a little game or victory here.
	Like, that's a very serious issue.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I take great pains to remind my daughter that I'm fallible, that I make mistakes, that sometimes she's right and I'm wrong.
	Yeah.
	I don't want her to ever feel that I'm right because I'm bigger or I'm right because I'm dad or I'm right because I'm me.
	I'm right because of what I think and I make mistakes and she is right about some things and I'm wrong about some things.
	And I'll tell her afterwards, OK, who was right?
	I was, Daddy.
	And who was wrong?
	You were, Daddy.
	I said, that's right.
	That can happen.
	And when I'm right and she's wrong, who's right?
	You were, Daddy.
	Who was wrong?
	I was.
	Right.
	No problem.
	We're not trying to keep score.
	We're just making sure we remember that we're both fallible.
	Yeah, because it really doesn't matter who's right and wrong as long as you No, as long as you know what's right and wrong.
	It does matter that, it matters that I could be wrong, that I can admit that I'm wrong, and that I'm happy to be corrected.
	Exactly, yeah.
	That matters.
	Yeah.
	Because, I mean, there's nothing more, I don't know, to me there's nothing more contemptible and ridiculous than people who can't admit that they're wrong.
	I mean, it's sad when you see it with kids.
	Because you know exactly where it's coming from.
	But when they've grown up and still haven't dealt with it, it's just, it's so ridiculous and so exhausting and so obvious.
	It's such obvious trauma.
	You know, it's like the guys with, you know, spiky industrial glued hair and more metal coming out of their faces than if they'd fallen down an elevator shaft holding a tackle box.
	And they think it's about punk or cool or Marxism or something.
	It's like, no, this is your bad childhood.
	I get it.
	It's so obvious.
	And so I just never want to be that kind of person with anyone other than my family.
	Kids know when you're not being honest.
	And kids know when you're not being honest.
	They know when they can tell.
	Oh, yeah.
	Now I knew that with my mom's mom.
	One of the first things I knew about my mom was that she could never admit that she was wrong.
	Yeah.
	And how pathetic that was for an adult.
	I mean especially with a kid.
	I mean you know you're born looking up to your parents so much anyway that I mean they don't need this additional infallibility as well.
	I mean they're already ten times your size and have money and jobs and I mean infinitely greater knowledge.
	I mean, what the hell would they also need infallibility for, you know?
	Yeah.
	It's like, well, if you're God and you have a bow tie, then you're really God.
	It's like, no, we got it.
	You're God.
	You don't need the fucking bow tie.
	Yeah.
	So what I'm pointing out is that if you weren't, if your natural assertiveness, the natural assertiveness of babies, I mean, God, imagine how quickly the world would grow if we remained our comfort with discomforting other people that babies have.
	You know, babies are just like, you know, I'm going to basically cry until I get what I want.
	I'm sorry that it's driving you insane, but too bad.
	I need my food.
	Right?
	I mean, if we could just be as assertive in the truth of our experience despite the discomfort of others as your average three-week-old baby is, This world would be healed in about a generation, but then we get older and we're also afraid of causing people upset.
	Well, you know, parents are obviously much more upset if the baby half dies during the night because it decides not to wake them, right?
	And in the long run, the world is much better off if we basically give up caring about other people's discomfort and simply speak the truth.
	I mean, that's what keeps babies alive and that's what keeps societies alive, I think, in the long run, too.
	But I just want to point that out that, again, I would go back and try and deal with the stuff.
	You know, if you can actually deal with the stuff that happened to you as a kid to the point where you can be clearly and unaggressively assertive, then your economic value will go up far more than any negotiation that you can make at the moment.
	When you say deal with it, do you mean talking to my parents about it or more therapy?
	Well, I don't think there's an either or there.
	Certainly, if you're going to talk to your parents about difficult stuff that happened in your childhood, I think having a therapist in your corner to talk things over with, to prepare for it, I think is really, really important.
	If you're going to have any significant confrontation with your parents about childhood stuff, then I think it's really, really important.
	To do that, if not downright essential.
	But there's lots of stuff that you can do ahead of time, right?
	I mean it's lots of stuff you can do around journaling and there's Nathaniel Brandon and John Bradshaw have these great workbooks that help you to start to map your history and all of that.
	So just get that stuff in the library or buy it up and just mark it up, you know.
	Put a cup of coffee on, sit down, just write through it, grind through it, start writing journals, write down your dreams.
	I mean I got whole shows on this kind of stuff and that way when you When you go to therapy or whatever, if you go to therapy, and I hope that you will, because it sounds like you've got a lot of brains and potential.
	It's being held back by stuff that happened with you as a kid.
	Yeah, I think I've been figuring that out in the last few years.
	The last thing you just said.
	Yeah, well then you'll get a lot more value out of therapy if you're prepared, right?
	Who is that second one you said?
	You said Nathaniel Brandon and then who else?
	John Bradshaw.
	Yeah, he's got, I mean, he's, to be fair, he's, you know, he's a little on the Christian side, but that doesn't really show up much at all in his, you know, so's Bono, but you know, Bad is still a great song.
	But I would work through those kind of stuff.
	Again, the Alice Miller stuff is really great to read.
	And there's a book.
	Soul Murder by Shine Gold I think, Love's Executioner by someone else, I can't remember.
	There was a whole bunch of books about sort of therapies, the therapy process and so on.
	In Treatment is actually a pretty good show to watch for that as well with Gabriel Byrne.
	It's adapted from an Israeli show that I've never watched but there's lots of things about that to watch that I think is Ordinary People with Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland is also really worth watching just to get a sense of that Stuff that can go on in therapy.
	Winona Ryder film as well, because the name escapes me, with Winona Ryder and young Angelina Jolie.
	That is also worth watching.
	And so I would just start to get into that self-knowledge thing and read Lots of the great psychologists are worth reading and just really start to get into mapping yourself and realizing that your economic value, which is very interesting because there's no secret.
	Most of the therapeutic movies are about a big secret that gets unburdened and this woman has no secret that gets unburdened, which is very interesting.
	But just start to get in the self-knowledge thing.
	Tom Likas, who is somebody I have mixed feelings about, he was for 15 years, or for many years, at least the number one radio show host and the number one radio market, I think, Southern California or something like that.
	He's still on, right?
	Tom Likas?
	No.
	He's now an internet guy because his argument basically is that the radio industry, they had this massive set of conglomerations.
	They all aggregated together, all bought each other up.
	And now they're in such debt that they can't pay the talent, anything.
	So they're basically offering him like half what he used to make because they're also, that's his story.
	So heavily in debt and so on.
	And so he's gone internet, but he, he was grew up, his father was an alcoholic and so on.
	He did like, I think he said he did 12 years of therapy.
	I mean, this is some crazy, like Woody Allen.
	I've been in therapy more longer than I've not been in therapy in my life or whatever.
	And he said it's the best investment he ever made.
	The years of therapy that I did, it's the best investment I ever made in terms of my economic value, in terms of my capacity for being a good friend, a good husband, a good father, hopefully a good force in the world.
	There's just no better investment that you could make and I continually say that it's With the right therapist.
	It's just a fantastic, fantastic thing.
	Any advice?
	There's a show actually, I think the Magic Mike has just put it out as a, it's FDR 1929 if I remember rightly, but it's called How to Find a Great Therapist, at least my thoughts about it.
	It's such a great thing to do.
	I mean, excellence in any field generally requires coaching.
	It requires coaching from somebody who's not usually intimately involved in you already.
	My daughter, I mean, I was a swimming racer, a water polo guy.
	Like I was a really, and still am, a really strong, good, competent swimmer.
	And I think I came in seventh or eighth in Ontario when I swam in high school.
	But I send my daughter to swimming lessons.
	It's just, it's important.
	I mean, if you want to achieve excellence in any field, Coaching is good and excellence in philosophy and excellence in economic value has a strong degree of self-knowledge component, at least that which is sustainable and benevolent.
	And of course, there are exceptions, right?
	I mean, I don't know the degree to which deep knowledge reveled in the warm bath of self-knowledge, but generally it's something that's significantly under your control.
	And even if it doesn't add a lot to your economic value, it sure is going to make your chance of success in marriage that much greater.
	You know, you think therapy is expensive, try divorce.
	I mean, that's expensive and can ruin your entire life, and so on, right?
	I know that firsthand.
	Oh, from your own parents?
	Or from your own life?
	Myself, yeah.
	Oh, yeah, okay.
	So, you should have done therapy before you went and got married, right?
	Yeah, yeah, you're right on everything about divorce.
	It is the end, just about.
	Oh, what happened?
	If you can give me the brief with yours, what happened?
	Oh, I was married to a lady for seven years, and it was just psychotic seven years.
	And it's over now, but man, it's like, you're suddenly free, you know?
	Suddenly free.
	Oh yeah, and then you look back and you're like, what the hell was I ever doing there, right?
	Yeah, I mean it shouldn't have lasted a month.
	It was just psychotic, absolutely psychotic.
	You wonder how you survive it every day of your life.
	Oh yeah, I bet that's right.
	Was it a psychotic divorce or was it not too bad?
	No, it was real bad.
	We have a daughter together and everything you say about the courts, as a man you just forget it.
	I mean, just plan on spending a ton of money.
	You know, she got a free attorney or whatever through the state, but I had to pay for all my attorney fees.
	So, I mean, you're just, you eventually just run out of money, you know, and then you lose.
	It's about how it works.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, I mean, they say, you know, with a straight face, they'll say, you know, you need to give me a $20,000 retainer or something like that.
	It's like, really, can I give you a side of kidney with that too?
	Because I got two of those as well.
	Yep.
	Yeah, I'm sorry about that.
	Yeah, so yeah, lesson learned.
	I mean, there's nothing pricier.
	I mean, I'm glad you have your daughter, I guess, but there's nothing pricier than a lack of self-knowledge relationship and particularly a divorce, particularly if there are kids involved, right?
	What is that that guy says?
	I'm not going to get married next time.
	I'm just going to find a woman I hate and buy her a house.
	Yeah, that's the quicker route.
	As far as if I do approach my parents on these things, I don't suspect that they will be too receptive.
	Should I just expect that?
	Or, I mean, what if they just don't want to talk about it at all?
	Do I just move on?
	Well, you see, this is around the assertiveness thing, right?
	Which is that if they don't want to talk about it, then you say, well, it's really important for me to talk about it.
	I really do want to talk about it.
	Well, we don't want to.
	Well, sometimes you have to do things in life for the benefit of others, right?
	Even though it's uncomfortable for you.
	Right?
	I mean, you just, I'm sure at some point when you were a kid, they said to you that you would have to do something for the comfort of others, even though it was less comfortable for you.
	Right?
	Right.
	Did they ever?
	They did, right?
	Oh yeah.
	Yeah.
	So you simply remind them of that.
	You know, remember that thing you told me, I don't want to go to church.
	Well, it's important to go to church or I don't want to kiss grandma.
	She smells like peppermints.
	Well, you've got to make her feel good, right?
	Well, now this is your chance to live up to all of the rules that you imposed on me as a kid.
	It's really, really important.
	I'm sorry if it's uncomfortable for you, but it's really important for me, and you taught me that I should do things that are uncomfortable for me if they make other people happy.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	And if they simply won't do anything uncomfortable for them, for the sake of your happiness, then that tells you quite a fuckton about them and you, right?
	Yeah.
	And I used to think we had a good relationship, but the last few years I'm starting to realize that it's kind of just, there's not much depth to it.
	Well, they let you marry a crazy bitch, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It's not good, right?
	Somebody who gets married to someone who's crazy, it tells me everything that I need to know about their environment and their surroundings and people who, like, either your parents didn't know she was crazy, in which case they're completely blind to that, which is not healthy or good, or they knew she was crazy but let you marry her anyway.
	Either way, it's not good, right?
	Yeah.
	Like, nobody gets married in isolation, right?
	You fall out of an airplane into a wedding, right?
	Right.
	I mean, there's a whole process.
	You know, when I got out of a seven-year relationship with a woman who was not crazy, but definitely not healthy.
	I mean, I got that everyone had let me continue in that relationship.
	Getting out of that relationship through every one of my other relationships into some pretty serious evaluation.
	Say that again?
	Well, once I got out of that relationship, which I've been off and on in for about seven than everyone around me who'd let me continue in that relationship without saying, like, what the hell are you doing?
	I mean, Christ, I almost married this woman.
	I proposed everything.
	And people were just letting me do it.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Gotcha.
	She's the wrong woman.
	Not just for me, just the wrong woman.
	And people just let me do that.
	I'm like, can I trust you people?
	If you're not watching my back for something as obvious as this, And that's why people stay in bad relationships, because the moment they jump out of them, one of the reasons, the moment they jump out of them, they've got to look at everyone who let them stay in a bad relationship and say, well, how the fuck close are we?
	Yeah.
	How much do you really care about me?
	How much are you capable of caring?
	If you can't see bad people, then how can you protect me from them?
	If your parents can't see bad people, how the hell are you supposed to see them?
	And if they could see them, but didn't warn you, that's even worse.
	Yeah.
	People in bad relationships, yeah, it's bad for them, but it's a real, a real condemnation of everyone around them who's letting that happen.
	Yeah, sure.
	And my mom, being religious, feels that divorce, you just don't do it.
	I mean, like marriage is forever, no matter how wretched it is, you know?
	Well, then she had an additional responsibility to make sure you didn't marry a lunatic if she felt that divorce was not an option.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Right?
	That doesn't get her off the hook.
	I mean, that makes her even more on the hook.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, but that's one reason why I was in it so long is because, you know, everyone's pressuring me to stay in it because you're married for life and you gotta stick with it, you know?
	Yeah, well.
	Yeah, and I'm sorry about that.
	I mean, that's just a big mess all around and you should have had people who, um, You should have had people around you who would warn you about that.
	Yeah.
	But I made the bad choice too.
	I mean, I should have.
	No, and I appreciate that.
	And I appreciate you taking ownership of it, you know, I mean, but, but there's still better or worse situations to come from.
	Like we're all responsible as adults for sure.
	But that doesn't mean that we all start at the same place.
	Right.
	And I can say, yes, you're responsible for marrying the woman.
	But I can still have sympathy for knowing for a fact that if you'd had different parents, you never would have married her.
	I mean, that's for sure.
	Yeah, I agree with that.
	My daughter's just not going to marry some psycho.
	Right?
	So she's got an unfair advantage, so to speak.
	Now, yeah, everyone's an adult and everyone's responsible, but that doesn't mean that we all start from the same place.
	Sure.
	And now I feel like I have a good psycho radar.
	Yes, for sure.
	And that's really good.
	I can smell them.
	Yeah, hopefully you can teach that to your daughter over time as well and all that.
	So I just wanted to say I'm very sorry.
	Yeah, I would definitely sit down with your parents and just remember, all you have to do is use the same moral rules that they used on you.
	I'm sorry if it's uncomfortable.
	You know, it was uncomfortable for me to get those shots, but you said it was important.
	So this is uncomfortable for you, but it's important to me.
	So I expect you to live by the rules that you inflicted on me.
	And the talking and approaching my parents about it, that's part of the healing process of this whole thing?
	I don't know.
	I mean, I'm not such a big fan of the healing process.
	I mean, I'm in the truth process.
	I'm not in the healing process.
	I'm just in the truth process.
	Right.
	You know, they say the truth shall set you free, but it'll piss you off first.
	I don't know about setting you free.
	I don't know about healing.
	I don't know about forgiveness.
	I don't know any of that stuff.
	But what I do know is that if you say that you love someone, then speak your mind and heart honestly and truthfully to them.
	Because that's called having a relationship, right?
	Absolutely, yeah.
	You know, I don't buy a car to sit in a chair next to it and pretend to drive.
	I don't have a relationship in order to lie and hide myself from people.
	Because that's not having a relationship.
	That's like having the opposite of relationship.
	That's like pretending I have a job when I'm paying someone to show up and work.
	So I'm sort of, I'm not in the, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a psychiatrist, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not, you know, I'm an idiot on the internet with hopefully some good arguments, but I am in the truth business.
	I do believe, and I think more than believe, it's almost axiomatic, that to have a relationship, you need to be honest.
	You can't have a relationship if you're not being honest.
	And there's open dishonesty, and then there's sins of omission, wherein you simply don't talk about things that are important to you with the people who you claim are important to you.
	Right.
	And that's how I relate.
	So if you're going to have a relationship with someone, then have a goddamn relationship with them.
	And if you're not, then don't.
	Yeah, and that's exactly how my relationship is with my parents.
	I mean, there's just things that we don't talk about.
	Well, okay, yeah, but your parents define the relationship, so basically there's things that your parents don't want to talk about and you obey because you're the kid and that's how you're programmed, right?
	Yeah, that's exactly how it is.
	I mean, they've told me we don't discuss these certain subjects.
	Well, yeah, and why?
	What do you mean we don't?
	How do you get to just say that in a relationship?
	I mean, that's ridiculous.
	We don't get to discuss certain subjects.
	I mean, that doesn't really make any sense.
	What if I want to?
	Yeah, I totally agree with that.
	If you have to walk on eggshells, what's the point?
	Well, I mean, it's just not, I mean, everybody can spend their life however they want.
	I just, if I can't talk to someone about what I'm honest and passionate about, I mean, this show helped a lot with my relationships too, right?
	I mean, this is a very significant passion in my life, right?
	I mean, after my family and like not being dead, this is, this is, this is it, right?
	And I mean, when I started doing this show and it really started to take off, You know, my friends who never listened to it and never asked me any questions about it and seemed really bored whenever I talked about it, like, well, I guess I know where I stand with you, right?
	Or when I have a kid too, right?
	People don't really ask about the kid and, you know, it's like, well, sorry, I have a child now.
	It's like, you get married and people aren't interested in your wife.
	It's like, well, she's the love of my life.
	If you don't care about her, that tells me a lot.
	You know, my daughter's incredibly important to me.
	seem that interested to her, then sorry, you know, there's a value disparity, to put it as nicely as possible.
	And that's why people don't change in their lives a lot of times, because they don't want to see how other people won't notice or don't care.
	Anyway, so that's, yeah, I think you have those kinds of conversations, start to work on self-knowledge and figure this stuff out, how to be more assertive and You gave me an answer earlier, that's why I was kind of unpacking this as we went along, because you gave me an answer.
	Do you remember what you said?
	You said, I'm horrible at asking for a raise.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I remember.
	Yeah, I absolutely am.
	And that's, no, but that's, that's not true.
	It's not, it's not, I mean, it may be kind of true, but it's not useful.
	It's not informative, right?
	Right.
	Why is that?
	Why is that?
	Because there's no circumstances around it, right?
	Yeah.
	Like if you go to a psychiatrist, you say, well, I'm scared.
	I'm scared to leave my house.
	He's going to think you're an agoraphobic, right?
	And then if you say, you know, and I'm calling from a war-torn country and there are snipers outside and roadside bombs, that's a little different, right?
	Exactly.
	Right.
	Just the statement without context, without environment, and without history, without circumstances, is useless because it's like a pseudo answer.
	Well, I'm just horrible at this stuff, right?
	You know, like if I say, well, I'm just bad at math.
	I mean, what does that mean?
	Well, what that means is that I'm good at literature because literature was an escape from my abusive household, and I'm bad at math because math required that you study.
	And my household was too chaotic to study it.
	Right?
	It does, there's no context.
	And it doesn't, it's just, Oh, I'm just bad at math.
	It's like an answer, but it's not an answer because there's no circumstances.
	There's nothing.
	There's no history.
	There's no context.
	Right.
	Do you think that, um, like you don't know my parents, but do you think that they know about these problems and just don't talk about them?
	With my relationship with them?
	Yes, of course.
	Of course they know.
	Of course they know.
	Now, do they sit there and have a chart?
	You know?
	Do they plot and plan and have a chart and a map of all the things that they can't talk about and the consequences of what happens if they talk about it?
	Well, no.
	But lions can't even talk, but they hunt together.
	Right.
	They have an instinct, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	So your parents have an instinct about what will be problematic to talk about, right?
	And they avoid and they evade and they avoid and they, right?
	And everyone has these instincts about what is going to be productive or unproductive to talk about, for sure.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And it's not your job to manage their discomfort.
	It was your job as a kid because you needed to survive, right?
	But, you know, as you get older and You know that.
	It's not your job to manage your ex-wife's discomfort.
	It's just not your job to manage people's discomfort.
	It's their job.
	If you're talking about something that makes other people uncomfortable, well, they can talk to you about it.
	You can be sympathetic if that's uncomfortable, but it's not your job to manage them.
	Again, I don't know why this popped into my head, but it's not like I've been listening to a lot of the guy, but Tom Likas had a choleran.
	You know, Tom Liker's very negative towards marriage.
	Guy's been married four times and negative towards marriage.
	Caller comes on, woman comes on and says, you've got to stop talking down marriage because I don't think my boyfriend doesn't want to get married to me now.
	Right?
	And Tom Liker said, so basically I should stop saying what I believe in so you can get what you want.
	That's putting it very clearly.
	That's a guy who's been to therapy, right?
	Because he knows how to, other people's discomfort is their responsibility.
	Right.
	If your parents get uncomfortable about it, if your boss is uncomfortable and you ask him for a raise, that's his deal.
	It's not your job to manage it.
	You certainly should not paralyze yourself because other people are alarmed by movement, right?
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Well, that's very helpful.
	All right.
	I hope so, and I hope it works out, and thank you so much for calling in about that.
	Yeah, you bet.
	All right.
	Thank you, everybody, so much.
	I really appreciate that.
	I'm sorry that we didn't do a show Sunday, Wednesday.
	We will be back on track.
	I'm actually traveling tomorrow, but we will be back on track Wednesday night.
	Back to our dual core, Wednesday night and Sunday morning call-in shows.
	Thank you for the callers and thank you for the patience of the listeners.
	I really, really, really appreciate it.
	And let's see what's coming up.
	Oh, what is that word here?
	Plug, plug, plug before the end of the show.
	I feel like that's a hint about something.
	I'm not sure.
	Anyway, I'll just read it.
	It says Students for Liberty, Canadian Regional Conference, November 16th, 2013, 9am to 8pm.
	Gosh, does that mean I'm talking for 11 hours?
	Oh, how lovely.
	It's about time.
	University of Toronto, St.
	Michael's College, Mutsu Alumni Hall, 121 St.
	Joseph Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
	What?
	No postal code?
	No website?
	I mean, how am I to plug it?
	This Saturday?
	Yeah.
	So a week, in a week, I'm doing an anti-war speech with smoke grenades, I would assume, and flashbangs.
	And Mike is awesome.
	Hey, wait a minute.
	This Mike is awesome.
	I think that's what he means.
	And apparently he needs a raise.
	He has a raise.
	Oh, oh my God, he's got access to my PayPal account.
	He already has that race.
	All right.
	Well, thanks everybody so much.
	Have yourselves a completely wonderful week.
	Thank you, Mike, for staying up late.
	And I will talk to you guys soon.

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