July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:58:05
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Good morning, Steph. First, I want to say thanks. | |
| I've been watching and listening to you now for, I don't know, four or five months, and I'd stop short of calling it an obsession, but I appreciate the brain food. | |
| Thank you very much. You're very welcome. | |
| Thank you for your obsession. I mean, stalking. | |
| I mean... Not quite. | |
| Like I said, I had to stop short. | |
| Look, what's been really driving at me the last couple of months was the peaceful parenting thing. | |
| And I was telling James that what I was hoping to speak to you about was the repair of a relationship between a father and an adult daughter. | |
| So we're well, well beyond the ability to implement peaceful parenting techniques in this particular instance. | |
| Why? Are you still a parent? | |
| Well, no, this has nothing to do with me, actually. | |
| It's about two people who I love very dearly. | |
| Well, sorry, but let me just sort of be annoyingly technical as usual, which is to say that if you are a parent, and you're a parent until you die, right? | |
| I mean, it doesn't end. | |
| I mean, there are certain legal rights that end and certain things that end. | |
| But being a parent... It doesn't end, right? | |
| So I just sort of want to point that out. | |
| And it's never too late for peaceful parenting because if you're a parent and you want to improve your relationship with your children, whether they're adults or not, there's things, you know, as I've talked about before and I'm happy to talk about again, there are things that people can do, right? | |
| It's never too late to bring peace and positivity. | |
| Now, it may be too late if you've completely ruined the relationship, the person doesn't want to have anything to do with you, but it's always worth a strong and strenuous try, I think. | |
| You're right. I am a parent, too. | |
| I'm calling in particular today about my father and my sister. | |
| My sister's 32, and my dad's 54, going through his fourth divorce, I guess. | |
| So anyways, when we were children, my father wasn't really capable at the time. | |
| He was young, stupid, addicted to drugs, and a typical story, right? | |
| And so we didn't quite get a lot of attention from him. | |
| I'm a few years older than my sister, and so I have different memories of my dad, and we did get to do some things. | |
| And ultimately, when I became an adult, I made the choice to forgive him. | |
| I didn't tell him about it. | |
| I didn't talk to him about it and whatnot. | |
| And we have a relationship now that's more like friends. | |
| But it was my choice, and even now the relationship is... | |
| Essentially because I drive it. | |
| And that's just something that I'm willing to do. | |
| My sister is not. | |
| And she became a parent herself two years ago to a man who was like, Oh, whoops, you're pregnant? | |
| Yeah, see you later. | |
| And so what it's done is really brought back and resurfaced a lot of painful memories or lack thereof from her childhood with our own dad. | |
| And I'm... | |
| I keep struggling with how to help my sister make peace with it. | |
| And I just wanted to see what you might have to say as far as advice. | |
| Obviously, I love my sister. | |
| I love my father, too, very much, despite his sins and ills when we were little. | |
| But I'm primarily concerned about my sister because now she has a child that she has to raise up in the world that may present a similar future for her if we're not careful. | |
| You know what I mean? All right. | |
| Well, what do you love about your father? | |
| My dad is a great tragedy. | |
| And I stress the great part. | |
| He's a ridiculously intelligent man who's emotionally stunted, no doubt. | |
| He did suffer a lot of physical and mental abuse growing up. | |
| But he's very talented. | |
| He's very passionate. Ultimately, in his heart, he's very caring. | |
| He doesn't know how to show it very well. | |
| And he does enjoy talking, being a part of things, learning and sharing. | |
| And I'm fortunate because I feel like I get a lot of those characteristics or attributes from him. | |
| Sorry to interrupt. I mean, those are nice things to hear about someone. | |
| but my particular approach to love is that it's our involuntary response to virtues. | |
| Now, if, you know, so I'm going to go with that theory. | |
| You may disagree with it, but that's sort of where I'm coming from. | |
| And so what I meant was more specifically, what are the virtues that you admire or respect in your father? | |
| You know, Steph, I'm sad to say I don't really think I know him well enough to tell you a good answer for that question. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Well, you said that you love him. | |
| I'm not trying to corner you or anything like that. | |
| I mean, there must be something that you love about him. | |
| Talent, you know, I mean, Marlon Brando was talented. | |
| That doesn't mean that we have to love him. | |
| Freddie Mercury was talented. | |
| That doesn't mean that he was a good person. | |
| So talent, I don't think, is enough. | |
| It may drive admiration, but I don't think it can drive love because, of course, there are so many talented people in the world. | |
| And, of course, a lot of talented people in the world are complete shits in their personal life. | |
| Ernest Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht, Percy Bysshe Shelley. | |
| I mean, lots of people. | |
| Marlon Brando, for instance. | |
| And so I don't think that talent is enough to drive love, although it may drive admiration. | |
| So I think it's important. | |
| And I'm saying this, you know, if you want my advice about how to sell your dad to your sister, then I would say the first thing you need to do is to delineate the value that she's going to get out of the relationship with your father. | |
| With your mutual father, right? | |
| And so I think it would be clear to say, you know, you will benefit from an association with dad because of X, Y, and Z. And X, Y, and Z, for me, need to be kind of virtues, right? | |
| So if she's just had a child, yay, sad for the circumstances, but parenting is great, then I'm sure you understand the last thing that she wants... | |
| It's to have difficulties piled upon difficulties, right? | |
| So if your dad has sort of learned something from his experiences in his life and he's turned the corner and, you know, now wants to be there for his kids, I think that's fantastic. | |
| Then you can say, okay, well, you know, dad is really committed to this and he's going to be able to help you out with parenting in this way and he'd be a, quote, babysitter. | |
| That's a sort of diminishing kind of term to use for a grandparent, but if you'll forgive me, I don't know what, he'll be a good parent backup, parent substitute, and he'll make your life easier in this, that, and the other way. | |
| He'll be a great resource for you. | |
| But if he's sort of high maintenance and so on, I mean, I don't want to speak for your sister, but as a parent myself, a stay-at-home parent myself, I can tell you that you don't have a lot of extra resources when you have a kid, particularly a newborn. | |
| So she's going to need people in her life who are going to really help her, you know, stay over, give her breaks, you know, come over at 3 o'clock in the morning when she has a colicky baby. | |
| She's going to need people who are going to really give her resources. | |
| If your dad is in that place, then you can make that case for her. | |
| If your dad is not in that place, then it may be worth thinking about the need for this at this time. | |
| I see that, and I'm going to have to struggle with the first proposition you made about selling him to my sister because he's a little late in the game to be developing what I consider redeeming qualities, but I'm sure with the difference in situation and the memory that she has, she probably does not. | |
| More importantly, what I'm concerned about with my niece is if you had to guess, What things I might look for as a concerned uncle. | |
| Patterns of behavior, per se, with my sister and the upbringing of my niece to help. | |
| Ideally, of course, we want to steer her away from those same patterns of behavior to get locked into... | |
| The things that happened with my own sister. | |
| So if you just had an insight as to what I might look for in my sister's behavior to cue in when somebody might need to say, hey, we need to guide back this way. | |
| And that'll be the last part of my call. | |
| Thank you so much again. You're very welcome, and I really appreciate your concern for your sister and your niece. | |
| I think that's just wonderful, and she's very lucky to have you as a brother. | |
| So as far as, look, unfortunately, your niece is facing a stack deck. | |
| You know, it's a sad but tragic truth that Being the child of a single parent is really not good. | |
| It's not good. Some people have argued, it seems to be fairly true, that if there's one thing that you could choose before you were born, it would be to have two parents. | |
| That having one parent is about the biggest strike against you. | |
| Now, that doesn't mean that you're doomed to a life of disaster. | |
| I mean, I was raised by a single mom, so to speak, and I think I turned out relatively okay. | |
| But, you know, there are... | |
| Particular strikes against you. | |
| So I think it's really important to be concerned and to remember that. | |
| The first thing that I would do is bring facts. | |
| We need facts. | |
| A lot of parenting is habitual. | |
| It's either how you were raised or a reaction to how you were raised or what the Bible says or what culture says or whatever. | |
| It's not based on facts. | |
| And so the first thing I would do is you can have a I want you to have the very best parenting experience that you can have because you've got an uphill climb. | |
| I mean, you're a single parent. That's hard. | |
| That's hard. Obviously, I want to be there for you. | |
| I want to be there to help you. | |
| I want to be there to invest in the kid and do the best that I can with the resources that I have, give you time off, give you support, give you backup. | |
| But really, what I'm most committed to is that you have the very best parenting experience that you can. | |
| And the scientific facts, as best as they can be ascertained in this uncertain area, appear to be very, very clear, unequivocal. | |
| Which is that you have to make a commitment to not hit your children, to not spank your children, to not raise your hand against your children, to not raise your voice against your children, to not parent your children with aggression. | |
| Because if you do, and given our history, like, I mean, I can understand why you would gravitate towards this. | |
| I'm sorry? Sorry, if you're not talking at the moment, if you could mute. | |
| Please? So... | |
| I really want you to have great experience as a parent. | |
| If you use aggression in the raising of your children, here's what's going to happen. | |
| You are going to reduce their IQ points some considerable amount, which is going to make them harder to reason with. | |
| You're not going to teach them reasoning skills. | |
| You're not going to teach them self-assertion skills. | |
| You're not going to teach them negotiation skills. | |
| And if you as a parent do not have negotiation skills with your children, and if your children do not have negotiation skills with you, How are you going to resolve disputes? | |
| Well, you're going to use your size, you're going to use your strength, you're going to use your power, you're going to use your authority, and you're going to use your legal standing, which really only teaches children that makes right, that people in authority, people who are bigger, people who are... | |
| And that may get you some short-term results, but the science is very clear. | |
| The research is very clear that you are sowing the seeds of a continual escalation of aggression that will exhaust you and truly harm your children. | |
| They may submit to your science and your power, but they will harbor resentment and they will find ways around your authority if it is unjustly imposed upon them. | |
| And you will forever be in a cat and mouse cage game with your children. | |
| They will not be honest with you. | |
| They will not respect you. | |
| They will not come to you with their problems. | |
| They may fear you. | |
| They will resent you. | |
| They may loathe you. | |
| But that is going to be the result of forcing your children to obey you based upon size, strength, power, and authority. | |
| And furthermore, what I'm really concerned about is if you've spent 11 or 12 years raising your children with this constant exhausting cage match going on, that they're going to get into their teenage years and lo and behold, they're going to get bigger and stronger and faster than you. they're going to get bigger and stronger and faster than And remember, Mike makes right and they're strong. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Younger, healthier, leaner, meaner. | |
| And I really, really want to protect your enjoyment of their teenage years. | |
| But that means that you have to reject of aggression in the raising of your children. | |
| That is the only way that you can build the best possible scenario and have the most enjoyable possible experience as a parent. | |
| And I know this guy on the internet. | |
| An expert in almost nothing. | |
| Actually, an expert in nothing is almost the definition of philosophy. | |
| You know what is not true. You know what is not right. | |
| You know what does not exist. | |
| But, you know, he's doing it and his kid's growing up great. | |
| His kid always asks her parents if she can do stuff, if it's okay, if it's all right. | |
| Because they consult with her, so she consults with them. | |
| Everything you do is a mirror to Here are the facts. | |
| Here are the statistics. This is my greatest gift to you. | |
| To have the most enjoyable, fun, magical, enlightening, delightful, beautiful, wonderful, happy time as a parent. | |
| It is your best and greatest chance to truly relish and enjoy parenthood as the most amazing, powerful, awesome responsibility of joy that there is in the world. | |
| And it's different from what we learned. | |
| It's different from what we grew up with. | |
| But it has to be this way. | |
| It has to be this way. Otherwise, your parenting will feel cursed. | |
| And you will be in a battle forever that may take years off your life that will exhaust and debilitate you and will have you shaking your head wondering why you ever became a parent at all, which will not happen if you parent peacefully. | |
| Does that help? Absolutely. | |
| Thank you. I'm hoping to help my sister guide my niece down a path to better life choices and I believe that it absolutely, absolutely starts with... | |
| Peaceful parenting. I knew nothing about that until about four or five months ago. | |
| I really appreciate you for putting it out there. | |
| Thank you again for taking my call. | |
| I enjoy the show. | |
| You're very welcome. | |
| You know, also, you can, you know, get some audio books, parental effectiveness training. | |
| I've got, of course, the podcast on the podcast page at freedomainradio.com. | |
| You can burn them on CDs. | |
| If she drives a car, she can pop them in. | |
| There's lots of different things that she can do, but the sooner the better, you know. | |
| Take care. | |
| And, of course, the majority of kids do get hit before being one-year-old. | |
| So thank you so much for your concern and care. | |
| This is the most important thing in the world, and I really applaud you for doing it. | |
| Thanks, Dan. | |
| Take care. | |
| All right. | |
| Take care, man. | |
| All right. | |
| Next, we'll have Hunter. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Alright, thank you for your patience, my friend. | |
| I'm all ears. Well, I have some ears. | |
| I have two. Hey there, Steph. | |
| Can you hear me alright? I sure can. | |
| Very good. So, how do you prefer your name pronounced? | |
| Stephan. Stephan, okay. | |
| So, good, Stephan. | |
| First of all, I'd like you to... | |
| I have a few questions for you, if you don't mind. | |
| We may not get to all of them because I think we have people in the queue, but bring up your most important first. | |
| Definitely. I'd like you to consider these questions to be somewhat of an intellectual playground, if you will, for radical self-expression. | |
| Feel free to answer them or you can further clarify the intentional specificity of each question. | |
| I just so want to mention Intentional Specificity, the worst name for a Chinese punk band that I've ever heard. | |
| But anyway, please go on. Okay, so I wanted your general opinion on just what do you think of Shakespeare? | |
| What do I think of Shakespeare? | |
| That's a great question. It's a great question. | |
| I have some knowledge of Shakespeare. | |
| I haven't read all of his plays. I was the lead in Macbeth in college and did a bunch of Shakespeare, of course, in theater school. | |
| Shakespeare is a natural-born genius of language and is truly a testament to the astounding power of the human soul. | |
| And the human mind. | |
| So from that standpoint, his plays are funny, they're tragic, they're moving, they're powerful, and he really lies at the center of what Harold Bloom calls the Western canon. | |
| And it's really hard to understand much about Anglo-Saxon or Western culture without understanding the degree to which Shakespeare is at the center of it. | |
| So you almost can't lose by listening to Shakespeare by... | |
| By reading Shakespeare and so on. | |
| He does the full range. | |
| He goes from intense comedy to intense tragedy, pathos. | |
| He's one of the few playwrights who can regularly make me burst into tears. | |
| A very, very powerful writer, limited by his time, naturally. | |
| He doesn't have really much about parenting. | |
| He has very few children in his place. | |
| The only person who has fewer, I think, is... | |
| I really had to wait until Charles Dickens to have childhood explicated in any significant way in English literature, and so that was a huge step forward. | |
| Shakespeare was a state-sucking, soulless toady as far as that went. | |
| It's something that I had trouble with when playing Macbeth. | |
| Macbeth comes off the battlefield at the beginning of the play, having cut guys in half from the top of their head to the bottom of their balls with his sword, you know, mown them down like a combine harvester, and that's all great. | |
| No problem with that. | |
| But, you know, stick a shiv into the ribs of some old guy, and then he can't sleep, and all of the curses of hell, Hades, and the three witches are upon him. | |
| And so that is, you know, what he was doing, really, what Shakespeare was doing, and he was, of course, concerned about censorship under the monarchy at the time. | |
| And so he had to, and of course, the play was written, I think it was James, who was the king, I can't remember which number at the time, who had a significant interest in the occult and so on. | |
| So Macbeth was partly written for him. | |
| But Macbeth, of course, is a massive piece of tax farm propaganda, which is if you kill people that the ruler points at, you're a hero and all good things in the world will happen to you. | |
| However, if you stick a shiv in the sign of a ruler, then you are cursed beyond words and will go to hell and that hell will start tomorrow when you're unable to sleep. | |
| So, you know, again, the beauty and power, you know, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time. | |
| And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. | |
| Out, out, brief candle, life's but a walking shadow on a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. | |
| It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing. | |
| It's an incredible, incredible speech of nihilism. | |
| And it only comes because he killed the king. | |
| You know, he can go neck deep in blood on the battlefield, and he's happy and sleeps like a baby, but he gets some old sclerotic blood on his hands, and then it's just doom and curse for him. | |
| And you can see this happening quite a bit, and I've talked about this some times before. | |
| Hamlet, of course, is a truly astounding play on just about every level. | |
| And one of the things, of course, that occurs with Hamlet is the same kind of thing. | |
| Hamlet can kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or order their death and there's no problem. | |
| Spoiler, spoiler. There's no problem with any of that. | |
| But killing the king who killed his father, that's a huge problem. | |
| It's no good. So it really is. | |
| Keep the blades pointed at the throats of the poor people and the foreigners and the soldiers and the innocents and no problem. | |
| But point it towards the rulers and all hell breaks loose, literally. | |
| Thank you so much, Steph. | |
| I have a burning question right now. | |
| Oh, sorry. That's usually better for a doctor's show. | |
| Oh, sorry. I'll show up in another three weeks. | |
| Okay, so I'm joking. | |
| Anyway, after listening to you for about four months now, very intensively, I mean, I... I spend my free time pouring over podcasts and I thank you so much for what you do. | |
| You've kind of helped to bring up this burning desire that has been somewhat dormant, and that's to do something when it comes to, I don't know if you want to say the word politics. | |
| Probably not, because politics just sounds like bullshit to me. | |
| I mean, the word itself. | |
| Poly, right? So just think of the word. | |
| Poly is many, and ticks is a blood-sucking parasite. | |
| And so politics is the management of many blood-sucking parasites that you can barely see but which drain your essence. | |
| Sorry, etymology is a fun fantasy game. | |
| You know, that is kind of interesting because I just wrote a poem called Poly-Tix. | |
| And it's, you know, could I read you the first very short few, like, 12 lines? | |
| Okay, so it's right in front of me. | |
| All right, but only if they're in iambic pentameter. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. I don't think they are. | |
| Uh, but, is it alright if I continue a little bit? | |
| Go for it. Okay, so, uh, holding happiness for ransom, riding a bike that's a tandem, uh, Except for riding back with laugh, | |
| that's damn fine. Oh, yeah. | |
| I'm trying to express myself, I guess. | |
| Thanks for listening to that. | |
| Back to that desire that I have, I really respect what you do. | |
| And I would like to do something that kind of helps people out also. | |
| And I want to affect as many people as I possibly can in a positive manner. | |
| And I was just curious, from your standpoint, what I could do to just get out and do something to make a difference. | |
| But you have friends, right? | |
| Yeah, so start with them. | |
| You have friends, you have family. | |
| So what you can do is ask them about their childhoods. | |
| So how would that go or what would that do? | |
| Could you illuminate it? | |
| Well, you could say, listen, I've been really interested in, you know, we've got lots of problems in society and I've been really interested in the arguments that some people have. | |
| I wouldn't reference anyone in particular, but arguments that some people have that say a lot of problems in society are caused by the mistreatment of children. | |
| I'm not sure that I can really know you If I don't know where you came from. | |
| So, you know, if you will indulge me, you know, I'd really like to get to know you better. | |
| And one of the ways to do that is, you know, what was your childhood like? | |
| What did you like? What did you not like? | |
| How were you disciplined? How do you think that affected you as an adult? | |
| Did you like school? What did you like about school? | |
| Did you not like school? Did you want to get out? | |
| Was it like a lead coffin sinking in mud that you had to claw your way out of or was it someplace you liked? | |
| Why do you think you liked it or didn't like it? | |
| How do you think your childhood affects how you relate as an adult? | |
| Did your parents stay together? Was the divorce hard? | |
| If they didn't, if they stayed together, were they happy? | |
| How did they resolve disputes? | |
| Did you really understand how they resolved disputes? | |
| Did they always do it out of ear shut? | |
| This is all just shit off the top of my head, but if you want to really get to know someone, a huge portion of who we are comes from where we came from. | |
| It's like saying, I have a friend who's Greek and I have a friend who's Macedonian. | |
| And to imagine that their culture, their background had no effect on them is like to say that a Jew and an atheist and a Catholic are exactly the same. | |
| Well, no, because their culture, their history, their upbringing, even if they've rejected some of those things, it's still shaped to a large degree who they are. | |
| So I think that, you know, again, if somebody asked me what questions I would ask the American candidates if I were the moderator, I would say, hey, it's interesting. | |
| Tell me about your childhood. | |
| Tell me about how disputes were resolved. | |
| Tell me what you think might have given you the idea that you can solve hundreds of millions of people's problems. | |
| That's a pretty grandiose thing, right? | |
| What makes you think you can have a moon base? | |
| Mr. Gingrich, I mean, I understand you may want to go to a place where your gut is not pulling you towards the center of the planet in such an outspoken way. | |
| I can sort of understand why you might want to feel lighter and visit a moon base. | |
| But tell me, I mean, tell me what makes you think that, I mean, what an amazing thing to believe that you can run the free world from, you know, a domed house. | |
| I mean, that's... Tell me, how did this come about? | |
| How did you resolve disputes? Newt Gingrich, what effect did your parents' marriage have on your choice of marriage partners, do you think? | |
| Now, if they don't have any clue, then I would say, well, you don't really have any self-knowledge. | |
| And if you don't really have any self-knowledge, you don't really have any insight about who you are, where you came from, how you became who you are now, I don't really think you have the wisdom to run other people's lives. | |
| I mean, it's almost a self-defining thing, right? | |
| I mean, if somebody has self-knowledge, They lose desire for power over others. | |
| And if somebody doesn't have self-knowledge, they should damn well never be given power over others because they'll just be acting out all this strange shit, right? | |
| So anyway, sorry, that was a long answer, but I hope that helps. | |
| Oh, thank you so much. We need to get you in front of Obama so you can ask him some pressing questions. | |
| So there could be a dim explosion and the fabric of space and time can start to reverse themselves. | |
| I'm not sure about that. | |
| Although I maybe would do a karaoke duet with an Al Green song with him. | |
| That's the only thing I could think of as having anything in common. | |
| It might be worse than all the CERN conspiracists and their theories. | |
| That's right. Time went backwards and he went back to Hawaii and I got a full head of hair. | |
| It was amazing! It was miraculous. | |
| Where did I leave my TARDIS key? | |
| That's right. I need my scarf and my Dalek. | |
| And you just – so as soon as I get to know people through their past and kind of like knowledge of them and their self-knowledge or lack of, what could I do after that or where does that head kind of – Well, what that heads – I mean of course what that heads is either they thought of these things in which case you can have a great conversation about it and hopefully if they've developed any wisdom, they can also ask you about yourself. | |
| Intimacy starts with history. | |
| Intimacy starts with history because who we are is so predicated on our history. | |
| And again, even if you've rejected your history and so on, I mean, would I have come up with my parenting approach if I had not been so brutalized as a child? | |
| It seems highly unlikely. | |
| So even my peace, the peace in my peaceful parenting comes from the war of my history. | |
| And so, you know, people can't... | |
| People who don't think about my history cannot understand. | |
| Where did I develop these reasoning skills? | |
| Well, for 15 years straight, you really have to learn to think nimbly if you want to avoid that kind of stuff. | |
| You develop pretty agile tongue skills for language and so on if you have to keep pocketing in your cheek all the drugs you're being force-fed. | |
| Yeah, so people, I mean, anybody who cares to understand me, if they're at all interested in that, I mean, you start with my childhood. | |
| That's where a lot of my stuff comes from. | |
| That's where I saw the destructiveness of mysticism. | |
| That's where I saw the moral emptiness that's coming from religion because on my father's side, there were all my aunts and uncles who I spent lots of time with in the summers in Ireland and so on. | |
| And they all knew how bad he My mom was and none of them did anything about it, though they were Christians and were told to protect children at all costs by their Lord Jesus Christ. | |
| Why am I skeptical of the two major solutions to moral problems called the state and called religion? | |
| I grew up being brutalized in an environment where the state and religion ran morality and no one did a damn thing to help me. | |
| Even after I became an adult and started talking to people about this stuff, People would clam up, never talk to me about it again because of their guilt. | |
| And so one of the reasons that I became very interested in ethics was realizing that the major problem in the world is child abuse and religion and the state are doing absolutely nothing, I believe, to fundamentally solve this problem. | |
| And so I needed another approach. | |
| I mean, I could go on and on. I don't want to bore everyone with sort of my motives and histories, but this is where all of this stuff comes from. | |
| So if you want to get to know people, then... | |
| get to know their histories. | |
| So if they know this stuff, great. | |
| They can start to talk about it. | |
| They'll ask you about it. | |
| You'll get even closer. | |
| If they don't know this stuff, then you start them down the road of not assuming that they are mere machines of the present but recognizing that they, like trees, have roots that go, it would seem, to the very center of Earth and the very bowels of their history. | |
| And so if you give them self-knowledge, then you will give them freedom. | |
| You cannot have free will if you do not have self-knowledge. | |
| That's why I always know. | |
| People who are determinists, in my experience, and the experience now has been quite considerable, lack self-knowledge. | |
| And so they are machines being run by defenses, being run by the unconscious, being run by avoidance, being run by culture, being run by nationalism. | |
| They do not have freedom because they do not have knowledge. | |
| Freedom is something that you earn through self-knowledge. | |
| If you do not have self-knowledge... | |
| You will not have freedom. So if you want to set the world free, give people the keys to the golden kingdom of the self, and that comes through the past. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I would love to ask you your opinion on dreams, although that's too much for today. | |
| I will ask you, maybe shortly, that brings up an interesting point. | |
| What is true spirituality, in your opinion? | |
| Well, I mean, I use the term spirit and soul. | |
| So true spirituality, they're almost antonyms in the way that the words are commonly used. | |
| So I think that spirituality, to me, is to recognize, I sort of view the self, it's sort of kind of like an hourglass, if that makes any sense. | |
| So we've got this amazing conceptual, rational, scientific, philosophical reasoning ability, this intellectualism, these abstractions, which is sort of the bulge at the top. | |
| And we also have this amazing, which we share with the animals, of course, ability to eat broccoli and write a poem. | |
| I wrote a poem a long time ago which said, a pig is a great way to turn a pig into a poem. | |
| And so we have this amazing ability to transform animals. | |
| The raw materials of food and drink and so on into these amazing, crystalline, beautiful, wonderful things called books and buildings and iPods and so on. | |
| And then down at the bottom, we have these very powerful dreams. | |
| Brute, powerful, philosophical, incredibly insightful unconscious that gains strength the more it is repressed. | |
| I mean, it's amazing. I think that spirituality is to recognize that from the very top of our greatest abstractions to the very bottom of the stuff we drop in the toilet bowl every morning, that is the full range of human experience. | |
| We can only go down with our minds so far. | |
| I can't look inwards and examine it unless it's giving me pain or whatever. | |
| There's a certain amount that we can do in terms of introspection, but deep down where the knots of the brain go into the earth of the body, We can only go down so far, and that, to me, recognizing that full dimension and stretch of human experience and capacity is empathy. | |
| I mean, it is. If you are, then it's really hard to harm them. | |
| If a monkey can throw its shit at the Mona Lisa because it doesn't get how beautiful the Mona Lisa is, but once you get how beautiful the Mona Lisa is, you simply can't throw shit at it. | |
| To me, spirituality is recognizing the full depth, grandeur power and possibility of human beings as a whole, which means that cruelty becomes something that you just can't do anymore. | |
| What you're saying also is that self-knowledge un-represses the deepest repressed parts of ourselves, potentially. | |
| Yes. I mean, unfortunately, we live in a world where almost all that is true is forbidden. | |
| You know, we live in an underground railroad where the truth has to be smuggled out from very vicious, coal-eyed, fiery-whipped slave owners. | |
| And there's like an underground railroad, which of course has now become lit to the skies, to the very universe through the Internet. | |
| But there's an underground railroad where we smuggle truth out into the world, which was formerly virtually impossible before the Internet. | |
| And so... | |
| I think that's what's so fantastic about this community is that we will do whatever it takes. | |
| We will rip fingernails off our hands, clawing down the walls of repression and blindness and insularity and defensiveness. | |
| Sometimes that's a caress and sometimes that's a scratch. | |
| But it is, I think... | |
| Where we can get the only possibility for truth. | |
| Almost everything that is true and noble and good and pure and consistent in this world is attacked, and therefore it goes underground within us. | |
| We can only build the future by unlocking that potential in ourselves in the present. | |
| Steph, I'm really interested in this self-knowledge that you speak of, and what is kind of the root of self-knowledge? | |
| Can you dig down to the taproot so I can... | |
| Yeah, I mean, look, self-knowledge is like science in the age of religion. | |
| It's reason and evidence without propaganda. | |
| That's all it is. I mean, there's the pursuit of knowledge and philosophy. | |
| It's reason and evidence, right? | |
| So, you know, I was told my whole life that, you know, your parents are everything and you have to love your parents and you have to deal with your parents and you have to forgive your parents and if you don't have a great relationship with your parents, you can't have a great relationship with everyone. | |
| I was given all of these... Rules which are barely above ancient Egyptian curses if you disturb the mummies too. | |
| But there's a massive amount of propaganda, right? | |
| They left your head wound up like an Arab. | |
| Something like that. | |
| So for me, it's like, okay, let's put all of that aside and let's look at the fact. | |
| Let's approach the parent-child relationship. | |
| As if it were any other relationship. | |
| Now, fortunately, of course, I had a comparison, which was marriage, right? | |
| Which, of course, most of the people I knew were children of divorced parents, and the parents are divorced sometimes just because they were unsatisfied with their marriage, sometimes because there was abuse, and sometimes because they were just bored. | |
| And so I thought, okay, well, hang on a sec. | |
| So if parents, children, that relationship, but somehow it has to be always present and you can't ever leave it, But husbands and wives do choose that relationship, but they get bored. | |
| How does the relationship that people choose, how is that optional to leave? | |
| And in fact, it's a good thing to leave if you're bored or abused or unhappy. | |
| But the parental relationship, which you don't choose, is something that you have to wear around your neck like a millstone if it's horrible for the rest of your life no matter what. | |
| So again, you just approach the universe as if there was no Bible. | |
| So God is the unmoved mover. | |
| God placed the earth at the center of things. | |
| But you say, well, okay, so let's just put the Bible aside. | |
| Let's just put all of that aside and let's look at the universe and see what it shows us. | |
| Well, the evidence shows us that the sun is the center of the solar system, that the stars are suns dozens of light years or hundreds of light years or thousands of light years away, that the world is round, all of this kind of stuff. | |
| And so you... | |
| You simply put the mythology aside and you look at the actual facts. | |
| And that's hard to do. | |
| What's easier to do is to compare like to like. | |
| So you say, okay, well, when I deal with my world, my immediate world, I don't use God. | |
| So if I want to make a hammer, I go to a smithy. | |
| I go to a whatever, the hammer maker. | |
| And I make a hammer and I don't sort of just expect that the Bible is going to produce one or God is going to produce one or whatever. | |
| So if that's how I deal with my immediate reality, which is nothing to do with the Bible, then what if I just dealt with reality as a whole, as if there were no Bibles, since that's how I deal with my life as it is. | |
| And so you can at least do the comparison like to like. | |
| And so when it comes to relationships to history, say, okay, well, if I take away the mythology of family and I simply look at the relationships themselves... | |
| What is good? What is bad? | |
| If I take away the mythology, if I take away the religion of the family, if I take away the mythology called the nation, the state, the law, chaos, anarchy, if I take away all of the emotionally charged propaganda and look at things philosophically, look at things as they are themselves, according to reason and evidence, not according... | |
| To all of the fast food bullshit that was force-fed to me as a child, what do things look like? | |
| Self-knowledge is really around reason and evidence. | |
| What is the evidence? So my last call to the guy, the guy I was talking about, I want my sister to have a great relationship with my dad. | |
| I love my dad. Okay, love is a word. | |
| So what do you love about your dad? | |
| What is the evidence? | |
| What is the evidence? It's not what is the mythology, not what does society approve of. | |
| And I'm not saying this about this last guy. | |
| I'm just talking because I don't know why he loved his dad and I couldn't really sort of figure it out. | |
| But the questions. | |
| I love so-and-so. | |
| Well, tell me what you love about them. | |
| Well, how can... Okay, so if it's talent, well, lots of talented people in the world, so it can't really be that. | |
| It has to be something else, right? | |
| And so it really is just an unsentimental, unpropagandized, you know, rip the bullshit scales from your eyes that everybody clamps down on them. | |
| Like... It's simply looking at things directly. | |
| It's what Noam Chomsky said. | |
| He said, it's really not that difficult to save the world. | |
| I mean, he wouldn't put it that way. | |
| He doesn't like any kind of language. | |
| But he said, it's really not that difficult. | |
| I mean, all you have to do is look at the facts and tell the truth. | |
| All you have to do is look at the facts and tell the truth. | |
| And that's really all self-knowledge. | |
| Yeah. Wow. | |
| Steph, this was definitely worth it. | |
| There was a pause there. | |
| All right. I could have been eating a cheeseburger. | |
| I could have been masturbating. I could have been doing any number of things, but I will count this one in the win column. | |
| No, I greatly appreciate it, Steph. | |
| I'm assuming you weren't eating a cheeseburger, let's say, while we were talking. | |
| Anyway, sorry, go on. Hey, by chance, I greatly appreciate it. | |
| What is your favorite offer? | |
| I'm sorry to interrupt. | |
| We have a bunch of callers today, so I'd like to move on. | |
| I could get a one-word answer. | |
| Actually, no. Next time. | |
| Yeah, next time. Let me think about that. | |
| Sorry. Thanks, James. | |
| Go ahead. Albert, I'm sorry if you don't have enough time today, but go on. | |
| Hi, everybody. | |
| I hope everybody's doing well. Just two things. | |
| One, I think... | |
| You can hear me, right? Yeah. | |
| Okay. One, I think... | |
| The easiest way, well maybe not the easiest, but the quickest way besides informing people and self-knowledge to break free from the state is to be self-sufficient and that means, you know, having your own energy sources, growing your own food. | |
| I guess those would be the most important things. | |
| I guess if you're in some rural areas or closer to more Open land and you can actually have clean water sources like wells and rivers and whatnot. | |
| But I think the solution would be to grow your own food, community gardens, rooftop gardens in the city and whatnot, and you've got to break away from that which the state supplies. | |
| Now, I think the state will come after you eventually, you know, things like the FDA and the DEA and zoning department, whatever. | |
| They're going to come after you because they don't like When people can show others that the state is not needed. | |
| Now, that's my current belief, which brings me to a point, to a question or a criticism where some people might say, you know, you can't complain about the government if you have a contract with it, such as a social security number, social insurance number. | |
| I think that... | |
| Having that, whether by choice or because your parents, you know, they didn't know any better and they gave you a number given by the state, that kind of binds you into the system. | |
| I mean, I guess I'm not sure about the law, really, but I don't know how you would be able to be taxed if you didn't have a Social Security number. | |
| I mean, there's things like the so-called Freeman movement or, you know, reclaiming your birth, the denizens where you're not a citizen because you don't have this so-called... | |
| Well, look, sorry, sorry. | |
| I just sort of get where you're coming from. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And, I mean, look, I obviously have no problem with people who want to do that. | |
| Right. | |
| It just seems to me kind of selfish. | |
| Kind of what? | |
| Selfish? | |
| Kind of selfish. | |
| Okay. | |
| And, I mean, please understand, it's perfectly fine. | |
| I mean, I'm just telling you what my thoughts are about it. | |
| Yeah, no, please. | |
| No criticism. | |
| The reason it's selfish is that we've got to help people. | |
| Yeah, go live in the woods. | |
| You know, it's like I've got this great cure for cancer, but I'm going to just take it with me to the woods and guard it like Gollum and its ring, right? | |
| So, I think that we need to stay in society. | |
| I don't think that abandoning society is the way to help it. | |
| It's hard to help with this, right? | |
| If we abandon society in a time of plague, well, the plague is going to catch up with us. | |
| this. | |
| The government's going to get bigger and bigger and stronger and stronger unless we do something to, you know, stay light as the man sings. | |
| So I think that we need to stay in the world I think we need to stay in society. | |
| I think we need to keep talking to people and keep making our case. | |
| I don't see how you can do that if you go off the grid. | |
| I don't think it's necessary as yet. | |
| Of course, if you're going off the grid, then you're not free of the state because you're only off the grid because the state is there. | |
| I don't see how that... If I may... | |
| Yeah, please. I don't see why... | |
| Now, look, I don't see why it necessarily means going off the grid or into the wilderness... | |
| Well, I know, because you're calling on a phone, right? | |
| Yes. Right, so you're on the grid, right? | |
| Right. No, no, okay, this is my point. | |
| I'm not saying that you have to, I mean, totally disconnect, but... | |
| You can take steps, right? | |
| So when I said rooftop garden, it's because I live in the city. | |
| So, I mean, it's just not that easy. | |
| But, one, if you're growing your own food with community gardens or within a community, you know, small scale, Sorry, I just want to make sure the show stays interesting. | |
| Are you saying that this is something that's not a bad thing to do? | |
| I think we agree. | |
| There's nothing wrong with growing in your own food. | |
| If you live in a city, there are possibilities for interruptions of the food supply and so on. | |
| So I'm with you on that. | |
| I just want to make sure that if you either get to a question or something that we disagree with, that would be helpful. | |
| Okay. Well, okay, I guess I disagreed about the... | |
| You kind of assumed that, you know, to break free from the government, it has to be cold turkey. | |
| Maybe I'm wrong in that, but you can take it by steps, which is, you know, there's alternative energy sources, solar panels, and, you know, wind generators, things like that. | |
| But I think one step at a time is useful and easier than, you know, trying to be completely self-sufficient, go into the woods, And also, what you're saying is to those who argue, ah, well, you still have a social security number, you can't complain, that is being selfish, yeah? | |
| No, look, I mean, people like that, why would you want to have anything to do with them? | |
| Just like saying to a slave, well, you still eat your master's food, so you've got no reason to complain about being a slave. | |
| Screw you, man. I can't deal with chuckleheads like that. | |
| They're so propagandized that there's just no point. | |
| We have to pick our battles. | |
| We have to do triage. People like that, it's like you're a doctor coming in. | |
| Some guy comes in who's got a collapsed lung and some other guy comes in who's been beheaded. | |
| It's like, I think I'm going to work on the guy with the collapsed lung because I can save that guy. | |
| The guy who's beheaded, forget it. | |
| It would be an insult to the guy who's only injured to deal with the guy who's completely terminal. | |
| You don't do CPR on a zombie. | |
| You just don't. There are so many chuckleheads out there who are propagandized to the point where their soul has been replaced by a bunch of leaflets from their local politician. | |
| That's all that's there. All they're going to do is they're going to attempt to project all of their fears, anxieties, and deadness onto you by creating doubt and fear and uncertainty and this and that and the other. | |
| It's such a transparently ridiculous argument to call a social insurance number. | |
| I think it's an insult to the word contract. | |
| When I buy a computer at a computer store and they say, do you want an extended warranty with that? | |
| That's a fucking contract. | |
| A piece of paper that I have to sign in order to get healthcare, that is not a contract. | |
| That is a hostage taking contract. | |
| And I'm just not going to blame the victim in those situations. | |
| So I'm certainly not going to organize my life to deal with propagandized fools who are never going to see the light of day, even if you peel their eyelids off. | |
| So I just don't make my decisions based upon those criticisms. | |
| I agree with that, what you said. | |
| But I think you're going to extremes, because it's still possible. | |
| I mean, it's extremely difficult, but I would expect that it's... | |
| It's still possible to survive even by getting rid of your Social Security. | |
| So, I mean, you're still going to need people within... | |
| But that's not freedom, because then you just fear arrest all the time. | |
| You're so limited in what you can do. | |
| So many things you can't do. | |
| What do you mean? I mean, I don't see why you would be fearing. | |
| I mean, they don't have a file to process you through. | |
| I mean, so... There's nothing that connects you to their game almost. | |
| I mean, I think you would still need someone in the game to build up the self-sufficiency, right? | |
| I mean, you'd still need someone with probably a land permit or someone who pays property taxes, right? | |
| Or someone who has a building somewhat. | |
| But I still think that incrementally you can resist and All right. | |
| Well, I'll certainly agree with you that if people want to start becoming more self-sufficient, I think that's a great idea. | |
| I have no problem with it whatsoever. So, do you mind if we move on to the next caller? | |
| Because I think that we're in agreement with each other, and so I'd like to move on, if that's right with you. | |
| Okay. Not exactly. | |
| All right. Anyway, take care. | |
| Take care. Okay, Steph. | |
| What I was wanting to branch with you is the fact that I think we pretty well agree that everything that our government tries to do pretty well gets messed up, which pretty well indicates that governments as a whole are pretty well incompetent. which pretty well indicates that governments as a whole are Now, here's the question. | |
| With governments being so incompetent, why have they managed to keep us, well, pretty well taxed slaved? | |
| Why do you think they're incompetent? | |
| Well, because basically everything they do pretty well gets messed up. | |
| They don't really accomplish anything that they're going after. | |
| Everybody says that we're trying to get equal rights, but what they end up doing is just granting advantage to a different group of people. | |
| Nobody wants to be equal. | |
| You say that everything they try to do gets messed up? | |
| Pretty much. | |
| I'm not sure what I mean by that. | |
| Well, okay, let's just take the example of balancing a budget. | |
| I have never seen a government that's been able to balance one yet. | |
| Why do you think they're interested in balancing their budget? | |
| Well, at least that's what they claim anyway. | |
| Yeah, okay. | |
| But I mean, we're smart enough to look beyond the obvious, right? | |
| Yeah. Well, a balanced budget would end up getting the people that are sitting in power re-elected, so they would be able to re-secure their own jobs. | |
| Sorry, you think a balanced budget would get people elected? | |
| I think it would get the sitting power of people re-elected. | |
| Why do you think that would be the case? | |
| Well, if the people that were sitting in the office currently that they're elected to were actually able to accomplish... | |
| What they claimed they were going to accomplish, that being a balanced budget, as an example, wouldn't that get someone re-elected? | |
| Well, how would you balance a budget? | |
| How would I balance a budget? | |
| Right. So let's say you're in charge of the government, what would you do to balance a budget? | |
| I actually don't believe that it is unbalanced. | |
| In reality. We're just being fed a whole line of garbage from media that is owned by the government. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I guess when people say the government is incompetent, my question is always, at what, right? | |
| I think the government is incredibly competent at what it does, which is propagandizing people. | |
| It's securing its power. | |
| It is making people dependent upon the government and crippling people's brains to the point where they think that only government guns can be the solution to any significant problem. | |
| I mean, in terms of coming up with one fear-mongering situation. | |
| Yeah, flu pandemics to... I mean, it's brilliant. | |
| It's a cavalcade of hell. | |
| I'm sorry? That myth about the razor blades and the candy, that myth has been around forever. | |
| Yeah, there's no truth in it at all. | |
| It's all nonsense. Right, so, but this is, I mean, so as far as I'm concerned, they're perfectly brilliant at maintaining power over the population. | |
| They create scares and And then they take over power to solve these problems and then those problems get worse which they use as an excuse to take over more of society and everything they do turns to shit and then they blame freedom for the results of their own violent tendencies. | |
| I mean, it's completely brilliant. | |
| Look, a guy who's abusing his wife terribly who gets his wife to stay with him and nurse him on his deathbed for 40 years Well, the point that I'm trying to get at is I don't think that the government is actually consciously aware of what it's doing. | |
| I know a lot of people from having gone all the way through school with them that decided to get into politics with completely altruistic motives. | |
| But, anything that gets implemented seems to reduce down to the lowest common denominator and any system made by a human being seems to be fouled and they all just end up creating the same problem over and over again. | |
| Well, but that's because they're not interested in solving the problems. | |
| If you gave people in government a switch That tomorrow would make all children raised well, which would result in almost no criminals, in almost no drug abuse, in almost no physical, emotional, sexual or verbal abuse. | |
| Would the government throw that switch and throw themselves out of a job? | |
| Of course not. The government does not work to eliminate itself any more than a company works to eliminate its own market. | |
| A company works to expand its own market. | |
| And the market... | |
| For government, it's evil masquerading as its own cure. | |
| So the government has no desire to eliminate evil because evil is what scares people into running into the embrace of the state. | |
| So I think that they're doing very well. | |
| I don't think that they're incompetent at all. | |
| They're incompetent if you think that they're there to solve the problems of poverty and illiteracy. | |
| They're not there to solve those problems. | |
| The reason that there's public school is twofold. | |
| One is to indoctrinate. | |
| Well, threefold, I guess. One is to indoctrinate. | |
| Second is to create a massive class of dependent educators who will never talk trash about the state because they are dependent upon the state. | |
| And the third is to free up women to go and become tax slaves to the system. | |
| So, I mean, as far as that goes, it's working beautifully. | |
| If you think that the goal is education, then it's working very badly. | |
| But the fact that it continues, even though it's working badly, means that it is working well, just in some other way. | |
| I think it's also true that the parents, in some ways, really want their children to be propagandized because the parents were propagandized. | |
| And if the children aren't propagandized when the parents were, there's going to be a lot of problems in those relationships. | |
| So... That's why a lot of Christians don't send their kids to atheist camp, right? | |
| Because they have a lot less in common, right? | |
| Or atheist camp would make the kids ask uncomfortable questions. | |
| So people who were raised in public schools and propagandized in public schools, they have a draw, not all. | |
| They have a tendency to want their children to go through the same shit they did. | |
| I guess this goes hand-in-hand with the opinion. | |
| One of the best teachers I ever had through the, again, public school system, if you ever asked him a question about politics or how the world is run and that kind of thing, the first thing he said to you is, do you want me to give you the answer the school wants me to say, my real opinion, or what the truth is? | |
| Hopefully the last two would be somewhat hand-in-hand. | |
| What was that? | |
| Hopefully the last two would be somewhat hand-in-hand, but yeah. | |
| Well, they're pretty close. | |
| One of the best teachers I ever had, and unfortunately he's not teaching anymore, but yet again, high school for me was a long time ago. | |
| Right, right. Yeah, so I would just reassess, you know, whether you think the government is good or bad at stuff, right? | |
| I mean, it's like saying that some company that sells chemotherapy is really bad at preventing cancer. | |
| Well, that's not their business model. | |
| Their business model is not to prevent cancer, but to cure it in a ghastly way, or try to. | |
| Right, so you have to understand the business model and I use the word business somewhat insultingly to actual businessmen but the purpose of the government is not to prevent or solve problems but to scare the population into surrendering more and more power and money to the state and in that it's brilliant. | |
| It's perfect. It's a glorious evil beast. | |
| It's like a perfectly spherical death star without even that Brian Adams pimple crater on the side. | |
| It's a perfect machine of black beauty. | |
| Yeah, that's like something George Carlin once said. | |
| The rich are the people that run the country. | |
| The middle class are the ones that pay for the bills and do all the work. | |
| And the poor are kept there by the rich just to scare the shit out of the middle class. | |
| Yeah, I think that's fairly close. | |
| Although I would divide it not into classes, but into... | |
| There are people who use and profit from violence and there are people who use and profit from voluntarism. | |
| Those are the only real two classes in society. | |
| The rich guy who's getting government contracts has much more in common with the able-bodied guy getting welfare. | |
| Well, thanks for taking the call here, Steph, and I guess I'll let you get on to the next person. | |
| Thanks, and I have this irresistible urge to call you old-timer because I view you as somebody who's probably sitting around in a cave in a Yosemite Sam costume, entirely unjustly, I'm sure, but I just wanted to share with you my impulse. | |
| Well, no, I'm actually sitting in a little tiny apartment in St. | |
| Catharines. Oh, yes, I think we've heard from you before. | |
| Welcome back. Oh, yeah, and basically I'm in a little tiny apartment in St. | |
| Catharines because... A bunch of foreign nationals were able to operate a criminal gang in the business that was next door to mine, and they put me out of business. | |
| I'm sorry to hear that. | |
| I lost my shirt. But the great part was that because I'm not an idiot, I managed to get myself completely 100% out of debt within two years of my business vaulting. | |
| So I'm up to being broke. | |
| Oh, excellent. Well, there's an old story from a guy I don't particularly admire. | |
| Donald Trump was walking up to when he was really in the ditch financially. | |
| He was walking up to some building where he was trying to land a deal and he turned to some guy walking with him, pointed at the panhandler and said, you know that guy is $8 million richer than I am? | |
| Because that's how much he was in debt or some ridiculous amount. | |
| Sometimes just getting out of debt is a wealth in and of itself. | |
| Well, it's great to just know that no matter how bad things got, you could just walk away from it. | |
| Nobody can come after you, legally. | |
| Yeah, that's a kind of freedom in that, too. | |
| All right, well, thank you so much. We'll move on to the next squad. | |
| Not a problem. All right, well, Kevin, you're up. | |
| You're up. We need to talk about Kevin. | |
| Sorry, go on. I just saw that movie. | |
| I recommend it. Hello, Kevin. | |
| Oh, he may not be at the phone. | |
| We'll go on to Keith and then Kevin. | |
| Keith. Alright, Steph, it's me again. | |
| Hey, how's it going? Oh, mate. | |
| I think, first of all, for anyone else, because everyone asked about, oh, do you still have issues with Steph and stuff, but we talked about that on Skype, and I think there were different circumstances. | |
| Your advice was helpful. | |
| For the large part, but I also don't think you know enough about me and my history and vice versa. | |
| But for what it was, it was helpful and it motivated me. | |
| And I think I wrote to you all the stuff that I was doing, looking for a job and all this stuff. | |
| Yeah, my goal was just to be the brick wall that might help you turn around. | |
| That was all. Sorry, go ahead. | |
| It was helpful. | |
| It was motivational. | |
| I think I had such a negative effect because that's all the negative shit. | |
| Just sort of saying, no, the voice of reason might be wrong. | |
| Let's keep in this situation. | |
| I don't know. I was pushing forward. | |
| I was doing stuff. I was making goals. | |
| I had a I lost my temper quite badly with a friend of mine. | |
| And another friend was there and she doesn't want to have any contact with me anymore. | |
| It was quite bad. | |
| I was quite aggressive. | |
| I threatened him. | |
| I... And he'd done nothing wrong. | |
| I might add, he did nothing wrong. | |
| I was just merely... | |
| I was merely jealous of his successes. | |
| And I just want to know why I'm doing this. | |
| Because, as I say, things were going really well. | |
| I was experiencing fear and anxiety, but I knew what that was, and I was prepared to deal with that, and I kept myself busy. | |
| I had, you know, goals written down. | |
| I'd written down on the computer, and I'd written all this stuff. | |
| I'd written pages and pages of goals. | |
| I'd cleaned my flat from top to bottom in the space of a couple of days where that would have taken me, you know, weeks or something. | |
| So, this kind of, like, insane jealousy. | |
| And also, not just that, just this... | |
| Alright, sorry. If I get too much information, I won't be able to deal with anything in particular. | |
| So you said you got angry with your friend because of his success. | |
| Yeah, I always give out loads. | |
| Yeah, yeah. Let's just keep it specific. | |
| Yeah, well, maybe... | |
| Yeah, okay. | |
| He'd gone out with this girl, and I was jealous of that. | |
| He's younger than me. | |
| He's better looking than me. | |
| He's stronger than me. | |
| But we've had similar histories. | |
| But I just feel like I'm a bad guy. | |
| I feel like I'm horrible. | |
| Right, so you feel that he's making a greater success of his life, though you had similar histories. | |
| Is that right? Yeah. | |
| And what does that mean to you? | |
| That's what I felt at the time. | |
| Yeah, so what does that mean to you? | |
| Like, so what does that mean? Let's say that that's true. | |
| I don't know, obviously, but let's say that it's true that he's doing better, although you have similar histories. | |
| What does that mean? About you. | |
| Oh, I know what that means. | |
| It means like... I know. Well, I guess it must mean that I'm a bad person or something, you know? | |
| Well, it means that you could be doing better, but you're not, right? | |
| No. No. | |
| Sorry, no way. No, I'm not. | |
| Yeah, you're right. Yeah, no, I'm not. | |
| I could be doing better, but I'm not. | |
| I'm still giving in to rational thoughts and worries about what people think of me and how I look to other people and showing no ounce of self-respect towards myself still. | |
| Right. I got a message. | |
| I... I got a message from my 10-year-old sister recently. | |
| Sorry, sorry. No, no, no. Let's just stay with your friend. | |
| Let's stay with your friend. We're going to do one topic, okay? | |
| Really? Okay, okay. | |
| Yeah, yeah. Just one topic. | |
| Yeah, okay, okay. We'll go deep, not wide. | |
| Okay. So why do you think your friend is doing better? | |
| Is it because he has superior self-knowledge? | |
| Is it because he's gone to more therapy? | |
| Is it because he's become wiser? | |
| Is it because he's confronted his demons? | |
| Why is your friend doing better? | |
| Oh, because he's put the work in. | |
| So, he's put the work in. Oh, yeah, he really helped. | |
| evidence is shown. | |
| He's, well, you can just see it, the way he is with people, you know. | |
| I was jealous because a lot of people liked him and he was getting more female attention, but he puts the effort in. | |
| He's always positive, you know, whereas I'm always kind of like... | |
| Wait, wait, wait, sorry. | |
| What do you mean he puts... | |
| Sorry, sorry to interrupt. | |
| When you say he put the effort in, I thought you meant he'd gone to therapy, he'd worked on himself, he'd done that kind of stuff. | |
| But what do you mean? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well... | |
| exactly that. He's... | |
| Put more work into how he copes with things, you know? | |
| Because that situation he said a couple of years ago, he would have responded back to me, but he didn't. | |
| He walked away in that situation. | |
| So he's grown. | |
| So he's become... | |
| Sorry, so an option, right? | |
| One option that you have, right? | |
| Because there's so much of things, right? | |
| There's an old line from Hamlet. | |
| It says, there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it suck. | |
| So there's a lot of stuff that really depends on how we look at it. | |
| So you could look at this guy and say, you know, what a bastard. | |
| I feel like shit. So I'm going to level up with him by trying to pull him down to my level. | |
| That's one option, right? | |
| Now, another option is you can say, holy shit, it's possible. | |
| It's possible. I could not only end up with what this guy's got, but I could get even more. | |
| It's possible. He got out of a wheelchair and is walking around, so rather than trying to cripple him again, I can be like, holy shit! | |
| You mean we can get out of these wheelchairs and stay out? | |
| That's fantastic! Tell me! | |
| Tell me how you did it! You could be enthusiastic. | |
| You could ask him for advice. | |
| But this is a challenge for you, right? | |
| Because you were not treated well by authority figures, to say the least, when you were younger. | |
| And so if you go to this guy and you say... | |
| Tell me how to get what you've got. | |
| You're teaching him as an authority figure, and that's hard for you, right? | |
| Yeah. It's hard, but I don't think that should be an excuse. | |
| I should not be acting this way. | |
| No, I'm not trying to give you excuses, right? | |
| I'm not trying to give you excuses. | |
| I'm just trying to... If you want to know the why... | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, the why is that he makes you feel bad because he's further ahead and that makes you feel guilty and it makes you feel angry and it also... | |
| Doesn't it make you feel a little panicked? | |
| Like time's running out? | |
| To change? To grow? | |
| Because every time... | |
| You abuse someone, it gets harder to not abuse them next time, right? | |
| And after a while, I believe, habits become almost irrevocable. | |
| And so there's a kind of panic if you're not growing as fast as you need or somebody else is showing you a better way to be that you're not pursuing. | |
| That's kind of like a panic. | |
| We don't have forever, right? | |
| So let's say, I'm not saying you would, but let's say you were an abusive guy until you were 85, right? | |
| And then somebody said, well, you've got cancer, you've got a month to live, right? | |
| Well, what would be the point of changing, almost? | |
| Sometimes it's too late to do anything meaningful with change. | |
| And when that is for everyone is a different time, but I believe there's a tipping point. | |
| You've got a seesaw. | |
| I don't know what you call it. I can't remember what you call it in England. | |
| But the thing where two kids... | |
| They go up and down on this plank, seats on either end, and there's a little pyramid in the middle. | |
| They go up and down. It's like change's habits are like walking up. | |
| It's kind of hard to begin with, but then it tips once you walk over the middle. | |
| I think that there's a tipping point for our habits, whether they're good habits or bad habits, where it becomes harder and harder and then virtually impossible to quit. | |
| You also may be experiencing a kind of A kind of panic about how much time you have left to change. | |
| Yeah. It's not forever, I'm telling you. | |
| When you say panic, yeah, no. | |
| Okay. I mean, it doesn't help as well. | |
| This is an excuse, but I found out my brother's been singing in a band, and I've always wanted to be a singer, but my brother always got praise for his singing. | |
| And then I thought, well, what did I used to get told about myself as a child? | |
| And it was just like, I was angry Keith. | |
| I was Keith that acted out. | |
| Keith that was trouble. That I was trouble. | |
| I always just got noticed for the bad things I did. | |
| It's like it's hard for me to see myself being successful. | |
| And any positive attention I get from people, it feels very uncomfortable. | |
| It's like I'm at home with feeling like Keith the bad guy. | |
| When, like, surely that's just like a small part of me. | |
| Right. But yeah, I definitely relate to the panic stuff, definitely, and the whole time running out thing, because it's how I view myself. | |
| It's like, if I can view myself as someone not doing that stuff, you know, and all I can do is try and research what You know, all this stuff about how people cope with anger, what scientific research has shown about anger and stuff, | |
| you know? Yeah, and look, I mean, when I was trying to deal with my temper, which is certainly not perfect again, when I was trying to deal with my temper, I'd just, you know, take a deep breath, count to ten, walk away, just remind myself, it's a choice, it's a choice, it's a choice. | |
| I have a temper. My temper doesn't have me. | |
| It's a choice, it's a choice, it's a choice. | |
| I can do anything with this situation. | |
| I can do anything with this moment. | |
| Those kinds of things can be helpful. | |
| Look, I'm no expert on this, and anger management courses, I'm sure, are very good, but you do have a choice. | |
| And, you know, the conversation that we had that was troubling for you, I mean, I just... | |
| Sometimes people only turn around when they hit a brick wall, and I tried to be that brick wall for you. | |
| And I'm sorry if you bumped your nose, but at least it got you turned around. | |
| So I'm certainly happy for that. | |
| No, that's... I mean, that's okay. | |
| You know... You only had what I had to give you in terms of knowledge about my situation and stuff. | |
| All right. Listen, do you mind if we've got a couple of other comments before the end of the show? | |
| I'd like to move on if that's all right, but I would definitely look at the feelings that occurred right before you get angry. | |
| I think that's where the possibility for change occurs and really, really work. | |
| I'm sure you can get some anger management courses around that will help you out with that stuff, and I certainly wish you the best with it, and I hope to get to hear you sing someday. | |
| Okay, well, yeah, sure. | |
| I mean, how do you feel about the conversation and stuff? | |
| I'm worried that I kind of alienated some people, you know. | |
| Well, I don't know about others. | |
| I think that you said you did seem to get quite angry after the conversation, but that's okay. | |
| I mean, you know, people, you know, I try to do the good that I can with the info that I have and all of the caveats in the world, so it's not important for people to like me, but it's important, I think, that, you know, people try and get some level of truth, at least as far as I see it, All right. | |
| Well, thanks, Keith. I'll talk to you soon. | |
| All right. Bye. Alright, next we have Kevin. | |
| Hey, how's it going, Steph? | |
| That's right. This show is brought to you by the letter K. So, go on. | |
| Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about maybe some alternate methods of promoting NAP and nonviolence besides moral arguments and violence against me arguments. | |
| I feel that some people, it just doesn't work. | |
| I don't necessarily think that means that they're bad people, that they just have an ego that they're so ingrained with these thoughts and ideas that it's really difficult for them to give up. | |
| I was wondering if more socio-economic arguments would be just as effective or as long-lasting as something like a moral argument. | |
| So saying like these forceful interactions aren't as efficient and it would benefit everybody economically to only have voluntary interactions. | |
| Do you think that would be just as good as forces, you know, bad in general? | |
| I don't think so, no. | |
| And I don't say that lightly and I don't say that off the cuff. | |
| You might want to read a book called The Myth of the Rational Voter, which sounds like really a dull book but it's actually a very good book. | |
| The arguments say for free trade. | |
| So free trade makes everybody richer except for the people who formerly had protectionist trade. | |
| Free trade makes everyone richer. | |
| The economy grows faster. | |
| There are more opportunities. There are more jobs and so on. | |
| This argument has been made for 350 years and very few people believe it. | |
| And this argument has been made for 350 years. | |
| It is held onto as true, as axiomatic really by the vast majority of economists and yet very few people accept it. | |
| And so I figure if something hasn't worked for 350 years, I don't think that 351 is going to make a difference. | |
| Tens of thousands of highly educated experts have made the case for hundreds of years and it's penetrated the thick marble-like skulls of almost no people in the world. | |
| I don't think that one more round, the merry-go-round by me or by you or other people who don't have PhDs in economics, I just don't think it's going to make any difference. | |
| And one of the reasons why I avoided the arguments from effect, as I call them, is because, you know, as a I'm a student of history. | |
| I kind of wanted to look at stuff that had worked and stuff that hadn't worked. | |
| I really got the free market arguments. | |
| When I was doing research for a historical novel that I was writing set in the 18th century, I read a book called England's Treasure by Foreign Traffic, which went over all of the arguments for free trade. | |
| And, you know, in the 19th century, there were the Corn Laws, which were around liberalizing trade in England and so on. | |
| One of the reasons England had an empire was it was one of the first free-trading countries around. | |
| And, you know, after all of that history, free trade in England is pretty terrible. | |
| I mean, the number of people that you would get who would understand the arguments for free trade, you know, one in a hundred maybe, two in a hundred if you're lucky. | |
| So... I just looked at 350 years, tens or hundreds of thousands of experts, thousands of books, the combined current expertise of the greatest specialists in the field is almost unanimous about the virtues of free trade, and you try running as a politician on the platform of free trade and just see what happens to you. | |
| It doesn't work. | |
| But you do think free trade is a good idea, it's just that's not the way to convince somebody to not be violent? | |
| Well, you can't even convince somebody that free trade is a good idea. | |
| I mean, of course, I think that free trade is not just a good idea. | |
| Free trade is the only moral thing that you can have because otherwise you're initiating the use of force which is evil. | |
| So yeah, I mean, free trade is just non-theft. | |
| That's all it is. I mean, I'm not for free trade. | |
| I'm against sticking guns in people's faces. | |
| I'm against violence as a way of dealing with any problem other than immediate self-defense. | |
| So, yeah, but I'm, you know, free trade is, you know, and I mean, there's tons of reasons why it doesn't work and, you know, they're explained in my podcast and in this guy's book and lots of other places. | |
| Tons of reasons why it doesn't work as an argument. | |
| But basically, arguments from effect don't work because the benefits are diffused and, sorry, the costs are diffused and the benefits are concentrated, right? | |
| So, if you want to get rid of the tariff that the U.S. currently has on sugar... | |
| Then it might save everyone in America a couple of bucks, 10, maybe 15 bucks a year, but it would cost the sugar industry millions and millions and millions of dollars a year. | |
| And so they'll spend tons of money lobbying the government to maintain these laws, but nobody's going to spend a lot of money opposing these laws because it's just not worth it. | |
| And there's tons more reasons, but that's sort of the basic reason. | |
| I mean, how the hell is a goddamn government teacher going to Tell you about free trade when they're paid by the violence of the state, when you're forced to be there by the violence of the state, when competition is simply not allowed because taxpayers have to pay for government schools whether they use them or not, where the government controls the regulation and licensing of teachers, where government controls the curriculum. | |
| How can a teacher with a straight face tell you about free trade? | |
| That's why the government likes taking over teachers is that it turns them into tools and lackeys and mouthpieces of the state. | |
| So, you know, people have never heard about it and it's also a bit counterintuitive, right? | |
| There's lots of biases that people have in economics, right? | |
| There's a pro-labor bias which says somehow that getting rid of labor, using labor-saving devices throws people out of work. | |
| I mean, that's retarded, of course, and it doesn't take more than a moment's thought. | |
| I mean, we could put everyone back to full employment if we got rid of all farm machinery and went back to threshing corn by hand. | |
| But everyone would get that that would be going back to the Middle Ages and would make everybody half-starved to death. | |
| So there's like an anti-labor bias or anti-labor-saving device bias. | |
| There's a bias about my team versus their team when it comes to nations or whatever. | |
| that if China has manufacturing jobs, that it's stealing jobs as a whole from America and so on. | |
| That's just – people need education to get over it. | |
| that which seems to make sense in the moment. | |
| You need a little bit of nutritional information to understand why you shouldn't have cheesecake for breakfast. | |
| Cheesecake tastes a hell of a lot better than brown toast and a little bit of butter. | |
| People need education, but education alone just doesn't do it because the problem with free trade is not its economic inefficiency. | |
| Economic inefficiency is no argument at all. | |
| I mean, having children is economically inefficient. | |
| Does that mean that the human race should die out? | |
| I mean, children take a huge amount of time and money. | |
| And so economic efficiency is not what people do. | |
| If somebody has a hobby that doesn't pay them money, that is economically inefficient, right? | |
| If you have a hobby called, I don't know, origami or something, and you just like making little origami things, well, and you don't sell them, that's economically inefficient because you could be using that time to have a second job. | |
| But who cares? | |
| I mean, that doesn't matter. | |
| People don't live their lives according to economic efficiency. | |
| There's much more that goes on in people's motivations than economic efficiency. | |
| So it just doesn't motivate people that much. | |
| Okay, and sort of a related question would be – Some of these advertisements where you see people say, oh, make money off of the coming economic crisis or collapse or something like that. | |
| What do you think about businesses that try to make money, not necessarily deceiving people, but promoting making money after a big change towards a more free society? | |
| Sorry, can you tell me a little bit more? | |
| About what you mean? Is it possible that a company or a business of some sort could make money promoting these ideas? | |
| Your business promotes these ideas and you've got foundations that promote freedom and free trade and nonviolence. | |
| Are these Are these good ideas? | |
| I mean, not necessarily from promoting the ideas perspective, but actually making money, preparing people to assume a more violence-free existence. | |
| I'm sorry. Can you try one more time? | |
| time. | |
| I'm still not getting what the question is. | |
| Would more of these businesses speed up the process? | |
| I guess is what I'm saying. | |
| Well, it's tough. | |
| See, businesses don't usually drive demand in that kind of way. | |
| If more people got anxious about the future of the society that they live in, then these businesses would do better. | |
| I mean, in this book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, the writer talks about this sort of perspective in economics, which is that for 200 years, there's been steady economic growth, but everyone feels that a catastrophe is just around the corner. | |
| And more people in the general population believe that economic catastrophe is around the corner than people do in academia, in sort of professional economists. | |
| And, you know, you could make the argument, well, these guys have tenure and pensions, and they're not particularly worried about stuff. | |
| If they were entrepreneurs, it might be different. | |
| There seems to be some evidence against that, but there is this belief among economists that people tend to be more pessimistic than necessary. | |
| And, you know, some people who've been talking about economic collapse have been talking about it since the 1970s, and something that David Friedman said at Libertopia, he said, He said, I've been listening to libertarian economists talk about the coming collapse of the US dollar and reversion to Raquel Welch talking primitivism for 40 years and yet we're still muddling along now and that's of course a good point. | |
| That having been said, There are times where the shit genuinely hits the fan. | |
| The collapse of Rome genuinely took the population of Rome from like a million people down to 17,000 people in a pretty short period of time. | |
| The collapse of the Reich in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s ushered in Hitler in the Second World War. | |
| The dollar has lost 98% of its purchasing power in less than 100 years. | |
| So, if you look at what happened in Argentina or other places where fiat currencies have collapsed, which is basically all fiat currencies, except for the British pound, which has been running for a couple of hundred years, but still has lost almost all of its value from when it started, there is not slow and steady economic growth and progress. | |
| There are times where unbelievably multidimensional human catastrophes emerge out of financial crises. | |
| So I think it certainly is easy to get sucked into the, you know, let's get lots of tinned goods and live in the woods stuff. | |
| But at the same time, I think that poo-pooing all of that stuff and saying, well, you know, human race has been muddling along. | |
| There was an old, a pretty good show that I used to watch when I was a kid called WKRP in Cincinnati. | |
| Yeah. Yeah, I thought it was a damn fine show. | |
| Very funny. And in one of them, and I really remember watching this when I was... | |
| I don't know, maybe 12 or 13 years old. | |
| The guy who became the Maytag guy, Arthur Carlson, whose name was, his wife was having a baby and they were like old. | |
| Well, I thought they were old when I was 12 or 13. | |
| I might not think they're quite so old now. | |
| But he was really ambivalent about having a kid. | |
| And he said, you know, these are troubled times, my dear. | |
| And she said, people have been saying that. | |
| For 5,000 years. | |
| And I remember when I was a kid, that really struck me. | |
| I sat there. I turned the TV off. | |
| I sat there in the dark. | |
| It was growing dark. It was getting nighttime. | |
| I sat there in the dark watching all the lights go on in the apartment building across the way. | |
| I sat there in the dark and I thought, damn, that's really something to think about. | |
| These are troubled times, my dear. | |
| People have been saying that for 5,000 years. | |
| And it's like, that's true. | |
| People do always say, these are troubled times. | |
| But you know what? Sometimes they're right. | |
| And that was my big profound insight to come out of that. | |
| That you can't just say, ah, anybody who says they're troubled times is nonsense, right? | |
| People in the 1930s in Europe who said these are troubled times, well, they were pretty damn right. | |
| And so, yeah, I don't know. | |
| I'm sorry, that was a bit of a rambling answer. | |
| It may not even have been an answer, but that's the best I can say about the subject. | |
| Well, sounds good. All right. | |
| Well, thanks so much. Don't panic too much and for God's sake, get some tin food. | |
| No, I'm kidding. All right. | |
| Talk to you later. All right. Thanks, man. | |
| Do we have any questions we've been missing from the chat room? | |
| I've been pinging people to say, someone wants you to talk about the documentary. | |
| Documentary. Well, I met with the project manager on Friday. | |
| I bought my lovely daughter because the project manager does have one of the most adorable kittens this side of a tear-jerking secretary-style poster slash calendar. | |
| And so, yeah, we've gone over. | |
| We've got a whole bunch of volunteers. | |
| She's going to be organizing it. | |
| Her name is Julia. And she's going to be organizing stuff. | |
| And, you know, we've got some enormously significant musical talent, which is great. | |
| And so we've got some voice people, some editing people. | |
| I've got animators, a production company, who's interested in donating some time. | |
| And the script is coming along. | |
| I'm actually starting to get a little bit more comfortable with the script. | |
| I've been working on it for about a month now, and I really have to get it. | |
| It's hard, hard, hard writing. | |
| It's easy to blurb down some ideas. | |
| It's really hard to get them concentrated and in sequence and to keep it short enough. | |
| To get people's interests. | |
| But my goal with the documentary is to have people come out of the theater into a different world that they went into. | |
| And that is a challenge. | |
| To switch off the matrix for people is really a big goal. | |
| But as anybody who knows who's listened to the show, I am not immune to grandiose goals and visions. | |
| So, yeah, that is the goal. | |
| I was just working... I was working for two hours this morning on the first five sentences. | |
| So it really is nitpicky city. | |
| That's where I'm living on. | |
| So yeah, if you want to help, it's not going to be cheap to produce. | |
| It's not going to be easy to get done. | |
| So if you have time and money and energy to throw at the cause, it's hugely appreciated. | |
| But I can certainly tell you that we're going to do the very best job that we can. | |
| And... You know, without the same ending as Jurassic Park, we spared no expense! | |
| Spared no expense! That's the, you know, hopefully without too many lawyers being eaten by Tyrannosaurus rexes. | |
| Well, okay, maybe a few. | |
| Get that on film, you've got a great, quite a documentary and probably some ragged cheers going out from the audience. | |
| What is the documentary about? | |
| Well, I think that you'll have to see it to see, I guess. | |
| Production timescale, I'm hoping six months. | |
| I'm hoping six months later to get it out in the summer. | |
| Oh, somebody's got a question for me. | |
| A question on bullying interference. | |
| Let me see if I can get him on the call. | |
| Can I suggest alternatives for people seeking treatment for addictions? | |
| Well, I mean, I... I can't say anything of particular import other than, of course, you may have somebody who has addictions. | |
| I think it's probably worth having them check out the Bomb and the Brain material at fdrurl.com forward slash b-i-b. | |
| Simply because a lot of addictions seem to come out of trauma suffered as children and therefore to deal with that trauma, I think, would be to undercut the driving for the addiction. | |
| So I think that's useful. | |
| Alright, so this one person's asking if he sees two kids bullying each other in public, although I think it's usually just one bullying the other. | |
| I don't think it goes back and forth too much. | |
| What authority do I have to break it up? | |
| And I assume that these are like neighborhood kids or strangers? | |
| Well, I mean, I think you have authority to talk to the kids, and I think that probably is a useful thing to do. | |
| I mean, you certainly don't have authority to wade in and start prying them apart and throwing them around and stuff like that. | |
| I certainly wouldn't handle it that way, but you can go in and talk to them. | |
| And I think that could be a useful and productive thing to do. | |
| Somebody's asked, have I got a visual identity for the documentary, like graphic designer, proofer? | |
| Well, the documentary style is an interesting question. | |
| We're really trying to see how much philosophy we can get across in pure high-def 3D porn. | |
| So, obviously, my inbox is full of photos of people auditioning for various parts of the film. | |
| And so, yeah, if that's your graphics approach, then that's important. | |
| I do want the audience backing up and going, whoa. | |
| So... No, we do have some graphics designers, but we'll need a lot of them because I want it to be visually catchy as much as possible. | |
| We do want to keep a similar style, right? | |
| And we're still going to work out on what that is. | |
| Obviously, we don't want anything hugely expensive, but we don't want just stick figures, so that's the idea. | |
| Yeah, the third part is called the Butter Stick and the Llama. | |
| It's really, really exciting. | |
| I'm already 3D modeling a giant bald head for a sniff. | |
| Thank you. Yes, I have done a How to Find a Therapist. | |
| Somebody can put the number in and sort of ask us every week or two. | |
| How would you handle a personal encounter with state minions such as police and military knocking on your door for no apparent reason? | |
| I doubt a spiel about libertarianism and anti-state ideas would get you very far. | |
| Is there libertarian-based legal advice available? | |
| Yes! I can actually tell you that there is. | |
| And let me get it for you. | |
| I say this because when I was at Libertopia, well, we saw that. | |
| We saw that. So let me just get you some. | |
| Libertopia.org is, I think, where last year's stuff, or maybe it's coming up for this year's stuff, is going on. | |
| So, let's see here. | |
| Yeah, so if you go to Libertopia.org and click on Exhibitors, there's Liberty Legal, Conway Law Group at ConwayLawGroup.com. | |
| This guy talked, actually, and he was a – I thought he was a great guy. | |
| And let me just get his – AttorneyForFreedom.com. | |
| It's the website, and you should check him out. | |
| He gave a great speech. His name is Mark J. Victor, and he knows his stuff, and you can see his speech at Libertopia. | |
| So those would be my suggestions. | |
| I mean, yeah, sorry, FDR 1927, How to Find a Great Therapist, is my personal take on that. | |
| And, oh yeah, I've got a... | |
| I've got a speaking gig coming up. | |
| All right. | |
| Am I on? | |
| Yeah. Sorry, just before you start, can you hold on for just a sec? | |
| So July 30th, 20... | |
| Wait. Yeah, capitalism and morality. | |
| I'm going to be speaking... | |
| 30th of July in Vancouver and so far what I've got some people who are sort of lined up Doug Casey, Rick Rule, Butler Schaefer and so on and I don't know if these are confirmed or not but these are the people who are in there and I am going to be speaking there I don't think there's a website for it quite yet but I hope that you can make it if you're out there on the west coast I'm going to be emceeing and And I'm going to be doing a seriously lengthy set of speeches. | |
| So I hope that you'll be able to do it. | |
| This is going to be audience participation UPB, right? | |
| So I'm going to get audience members up and we're going to just act the crap out of UPB scenarios so that people can really get the power of the theory and the utility of the theory. | |
| So I hope that you will do that, you will get involved in that. | |
| I'm also working at bringing a Freedom Festival north to Toronto, perhaps in August. | |
| So that will be around as well. | |
| And I've got one other one coming up, which I would just get. | |
| Yeah, so you might want to check out Liberty Fest West. | |
| Let me just get you that. LibertyFestWest.com Sorry to go all... | |
| Infomercial on your heinies, but so February 11th, 5.30pm to midnight, I'm going to be emceeing that as well and speaking as well, so get ready to party like it's 1776. | |
| And I hope that you'll be able to make it down and check that out. | |
| I think that there are tickets available right now. | |
| You might want to buy them ahead of time. | |
| And it's like $10, $10! | |
| Come on, you can't beat that. | |
| You can email your contact info to Caleb Leverett at crankmycat at gmail.com. | |
| So there's VIP tickets. | |
| Again, I think there's going to be a sort of breakfast the next day as well, something like that. | |
| So I hope you'll come to Liberty Fest West. | |
| Libertopia, of course, is going to go back on. | |
| And after Libertopia, which is again going to be in California, straight after Libertopia is going to be the second annual Liberty Cruise, which is going to be October. | |
| And I hope that you will be able to make it to that. | |
| I've got to tell you, that Liberty Cruise is amazing. | |
| Absolutely something else and a half. | |
| I mean, that was one of the best times I've ever had outside of my own house. | |
| So, I think that would be... | |
| If you can make that, I hugely, hugely recognize it. | |
| Libertopia, let's see here. | |
| So, I think it's going to be the 11th to the 14th of October, and then right after that, we are going to be... | |
| Yeah, Libertopia 2012 is October 11th, the 14th, 2012, of course. | |
| So Monday the 15th, we're probably going to be leaving to go to Catalina Island on a cruise. | |
| Please, please, please come. It is so much fun. | |
| I mean, there's a whack load of kids around, great dancing, karaoke. | |
| You get to hear me yowl like a cat in truly terrifying heat, a variety of... | |
| What did I do? I did Hey Jude and I did Daydream Believer which was fun for me and at least half the audience stayed. | |
| Those, of course, who were Velcroed down. | |
| I hope that you will be able to come to that Liberty Cruise. | |
| It's hugely, hugely recommended. | |
| It is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity but something that you should really work at coming to. | |
| It really was a blast and we just That's so much fun. | |
| And maybe I can post a couple of pictures as well, but you should check that out. | |
| All right. Look at that. | |
| We are running out of time. | |
| Let's see here. Steph, I have a fear of taxes. | |
| Oh, we do have a caller on the line. I'm sorry. We do have a caller on the line. | |
| All right. Oh, am I on? | |
| Yes, you are. All right. | |
| Thank you for doing your show. | |
| I've been listening to you for... | |
| Well, I don't know. Time passes. | |
| Your Against Me video eventually converted me from a minarchist to a full-blown anarchist because I started using that argument with people. | |
| You know, I've got to think that even more powerful than the Against Me arguments is to say that if you become an anarchist, you will be fully blown. | |
| I think that would pretty much be the tipping point for the movement as a whole. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, one of the things about the against me argument is that, I mean, I started using it in my discussions, even though I was still, you know, a monarchist, you know, Ron Paul libertarian kind of thing. | |
| But the more kind of you accept the idea that nonviolence is, well, or I should say violence is inherently illegitimate. | |
| It is destructive. | |
| It is... You know, if you see someone else has a piece of candy and then you go beat them over the head to get that piece of candy, well, you're not committing an ethical act. | |
| And the more kind of ideas like that really hit people in the core, and I look at kind of my own sort of conversion, if you will call it, the more certain powerful ideas hit people at the very core, It's not so much a matter of winning the arguments about, | |
| oh, this one regulation is bad, or this tax is bad, or a whole bunch of these other ideologies and beliefs that are really kind of on the peripheral, or what I would call the distracting political action side of politics. | |
| You don't have to win all of those battles. | |
| In fact, I would say most of those battles are a waste of time. | |
| But more importantly, what I have discovered, and since I have converted a few people myself, is that the only real reason to address many of these kind of peripheral ideas and peripheral battles is just because people are scared. | |
| But at the very core, what really converts people is, you know, it's the equivalent of winning 100 of these battles if you convert someone at the very core, Is the ideas that, you know, the disgusting nature of violence and the prevalence of violence in politics. | |
| And as far as, like, being effective in converting people to libertarian or libertarian-type ideas, I think it's very important to focus on those kinds of things. | |
| Yeah, I mean, certainly I would agree with you there. | |
| It is... | |
| I think one of the reasons that people are drawn to these arguments from effect is that you can, frankly, dick around for a long time with that shit. | |
| You can have these back-and-forth arguments. | |
| You can go and get more data. | |
| You can provide counter-evidence. | |
| You can screw around a lot of time for a long time with that kind of stuff, and it's really tempting. | |
| It's dabbling around, and it avoids the confrontation of The baseline confrontation of the against me argument is something that people want to avoid. | |
| I can understand that. I really can. | |
| I sympathize with that. | |
| In which case, maybe you don't have the stomach for it and you've got to get off the field. | |
| I really get why it's a lot less stressful, a lot less make or break in people's relationships to sort of dick around with statistics and the arguments from a fact. | |
| But it doesn't really change anything. | |
| Because I think people really are run by morality, fundamentally, and that's the most important thing that people have going on in their hearts and in their minds. | |
| I agree with you. If you really do get someone to understand and accept the moral arguments, then that's something that can spread a lot more quickly than the argument from effects. | |
| One of the things I have noticed is the more experienced a person I believe I remember there's a quote by Lou where he said, there really is only one argument for anarchism. | |
| And he said, it is inherently illegitimate to use violence against an innocent person. | |
| He's like, you don't need any other arguments. | |
| That's the only one you need. | |
| I think anyone who, you know, this might be more directed at, you know, people listening in to the show right now, but, you know, if you actually want to be effective in converting people, these kinds of things are worth taking into consideration. | |
| Are you spending three hours debating a communist over whether a 1 or 2% tax increase is going to help or hurt people? | |
| Or are you actually, you know, hitting these ideas at the core? | |
| And I mean, you can't convert, you know, everyone or you can't convert everyone in an instant. | |
| But if you can indeed address the very core of the issue and avoid these distractions, which I almost exclusively avoid the distractions when I'm engaging in these kinds of discussions. | |
| But if you can do that, you'll be a lot more efficient, a lot more effective. | |
| And if we do want to see liberty in our lifetime, Or even in a children's lifetime, we'll have to treat this more as if it is kind of like a business. | |
| You want to be efficient. | |
| You want to be effective. You don't want to be like, you know, throwing resources out the door and then you go bankrupt because you spend them all on the wrong thing like political action. | |
| But, and then just one other related thing, which you'll probably be happy to hear, but I've actually been concerned I've been encouraging people to diversify their donations. | |
| Not, like, just merely send every dollar to Ron Paul, but to send it to other people like yourself, Will Sucks Podcast, Adam vs. | |
| The Man. There are other people out there who are far more talented than myself, who... | |
| My dollars would be a lot more effective supporting somebody like yourself, you know? | |
| You're a great speaker, you have a background in... | |
| Um, theater, um, my dollars are more effective in their hands, spreading ideas, liberty, than spending three hours of my time, um, you know, making a lesser effect. | |
| So that is something I want people to consider if they want to be effective in spreading liberty. | |
| Right. Well, I appreciate that. | |
| And, um, I think that people should not put all their eggs necessarily in one basket unless they really feel that there's no other basket. | |
| I'm convinced that political action is not the way to go. | |
| Even if people aren't convinced, throw a few bones to the other people working in the liberty movement because Ron Paul seems to be doing less well now and The unfortunate thing, of course, in politics is momentum is everything. | |
| Momentum is everything because if people think you're going to win, they'll give you money. | |
| If they don't think you're going to win, you're toast because the reason that people want you to win is so that most people, most donators, particularly the corporate ones, the reason they give you money is because they want political favors afterwards. | |
| Why is Newt Gingrich talking about a moon base? | |
| Because the war on terror is becoming politically unsustainable. | |
| People aren't buying a war with Iran. | |
| They're not buying a war. | |
| They're not buying the invasion of Libya or the funding of Libyan troops and so on. | |
| They're not buying that. | |
| So what else have you got to give to the military-industrial complex? | |
| I know, a moon base, just in case the president takes up residence on the moon. | |
| So people don't understand this stuff. | |
| They go, why the hell is he talking about a moon base? | |
| Well, he's talking about a moon base so that he'll get the major engineering companies that are currently sucking off the black tit of... | |
| Sorry, that's an insult to black tits. | |
| You know, the military industrial complex. | |
| And he says, there's going to be hundreds of billions of dollars coming your way for a moon base. | |
| Not to mention, you know, not to get too much into the news, but... | |
| Obama's pet projects with the energy companies are just like one catastrophic failure after another, so that one's becoming increasingly less popular, especially with things like, I think there is some looking into overturning ethanol subsidies, which is, well, that would be, of course, a good thing because it, you know, reduces the supply of food and, you know, makes food more expensive in other countries where people don't have quite as much. | |
| But, yeah. Anyway, I just wanted to make those few quick points, and I'll let you get back to other callers or whatever you're going to do with the rest of the show. | |
| All right. Well, thanks. I appreciate that. | |
| And thank you. I think, yeah. | |
| I just think that Moonbase stuff, every now and then there's just draw-dropping funny stuff that goes on in politics. | |
| And, you know, without wanting to sound overly etymologically punny, the Moonbase is truly loony. | |
| Anyway. So, unless we have any other yearning burnings, I guess we can close down the show for the week. | |
| Thank you, everybody, everybody, everybody, as always, so much for allowing me to do that voodoo that I hopefully do so well. | |
| And thank you so much for the callers coming in. | |
| Oh, fear of tax is so deep it's preventing me from organizing my affairs to make more than the legal taxable thresholds. | |
| I wonder that if I make a mistake declaring my various ins and outs, I will be punished. | |
| Can you please make the tax man go away? | |
| I cannot make the tax man go away, but it's probably worth investing in an account. | |
| I mean, there's no way to understand the tax laws. | |
| There's no way to understand. | |
| Nobody understands all the tax laws. | |
| There's just way too many of them. So, I mean, if you look at... | |
| Try and understand how Mitt Romney ended up with a 15% tax rate after making millions and millions of dollars, and it will literally make your head... | |
| It will seem to explode because your yawn will get so big that you will actually eat your own head like Patman being swallowed by ghosts. | |
| So, yeah, you might want to just invest in an account. | |
| It's one of these things that you got to pay, but it's easier. | |
| Somebody asked me, do I think there's no value in fantasy-based fiction? | |
| Or that the harm it may do outweighs its value as entertainment? | |
| No, I think there's value in fantasy-based fiction. | |
| I think it's fine... | |
| To view it as fantasy and to get moral arguments out of it, I think is fine. | |
| But I think far too many people go into it too deeply at the expense of courage and energy within their own lives. | |
| Now, it's like a glass of wine, but dinner is fine, but alcoholism is bad. | |
| So, yeah, I don't think it's bad for there to be fantasy-based entertainment. | |
| I liked watching Lord of the Rings. | |
| But I do think that it is... | |
| You know, if you sort of look at that Big Bang Theory kind of personality... | |
| It's stripping the most intelligent people from the moral arguments in mankind. | |
| There was a big bang theory. | |
| I'm not so keen on the show anymore. | |
| I liked the first season or two, but it just got too repetitive and too depressing. | |
| But there was one where the lead guy is saying to Penny, the woman across the hall, they say, oh, we won. | |
| They're cheering because their sports team won. | |
| And he's like, well, I don't understand that. | |
| I mean, you know, if we go to a Star Trek movie and the Federation wins, we don't think that we've won. | |
| Anyway, it's just sort of a comment on sports and how ridiculous it is. | |
| And, of course, she just gave him a look like, what would that have to do with anything? | |
| What would facts have to do with anything? | |
| What would objectivity have to do with anything? | |
| And, of course, he backed down right away because, you know, that's only the thing. | |
| Johnny Galecki's character. | |
| No, not Shelton. Not the... | |
| Not the stick insect space alien, the other one. | |
| Leonard. Leonard, that's the one. | |
| Let's see. Thank you. I have one more question on ditching status friends. | |
| What if they have a shred of humanity and their brains are short circuits and they shut down when you show them the gun in the room? | |
| Be patient. Be patient. | |
| Be patient with the recognition that patience is a virtue, but patience is not the same as procrastination. | |
| Be patient. Be aware of your feelings. | |
| I think your gut will tell you if they have a chance to flourish or if they're going to Fall into the dead weight of propaganda forever. | |
| I think you just trust your gut instinct that way. | |
| Yeah, and of course, you know, you don't have to bring up statism with any of your friends, but, you know, once you do, then you're in the ring. | |
| And, you know, that's the result of that kind of choice. | |
| All right. Well, thank you, everybody, so, so much. | |
| Have a wonderful, wonderful weekend. | |
| And I guess a couple of reminders. | |
| Let's see here. Oh yeah, so a couple of new videos. | |
| I had an interview with a very interesting libertarian academic, actually an anarchist academic, interestingly enough, from Dr. | |
| David R. Barker. | |
| It's called Libertarian Enslavement because I do love me my oxymoronic titles. | |
| And you might want to check out David R. Barker. | |
| You can find him also. | |
| Let me just get his website for you. | |
| It's on YouTube and I'm going to throw it into the stream in the next day or two. | |
| You can find his website at BarkerEcon.com. | |
| So I just put that up and thanks again to Phil for giving me a really nice template and making it look 5% more professional despite my idiot stuff, idiot questions. | |
| And I have uploaded, some people think it may be the longest video on YouTube. | |
| It is the complete free book, It's a Jetson's World. | |
| Which is available at YouTube.com forward slash FreeDomainRadio. | |
| It is the entire audiobook available as a video acted out with hand puppets. | |
| I hope that you will check that out and have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week and I will talk to you soon. |
Export Selection