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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:52:13

Resource Based Economy as Self Defense

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	Stefan from Mississauga, are you on the line today?
	I'm very nervous to be talking to myself.
	What would you like to ask the host today, Stefan?
	Oh, why you don't use more deodorant, you must tell me.
	I mean, I'm the one who has to live with you.
	Come on, slap a little on.
	That's what I want to ask the host, actually, why he doesn't use more deodorant.
	Actually, I think that's what your watering eyes want to ask the host.
	Good morning, everybody.
	It's the first of the month.
	It's Christmas month.
	And I believe we will be injecting my rendition of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer into the central cortex and brain of everybody who doesn't give me Christmas donations this month.
	What do you think? Shall I start?
	Oh, and it's Duke Nukem doing Rudolph the Reindeer.
	I'll donate Rudolph the Reindeer.
	What a very happy clock.
	Anyway, so yeah, don't forget...
	Wait. Santa doesn't exist and he's kind of immoral.
	Hang on. Let me come up with another one.
	The anti-Santa philosophy in your thoughts, if not your prayers, this holiday season.
	And if you would like to send donations, fdrurl.com forward slash donate, fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
	Hugely appreciated. Also not averse to...
	Bitcoins, but they have to be in whole prime numbers.
	That's very important.
	And that number cannot be below, say, 50.
	Didn't Fee just get a million dollars worth of bitcoins?
	Yes, they did. Fee just got a million.
	Hey, good for them.
	You know, there's nothing happier that a donation-based show likes than hearing that another show that's not donation-based got a million dollars.
	That just gets you out of bed with a spring in your step and a snarl on your face.
	You know, good for them.
	Good for them.
	I like for you a lot.
	So, yeah, if you'd like to help out, fdrewell.com forward slash donate.
	I would really appreciate it.
	I will be hosting the Peter Schiff Show 10th, 11th, and 12th of December.
	So, please feel free to call in and ask me insanely complicated questions about investing in the economy.
	At which point, I would just try and smile and look pretty.
	So, yeah, that's about all that's going on.
	No? Do I sound prepared?
	Do I sound professional? You sound the same as you usually do.
	Wait a minute. Yeah, yeah. I guess I'll just take that as very professional.
	The movie Arca was pretty good.
	Let's go to the first caller.
	Edding Scott via phone.
	Phone? Scott, how is 1984?
	Hello, Scott.
	Hey, Scott. You are live and on the air.
	You seem like you're in a good mood today.
	I am in a good mood today.
	I am breathing. The primary business plan of FTR for 2013, Don't Die, has been achieved, so things are good.
	Yeah, every day above ground is a good day, I agree.
	I hear you. Now, what I was calling you about, or what I had you call me about, was the Video you put out there, excuse my outrage, but I think it's justified.
	And I do excuse your outrage because I'm also very outraged by the basically Zionist-based push for war that we see going on even today in Iran.
	Now, help me understand this because I get a fair number of comments here and there about this Zionist thing.
	And I wonder if you could just explain that to me a little bit.
	Right. Well, I did send out a video.
	It's actually a talk given by the Reverend in the Church of England explaining the whole history of it and everything.
	But essentially what it is is a group of heretics that are very prominent in the evangelical churches in America today.
	The whole thing started basically in the 1850s.
	The Great Awakening was mainly, you know, that revival they talk about in the U.S. during that time was mainly a Zionist movement gaining ground.
	And, of course, you know, we had the Civil War shortly thereafter.
	Basically, their whole premise is to reinterpret the Old Testament prophecies regarding the return to Israel from exile, which were all about, you know, When the Jews were in Babylon and returning home, which they did, those prophecies being fulfilled and so forth.
	Well, these Zionists have taken that to mean that, you know, that was the justification for the creation of the State of Israel, rebuilding the temple and so on and so forth is their goal.
	And I've heard some of these arguments, so let me just sort of understand.
	So there is a biblical prophecy that says that Jesus can't return until the Jews are back in Israel.
	Is that right? That's more or less the Kool-Aid that they're drinking.
	Let me say this.
	The Schofield Reference Bible, which became the most popular Bible in the States around the turn of the century, was actually written by a convicted con man in England.
	It was published there.
	And it had all these annotations on the side of the pages, and this is basically what they've been using to teach this Christian Zionism ever since.
	The biggest seminary is in Texas where they push this stuff, and that's the biggest evangelical pastor training ground.
	So it's basically a poisonous doctrine that got introduced To get public support for this policy, the Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians have been working hand in hand in this holy war for the past 10 plus years now.
	They're the ones that are pushing it.
	The National Council on Churches, on the other hand, has been firmly opposed to it, as they were to Vietnam, as they are now.
	Sorry, which church has been? The National Council on Churches, which is basically your mainline denominations, like the Lutherans, the Methodists.
	Okay, now so if you know something about that, I don't know.
	I mean, I certainly believe that the people who believe in these prophecies and so on, it is very serious to them.
	And one of the reasons why this prophecy and stuff, it's hard to criticize or it's hard to For people to hear counter-arguments is that if you really are religiously inclined to that degree, then what happens is you believe all these prophecies, so there's no reason to criticize them.
	If you're not in that world, like if you're kind of secular or kind of like a Sunday Christian or Sunday or I guess sort of more of a secular Jew or whatever, then what happens is You kind of don't even know all this stuff because it's just not that big a deal to you and you can't quite believe that people take it that seriously.
	I mean, I've heard arguments, I don't know if they're true or not, that one of the reasons why the war in Iran occurred, Iraq occurred, is because of biblical prophecies and so on.
	And if you're not in that world, then it just all seems like, well, that can't be it.
	I mean, there's got to be some base political motivation.
	Like, the reason that America is pro-Israel is not because of Prophecies but because everybody wants to court the Jews in politics and control a lot of the media and so on.
	Donations, a lot of wealth and so on.
	But I genuinely do believe that people will make really foundational decisions in their life based upon what they accept as prophecy.
	I do think it colors a huge amount of what goes on in American policy.
	Because otherwise, you have to make the argument that everybody cynically uses religion as a means of controlling the masses or getting donations and so on.
	I don't believe that's true.
	I think obviously there's some people who do that.
	There's an old statement from, I think it was, I can't remember if it was Seneca, some old, I think it was a Greco-Roman philosopher who said, religion is true to the masses, false to the wise, and useful to the rulers.
	Right? And I think that a lot of people really, really do believe in these biblical prophecies.
	They really, really believe that the end of the world is imminent.
	I mean, it's like 40 or 50 percent of the American population believe that the world is not going to last for another 50 years.
	And I don't think that those beliefs are meaningless.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say, these are the same people that believe in the rapture, okay?
	I mean, they basically believe all this has to take place so they can be raptured.
	The rest of us will be stuck here to, you know, suffer.
	Yeah, and if you're not in that world, there's nothing to criticize.
	If you're not in that world, it seems vaguely unbelievable that people would actually live their lives this way.
	But people do. I mean, it's not just the Muslims and someone who really, really believe their theological worldview.
	I mean, there's lots of Christians who do it as well.
	So my question around this church, right?
	So does this church that you were talking about, or this council, Do they accept the punishments from God?
	Do they accept that God is going to punish people after death?
	Well, to some extent, yes.
	But what I should say is that mainly these are more what you would call progressive or leftist-type churches that are involved in this thing.
	I'm a member or was a member of an ELCA church.
	It used to be. American Lutheran Church was kind of center of the road.
	You know, now it's very far left.
	It's being run by the Chicago Communists.
	They're part of the National Council on Churches.
	They're all about social justice.
	Now they're talking like there's no hell, there's no right, there's no wrong.
	It's actually kind of lining up a bit more with your philosophy in some ways.
	I mean, I'm basically an anarchist myself, and I understand the apprehension and the distrust of all institutions, but I think there is some good that comes out of teaching the faith the way it was written 2,000 years ago.
	As you mentioned in your video, there's a moral code there that, honestly, without morality, I'm sure we both could agree there can't be any kind of free society.
	Well, okay. But this is what my outrage is and was.
	Which is that the people who are religious say that, well, you see, we have this moral code.
	We have the Ten Commandments.
	And boy, without those Ten Commandments, without the bribe of heaven and the threat of hell, we're just not going to have a moral society.
	Like you, atheists, are just like amoral or immoral or you have no moral compass whatsoever.
	And when I was a kid, I mean, that's what I was taught.
	We've got these Ten Commandments, and one of the big important ones is thou shalt not kill.
	Another big important one is thou shalt not steal.
	So by that logic, there should be no Christian who joins an army in a non-defensive war, like where ships aren't sailing up to your harbor kind of thing, right? Right. I agree with you there.
	Yeah, but there's none of that.
	I mean, there's none of that.
	I mean, everybody understands that America is not threatened by invasion from any foreign power.
	You can be friendly neighbors to the north and south, massive oceans to the east and west.
	If America pursued a non-interventionist foreign policy, which requires a military presence to begin with, if America pursued a non-interventionist foreign policy, it would be about as threatened as Iceland by Muslims or overseas people or whatever, right? Well, that's what the National Council on Churches advocates, is that non-interventionist.
	Non-interventionist. Okay, so then, the people who joined the military...
	By the way, there's 45 million...
	Hang on, people who joined the military...
	Let me finish. People who joined the military...
	Uh-huh....at the moment...
	...are breaking...
	We could argue the most foundational of the Ten Commandments.
	Thou shalt not... I think technically it's thou shalt not murder.
	But anyway, let's just take the common...
	Understanding, thou shalt not kill.
	And so they will all be damned to hell for eternity.
	And yet I don't see any priests fire and brimstoning saying people who are in the military, particularly people overseas in the military, are violating the most foundational of God's commandments.
	It is a mortal sin.
	It cannot be redeemed and they're going to burn in hell forever.
	And I've just, I've never seen anything like that.
	And that sort of makes me wonder, which is, oh, and also, you know, thou shalt not steal means, well, the government has to stop collecting taxes.
	Clearly that's, oh, render unto Caesar that, which is, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So what it means to me is that they just, they don't have a moral code.
	They don't have a moral basis.
	Why do the priests not thunder against the military?
	Because religion and militarism kind of go hand in hand.
	Where do most American soldiers come from?
	They come from the South. Where is there the greatest religious presence?
	It's in the South. So they just don't want to harm their market.
	They just don't want to stand in front of their congregation and tell their congregation things that the congregation doesn't want to hear.
	That's true. And that's fine.
	Okay, that's fine. They're just marketers.
	And that's fine. But then don't tell me you've got this moral code.
	I mean, that's just ridiculous. You're just telling people what they want to hear?
	Sorry, go ahead. You've got to remember, there's a lot of Christians that don't even go to a church.
	But yes, it was a Southern Baptist church.
	And the evangelicals of design is bent that mainly were the ones behind in backing this war.
	There's a pretty cool website you can look at about this for more information.
	It's called BeliefNet.com.
	It talks about faith group positions on the war with Iraq, which would explain, like I was saying, there's about 45 million members in the National Council of Churches, and even they got a lot of flack for coming out against the Vietnam War when they did, because like you said, a lot of the congregants and even they got a lot of flack for coming out against the They wanted to kill.
	They wanted to fight communism and all this other stuff that was put into their heads by the TV and the media and so forth.
	And I'm at point I would say...
	Well, no, no, no.
	See, see? You're blaming the TV and the media.
	And, of course, that's a factor.
	But... They have thou shalt not kill.
	That's all they need.
	I mean, there's lots of stuff in the TV and the media that Christians explicitly reject.
	The moral majority was very much against pornography and smut in the cinema and so on.
	So there's lots in the mainstream media.
	Secular humanism is violently attacked by – sorry, I shouldn't say violently.
	It's strongly attacked by a lot of religious folks.
	So they have – I mean, if the word of God, the commandment of the omnipotent, all-powerful, all-good God can be overturned by a series of commercials and gossip girl, then I don't really think you have a good basis for morality there.
	If Christians wouldn't go to war, there would be no war in the West, right?
	If Christians just said, hey, you know that thou shalt not kill, that's pretty clear.
	There would be no war.
	I mean, the Germans were very religious, right?
	When Hitler was around. And they all just went stampeding off into Czechoslovakia and Austria and Poland and France and you name it.
	I mean, good heavens, the Italians were Catholics, some of the most religious people in all of Christendom.
	And they just went charging off into Ethiopia and they strafed natives who were throwing spears at them from goddamn airplanes.
	And the Pope collaborated with the Nazis and the Pope forgave and didn't even have anything to forgive with these people.
	So my question is, if God says, thou shalt not kill, and if you're a Christian who accepts the Ten Commandments, why is there war?
	Why is there non-defensive war?
	Well, there's...
	And then we look across the world and we say, well, see, those Muslims, boy...
	They're really violent, aren't they?
	They take their religion so seriously, they're willing to do really violent things.
	It's like, yes! And that's not specific to that.
	Go ahead. See, that's the argument I hear a lot of times from atheists or agnostics, is basically whatever is wrong in the world, we can blame God for it.
	We can point the finger at Him and say, well, because this and the other is happening, there is no God.
	No, no, no. Hang on, hang on.
	Atheists can't point the finger at God.
	That's like me saying to my wife, it's the leprechaun who didn't do the dishes.
	But you know what I'm saying.
	They use that as a proof of no God being around in the first place.
	Or if he is, he doesn't care.
	That kind of thing. But I don't care about any of that.
	I'm willing to accept.
	If we accept for the sake of the argument that God is real, that God is all-powerful, that God is all-good, and the Ten Commandments are what he handed to Moses...
	If we accept all of that, then there should be no 720 US military bases overseas.
	Look, atheists are like 2% or 3% of the US population.
	Pretty fucking hard to wage a war with 2% or 3% of the population.
	Even if we assume that all atheists are just immoral bastards who will kill for pay, Which they're not.
	But if we assume that they are, then the Christians are all like, hey, war?
	Iraq? No, they're not threatening us.
	So we got a thou shalt not kill.
	Sorry, can't do it, right?
	Because we care about our eternal souls.
	And my preacher is telling me, thou shalt not kill is very clear.
	It's the most foundational of God's commandments.
	So no, we cannot go and invade another country.
	So they'd have to go to war with all the atheists, and they would have a tough time with atheists.
	I mean, boy, you think that an atheist is going to be a good Marine?
	When you say jump, I say how high!
	And he's like... No, of course not, because this is somebody that's going to question authority.
	Right. They're not very good at bowing towards irrational authority.
	Christians are a little closer to that paradigm, so it's kind of tough to wage a war with atheists.
	So even if we accept all of the premises of Christianity or other religions, well, you've got a thou shall not kill, and you've got an aggressive and invasive foreign policy.
	I mean, if 95% of Americans are religious, that means...
	And probably higher, I would say that almost 100% of people in the armed services are religious.
	Well, that means 95% of people in the CIA are religious.
	95% of people running the Fed are religious, right?
	Thou shalt not lie.
	The Fed won't even tell you how much goddamn money they're printing, right?
	95% of the people in the FBI are religious.
	95% of the prison guards are religious.
	95% of the people prosecuting the war on drugs are religious, right?
	I wouldn't say it's 95% that's religious.
	I mean, just because 5% are atheists, there's a lot of other people that are not.
	Yeah, okay. 85%.
	Fine. I think you may be quibbling about the least important part of what I'm saying, but go ahead.
	Yeah, yeah. I understand what you're saying.
	And what I'm trying to say to you is that even in the Christian religion, there is a big division.
	There's a war, if you will.
	Of words between the Zionists, those people that are in that camp that allowed all this crap to go on, and those that are against it.
	You know, like the National Council Church, there's about 45 million members.
	There's about, you know, roughly 50 million evangelicals.
	But you mentioned the Pope in the video, and you brought him up again in this discussion today we're having.
	And he did come out very strongly against the war.
	I remember that was, you know, you being tenet in that video.
	Yes, yes, but he didn't excommunicate.
	All right, well, how's he going to excommunicate millions of people?
	He'd have to do it one by one.
	That's how they would do it, you know, name by name.
	So you have to sit down, you have to have a huge fine network.
	He's the Pope, man. He's the Pope.
	Don't tell me he's bound by any laws.
	I mean, he's the direct pipeline of God.
	If God says to the Pope, I can excommunicate en masse, he can excommunicate en masse.
	I mean, don't tell me the Pope is limited by laws.
	He's omnipotent. That's why I'm a Lutheran and not a Catholic, because I don't believe in the infallibility of the Pope, and so on and so forth.
	That's a little bit ludicrous.
	I'm a free-hanger myself, you know...
	And I've been out on the street against the wars many times, amongst other things, protesting.
	So it's not like, you know, all I'm saying is don't lump us all in, paint us all with the same brush, because there is a lot of diversity within Christianity.
	And I would argue as well that, you know, there's a lot of people out there calling themselves Christians whose true religion is, you know, the state.
	And, you know, that's their faith.
	And whatever the state tells them, you know, is the word of God.
	That certainly is true for atheists as well.
	As somebody said in the chat room, I know so many atheists, the majority of those I've met, would fall on the sword for the state in a heartbeat.
	Well, see, if people would fall on the sword for the state, that would be okay.
	The problem is they keep pushing other people onto the sword of the state.
	And he said, somebody wrote, said, look at the Soviet soldiers under communism.
	Well, the problem with Soviet soldiers under communism, which was pick up this gun or we'll shoot you in the head, and then we'll kill your whole family, right?
	So it's a little, you know, the Christians who have a choice to join the military or not can't really be compared to Soviet soldiers under communism.
	Well, listen, I've got to move on to the next caller, but thank you so much for your call.
	Very, very interesting and important.
	And certainly, look, I know some Christians who are far better people than most of the atheists I know, far better people.
	And so I'm not saying...
	That all Christians are bad and all atheists are good.
	Good heavens. Lenin was an atheist.
	Stalin was an atheist.
	I mean, they were monstrous human beings.
	Atheism doesn't tell you much about anything other than, you know, I don't believe in leprechauns.
	What are my political views? Well, I don't know.
	I know that you're not going to be voting for leprechauns.
	That's all I know. But my argument is that the religious approach to ethics has not at all solved the problem of morality.
	Anymore than it solves the problem of physics, anymore than the pope damning free trade solves the problem of poverty.
	It's an illusion of an answer.
	And if people are naturally good, I think that in some ways religion can help enhance that.
	But if people – most people are naturally amoral and crowd followers – And we simply know that because whenever someone new comes in power, people are just like, hey, there's the new guy.
	Meet the new boss, right?
	Same as the old boss.
	And so I just say that we haven't solved the problem.
	We need to keep looking.
	So until Christians really start living by thou shalt not kill, I'm not going to take the moral foundation of religion or the moral argument for religion away.
	With any seriousness.
	But thank you again. Great call.
	I appreciate that. And thank you, of course, for all the anti-war work that you do.
	I appreciate it. And Mike, who do we have next?
	You're welcome. All right, Ross, you're up next.
	Go ahead, Ross. Thank you, Mike.
	Hi, Steph. Hello.
	Long-time caller, first-time listener.
	Oh, wait. I might have that backwards.
	Don't. I'm still working on my coffee, so don't screw things up that way.
	I'm like, yeah, good. Me talk big head for a long time.
	I know, Steph. I'm going to do what everybody always does, and thank you for everything that you do.
	Your work is fantastic, and it's helped me out so much in my life and everything that I do, and I really appreciate it.
	Thank you. And if you're listening to this and you've ever contributed to the conversation, that praise is to you as well, right?
	Because everybody, I do call-in shows, everyone emails me questions and all that, so I appreciate that.
	And I think as a community, we can all take credit for that, so I appreciate that.
	Yeah, absolutely. My question is more pertaining to love than war and politics.
	Just make love, man, not war and love.
	I like how you separate love from politics.
	Some people might disagree because people worship the state and play politic games with their lovers.
	But let's buggy on with your question.
	Yes, absolutely. You describe love as an automatic response to virtue in the same way that well-being is an automatic response to health.
	And I agree with that.
	Sorry. You just misquoted me twice.
	One is important and one is not.
	I said love is an involuntary response to virtue.
	And I also said that health is the result of healthy practices.
	In other words, you have to do things that are going to make you healthy.
	Like losing weight is the result of eating healthy.
	Less or better and exercising more or differently.
	If you do those actions, then you will likely end up with weight loss, assuming no other underlying medical condition.
	And if you stop smoking, you will end up with healthier lungs and so on.
	And so you do specific actions and the effect is health.
	And if you do particular actions, then the effect may be love.
	But go ahead. Okay.
	So by your definition, you are able to love multiple people.
	You say you love the listeners all the time and everything.
	My question is, what is the qualifiable difference between loving someone and being in love with someone?
	So, if I may elaborate, I can love my best friend and I can love my girlfriend, but the relationship that I cultivate with my girlfriend is clearly different than that which I cultivate with my best friend.
	What is the qualifiable difference between that and love?
	Isn't it sex? Sorry, you were expecting something philosophical.
	I mean, isn't it naughty bits and massive amounts of lubrication for those who are circumcised?
	But is that not the, you know, unless you're bagging threesomes all over the place, I would imagine it is sex.
	All right. No, and look, because there's sex involved, right?
	Because there's sex involved, you have different standards for girlfriends than you do for friends, right?
	So, for instance, if your friend sleeps around, then...
	I mean, you may not want to shake their hand without a hazmat suit on, but likely they're not going to pass any STDs on to you, right?
	If you are sharing a bed with a woman and she sleeps around, then she might get pregnant, which is going to be horribly complicated, and she also might get crabs or gonorrhea or syphilis or some godforsaken thing that makes your nipples rot off or something.
	You have a problem, to say the least, right?
	She might get pregnant and pass that child off as yours, as happens 5-10% of the time, apparently.
	And your friend can't do that, right?
	She might get married to you, she might divorce you, or she might just live with you until you're common-law and then divorce your ass and claim child support or alimony.
	Well, your friend can't do that, right?
	So, the standards that you have For your friends are going to be lower.
	We don't have to be lower, but practically they don't need to be as high as for the love of your life that you may be engaging in a permanent contract with the state as the third party and having kids and so on.
	You don't need your friend to have a huge amount of patience, but if you're going to have children with a woman, then, well, you want that woman to have a huge amount of patience because having children requires a huge amount of patience,
	right? So, you need trust in a romantic relationship in a way that you just don't need in a friend relationship because if you're going to have kids with a woman, then she's going to be – let's say you have two kids and you want to do the right thing and breastfeed for 18 months or 24 months and stay home with the kids until they're five,
	then you have – A relationship where the woman is going to be dependent upon your stability and kindness and financial generosity for seven plus years.
	And that's assuming that you're going to dump them in some school when they're five.
	If you want to homeschool or unschool, then she is going to be dependent upon you for 20 years.
	Well, it doesn't happen with friends.
	You don't mesh your finances together.
	You don't say to your friend, listen, man, I got a great idea for a series of novels, right?
	It's like Walking Dead meets Breaking Bad.
	We shoot heroin, man, into zombies.
	Meth. Meth.
	We shoot meth into zombies.
	And then they all turn into Brad Pitt and propagate themselves that way by adopting kids with a truly skinny woman.
	And you're like, well, that sounds like a pretty trippy idea.
	I don't know how that's exactly going to work.
	But it's like, man, it's got Brad Pitt in it already.
	In the book, Brad Pitt is in it.
	How hard do you think it's going to be to get Brad Pitt for the movie when he's already in the book?
	Man, come on. And you're like, well, okay.
	You sound very passionate about this.
	I'm not sure entirely hinged.
	In fact, you sound a little unhinged.
	But you sound very passionate about it.
	And he's like, okay, man. So here's what I need to do, man.
	I need to live in your basement.
	No. No, screw that.
	I don't like basements. I'm going to sleep in your bed like next to you.
	I'm a bit of a fodder, but it's okay because it keeps the idol down like three inches above us in the winter.
	It keeps us warm. I mean, okay, you pray for death, but you're warm.
	So I'm a fodder. I'm also a bit of a midnight screamer, and I wet the bed.
	But I need to stay in your bed for 20 years while I work on this novel, and you need to support me financially.
	Oh, plus, if this novel doesn't work out, I'm going to sue you.
	If you had a friend like that, you'd be like, huh, it seems like a bit of an imposition there, my buddy, my friend.
	How about this? Why don't you just go be a waiter like everybody else does and just write a whole bunch of shit and try and get an agent and try and get published that way?
	Why do you need to fart in my bed for 20 years and peel over God knows what and take all my money and sue me if it doesn't work out?
	So, yeah. So, you understand that if you had a friend who wanted to do that, and let's say you wanted to support him in his meth-addicted zombie Brad Pitt novel series, then you would need to really, really believe in and trust this guy that the standards would have to be enormously higher for that.
	So, when I was talking about sex, I mean, obviously there's some practical elements to sexuality like STDs and so on, but...
	If you're talking, you sound like a young guy, if you're talking about girlfriends and sex, then we're talking about fertility, pregnancy, child rearing.
	You just need really higher standards.
	Does that make any sense? It makes perfect sense.
	Oh, look at that.
	Hole in one. I'm not going to make that joke.
	It's too tempting. Thank you.
	That really cleared it up. I wasn't sure if there was some I mean, imagine this.
	Imagine if I was your husband and I said, honey, not only do I want to have a kid, I want to quit my lucrative job as a software executive and I want to start this crazy show, right?
	Okay, let me tell you about it. No advertising.
	We're going to give everything away for free, all the books, and there's no advertising on the website or anything like that.
	I have no idea how the income is going to happen.
	But what I'm going to do is I'm going to beg.
	Like, you remember our honeymoon? It'll be like that, but for money.
	And I'm going to talk about the least popular topics in the known universe.
	Like, I'm going to talk about there being no God and no government and the voluntary family, and I'm going to confront people about their child-raising practices.
	Every conceivable, volatile subject in the history of the known universe, I'm going to take the least popular stance on, and I'm going to rely on donations.
	Does that sound like a plan, honey?
	Now, if you have the best wife in the known universe, she's like, yeah, sounds good.
	And it might even work out.
	So, yeah, so you need that.
	You need that kind of stuff. I like it.
	That sounds good. Thanks, man.
	Best of luck finding this person, but don't have kids to lead you if you want them.
	I do, but I have a founder. Oh, even better.
	Then, you know, take off the condom.
	I'm just kidding. Mike, who do we have next?
	All right, John, you're up next.
	Go ahead, John. Do you hear me?
	I do. Okay.
	So, Stefan, I'm a long-time listener, first-time caller also, and I have two kind of lengthy points to you, because I basically...
	If you say kind of lengthy, pick the most important one first, just in case.
	So, go for it. Okay.
	I think you might be an unwittingly supporter of a resource-based economy.
	Because you think it's not what you think it is and you actually run a resource-based economy at your home and yet you think it's some kind of Marxism.
	So I would like to explain basically what is it that you do?
	Sorry, is your argument that the family is kind of socialist in nature?
	No, because the research-based economy is not socialist.
	All right. Okay, go ahead.
	What do you need to understand is that the money system, the market, is a kind of information technology, and the same functions that are done by market can be done directly by digital signals.
	Sorry, by what signals?
	Digital. Let's say, is the Venus project centralized?
	No, it's not. There is no magical, infallible authority at the center that knows what goes where.
	The solution is exactly the same as in capitalism.
	The information is out there in people's heads, in the environment, storages, factories, nature, and so on.
	So, what is the difference?
	Let's say that the prices are a mechanism of sending signals.
	However, today we have a better method of asking people than voting with their wallet and a better form of signals than prices.
	It is a worldwide information digital network with enough processing power to keep track of every single need and resource on the planet and a network that allows us the needs to be met directly on the market.
	This information cannot motivate people to work except people who motivate themselves, so we can deal with that later.
	But it does motivate machines.
	Okay, sorry.
	Let me just say that.
	Let me just interrupt you for a second, if you don't mind.
	So if you say that there's a better way of allocating resources than the current configuration, then basically what you're saying… Sorry?
	Not exactly a better way, but a better meta way, a better way to get information where to allocate resources.
	It's basically the same principle.
	So capitalism is like you make money from allocating resources more efficiently.
	I mean, as a longtime capitalist, if I can figure out a way to automate something, then I do that, right?
	So when I was in the free market, I wrote a massive system to validate all of our code and our database and the web infrastructure and all of that and would give a whole list of things that needed to be fixed before we did testing.
	And it allowed us to cut our testing time down by like 80%.
	And so we'd just leave it running overnight and then we'd bang out the fixes and we wouldn't have to go back and forth with QA a lot.
	So that's just a more efficient use of resources.
	It makes more sense to spend a couple of weeks programming a validation tool than it does to spend a couple of months every year checking stuff which can be checked automatically.
	So because of all of that, we were able to offer systems faster and cheaper and all that kind of stuff.
	Now, if you have a way of allocating resources more efficiently...
	This is what you're telling me, or at least this is what I hear.
	You're saying, Steph, I have the greatest song that has ever been written.
	I mean, more complex than Bohemian Rhapsody, of a simpler and more delicious melody than Yesterday, of a funkier rhythm than Papa's Got a Brand New Bag.
	You go on and on, right?
	This is the greatest song ever written.
	And it's going to totally dominate the charts, and it's going to chart longer than Dark Side of the Moon.
	I'm like, okay, well then go release it.
	Because if you have a more efficient way of allocating resources, then it will be a very simple matter to get venture capitalist funding for your venture.
	And since it's more efficient than the price mechanism, you will get the money you need to buy the resources.
	People will give you millions and millions of dollars to buy the resources and then your algorithm will allocate them more efficiently and people will transition to that system.
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no algorithm.
	This is a basic – I don't know how to explain it but it's a new way.
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	We've got to stay on this point.
	If you don't like the word algorithm, magic beans.
	I don't care.
	Whatever acts you have that allocates things more efficiently, you will dominate the economy because you're more efficient.
	I don't think so, because an allocating algorithm is not superior to another algorithm that has a lot of energy below it.
	It just cannot play on its weight category, right?
	Alright, so I think we're losing the point here.
	Okay, just give me a couple of questions and I'm sorry for interrupting.
	Is it more efficient than the existing system?
	Is it better in some way?
	It is not yet an it.
	It is a new way how to think, how to design a new system which can be later tested to be seen if it's more efficient.
	And if you understand it, you will understand basically, you will solve another problem of yours that I can tell you later.
	No, no, sorry, sorry. Okay.
	Is what you're proposing, in your view, better than the existing system?
	Yes, it is better, of course.
	Okay, fantastic. Okay.
	So it's better than the existing system because it serves human needs better.
	It allocates resources more efficiently.
	It reduces overhead, whatever it's going to be that is more efficient.
	Will people who want to make money be interested in something that is more efficient and cheaper and better and for which there is going to be greater consumer demand, right?
	So if I found a way to produce an iPad for free...
	Or something like an iPad 3?
	I totally get you.
	I totally get what you're trying to say.
	But the big, big surprise I'm trying to tell you is that what I propose is already a reality.
	People already do it and it is only as good as much resources and energy we have.
	So, on the scale of family, we have a family.
	On the scale of a corporation, we have a corporation.
	So, within a family and within a corporation, we don't use the price system, we use direct information allocation.
	So, we already do that.
	I'm sorry, sorry, wait a sec.
	Did you say that in a corporation there's no price system?
	Basically, as I see it, the employees just pass things to each other, they put things into the storage, and then they don't use the price system to tell what goes where.
	Wait, wait. Sorry to interrupt.
	If there's no price system in a corporation, how do you determine profit?
	I mean you have a price.
	As a business owner, I have prices.
	I've got rent for my office.
	I have computer costs, electricity costs.
	I've got employee costs.
	I mean you name it.
	I got airfare, I got hotels, I got unit software costs and those are all costs for me and I have to produce value or receive more than I'm spending at least in the long run.
	So I'm not sure how a corporation isn't subjected to prices.
	Profit is an interface to the outside market.
	that it is not used inside of a company.
	No, it is.
	No, it is.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm sorry.
	Sorry, you're just wrong about that.
	So if I pay a salesman $100,000 a year and he produces $10,000 worth of sales, then he is not profitable.
	That's within the corporation, right?
	Or if I have a programmer who produces one line of code a week, then he's not profitable.
	So within a corporation, every employee has profits and losses.
	But what do you tell them by giving them money?
	Money doesn't tell employees or machines what to do.
	It doesn't tell them what thing to put where.
	You mean money doesn't have...
	Like money isn't like the annoying orange, right?
	Saying... Hey, employee!
	Hey, employee! Be profitable!
	Hey, employee! Knife!
	Sorry. But no, money doesn't tell people that's right.
	That's correct. But money is a measure as to whether what you're providing is a value and is more efficient for the people that you're providing it to.
	Yes, it's a measure, but it's not like important for the tasks.
	It's not like a direct problem solution.
	It's important... Sorry, have you ever run a business in the past?
	No, but should I have to understand it?
	I think you might want to or at least read a little bit more about the economics of business because the things that you're saying are just not correct.
	Because, well, let's say, let's try a family because the same principle works in the family and it's not like you have business in your family.
	Well, I certainly agree with that.
	Yeah, absolutely. The family is a very different economic relationship.
	I don't charge my daughter rent.
	She doesn't work and all that kind of stuff.
	But parent-child is a different relationship fundamentally, right?
	And one of the reasons we know that is that children don't have the ability to enter contracts.
	They don't have the ability to vote.
	They don't have the ability to go out and get jobs when they're five and all that kind of stuff.
	So children, through their dependent position, have enormously curtailed rights.
	So rights and responsibilities kind of go hand in hand.
	So we will – most charities or most even governments will say, okay, we're going to put you in a home because you're mentally handicapped or something.
	But that comes with a severe curtailment of responsibilities.
	And that's the sort of sliding scale.
	So the more freedom you have, the more responsibility you have, and vice versa.
	So that is the case with families, right?
	Now, I can't treat adults like idiots and children.
	So comparing the family, which is where people voluntarily create other people and those children have very few responsibilities and very few rights, means that if you want to extend that to society as a whole, then you have to divide society into two means that if you want to extend that to society as a whole, Those who have a lot of responsibilities and rights and those who have very few responsibilities and rights.
	And I don't feel comfortable doing that with society as a whole because that's just not how people work.
	Most people are of average intelligence and reasonable levels of competence and so on.
	So I just – I don't think – you can't sort of say that society should work like there are parents and children.
	There are people who shit themselves. No, no, no.
	I'm still not good at explaining it.
	Basically, price system is a way of communication outside on the market.
	But within a family, we have a better way of communication.
	We tell each other what we want, we have our memories and so on.
	And in a corporation, we have phone calls, we have email, we have warehouse software and so on.
	We coordinate what we do, our daily schedule.
	And I would paraphrase you on your recent show.
	The resource-based economy is directly mirrored in the very act of living in a family.
	Therefore, you don't use the price system and competition when managing your household and loved ones.
	You said you educated your daughter for years for how the world works, so you don't worry what if she tells you that she wants a doll made of gold and diamonds, right?
	She's smart, she's educated, and she knows what is or isn't possible.
	So I don't like to receive arguments, what if somebody wants a golden house, and so on.
	Learning about reality is the basis.
	So this is the point I wanted to make.
	Our price system is just a simple mechanism of communication, and we today have better mechanisms of communication.
	But you did not...
	Okay, but sorry to interrupt.
	So it... In the society that you propose, who are the children?
	What do you mean by children?
	People who don't have to work and have no real rights.
	What are rights?
	You mean everyone needs rights and everyone should be able to work if they want to.
	Okay, then you can't bring my daughter into it because my daughter cannot work, my daughter cannot enter into contracts, my daughter cannot vote, my daughter cannot drive, my daughter cannot fly an airplane, my daughter cannot be left alone unsupervised until the age of 12.
	So if you're going to compare society to the family, my question is, who are the children?
	Because the family structure is around children.
	So who are the children in your society?
	The children are those who cannot be educated by any means.
	Okay, and how many of those are in society?
	I don't know, but we can always solve this problem.
	It's not many, right? It's not many.
	I don't know. But this is just a communication mechanism.
	I don't know what's relevant about this point.
	No, look, come on. You have to know what's relevant.
	If you're going to compare society to the family and you're saying you don't charge kids for rent, you don't, right?
	Then you have to tell me who in society are the children.
	And if you say, well, almost nobody in society are the children, then you can't compare it to the family, right?
	If I say, well, this stuff is like water, and you say, in which way is it like water?
	And I say, well, it's as hard as a diamond and as dry as a desert, then I say, well, then it's not like water, right?
	So if you say society is like the family, and then I say, well, this is how the family is structured with regards to children, then you have to tell me who are the children in your society.
	I think you have connected two things together.
	Basically, who can work and who has rights.
	This is like connecting these things is not necessary.
	I think everyone should have rights and nobody should be forced to work and we have means to carry it out.
	I'm sorry, who is forced to work now?
	Like who goes to someone with a gun and says you have to work?
	Ah, well, this is a deeper point.
	This could take a while to explain, because if you use this kind of argument, this is a rabbit hole, basically.
	I think I propose we move to the next point, because there is a reason why I'm having such problems communicating with you.
	Okay. Okay.
	I will scroll a little down because there is a kind of serious thing I have to talk to you about.
	When you talk about the market, it's strange.
	You get all misty-eyed and things you say are really simple as from a textbook.
	Not like when you talk about the real-life issues like parenting or violence or politics.
	Where I stand, it doesn't look like you're using your full brain potential.
	It's like you had this market and money stuff.
	Sorry, sorry, sorry. If you want to make an argument, make an argument.
	But don't just tell me that I'm wrong.
	I mean, don't frame the discussion like, Steph, you're not emotional about this stuff and the idea that I'm not emotional about parenting or not connected to parenting I think is not true.
	But just saying, well, it doesn't seem like you're using your whole brain, just tell me where I'm logically incorrect and then you've made your case.
	Well, this is not like a case.
	This is more like showing you a mirror and you would have to step in I think we're good to go.
	But we are sort of into the reason and evidence stuff as best we can.
	And even when we do things like sort of dream analysis and so on, there usually has to be some kind of rationale behind what is occurring.
	And it also has to have connection with the dreamer's history and so on.
	But if you want to tell me a very brief story, I think that's okay.
	Okay. So there are topics in which all your thinking is brilliant.
	brilliant and then there are topics when you get really simple and you don't, you are not so brilliant.
	Hey, you're not telling me a story.
	Sorry, you're not telling me a story.
	You're just kind of insulting me.
	If the story is "Let's insult Steph," then I don't want to hear that story.
	I mean, if you have a story where I'm wrong or if you want to tell me a story, I like unicorns, so if you want to tell me a story about something like that, that would be great.
	But let's not have a story called "Steph is not thinking" somewhere.
	Have you heard about black holes?
	A black hole is a point so massive that it wraps the space itself around and it is invisible because all the light goes around it.
	If you would stand on the surface or even horizon of a black hole, you would see yourself, you would see all the universe around you, but you would not see the black hole.
	And this is what I think you have.
	You have a blind spot which totally prevents you from seeing something.
	And which only an outside observer like me can see.
	And I have observed you for months.
	And you are very, very reliant on logical consistency, but this is not about logic.
	This is about input you give to this logic.
	This is a case of garbage in, garbage out, even if the internal logic is perfect.
	So this is very, very tricky, and it goes deep into personality, and I have dealt with this before in my personality.
	So I kind of think I have the same kind of black hole case here.
	And I think this is ruining your show because it's so public.
	It's so about economy sometimes, and this is a frequent topic.
	So I am worried about you, Stefan.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	And I remember when I was reading some of the comments on my debate with Peter Joseph that people were saying, well, you can see from Steph's body language that he doesn't believe what he's saying.
	And therefore, maybe because I'm leaning forward, I'm wrong.
	And now you're saying, Steph, you're wrong because black holes.
	And... I appreciate.
	I could be wrong. Yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, good heavens. There's no infallibility under sun or moon.
	But the challenge is to not tell me that I'm wrong because of an analogy.
	The challenge is to show me through reason and evidence or either one is fine how I am logically incorrect.
	Saying, Steph, there are black holes that warp space-time and therefore your thinking is incorrect is not thinking.
	That's an attempt to provoke insecurity through analogy.
	And saying that you're worried about me is, I mean, I guess I appreciate that, but it's not an argument, right?
	Well, then please take it just as a hypothesis.
	I would say there are topics about which you can think in many different ways, and there are topics about which you can think in just one or two ways.
	And you don't know this.
	You can think of many alternatives in one area, let's say relationships, but when it comes to market, you can think only in one way about market.
	And I can think in several ways about the market.
	I think this is limiting your potential here.
	Okay, so I can only think one way, but thinking in many ways is better and my potential is limited.
	I think that the key thing that you said earlier is where I'll end this conversation.
	You said it's not about logic, and from that standpoint, I would certainly agree with you.
	Mike, who's next? All right, Francois, you're up next.
	Go ahead, Francois. Hi, thank you.
	Hi, Stéphane, and we've met before, but I like your show a lot, and thank you, and thank you for having me there.
	I have a personal question, but I don't know if I'm allowed to...
	Say a few remarks about the previous scholar or not.
	Please. It is your show.
	I mean, I'm just trying to facilitate.
	I have a remark for the previous scholar who wanted to promote his resource-based economy or whatever crypto-socialist scheme was there.
	And I noticed that he seemed...
	Intent on things as being a communication problem when actually what matters is an incentive problem.
	The problem is not knowing, oh, I want more resources.
	Everyone wants more resources.
	The problem is having, well, as you said, rights who decides which resource goes where, but also...
	How people are going to be incentivized to do the right thing.
	And even inside a company, I was recently working at a company where there were a lot of organizational issues.
	And when I tried to talk to the top manager in my department, he also only saw communication issues.
	Oh, we're going to solve these communication issues.
	And you couldn't even, like, programs of incentive didn't even register with him.
	Yeah, I mean I get frustrated with the resource guys because it's just such a moving goalpost.
	And also contradictory information doesn't slow them down.
	So if somebody says to me price is not relevant internal to a corporation, I mean that's just – I mean if price wasn't relevant, you pay everyone a bazillion dollars if price wasn't relevant internal to a corporation.
	And they talk about things that they haven't studied.
	They talk about things that they haven't had any direct or even indirect experience of.
	And that, I think, is indicative of – to me, it's just immature.
	Non-thinking, right?
	So if your argument is that we can run society like a family and there are children in families that you don't charge, it's like, okay, well, who are the children in society?
	Well, no, that analogy – all they do is they make claims and then you point out logical inconsistencies and they say that you're incorrect and then that you're a black hole.
	I mean this is just silly, right?
	But it's important to expose people to silliness so that they can spot it and recognize it.
	So go ahead if you like with your question.
	Yes. Okay.
	So my question as such is that I'm, I think, a guy with a lot of potential.
	I think I'm very intelligent, etc.
	But I'm a vast underperformer and underachiever.
	And Every time people ask a question in your show, you go back to their childhood and I can indeed see that I'm repeating some patterns of things I've lived in my childhood and that makes me very worried because I now have a daughter and I'm wondering how I'm going to escape doing to her what's been done to me even in a reduced way.
	Well, Francois, I appreciate that attempt at self-knowledge, but you have to remember the whole problem is the price system.
	I'm just kidding. That's great.
	That's really great that you're recognizing these kinds of things.
	How old is your daughter? A year and a half now.
	Oh, fantastic. Good for you.
	Good for you. I mean, for thinking about these things and so on.
	I think so far she's happy and so far I'm not doing too much wrong, but I can already see me...
	Neglecting her, relatively speaking, emotionally.
	I know I had some emotional neglect when I was a kid, and that probably, like, accounts for a lot of my insecurities.
	But I see me doing that to her to a point, and I'm worried.
	Okay, so how do I go from understanding these issues, this childhood trauma, how do I go from knowing to doing, or...
	Well, okay. So the first thing to do is, in my opinion, and if you don't mind this, I'll try to be insistent, is I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions.
	I need short answers.
	I know that you have a French background.
	I still need short answers.
	Of course. So can you tell me a little bit about the emotional neglect that you experienced as a child?
	Well, I think that for a long time my father was emotionally out of the picture until he had got health problems and then he became more open emotionally.
	He was often just locking himself out in his office and I wouldn't see him for the whole day and he wouldn't get involved in our life or in our education until we were old enough to To learn mathematics, he was always good at teaching mathematics.
	That was his job and his love.
	And how old were you when your father became more involved?
	Maybe I was like an adult.
	I don't know. Oh, so basically you didn't feel much connection with your father until you were an adult?
	Yeah, until I was not an adult, but like an adolescent.
	And my mother...
	She was never a very emotional person.
	She had a strong sense of duty and sense of justice, and she did, like, do everything for us, but it was never...
	She was never a warm person or emotionally...
	What do you mean when you say she did everything for you?
	That sounds like a very wide blanket.
	I don't do everything for my daughter, right?
	I mean, I try...
	I just don't, right? Yeah, I mean, she did all the chores.
	She cared for education.
	She also tried to impose her values.
	And she did some spanking, which I reckon is wrong.
	Although she didn't do...
	Not that often.
	I mean, I don't remember how often, but...
	Just roughly. You know...
	Maybe once a month.
	It could be like not at all for a few months and then some months, several times a week.
	But it was never like in a row at a time and then not at all for months.
	Usually it was prompted by our not behaving in school or whatever or something.
	No, no, no, no.
	Oh my god, I have to say this every time.
	Okay, okay, yes, sorry.
	No, listen, this is what abuse victims say.
	Yes. My husband beat me because his dinner wasn't warm enough.
	My husband beat me because I wasn't wearing makeup when he came home.
	My husband beat me because he thought the pair of shoes I bought were too expensive.
	Sure. My husband beat me because the children were too loud.
	You understand? What would you say to someone like that?
	Yes, I say that the prompt is not either an excuse or it's the explanation.
	It's just a prompt and she had to will it and she had indeed, she wanted, that's how she understood discipline and she was wrong.
	And that's indeed abuse.
	And I remember after leaving home and coming back home and seeing her abuse my sister, I remember once it all fell down.
	Wow! And that's the day I realized how I had been abused.
	Because by seeing her trying to, like, abuse my sister, but, like, learning her violin lessons, I could see the abuse that I had suffered when I was living with her.
	And it all...
	I just want to be really clear and never let it pass when people say I caused or what I did to bring about the abuse.
	Yes. Okay.
	I just want to be really, really clear about that.
	Yes, I meant more prompt than cause.
	I think you understand what I mean.
	I mean, my mother would...
	Okay, but let me sort of tell you because when people...
	Also, the reason I paused when you said my mother did everything for us, there's this funny thing where there's a story in society and just be patient for a sec because I think this is important to your motivation issues and so on.
	There's a story in society which is that...
	Parents do stuff for their children and that creates an obligation.
	Or parents do stuff for their children and that means that they're kind.
	And this is as ludicrous as me sending $100 to a charity and then sending a bill for $100 to that charity.
	Of course. Right?
	I mean, we owe our parents absolutely nothing because they fed and clothed us.
	Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
	We owe our parents, like we owe everyone in the world, justice, which is a true apprehension of moral stature.
	You've given a number of excuses for your mother.
	The first is she did everything for us.
	The second is this is how she understood discipline.
	So what? I'm not sure you know that for sure as the victim.
	The other thing too is that she should learn about how to be a parent when she's a parent.
	People who go driving without a license get thrown in jail.
	And it's a lot safer to drive without a license than it is to spank children because one is only possible harm and the other is certain harm.
	So I just want to point out that if you're going to start making excuses...
	No, I thoroughly agree with you that she did wrong and there's no excuse for that.
	There's an explanation which was, I mean, relatively speaking, she was much as abusive than she was abused, but that's an explanation, that's not an excuse.
	No, that's not an explanation.
	An explanation is deterministic.
	Right? I was abused.
	I was abused. Why am I not an abuser?
	Right? That is back to the issue of free will, if you want.
	Sorry, hang on a sec.
	We don't need to philosophically understand the arguments for free will to find out if your mother was responsible.
	Listen, listen. All who punish accept free will.
	All who punish children accept free will.
	Now, some people punish dogs.
	But they generally punish dogs because they think the dogs are bad, right?
	I mean, they probably projected more free will on the dogs than dogs actually have.
	But all who punish children say that they are punishing their children because the children did something wrong, made a bad choice, disobeyed, were careless, were foolish.
	And so we know for certain...
	I bet you your mother didn't spank you saying, I had a bad day.
	I need to take it out on someone.
	Bend over. She didn't say that.
	You said to me, it came about because you did something wrong or you did something disobedient or something like that.
	And therefore, she punished you because you had the choice to do something better.
	You did something worse and therefore you must be punished.
	And so she imposed the standards of free will on you when you were a little boy.
	And therefore, she fully accepts the standards of free will.
	And therefore, she made the choice to not learn better parenting.
	She made the choice to spank.
	She made the choice to not sit down with your father and confront him about his emotional distance.
	I mean, if I spent two hours not talking to my daughter when I wasn't working, do you know what my wife would say?
	Hey, what's going on?
	Why are you guys not...
	Why are you guys not connected? Is there some problem?
	Is there some distance? Are you upset?
	Because that's what we do as parents is we make sure our own parenting is good and we make sure that the other person's parenting is good.
	So if you were an adolescent before your father began to take even an abstract intellectual interest in you, then your mother made the choice to have a child with that person and also then to let that person be a distant and absent father for 15 years.
	These are 100% her choices, 100% her responsibility.
	There are no explanations.
	There are no excuses because no explanations or excuses are offered to or accepted by children.
	Were you ever about to get spanked and then were able to offer an explanation which prevented the spanking?
	Yes, of course.
	Okay, tell me that.
	Tell me what happened.
	Well, there was an argument, but in the end, if she thought that I breached the code of conduct that she imagined was necessary, then she would spank, or she wouldn't, if I could argue my case according to her own standards.
	But, I mean, once again, I'm not here to...
	To make excuses for my mother, I'm more worried about how not to propagate… I'm working on that with you.
	I'm working on that with you.
	Look, when you have… I can't remember how you put it.
	You said that you were underutilized or failing to achieve your potential?
	Yes. I think that's… That's because you are providing some sort of excuse for yourself that permits you to not achieve your potential.
	So if I hear someone who says, I'm making a lot of excuses for myself, the first thing I'm going to look at is who else have they made excuses for in the past?
	Yes. Like somebody says to me, I speak Esperanto.
	My first question is, who taught you Esperanto?
	I mean, you didn't just come up with it on your own, right?
	Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
	But once again, even assuming this is, I mean, okay, so she, for whatever reasons, including most importantly her own, she failed.
	And the context where she was, well, she failed.
	Okay, how am I going to fail?
	You're still making excuses.
	You're still making excuses because the word failure has no moral content.
	Right? Yes. Yes.
	Because the word failure covers many, many things, the vast majority of which has no moral content.
	Okay. If I fail to do a proper flip on a trampoline, there's no moral content to that, right?
	Probably not. But okay, let's say she was...
	Wait, wait. What do you mean probably not?
	Hang on, hang on. What do you mean probably not?
	Okay. No, no, no.
	You're right. It's a word that deliberates you more in neutral.
	Which means that you're still making excuses.
	And I'm not criticizing you for that.
	I'm really not. I'm not trying to say that you're doing anything wrong or bad in any way, shape, or form.
	It's just that. Okay, so what would you use in this case?
	Well, that my mother chose to be abusive.
	Yeah, she was abusive.
	She chose to be abusive and she...
	Yeah, she was abusive.
	I mean, to a certain point.
	I mean, I've heard cases in your show that were like a zillion times more abusive, but that doesn't make...
	In the end, she's still like transgressed.
	She did the wrong thing and she chose to do the wrong thing and okay, but...
	And non-interaction with children is also abusive.
	Yes. So your father chose to be abusive by not interacting with you.
	Sure.
	to grow, to develop, to get a sense of their own potential, to learn how to negotiate, to learn how to interact, how to have conversations, to develop social skills.
	You cannot morally have a child and then not interact with that child.
	And I'm not saying your father never interacted with you.
	I understand that.
	Sure.
	But this was very destructive to not interact with your children.
	Nobody forced him to have children.
	I assume your mother didn't drug him and extract semen from his balls with a turkey baster, right?
	So nobody forced him to have children, but once you have children, you have a responsibility.
	If you don't want to interact with your children, then damn well give the children up to someone who will.
	Yeah. Because you can't have any more responsibility in your life than you assign to your parents.
	Let me say that again.
	You cannot have any more responsibility in your life than you assign to your parents.
	If you think your parents are like dominoes from their history, then you are going to be like dominoes with your history.
	You cannot have any more will in your life than you ascribe to your parents or your teachers or your authority figures or your priests or anything like that.
	The moment you start stripping away choice...
	And will and freedom and moral responsibility from your parents, you will start stripping it away from yourself because our brains are universalizing machines.
	This is why it is so impossible to segregate.
	Let me finish. This is why it's so impossible to segregate the rules that we make.
	Everybody wants to have different rules, right?
	But we don't have different rules.
	We don't have different rules.
	And Deep down, whatever we forgive our parents for, we forgive ourselves for.
	Now, if our parents have earned our forgiveness, if they've done us wrong and they've earned our forgiveness, fantastic.
	I could not be more pleased.
	But if we make excuses for our parents and we say they are not responsible for what they did or they were doing the best they could but the circumstances they had or they didn't know any better or they weren't really in charge or they weren't really in control or they had a bad childhood, all we're doing is we are making exactly the same excuses for ourselves.
	Deep down. I was able to develop my own strength of character and willpower by giving strength of character and willpower to my parents.
	By refusing to pretend that they were sort of dandelion seeds blowing in the wind, by ascribing them full moral responsibility, I was able to gain full moral responsibility for myself.
	And this is why I'm chipping away It's a perfectly natural response.
	And it's a healthy response when you're a child.
	But if you're concerned about your own lack of motivation, then I would argue that you need to assign full responsibility to everyone around you.
	100% responsibility.
	And also, every adult around you Gets 1,000 times the moral responsibility that you had as a child.
	At least, if not a Googleplex, as my daughter would say.
	If not, nearly infinite.
	Every adult around you has thousands of times more moral responsibility than you have or had as a child.
	That's what I'm saying.
	You're sort of giving me a scenario where the tail wags the dog and somehow your choices as a child provoke your mother's And I'm just telling you that your mother wouldn't believe that fundamentally because she acted in the opposite manner.
	All who punish children fully accept moral responsibility, free will, and choice.
	And they, by punishing children, say the child should have known better, the child should have listened, the child should have understood.
	And schools do this all the time.
	Schools do this all the time.
	I never got a single pass in school for my abusive household.
	I never got it.
	Nobody ever said to me, well, Steph, I mean, obviously you can't study.
	Your household is insane, right?
	You're hungry. You're scared of getting evicted.
	Your mother hasn't gotten out of bed for three weeks.
	So you don't have to take this math test right now because we've got other kids whose moms are great, healthy, wonderful science teachers.
	So we understand you come from a very difficult background, a very difficult environment.
	No, I was scored the same as every other goddamn child.
	And I'm like, okay, I get that.
	I get that. So circumstances doesn't mean a goddamn thing.
	Doesn't mean a goddamn thing.
	You get judged the same no matter what.
	That's when you're a child and have no control over your environment.
	I did not get to claim bad childhood, bad history.
	I mean, Jesus, the kids, I mean, everybody knew it.
	I was coming to school in clothes with holes in them.
	I probably smelled like pig pen from Peanuts.
	My mom never showed up to a single parent-teacher meeting.
	My mom would put down the wrong grade on my paperwork.
	She didn't even know what grade I was in.
	I forged my mother's signature half the time.
	Right? I mean, oh God, now I'm going to get a call from my guidance counselor.
	Right? But there was no excuse for me based upon my environment when I was 6 or 7 or 8 or 10 or 15 years old.
	I was held to exactly the same standards as a helpless, dependent, and abused child.
	I was held to exactly the same standards as everyone else.
	My history, my circumstances, my environment counted for nothing.
	And I am somebody who has had the extreme pleasure and occasional misfortune to have truly listened to what society's moral rules were.
	And I was told in no uncertain terms that truly victimized environment was no excuse.
	Now, if it was no excuse for me to be the victim of abuse, Then how could it possibly be?
	How could there possibly be any excuse for my victimizers?
	Right? That would be like saying, well, you're in prison.
	You're in prison, so you have to have as good a tan as everyone else who's out of prison, or we're going to beat you.
	Right? And that would make no sense.
	I mean, but these are the rules that society has.
	It doesn't matter if you're in prison, you better have as good a tan as everyone else.
	Too bad. Doesn't matter.
	Irrelevant. Okay, fine.
	I get it. I get it.
	So circumstances are no excuse whatsoever.
	So then, no parents, no teachers, no politicians, no preachers, no adults of reasonably sound mental competence can claim circumstance or excuse.
	I mean, if my own childhood was no excuse for underperforming in school, if my childhood was no excuse for underperforming in school, Thank you very much.
	The school or to leave my family as a child, people have the full capacity to leave bad marriages and to abandon parenting.
	If you don't like being a parent, you can drop your kids off at a hospital and somebody will find a home for them.
	So I'm really pointing this out, that when you take full moral responsibility for yourself, you can usually only get there by assigning full moral responsibility to others.
	No excuses. At all.
	Full choice. You know, the sentence that I remember from when I was a kid, I don't know, I was maybe 12 or 13, and a teacher sat me down and said, you know, you're such a bright kid, Steph.
	I mean, it's obvious. You're such a bright kid.
	I mean, my English teacher read a novel I was working on when I was in grade 8, right?
	So I was, what, 12 or 13 years old.
	I was taking – when I was in grade 8, I took a grade 13 writing course.
	Because everybody recognized that I was a great communicator and a great writer and all that.
	I remember the teacher saying, you know, if effort matched ability, you'd be an A+. You just need to try harder, you see.
	You're kind of lazy. You're coasting on your abilities, you see, Steph.
	You just need to work harder.
	You're just not, you know, you're not focused.
	You're not trying.
	It's like, hey, you fuckers, come home and spend a weekend at my place.
	And tell me how I should try harder.
	Anyway, so this is what society says to children.
	You're fully responsible. Circumstances don't matter.
	Bad childhoods don't matter.
	You're judged the same as everyone else.
	Okay, I get it.
	Then don't pull as parents, don't pull as adults any kind of excuses because that which you do not grant to six-year-olds you cannot claim as 30-year-olds.
	Okay. Okay.
	I think I agree.
	I think I understand the idea.
	But somehow, from understanding the idea that there is no excuse, indeed, no one has any excuse, and people are fully responsible for each and every of their actions and their decisions.
	And this is...
	Just because they have explanations, no explanation is an excuse, and they're still fully responsible, and I'm fully responsible, and if I fail my daughter, I will be fully responsible for each of my bad decisions, and if I choose to let down my daughter, it will be by my own choosing, though I don't know which word you would use then for a moral failing, if you don't want me to use the word fail.
	We have immorality, evil, whatever you want to call it.
	I mean we have lots of words for morally bad things, right?
	Okay. So if I choose evil, I will have chosen evil.
	Yeah. Okay.
	If I choose a small evil, it's not as bad as if I choose a greater evil, but it's still evil.
	Okay. I'm sorry.
	I appreciate your patience and I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I think you've got the hang of that.
	So my question then becomes, what is it that you want to achieve that you feel you're capable of achieving?
	There are so many things, I think.
	But for instance, most obviously, right now, I mean, not such a happy marriage because I chose badly in the past.
	Sorry, not such a happy what?
	Marriage? Relationship with my wife?
	Oh, marriage. Sorry, yeah. Got it.
	Okay. So, I will have at some point to choose...
	How to improve the situation.
	And I'm also not such a happy employment situation.
	And I would have to choose to go freelance or do something else.
	And I'm often postponing my choices, but it's also because...
	Well, partly because of insecurities and partly because of the...
	I suppose I'm afraid of the unknown and I'm afraid to just jump and do things.
	I tend to postpone and let the world decide for me.
	I suppose I tend to avoid choice.
	And so, yes, I've made bad choices in the past and I also avoid the choice of changing the things and risking to lose a lot or...
	So what are the issues... I don't go out of my comfort zone.
	Sorry to interrupt. What are the issues with your marriage?
	I think that just like my parents, I'm in a relationship where I have a good intellectual connection with my wife but not such a good...
	Compatibility in characters or...
	You mean emotionally? Yes.
	Okay. Now, you understand that you have as a model with your father emotional distance, right?
	Yes. And that's why I realized that I'm totally repeating the pattern.
	I mean, with obviously differences and I hope not as badly, but I'm repeating the pattern and that worries me.
	Right. Right. Right.
	Okay. And that's good. I mean, it should borrow you because we don't want that, right?
	So if your father is 100% responsible for his emotional distance, then you are 100% responsible for your emotional distance.
	Yeah. I'm just nagging and I apologize for that, but that's what I want to sort of point out.
	If you don't give your father any excuses, then you don't have any excuses, right?
	If you say, well, my father was the way he was because of his childhood, then you say, well, I am...
	You give yourself excuses for lowered standards, right?
	Lower standards for everyone.
	There's only one dial.
	There's only one switch for everyone that you have in your brain.
	So crank it up for your father and crank it up for yourself.
	The moment I realized that my history was an excuse for nothing, right?
	This is really, really important.
	The moment that I realized that my history...
	Was an excuse for nothing.
	Was the moment I was freed from my history.
	The great danger of history is that we use it as an excuse and remain trapped in it.
	Right? I cannot blame my history for anything.
	And therefore, I have to have high standards for myself.
	I have to have standards.
	This is what philosophy is. What is philosophy?
	Philosophy of standards independent of history.
	What has history given us? Cannibalism, religion, statism, war, child abuse.
	This is what history gives us.
	Right? Science, philosophy, medicine, biology, they say.
	Screw history. What are the standards?
	The scientist doesn't say, well, all of the prior scientists believed this, so I guess it's true.
	The scientist says, what is true?
	To break the momentum of history means that we can assign zero responsibility for our actions to that history.
	If I want to be free of my past, I must be 100% responsible for my moral choices and can blame nothing on my history.
	So you have a father...
	Who was emotionally distant but intellectually engaged, right?
	When you were suitable to his preferences.
	And you have a wife, you say, that you are emotionally distant from but intellectually engaged with, right?
	Yes. Okay.
	Now, as to how you change that, well, it's all therapy and self-knowledge and all that kind of stuff that I've talked about a lot of times before.
	But the reality is that knowing that your father was emotionally distant...
	It tells you what you need to do that is the opposite.
	There's a great old poster from demotivational posters and basically it's a ship going down and it says it could be that the sole purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
	And that's sort of how I feel about a lot of the people that I grew up with.
	All that they did was show me what not to do.
	I mean, you know, if your grandfather...
	Chokes his life out with emphysema and lung cancer at the age of 66.
	What is he telling you? Don't smoke!
	Right? As he speaks through that electric hole in his throat, right?
	Don't smoke. Yes. It's a warning to others, right?
	And to his credit, my father...
	And this is why shielding people from the negative consequences also shields us from seeing examples of what not to do.
	But anyway, like somebody dies poor because they got sick and didn't have insurance, well, buy insurance.
	I mean... And that's again, when I was a kid, if I didn't study and other kids did study, they'd say, well, those kids studied.
	In fact, I got lower grades because other kids studied because of the bell curve.
	If other kids hadn't studied, I'd have been doing better.
	So I'm just sort of pointing this out.
	Now that you know that, you have to really take ownership for doing the opposite.
	Which means talk about your feelings or talk about your lack of feelings.
	Step into the discomfort zone of doing the opposite of what was imprinted upon you.
	Okay.
	I wanted to point out that my father was also beaten blue as a kid, and he chose not to ever raise a hand on his kids.
	So he's an example of how, indeed, you could choose not to repeat at least this bad pattern that he had as a child.
	Although he was amusing in a messy way.
	Okay. Yeah.
	So now, again, you're making more excuses, right?
	I'm not saying your father is such a terrible father.
	I'm glad that he... No, no.
	I'm not saying I'm making more excuses.
	No, because you're immediately going back to something that your father did that was good or better, right?
	But you see, as a child, you didn't know anything about your father's history.
	All you knew was that your father preferred to sit in his study and do who knows what rather than spend time with you.
	So the perspectives and the excuses and all of that which we make up as adults only serve the defensive needs of our parents.
	They do not serve the truth of our experience as a child.
	As a child, I did not know my mother had been around a war, in the war-like fighting, and I didn't know any of that.
	And you as a child, at least I hope, didn't know that your father was beaten black and blue.
	The true and original experience of you as a child was that your father preferred to do almost anything than spend time with you.
	That's very painful. Now, as an adult...
	You can say, well, but he had this, that, but it's not your experience as a child.
	And until you can connect with your emotional experience as a child, you can't communicate any of your adult emotional experiences because it's like trying to build a house on a cloud.
	It just falls through, right? You need your true childhood experiences authentically processed in order to be able to communicate your adult emotional experiences to others.
	And then if you make...
	Excuses for your parents, then you are denying your original experience of being ignored and or victimized to the degree that it happened, and therefore you are denying your own feelings.
	You're saying that your feelings are incorrect and then it's no wonder why you then have trouble emotionally connecting to people, right?
	Okay.
	I think I understand and there are still – and I think I still disconnect.
	So do you have exercises to propose such as repeating to myself, I am fully responsible and my parents were fully responsible both for their success, not successes, whatever, good and their evil?
	No, no. I mean, let me ask you this.
	Again, you're taking a very intellectual approach, which I understand.
	But how did it feel to you as a child that your father was in his study all the time?
	I felt... I don't know exactly, but I didn't feel good about it.
	I know I felt neglected or I felt in need of help that was not coming.
	And I felt...
	I don't know.
	I felt deprived of something.
	I felt... I appreciate what you're saying.
	None of these are feelings. What did you say?
	Sorry? None of the words that you used are feelings.
	I felt deprived or in need of help.
	These are not feelings.
	I don't know. I don't know.
	There has been so much intellectual cover-up on top of it.
	I know I was distressed somehow.
	I get it. So let me ask you again.
	When your father would come home and go to his study and you know that you wouldn't see him again for the rest of the night, how would you feel?
	Yes. Well, after some point, I would not feel anything in particular because I was used to it.
	Okay, let's talk about before you got used to it.
	That's going back so long that I don't know.
	I don't even remember.
	Alright, let's take another example.
	When you would be out in the world and you would see other children playing with involved fathers, how would you feel?
	Maybe slightly jealous or something?
	Don't say maybe. Don't say maybe because that means you're guessing.
	And I didn't ask you to guess at what you felt.
	I asked what you felt when you would see fathers playing with their sons at a playground or a play center or the park, laughing, rolling around, tickling, whatever was going on.
	How would you feel? I felt alien to that world.
	I felt like I was coming from a different world or...
	Not feelings. And again, I appreciate you struggling with this, and I really do.
	I mean, it's a challenge, right? Because you're used to describing yourself as if you're outside yourself, right?
	It looks like this, or I can analogize it this way, but that's not the same as being in your skin.
	We don't deny feelings to rabbits, for God's sakes.
	The feelings that we have that are the most authentic are shared by the other mammals, right?
	And other mammals probably would not describe themselves, if they could, as being alienated, right?
	If a baby ape experienced paternal abandonment, how would that baby ape feel?
	I don't have words for that.
	Sorry.
	I I don't have... Can I make some suggestions?
	I'm not trying to tell you your experience, but I'll make some suggestions.
	Please. Lonely?
	Yes. Sad?
	Yes. Slightly.
	Angry? Resentful?
	No. Frustrated?
	Yes. Okay, did you say no to resentful?
	I think I said...
	Did you say resentful?
	I don't remember you saying resentful.
	I think you said something different, but that's okay.
	I don't think I was...
	I was too used to...
	As you say, I had lowered my standards, so I don't think I had resentment at that point.
	I had resentment... Later, on my father for other things, when I was 20-odd, until I came to terms with my having been abused emotionally.
	Seeing other people with their parents is not when I would be resentful.
	When I would be resentful would be when I would discover...
	Some patterns of behavior from my father and later discovered that I had the same patterns and that would make me resentful to my father both for having these patterns.
	Sorry to interrupt. They do say that intellectualism is the toughest defense.
	I think it can be true.
	How did you feel after you were spanked by your mother and particularly if your father was in the house?
	I would feel hurt.
	I would feel abuser. I would feel helpless.
	I would feel helpless and antagonized by people who should have loved me.
	And so, yes.
	I don't know.
	I'm still happy about it.
	Well, I appreciate – sorry.
	No, go ahead.
	Did I resent my parents for that?
	To a point, I suppose yes.
	It's difficult. I have so much reflexes against saying those things that I don't know...
	Can't say anything precise or useful at this point.
	So you say you have reflexes against saying those things?
	Yes, I have.
	Against your feelings? Yes.
	And why do you have resistance to that, do you think?
	I acquired that as a defense mechanism as a kid.
	Well, but whose needs does it serve for you to feel uncomfortable with those feelings?
	It's dysfunctional, I think.
	It doesn't serve anyone's needs.
	I think it's dysfunctional. Oh, come on.
	Come on. Come on. You're a smart guy.
	I'm sorry I'm going to call you on that, right?
	Let me put it to you this way.
	Let me put it to you this way. If somebody steals your car and you get it back, do they want you to press charges or not?
	No. No.
	Okay, now what emotional state would you have to be in to not press charges?
	Have forgiven or made excuse for my parents in this case or for the seizure or whatever.
	See, I knew you were a smart guy, right?
	Okay. So for you to not be angry or to not experience your childhood emotions, whose needs does it serve?
	My parents. Yes.
	Sure. It serves their needs in the way that patriotism serves the needs of the state, right?
	Yes. And that makes perfect sense to do with a child.
	As a child, if we're harmed by our parents, we really don't want the risk of escalation.
	Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
	And the risk of escalation historically or as a species was abandonment or death.
	So we do not risk escalation as children.
	In other words, we don't say, Mommy, I hate being spanked.
	I don't want you to do it anymore.
	We don't go online number 10, look up spanking and say, Mommy, spanking is shaving IQ points off me.
	If I am spanked, I am more likely to end up as a criminal.
	If I'm spanked, I have less capacity to negotiate.
	I'm going to have more social anxiety.
	I'm going to have a smaller brain size and less empathy.
	So you need to stop doing it because it's morally wrong because you told me not to hit people.
	Other children, you said don't hit other children while I'm a child so stop hitting me and it's bad for me.
	You make me eat my vegetables, stop making me feel your hand.
	Yes. Now what would have happened if you'd done it?
	I would have...
	I had an argument with my mother and at worst ended up being spanked more.
	And what would that have told you about your mother?
	If you gave her facts, science, reason and evidence about how bad spanking was but she spanked you anyway, what would that tell you about your mother?
	That she made the choice of not believing something and she's in error and that she's done something wrong and morally wrong.
	And she punished you for it.
	In other words, she didn't care about the truth.
	She didn't care about facts.
	No, because if you can make the effective case to your mom that spanking is objectively bad for you, And she cares about truth and she cares about you, then she would stop doing it immediately.
	So there's this chemical called BPA, which people freak out about them being in baby bottles.
	They ban it like that.
	Video games might be bad for children.
	Limit your screen time.
	Boom! I think that if she had believed me, she would have thought that it's difficult to convince her or anyone of anything.
	And that they want to be convinced.
	I get it. I get it.
	So what that means is that it was her prejudice and bigotries that matter, not facts.
	Like, so she couldn't say, I spanked you because that's how you help children.
	I spanked you so that you would be a good child.
	Or I spanked you so that you would learn responsibility.
	Or I spanked you... Like, she would have to say, if you gave her the case...
	When you were 10, you sent her to my video or you sent her to Alison Gopnik or Elizabeth Gershoff or whoever the spanking experts are, right?
	And you said, look, 19 out of 20 studies show massively negative results for spanking.
	Then if your mother was interested in truth, if your mother was interested in your welfare specifically, she would say, holy shit.
	Holy shit! I didn't realize that.
	I didn't realize that spanking had all of these negative effects.
	I must stop it immediately.
	I apologize to you and I need to take you to a specialist to find out if there's any way that we can reverse the brain and neurological damage that has resulted from spanking.
	You know, it's funny. Everybody's freaking out about the possibility that in football you might have brain damage after 20 years of contact sports.
	Well, Jesus Christ, for 80-90% of American parents at least, parenting is a brutal contact sport.
	How about we deal with that?
	As opposed to people who have 20-year NFL careers, who have choices as adults.
	So what it means is that if your mother were to hear the case against spanking...
	So when I put this video out and put these interviews out, the bomb in the brain, the spanking, they've been viewed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times.
	And they're at a level that a reasonably intelligent 12-year-old can understand.
	Right? Right? How many emails do you think I've gotten from 12-year-olds saying, I showed this to my parents?
	And my parents said, oh my goodness.
	I had no idea.
	I'm so sorry. We are stopping right now.
	Did you get any emails?
	Zero. Yeah.
	Okay. I'm not surprised.
	I mean, as far as I said, I can imagine that some 12-year-old boys at least are online searching for the term spanking.
	Hopefully it will lead them to this presentation, right?
	But it doesn't happen, right? And why doesn't it happen?
	It doesn't happen because parents say, I'm doing the right thing.
	I know about truth. I know about virtue.
	I know about honesty.
	I know about integrity and I'm teaching you all those things.
	And then if children bring the case against spanking to their parents and their parents, as you said, the case with your mom, you might end up being spanked again.
	Then the parents are openly revealing that they spank against reason and evidence.
	And then the kid has to say, well, why the hell do my parents want to hit me then?
	If they know it's bad for me, if the science is about as clear as you can get… I mean, if there was some food that they were feeding me that had all of these negative effects, they'd stop feeding it to me, right?
	They say, not too much sugar, not too much screen time, be sure you get your sleep, don't hit other children.
	And so, if spanking has all of these negative effects, but they still keep doing it, what does that say about my parents?
	And this information has been out for decades and decades.
	So, What would it say about parents who continue to spank when they know that's immoral and bad for their children?
	I'm cut from the show.
	Hello? No?
	Oh, can you not hear me? No, you're back.
	Yes, so I agree with you.
	At the same time, well...
	No, no, no. I asked you a question.
	What would it mean about parents who continue to spank their children when the children have made the clear, rational, moral and empirical case against spanking?
	They are not interested enough in the truth to find out and go to the bottom of it.
	No, because the kids have made the case.
	The kids have made the case. So if I said to my daughter, you need to eat this food because it's good for you, and I force her to eat it, and then she shows me the scientific studies that say...
	That it raises the chances of cancer, lowers intelligence, causes social problems, neurological problems, raises the risks of ischemic heart disease and so on.
	And I said, too bad, you're going to fucking eat it anyway.
	What would that say about me as a parent?
	That you care more about your authority than about the truth, that you're making a choice against your...
	I'd be saying, I don't want facts to interfere with my sadism.
	Yes, I know.
	Let me stop you just a minute because it's hard to find a standard of proof that everyone can agree with.
	I mean, if people would say, oh, the science says, well, official science says things about the climate that are actually quite controversial.
	No, I understand that.
	Sorry to interrupt. I understand that there's gray areas in science for sure.
	Sure, I get that.
	The American Academy of Pediatrics says no spanking.
	Lots of doctors groups say no spanking.
	The American Psychological Association says no spanking.
	19 out of 20 studies find negative results.
	It's about as much of a consensus as you're ever going to get.
	This is not like climate science where like 51% of climate scientists think that it's real and man-made, right?
	And so that's sort of one example.
	The second thing is if there's a doubt, then surely you stop doing it, right?
	If there's a doubt, let's say that, well, it's maybe only 80% true that spanking is going to cause IQ point losses and risks of future diseases and lack of social skills and oppositional defiant disorders and future probability of – future probability of criminality.
	Let's say that the parent thinks, well, maybe it's only 50% likely to do that.
	Well, would that parent then say to you, well, you might as well smoke because like only a third of smokers die from smoking-related causes.
	No, we say to people, don't smoke.
	Because the risk is there.
	Right? So that's what we say to people in society.
	We say, if there's a risk, at least refrain from the behavior until you can sort it out more.
	Does that make sense? Yeah, but probably that sounds a bit too much like the so-called precautionary principle, which I think is bunk.
	Sometimes you have to make choices in ignorance.
	Jesus Christ, did you wear a helmet as a kid?
	No, not at all.
	Okay, it's now legal. Like, you have to wear a helmet as a kid now, on a bike.
	What? You do.
	I mean, here in Canada anyway, right?
	You have to wear a helmet as a kid because there's a precautionary principle.
	Let me ask you this. Did you receive any inoculations or vaccinations as a child?
	I did. Okay.
	So is your mother comfortable with the precautionary principle?
	I don't think she is.
	I don't know. Oh, come on.
	Come on. Stop at the defending.
	If you vaccinate a child, it's because you are taking a precaution, right?
	Yeah, but that's very different from the so-called precautionary principle.
	But yeah, taking precautions is good.
	Taking precautions is different from the precautionary principle?
	Yeah, the precautionary principle is...
	You know I'm now talking to your mom, right?
	Yes, I know. Okay, as long as you know.
	The precautionary principle is a theory advanced by politicians to justify the fact that in the end the politicians must take whatever...
	I'm not saying the spanking is like Pascal's wager.
	You make the consequences so negative that you change the behavior even if the possibility is tiny.
	The link between spanking and dysfunction is far higher than the link between smoking and disease.
	We as a society don't say, well, yes, smoking is great because it increases your concentration, because it helps you relax, because it gives you something to do with your hands, because it gives you a way to introduce yourself to strangers.
	I totally agree with you and I think the evidence is, at least as far as I'm concerned, I'm convinced and I'm not going to smack my daughter.
	My mother didn't see the evidence.
	She might have been convinced by the evidence or not if she had seen it.
	I cannot make the hypothesis.
	The thing is... Well, give it to her now.
	Give it to her now and see how she reacts.
	Okay, I will.
	That's actually a very good point.
	I think I will actually do that and I will see how she reacts.
	Okay. Well, good.
	I think that will also help get you in touch with some childhood emotions, right?
	Because if I had unwittingly been doing something that was really bad for my daughter… Yes.
	…right? I mean if I had – like if as a parent, I had read no books on nutrition and knew nothing about nutrition at all and I fed my daughter a sweaty diet of everything she wanted like sugar and fat and all that kind of stuff and that made her sick and harmed her development… I would feel like if I discovered that as an adult later on and it was too late to fix it or at least to prevent it from occurring,
	I'd feel like my heart was on an express elevator ride down to the center of the earth and I don't know that I would ever sleep again, right?
	And it's fear, partly it's fear of making those mistakes as a parent that has me read all these parenting books and has me interview all these parenting experts and all that kind of stuff, right?
	Okay. And so if your mother finds out that information was available to her that she did not get, that has resulted in harm to you, it will be instructive to see her response.
	Indeed. I think I will definitely try that.
	And I think that would be my strongest suggestion as to what to do for the next stage because...
	In my opinion, your personality and the alter egos of those around you as a child are all kind of mixed in and you're not aware when they move in and move out to defend themselves.
	I'm a big fan of internal family systems therapy, so you might want to look at something like that.
	It certainly was very helpful to me.
	No, that's Richard Schwartz.
	May the power of the Schwartz be with you.
	Yeah, Dr. Richard Schwartz.
	He's actually been on the show and you can see internal family systems therapy and all that stuff.
	But listen, I'm going to move on to the last caller, but I really, really do appreciate your call.
	Thank you so much.
	No, don't apologize.
	You did a great job. It's my choice as to the length of the call, so don't apologize.
	Remember, I am 100% responsible for my choices.
	If the call goes long, don't apologize to me.
	That's my choice. I'm going to hold on to that like grim death.
	But thank you so much for your courage and persistence in the call.
	Thank you. The last caller actually just dropped off.
	Let me try and add her back in.
	Oh, she's still there.
	She wants to be added back.
	She knows that it was Sunday morning sausage fest, right?
	What's she going to wear?
	Hello? Are you there, Tess? Hello. Go ahead.
	Hi. I heard you say you wanted to last caller.
	I'm sorry. Did you just fall asleep waiting for your turn?
	Is that what happened?
	No. I'm sitting here drinking a cup of tea wondering if I'm ever going to get on and then I hear you say last caller and then I went to press the unmute button and I pressed the hang up button.
	So that's the way things work.
	No problem. Yes. Well, hello anyway.
	Hello to you. How are you doing?
	It's lovely, lovely to speak to.
	I'm good. So firstly, I just really want to say thanks for everything that you do and I'm listening to you a lot and I love the way your brain works.
	So please just keep producing stuff because it gives us lots to think about.
	I appreciate that. Thank you so much.
	So I'm sorry to do this to you, but I want to speak about the resource-based economy again.
	Please do. So it's been a bit of a crazy thing, your little thing with Peter Joseph and it's made me think about a lot of stuff.
	Hey, I don't have little things, man.
	I don't have... I'm just kidding.
	Go on. So my main issue is obviously the fact that it won't be voluntary.
	So I can't get past any idea that forces people to do certain things, which seems to me quite reasonable, right?
	That's the... You mean it's reasonable to be against other people wanting to initiate the use of course?
	You had a whole cluster bomb of double negatives in there.
	Sorry. Yeah, we're on the same part.
	Violations of the non-oppression principle, double plus on good.
	Okay. Double plus, good.
	So it seems to me that for the RBE to work, everybody in the world has to be involved because they have to pull all the resources in an inventory of the globe and then figure out a way to safely distribute them because...
	It seems that the people who believe this will work don't trust that the general public and the free market is able to efficiently and safely and responsibly use the resources that we have on the earth.
	So they've come up with this idea of the resource-based economy and everyone has to be part of it.
	Sorry, let me just clarify that again for people who are jumping in late.
	So I don't require that all other podcasts in the world be shut down in order to claim that I'm successful as a podcaster.
	So I welcome competition from other podcasters.
	I've helped people set up their own podcast.
	I've helped them technically. I've given them advice.
	I've actually sent and bought equipment for people who I think I sent a very expensive microphone to the wonderful Brett Vernant from School Sucks project.
	And so I'm very happy to help Other people, I've helped coach people on speeches and all that kind of stuff.
	So I don't require that other people not talk in order for people to listen to me.
	In fact, I want more people to get into podcasting so that they find my show and listen more.
	And so... This is what I was trying to get to with the point with the caller earlier is that if you have a more efficient way of doing things, the free market will adapt to that.
	If you have an algorithm or some sort of centralization that is more efficient than the free market.
	In other words, if you have a city which says you come here and you don't have to work and you have another city which says you come here, you have to work, most people will kind of want to go.
	If it's a good idea, you don't have to force anyone to do it.
	If it's a good idea, you don't have to force anybody to do it.
	Like you said, I can't figure out why if they've got such an amazing program or system that is going to solve some problems, why haven't they already put it out there and sold it to us in a voluntary way?
	Because if it's good, we'll do it for sure.
	If they can produce a car for $10, they'll take over the car market.
	And if using that same technology they can produce a tablet for a dollar, they'll take over the tablet market.
	And there's nothing that stops them.
	If they have a more efficient way to produce and distribute things, they will get investment and they will produce those things.
	But the fact that they say we can't have money means that they believe that they cannot compete with a monetary system, that a monetary system will win every time.
	And that seems to be such fundamental insecurity.
	I think that they believe that it's not so much...
	I think that they need to get rid of the money thing so that without money, people's brains will be reconditioned into a more gentle way of trading or something, which I think you sort of promote the solution as being peaceful parenting and bringing up people in that way to sort of purify their minds again away from the sort of dog-eat-dog environment.
	And sorry, let me just sort of be clear about that.
	So if we just take one tiny aspect of the hyper-regulatory state or the growth of the state...
	Which is that if everything else had remained constant, our taxes gone up, the national debt, the military-industrial complex, the welfare state, you name it, right?
	Crappy public schools. If all of that had remained constant, but government regulations had remained at their 1948 levels, which was not like everything was unregulated at that point, then Americans would be approximately five times richer than they are now.
	Four to five times richer.
	Average income in America, I don't know, 30 or 40K, whatever it is, right?
	So we're talking $150,000 to $200,000, even if one tiny aspect of the state had remained relatively small.
	Can you imagine if we'd had a full-on stateless society?
	People would be 10, 20, 30 times richer and they barely need to work.
	So if you want to have people not work and have tons of resources and so on, We'll just minimize the state and we'll just do fantastically.
	I mean, if all people had was $150,000 or $200,000 on average per year right now, I think they'd think that's pretty great.
	And that's just one tiny aspect of eliminating state power.
	But sorry, go ahead. Yeah, so that's definitely one way to get what we want in an environment where we don't have to work, which it seems that that's what...
	These people really want.
	It's almost like they just complain that you have to work for a living and that you have to go out there and chop trees or grow food or whatever it is to survive on the planet and the fact that we have to do that, I think they get frustrated and they just want to will it right away.
	I'm sorry to interrupt. I've been having met a bunch of zeitgeistrists online and in person.
	The idea of those noodle arms chopping away at trees and doing hard manual labor just seems to me kind of...
	And that's why I love what you said about...
	I really think that you were very brave in saying so, and I love your courage with the things you talk about.
	When you identified them as people who are like children, and they just want to go back to that comfortable state where they are provided for.
	Well, sorry, to be precise, they're not...
	Like children, they are – at least the argument goes.
	I'm not saying it's a final proof.
	But they are adults, survivors of unprocessed childhood trauma.
	I mean my daughter is a child and she loves to work.
	I mean when I go clean the toilet, she's like, I want to come help.
	I want to scrub. I want to – all that.
	She loves to work and she works very hard at putting – right now at the moment, she's taking all of her colored scarves.
	And making the living room and dining room both beautiful and unpossible because it's like this massive kaleidoscopic LSD spider has crapped its webs all over everything.
	Half the time I'm tripping over everything.
	But it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work.
	And so she takes care of her toy kitty.
	I mean, she's working all the time.
	And so I think it is unmet childhood needs carried over into adulthood.
	Yeah. And you hope that you can create a future where those unmet childhood needs are going to be met and then you'll be happy.
	But it's also unconscious.
	Anyway, so I just want to be – they're not like children in that sense.
	Children are not zeitgeistrous.
	You know, my daughter is not. Let's take all my toys, set up a central repository and distribute them to all the children in the neighborhood.
	She's quite a little cat.
	She might trade them to you or loan them to you if you're really close.
	But anyway, go ahead. Good.
	So basically I'm just trying to exhaust any possibility of how this idea could possibly be something that is worth thinking about.
	And so I'm just thinking that the only way it could ever work is if initiating force and forcing people to be a part of it is okay.
	And the only case when this is okay for a non-aggression principle is in self-defense.
	And so what I'm thinking of is that Nature is our only dictator in life.
	We're quite free to do whatever we want, but it's nature's laws that we have to comply to and bow to.
	It is our one limitation.
	And I think in this case, it's perhaps that they are using the idea that the environment is such a bad shape that unless we all band together and figure out a way to protect ourselves from the possible destruction of the resources and therefore humanity, We need to, in self-defense, force people to use their resources better because they simply don't have the knowledge or they're ignorant or whatever it is that we're just stuffing things up.
	So it's kind of like self-defense forcing.
	And then in a way, it's nature that is actually initiating force on us, not each other, if that makes any sense.
	No, look, I think that's a fine argument.
	I mean I think that if you could say that our existing system is going to lead to the destruction of humanity, then without a doubt there could be reasons and rational justifications for reacting to it in terms of self-defense.
	So I can fully understand that.
	I think that's what a lot of them think.
	Obviously, everyone loves their environment, but I feel like I've come from a bit of an environmental activist past, and I'm pretty concerned about the environment's shape at the moment.
	I'm sure many people are, and they seem to be really, really concerned to the point where they think that it's worthwhile to have this system, and it's not just worthwhile, but it is essential that we do this in order to protect ourselves from destruction.
	So I I think that might be an excuse.
	But there's a couple of problems with that.
	I mean, just a few spring to mind, and I'm not going to say this is any kind of clincher, but there's a couple of problems with the argument.
	First of all, you could say that about anything.
	Religion is going to lead to the destruction of humanity.
	Therefore, we need to take kids away from religious parents.
	Exactly. Advertising corrupts children to the point where they want things that are bad for the environment.
	Therefore, we need to restrict freedom of speech for advertisers.
	If you create It's a Pascal's wager, basically.
	Like, if you create enough of a disaster scenario, you can justify anything.
	So, as a principle, the barrier of proof required for a disaster scenario where you're going to strip all human beings of their rights must be enormously high, right?
	Yeah, pretty diastrate.
	Does that make sense? Like, oh my god, the barrier of proof must be staggeringly high, not only that you have the correct diagnosis, but also that you have the correct cure.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And also, when it comes to environmental degradation due to technological advances or progress or whatever, You know, like, who's to say how far we're willing to go in terms of what we sacrifice in the environment and pollution and stuff for the things that we get in return from progress.
	So we've already, you know, come through history with sacrificing quite a lot of the environmental health, but it seems to have been worth it for certain things.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	But this argument that somehow technology or the advancement of society has degraded, The environment, I think, is not supportable historically.
	That's not what I mean at all.
	I just mean that when certain things of the environment might have been damaged slightly, there might be another creation that's come along that wouldn't have been able to come along unless that degradation had occurred, and that might even fix that environmental problem.
	So I'm not saying that it's always just in decline, but it's sort of like...
	It's an opinion about what is worthwhile using with those resources.
	And so the computers, you know, if you were to have an inventory of all these resources, then how would you decide whether or not that person's invention, which would use this resource, is worthwhile?
	And given all the other things that could be used for an invention or, you know, do you know what I mean?
	Does that make sense? No, I understand that.
	I mean I sort of – I mean I lived in the woods for like a year and a half panning for gold and like lived in a tent throughout winter and stuff.
	Nature is a total bitch, frankly.
	I mean I'm glad to have a human shield between myself and things like cholera and smallpox and polio and wolves and things like that.
	I mean diphtheria is a pretty bad form of pollution, right?
	I mean smoke in your house because you can't get electricity.
	So smoke in your house that kills you of lung cancer when you're 35 is a pretty bad form of pollution, right?
	The pollution that is sort of negative to human health that is released by a power plant is far less than having everybody individually cut down trees and burn stuff in their house because they don't want to die of cold in the winter, right?
	So I mean I don't really view the history of the world as us coming from the Garden of Eden and corrupting it with our infernal satanic mills and machines.
	I view we have progressively improved our capacity to survive in nature.
	A really bad form of pollution was the bubonic plague, which killed like a third of all Europe.
	I mean that's some pretty bad stuff right there and the fact that we have water filters and water cleaners and sanitary sewage systems and so on means that we don't drop dead of I think that dentistry is a wonderful step forward in keeping the pollution of tooth bacteria out of your body.
	It could cause heart attacks and all that kind of stuff.
	I think there's been this progressive march forward.
	Now, there have been massive, massive problems.
	The governments are by far the biggest polluters.
	War is a massive polluter.
	The amount of oil used in one day in Iraq and Afghanistan by the American military is equivalent to all of India, whether it's a billion people or whatever.
	There is massive environmental destruction that occurs, but it seems to me that environmentalists tend to focus on I think we're good to go.
	I think we're good to go.
	Then I know it's just what they call a watermelon, right?
	It's green on the outside but it's red on the inside.
	It's just socialism in another guise.
	The moment they start talking about the free market and they say, well, I'm concerned about the environment, therefore free market or whatever, right?
	Then they're not looking at things empirically.
	They're just looking at things ideologically because if you were concerned about the environment and you looked at things from a fact-based standpoint, you'd say, well, first thing we need to do is get rid of governments, right?
	Yeah, no, definitely.
	At least the RBE will get rid of the pricing mechanism, the fiat currency part of it, so that will help a bit.
	Oh, yeah. How much conspicuous consumption is provoked by fiat currency and inflation where people feel they have to buy more now?
	It's crazy. Sorry, go ahead.
	You know, the value that we place on our environment, it's a completely human opinion.
	You know, it's nothing. There's such thing as the Earth's health in terms of from the Earth's point of view.
	I mean, I'm probably going to just put people out there going, ah!
	But, like, we...
	It's all right. You're talking on the Internet.
	That's going to happen, trust me.
	I mean, I do a thumbs up in the video.
	I get six million emails saying, man, you should have used the other thumb.
	That's a satanic symbol.
	It's a Rastrianism or something.
	I mean, just, yeah. How frustrating.
	Yeah, so, you know, we only value oil now because we know what it can be used for and we get frustrated that, you know, we're going out there and drilling through the Arctic because we value the way it looks or whatever, or we understand that it's important for our climate.
	I don't know, but, you know, it seems to be that all these things are very, they change throughout history depending on our knowledge and what we feel like valuing at the time and So it's not really anything objective.
	I don't know if that's the right word to use.
	But also another thing that frustrates me is that the resource-based economy idea and the whole Venus Project thing and everything, it's not a solution that would work at any point in time given any progressive civilization.
	It's almost as though they think that now that technology has gotten to this amazing stage, it's going to work.
	Whereas before it couldn't.
	It's not a gray area.
	It's a gray area. The whole progressive technology is a It's a scale of increase.
	It's not like all of a sudden we've just got the exact answer we need and now we can do it.
	Now we can have socialism.
	No, no, but this is what people who have irrational ideas always do.
	They try to piggyback on the back of rational ideas and then say, well, now with the spread of rational ideas, my irrational ideas could work.
	Originally, socialism couldn't work because it was all agrarian.
	And then when the Industrial Revolution happened, there was a massive resurgence in interest in socialism.
	And they say, well, now we have factories.
	Now we have industrial methods of production.
	Exactly. Socialism can work.
	And this is what Marx said very explicitly.
	He said, you cannot get communism from agrarianism.
	You have to go through the Industrial Revolution first.
	So they were saying, now we have machines.
	Socialism can work, right?
	And then now we have fiat currency.
	Socialism can work. Now we have computers.
	Socialism can work. It's all just nonsense.
	It doesn't work because it's irrational.
	It doesn't have anything to do. It's this old argument in computer science.
	It's a joke.
	It says, I want a computer fast enough to break out of an infinite loop.
	I don't care how fast the processor is.
	You are not breaking out of 20 go to 10, 10 go to 20.
	It's just not going to happen. Right.
	And so it doesn't work because it's irrational and more technology does not make irrational rational, right?
	I mean, more technology doesn't – I want a computer that is advanced enough to make two and two into five.
	Well, no, that's never – We're talking about such huge problems, like how to run the world better, how to have a better society.
	These are problems that need to be solved, like from the first principles, like with philosophy.
	So therefore, we have to come up with something that is an answer and is applicable at any point in time to any society that's living with whatever technologies or developments that they've got at the time, not just one that has computers or computers.
	The solution needs to be sound, fundamentally, principle-wise.
	I agree with that.
	Just out of curiosity, if you follow the movement at all, I don't, but what do the Zeitgeistrists say about Bitcoin?
	Because it seems to me that they should be enormously positive towards Bitcoin as a form of value exchange that's decentralized.
	They always want decentralized, open-source mechanisms to replace existing fiat currency price systems.
	So they must be enormously positive towards Bitcoin, at least I would assume so.
	Well, to be honest, I don't really listen to much of their stuff.
	I mean, I don't know.
	I've seen all the movies and I've been to a few meetings for Zeitgeisters, but I haven't really gone down that road since Bitcoin, since I've really looked at Bitcoin, so I don't know.
	But I don't think they would focus on that that much.
	I mean... I don't know.
	It still uses the whole idea of competition, which I think is one of the fundamental things that they're against, is the fact that you have to compete with others around you and it's a win or lose situation.
	They seem to think that anyone who has, someone else has to be without.
	But that's true for, I mean, I assume you have reproductive organs and if some man uses them, then they're unavailable to all other men.
	And I assume that you say yes or no to that process based upon your level of attraction and interest in the man and say no simultaneously, very selfishly, I might add, to the other three billion men on the planet.
	So unless they're willing to talk about the socialization of reproductive organs, it seems to me odd that they would have a problem with that, right?
	I mean, when I'm watching the Zeitgeist movies, I'm not watching all other documentaries.
	He wants me to watch the Zeitgeist movies and by the very nature of that, I'm not watching all the other documentaries.
	It just seems kind of odd that they want their system to win, to spread and yet they don't like competition.
	I just think that's kind of a contradiction.
	Yeah, for sure. On that topic of competition, I find that a really interesting thing to think about anyway because I like the idea of when you speak about negotiation, I love your definition of that where you both use your brains to come up with a solution that sometimes is even better and you both get what you want and more.
	I think when you can communicate, that is so often the case that that's what happens.
	If you have two people who can think a lot of the time, competition doesn't end up being that dog-eat-dog type situation that the IBE people talk about.
	Sorry, finish your point.
	Sorry to interrupt. No, that's okay.
	You go. I thought I was adding and it turns out I was subtracting.
	Well, because people say – and this is not just particular for the Zeitgeist movement – but people say, oh, yeah, you anarcho-capitalists.
	Why don't you put your system into place?
	You tell us to put our system into place.
	Why don't you put your system into place?
	And, I mean, the reality is I have put my system into place.
	I don't have anyone around me who advocates the use of violence.
	All of my interactions with the people I choose in my life are voluntary, win-win, peaceful negotiations.
	It doesn't mean we don't get upset with each other.
	It doesn't mean we don't have disagreements.
	But that is the world that I'm putting in in my entire career.
	My entire career is predicated on, you know, I'm going to put stuff out.
	People find value. They can choose to listen or not.
	But sorry, go ahead. Lucky for you, you don't have to come up with a whole program algorithm that can allocate resources for the whole entire world and tell everyone what to build.
	So you just have to do your own life and you're done.
	And I appreciate that. But I do think that...
	There are times in the process of implementing the non-aggression principle in your own life where you sure as hell don't feel too lucky and it would be a whole lot more fun to make documentaries about robot mommy Marxist cities.
	So it does really suck at times.
	It's like, oh man, really?
	Somebody else bites the dust?
	You know, when you have the against me argument with people and so on.
	But anyway, go ahead. I haven't had that argument yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
	Well, when you do, we'll have another chat.
	I sort of have a very lovely life.
	I've had a fantastic childhood, and I'd love you to see if you can pick a hole in it.
	And I sort of feel now...
	I feel quite under pressure now to do something great.
	What am I supposed to do?
	That's an interesting point.
	point, but I also wanted to confirm you sort of have this idea that you bring up kids in a sort of environment where they're not used to having authority, you know, at least like authority that's not based on respect or, you know, utility of that person having knowledge or something.
	Then they will grow up and think the state is ridiculous.
	And I can really say that I just cannot get around, get my head around someone telling me what to do and that being okay.
	I find that so weird.
	So I think that was probably because I had a childhood of minimal authority.
	Okay.
	No, I think it's great. Maybe one day we can do a little show where you talk about that because I obviously want to provide that information to people.
	Of course, some of the people who call in are like a childhood and stuff and all that.
	I think that's great.
	Actually, it was nice because I got a very positive sense of clarity and health from the moment you opened your mouth in the call, which is always really nice to hear.
	Congratulations to your parents.
	That's wonderful to hear. Actually, it's funny because I've been thinking about that my whole life.
	Since I was like, you know, 18 maybe.
	So like the later part, thinking how lucky I am and I feel kind of bad about it.
	Like I have to be really appreciative.
	And what is it, you know, about me that's so special?
	I've had such an amazing life and it sort of put me down a little bit in a way.
	And listening to all your shows with all the childhood issues and I'm like, oh, I really want to learn about myself.
	And I'm so eager to like learn more and find out about me and what might have happened when I was younger.
	So I was like, all right, I want to see if there is anything that I don't know of.
	And I spoke to my dad and I was like, I'm really close to my dad.
	He's amazing. He's really philosophical.
	See, right away, you're kind of in a different category than most.
	I had an issue with my childhood.
	First thing I did was talk to my dad.
	You know, that's already an unusual situation.
	People are like, maybe you should talk to your parents.
	They're like, maybe I will.
	And he actually said, like, straight away, he's like, actually, yeah, there is something that I can tell, you know, I wasn't sure if I was going to.
	And he's just like, well, when I... I'm the fourth child.
	I'm the youngest out of four.
	And he said that my third sister, so my third sister, yeah, She was a bit of a handful.
	And so my parents decided they only wanted three.
	And then when I came along, they were surprised, obviously.
	And then my dad took a while to get used to me and accept me.
	And so he said for the first three years of my life, I was sort of unloved in a way.
	And he really felt it like it wasn't just subtle for him.
	It was like he really didn't connect with me.
	He was like, was he kind of resentful?
	Like, I thought we were done this whole phase and we're not.
	Yeah. And I think also, I sort of, I asked him, I said, well, do you think that maybe you felt that way because you hated your job and you were stuck doing a job, you know, that you didn't like just to support your kids and already it was difficult and now you've got to be in the long run for a bit longer?
	And he said, not really, but I don't know, maybe...
	I don't know if that's true. But also he was with my mum and they never really had an amazing relationship.
	Like it wasn't affectionate, but they never really fought in front of us much or anything like that.
	But they didn't have like a really lovely romantic relationship.
	And they divorced when I was 14 and they waited until I was that age to do so.
	Oh, come on. What are you doing to be here?
	Wait, wait, wait. Have I had a bad child?
	I didn't say you had a bad child.
	What you're saying is, Steph, I just wish you could find some way to poke any holes in my family situation while I was on love for the first three years.
	My parents weren't affectionate in the divorce when I was 14.
	Hmm, I wonder if we might not.
	No, no, I think we have to keep looking.
	Did asteroids strike your house at any particular time?
	Did demons come out of your faucet when you turned the water off?
	Were you stuck in one of those rooms like the garbage room in Star Wars where they crush everything up and you were there with a robot who couldn't help you?
	Anyway. Well, yeah, no, and that's funny because I was thinking, is that classified as something that went wrong?
	I mean, but I feel like they did their complete best and they were fantastic and it's just a shame that they didn't have a lovely, romantic, affectionate relationship.
	And that happens. You think you fall in love with someone and then you fall out of love, but you make do and do the best you can with what situation you've got.
	Were you listening to the show earlier?
	Am I making excuses for my parents?
	Is that what you're saying? Well, I mean, gosh, that's a whole lot of conclusions.
	And what a terrible belief to have.
	I mean, maybe it's true. I don't know.
	I don't think it's true. But what a terrible belief that you might love someone enough to have.
	You're the fourth, right? Yeah, the fourth, yeah.
	Yeah, so you might love someone enough to date, get engaged to, get married, have four children, and then it just, you know, like people in the backwoods of Arkansas being met by space aliens, the love just goes away.
	Yeah, no, what do you mean?
	Like, awful to think of that.
	That's terrifying, because you're going to fall in love with someone, maybe you already are, I don't know, but you're going to fall in love with someone, and if you believe that it might just vanish through nobody's faults.
	That's kind of anxiety-provoking, isn't it?
	I'm not worried about my love with my wife vanishing tomorrow.
	Like, I guarantee you, until we're dead, right?
	We're together. I mean, she's not going to wake up tomorrow and look at me and say, you old bastard, I'm out of here, right?
	Like, I have no anxieties about that whatsoever.
	I don't think that my daughter is going to wake up tomorrow and say, you know, I really don't like you as a dad.
	You know, I've just... You seemed okay, but you know what?
	Now that I'm over four, your jokes...
	I find them too immature.
	And we keep talking about peepees all the time.
	Anyway, so... But if you have the idea that it can just vanish, I mean, isn't that kind of...
	You're going to build a life. Maybe you're going to have kids with someone.
	It can just evaporate.
	It's not even sunny out, but the lake just evaporates.
	Yeah, but I don't think it evaporated.
	I just think that they weren't rightly matched to start with, and I can see why.
	I know them both quite well, and...
	And could they not fix it?
	And why did they not know that they were not?
	What do you mean fix it to the point where they are rightly matched?
	You know, like, what do you mean? Well, yeah, I mean, because it's not like one of those Japanese game shows where you have to assume this weird Tetris-like position to get through something, right?
	Compatibility, I mean, in terms of compatibility, I don't think there's any virtuous person I'm not compatible with.
	Yeah, well, maybe...
	No, I don't know. I have no idea.
	I don't know what was...
	The problem there, but they managed to make it pleasant enough to bring up four kids, hopefully in a way that was okay.
	I'm not saying it didn't, but what I'm saying is that if you don't know why, because you have a template of, well, we love each other, we're going to have four kids, but we're not really that affectionate, and then we're going to bust out.
	Well, I can tell you what I think, actually.
	Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, why my mum and dad, yeah, weren't that close, I think, after a while.
	I think my dad began to feel resentment towards my mum because he felt that he wasn't able to do anything in life that he really wanted to do because he was trapped in the family life, or not necessarily with his kids, but I think he felt that she was making all the decisions and he wasn't free to pursue his dreams, whatever they may be. Wait a minute.
	Did your mom, like, extract semen from him while he slept?
	Yeah, no. He was a bit of a bitch.
	I mean, oh my God.
	I mean, do not use that turkey baster.
	No, sure. And that's what I said to him.
	He made the choice, right? I mean, he made the choice.
	And you say you were a surprise.
	I mean, come on. There are 16 different methods of birth control, right?
	One of which is a giant picture of the Pope in a leotard.
	But, you know, there are 16 methods of birth control, and so the idea that you were a surprise in an accident is not particularly credible, right?
	It's like saying I accidentally got a PhD, right?
	Yeah, no, no. Like, yeah, that's fine.
	Whatever. I'm sure that they realize the risks there, that I could have happened or could not have happened.
	But no, I said to my dad, like...
	Well, with three already in the can, you know, we know that there's fertility going on, right?
	It's not like... I was 55.
	I'd been infertile for 20 years.
	And then, right?
	Yeah, I know. I said to my dad, I said, you know, like you were free to leave or whatever.
	You don't have to do anything.
	And, you know, you made the decision to let her.
	He's the one who's responsible for him feeling trapped because obviously he wasn't acting in a way to make himself feel like he was free.
	Yeah. Well, and again, just from – it doesn't sound like you're a parent, but I mean from a parent's perspective, yeah, there are times when you're doing stuff you don't want to do.
	I mean I'm not going to be sitting there crawling around a McDonald's play center when my daughter is 18 or if I am, I hope somebody calls the cops, right?
	But – There are times where you feel like decisions that you've made in the past are limiting your decisions in the present.
	But, you know, you say, well, okay, but I mean, did I not know that going in?
	Did I not know that there was a risk of pregnancy?
	Did I not know that, you know, especially me with my annoying philosophy of, you know, be there for your kids and stay at home if you can.
	Did I not think that that was, you know, was that just for my listeners and not for me and all that?
	So there are times where you get shaken into or I shouldn't say it kind of creeps over you.
	You're like, have you ever been out?
	You're not cold. You're not cold.
	And then suddenly you're like, ooh, what the hell?
	Why are there icicles in my bone marrow, right?
	And that's sort of what it is sometimes with responsibility, right?
	Like you make these decisions. You make these decisions.
	And suddenly you're like, oh my God, I'm a victim.
	I am. I'm a God.
	I mean, I don't want to be. Subject to your choices, yeah.
	Yeah. But then you say, okay, well, each of these choices I made.
	You just have to sort of shake your head and get the cobwebs out, right?
	Yeah. But everything, it sounds like your dad, you know, he chose to have kids.
	He chose to be a father.
	And, you know, three years is a long time to be called to a kid who you chose to have born, right?
	Given up for adoption or whatever, right?
	I mean, I'm glad they didn't.
	It sounds like they were pretty good parents in a lot of ways.
	But if you decide...
	The other thing that happens too is there is a division of labor in marriage, right?
	I've got a whole podcast about this.
	I don't know if it's ever going to see the light of day.
	I might have to re-record it. But there's a division of labor in marriage.
	That's one of the reasons why marriage is so effective and so efficient, right?
	So my wife has stuff that she's really good at and that she does and there's stuff that I'm really good at that I do.
	We're still trying to figure out what that is but I promise you next year I'm going to come up with something maybe other than adding to her list of needs.
	But there's things that I do and there's things that she does and that division of labor is really great.
	It's one of the reasons why people who are married make more money because they don't have to do everything themselves.
	But what happens is the division of labor is giving up choice.
	To someone else, right?
	So if my wife runs the finances, then she says yes or no to stuff, right?
	And we can talk about it or whatever, right?
	But that's the way that it works, right?
	And so then if you get the advantages of the division of labor, which is the removal of choice, right?
	Like I mean if I go and work in a factory, I don't determine the market strategy if I'm working on the floor, right?
	I'm not dealing with sales and marketing strategy.
	Someone else is doing that. Right?
	And so when you specialize, you give up choice.
	You know, I go to my dentist and my dentist says, I need to do X. I'm like, well, okay.
	I'm not going to go pick up a dentist and figure it out.
	I have no desire to invent an iPhone, so I'm sure glad someone's going to do that shit for me.
	Yeah, exactly. And there may be some things you don't like about the iPhone, but you have an iPhone, right?
	Yeah. I think in good marriages, there has to be this division of labor.
	Like the people who hang on to duplicating everything, I do my dishes, you do your dishes.
	I do my socks, you do your socks.
	I vacuum my half of the bedroom.
	It's inefficient. It's just a lack of trust and it's just ridiculous.
	It just adds to your labor and complications rather than just figuring out who's better at what.
	But what happens is you give up all of this authority and this choice in your marriage.
	In the same way that you give up marketing strategies when you work on The floor of a factory.
	And what happens then is that sometimes you feel like you've given up too much power and authority.
	You don't look at the division of labor that's making you so much more effective and efficient as a human being and you just look at what you've lost.
	And this is what happens with – factory workers have this too, right?
	Like they forget that somebody else built the factory and gave them the machine and is out there selling stuff and they say, well, we're selling these widgets for $10 and I'm only getting $5.
	They don't look at the division of labor and what they're paying for to get the five bucks or whatever.
	And so the same thing can happen in a marriage where you say, well, I used to make some of these decisions for myself and now my wife is making those decisions.
	And the wife may feel that about the husband too.
	So they both like the sacrificing, but they're forgetting to see what they're gaining from the relationship in terms of outsourcing certain things.
	Is that what you mean? Yeah, like I might want to buy something and my wife says, well, I don't really think that's a good thing we could do right now.
	Yeah, my 80th tablet.
	No, I need another one, right?
	And I do.
	I use them all. I really do.
	Why do we have another headphone in the house?
	Why do we need faster internet?
	Anyway, so I may sort of say, well, I want to buy X, right?
	And she may say, well, You know, like so with my video camera is like the one I use for my show is like, I don't know, six, five or six years old and the picture wasn't very good and I wasn't satisfied with a lot of post-production and all that.
	I'm like, oh, I got a new $2,000 video camera.
	It's for the show, man. And she's like, well...
	But she trusts you that you've got that damn pat and that you understand.
	Well, no, no, no, because she runs the finances.
	Okay. Right? Now, maybe I can make a business case.
	You have to sell her what you need. But she said, well, if it's absolutely necessary.
	Well, first of all, it's not absolutely necessary.
	You already have a camera and you have three webcams.
	I'm like, yeah, but they're different.
	And you also have a tablet that takes video.
	Yeah, but it doesn't do high def.
	Anyway, so she says, look, if you feel it's absolutely necessary, but have you explored all the other alternatives?
	Right? And she – I hadn't.
	So I drove down to a camera store with the camera and I said – I showed them my video and I said, here's my problem.
	I look kind of flat. I look like a two-dimensional Pillsbury Doughboy rather than a richly three-dimensional Pillsbury Doughboy.
	And they said, oh, you need to do X, Y, and Z with your lighting and just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So when Mike was over, we experimented with it and we found, yeah, wow, this looks a lot better.
	Saves $2,000 plus tax.
	If I were her, I would have assumed that you know what you're talking about and I would have just been like, oh, okay, well, if you think you need it, you're the expert in that realm.
	I'm not going to say that you haven't done your research because I wouldn't have a clue.
	So it's like she had to babysit you through that process.
	I would have thought that she wouldn't have to do that.
	That's a pretty provocative way of putting it.
	She asked me a rational question, which is, is there any conceivable way that you can get the existing camera to work?
	Now, I had tried all the settings.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on. I had tried all the settings on the camera, and it's really boring stuff because you've got to change the setting, film it, put it back, try to...
	It takes forever, right?
	So I tried all the settings.
	I had not imagined that if I... We had to turn off one of the lights, right?
	And they said, if you turn off this light over here, you'll get richer shadows and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	I mean, I just didn't know.
	And I didn't know that I didn't know.
	I wasn't like, well, I could change the lights, but screw that.
	They're hot. But Christina pointed out to you that you might be better off going to seek some expert advice.
	Is that how she helped you?
	Men, electronics, and expert advice.
	She must just tell me to put my testicles in blender and hit frappe.
	Because as a guy, you're like, well, what do you mean?
	It's like hiring someone to put my stereo together.
	I can't do that. Anyway, look, I take some pride in my technical expertise and blah, blah, blah.
	Anyway, so So it turned out that she was right.
	We saved $22,000 plus tax and I think the videos look better and I also get to save a bit of electricity because I'm not having to have all the lights on.
	So the fact that she said no, was that a limitation?
	Not that she said no, but the fact that she said she gave me pushback on the camera purchase, well, that made sense.
	I'm grateful that she did that.
	That's the division of labor and all of that.
	Whereas if I'd have been in charge of the finances, I would have said, well, I've tried everything I know and I would have said I've tried everything.
	I just need a better camera.
	This thing is too old because that's the way it is with other technology.
	If your computer is too slow, generally, it's just a whole lot cheaper to get a new computer than it is to start upgrading bits because you don't know which is the bottleneck and you might get...
	Not fast enough memory but a faster processor or not fast enough bus but too slow a memory.
	So we just get a whole new thing.
	That's usually the way to go and plus they're so cheap these days.
	So what I'm pointing out is that there is an example where the division of labor and her being in charge of something was hugely efficient.
	And I was very grateful to her.
	And so I bought myself a $2,000 massage with gold flakes to show her exactly how in charge I was.
	Sorry, you were going to say it. As I said, the more opinions that people give forth, if you're good at communicating with each other and it's not conflicting, then it's obviously a better situation.
	You get different perspectives. So that's always a good thing.
	Yeah. So I just want to sort of point out that...
	If you're feeling trapped by the division of labor, you might want to revisit your economics because usually you're being trapped by the division of labor.
	I don't get to make any marketing decisions as a factory worker, but it's good, right?
	But I'm not sure how, to be honest, how that actually relates to what I was talking about before.
	I'm not sure in what way would I be constrained from the division of labor.
	What do you mean? No, but you were saying that your father felt that your mother was making all the decisions, right?
	Oh, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, well, yeah, well, I think...
	It's more so that he had dreams of how his life might work out.
	I think he wanted to be an astronaut or something.
	And then he ended up being an engineer in a job that he felt trapped in and he wasn't really doing what he wanted to do.
	And that was because he was in a family.
	So I think that in that way...
	So then the problem wasn't your wife.
	Yeah, I don't really understand. The problem wasn't his wife.
	The problem was his fertility and his choices, right?
	Yeah, I don't really understand in what ways my mom dominated him because for me that...
	I don't get why you wouldn't just stand up for yourself, so it doesn't make sense to me much either.
	Well, and I can tell you as well that I don't get any sense of dominance from you.
	And if your mom was like this harridan who bossed everyone around, I'm sure that you and I would have had a sharper intersection of opinions in this conversation, right?
	Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that sounds pretty… But it's worth exploring.
	I mean if I were to be so bold as to make this suggestion, which is all just nonsense, right?
	I think it's really worth exploring figuring out what happened with your parents' marriage because that is your template, like it or not, right?
	Yeah, yeah. And you sure as heck don't want to… If you can avoid it, the till death do you part thing is pretty sweet, right?
	Because I mean I can't even imagine.
	I'm 47 years old.
	The idea of going out and dating… Dear Lord, I'd rather pull out my own spleen with a ball peen.
	And so that I think is, if you can do the death till you part thing, I think it's great.
	If I can find someone who it's worth that, that will be a miracle.
	Right, but then you need to figure out, hopefully not a miracle, but then you need to figure out what happened with your parents' marriage so that the same undertow doesn't happen.
	Because then the likelihood is, as you know, that you're going to choose someone like your dad, right?
	And the fantasy of the alternate life, like I can understand that.
	I really can. I really can.
	There's a great Woody Allen film.
	I mean, okay, he's kind of creepy as a human being, but there's a good Woody Allen film where the guy who's a single guy who's dating all the time is looking at the guy with wife and kids and totally envious.
	And the guy with wife and kids is looking at the single guy who's dating all the time and is totally envious and so on.
	There is a kind of grass is greener and an alternate history wherein you feel like you could have had this great life except for, right?
	But what happens is to sustain that fantasy, you have to strip yourself of moral ownership and of will ownership of your own life.
	Yeah.
	Now when you say stuff was done unto you, the tragedy is, particularly for those around you, is you have to find a scapegoat, right?
	But you can just have regret based on your own decisions though, can't you?
	Like you can just be anxious throughout your whole life that you want to make the right decisions and make the best out of life in the time that you've got and then that fear itself It makes you constantly reflect on decisions you've made and possibly have a lot of regrets.
	That's not being a victim.
	That's just having regret.
	Is that a different thing? Well, the difference is blame, right?
	Yeah, well, you know, regret.
	You're blaming yourself, right?
	Well, I don't know that regret means blaming yourself.
	I mean, I regret that I lost a whole bunch of bitcoins, but, you know...
	I'm going to blame myself.
	I mean, what would the point of that be?
	But you're talking about a life that could have been, an alternative life where everything would have been better.
	In terms of that, you have regrets about the decisions you've made because you think that you could have made another decision that would have led to a different path and that would have been amazing.
	Okay, but the question is why wouldn't someone make that decision, right?
	If your father had been an astronaut, would he have had four kids?
	Yeah, I don't know. Probably not.
	I have no idea. And certainly, I mean, the astronauts, if you sort of follow what happened to the astronauts, I can't even believe I know this.
	It's just something stupid I read.
	The lives of the astronauts and their marriages were just catastrophic.
	I mean, astronauts in particular, their marriage is just completely crumbled, right?
	Because fame is a toxic...
	It's a toxic and corrosive thing in modern society.
	And this is why I try and stay as far away from it as humanly possible, given what I do.
	But it is very toxic.
	So, I mean, there would have been advantages for sure.
	And there would have been disadvantages, right?
	I mean, I can look at my bookshelf and say, I was writing at least a book a year before I had my daughter.
	I've written like one half of one book since.
	So I could look at my bookshelf and say, four and a half empty spaces on the bookshelf.
	Or I can look at my book.
	Right. It's like, well, what would I rather have?
	You know, those books aren't going to hold my hand when I go into the great beyond.
	So I think it's better to have the people than the stuff.
	He loves us to death.
	You know, he always says we're the best thing that's ever happened to him in his life.
	So that should give him some perspective on his life choices, right?
	If you're the best thing that's ever happened to him, then being an astronaut is like, well...
	I could have been an astronaut, but then I wouldn't have had this very best thing.
	Like, it's literally like saying, winning that lottery was the best thing that ever happened to me, but I could have taken that five bucks and bought two candy bars.
	And so I am totally short two candy bars, man!
	God! Those candy bars would have been the best candy bars ever!
	Right? If you are the best thing that ever happened to him, then the choices he made were the right choices.
	Yeah, no, yeah.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	I'm Anyway, boring topic.
	My dad. I personally don't think so, but that's boring for you, I guess.
	I just don't find there's any...
	Honestly, I think so much.
	My brain doesn't stop and it's frustrating.
	I talk to my dad a lot about stuff.
	I have a question about that sort of stuff and I just don't really know what more stones there are to turn over.
	Maybe there are more. Who knows?
	But anyway, I'm really enjoying chatting with you.
	Can we chat about other things? I've got just a few minutes.
	How much time do you have? I'm hungry.
	Just a few minutes. What have you been going?
	An hour? Three hours and 15 so far?
	Okay. Well, I... Yeah, good job.
	Well done. It's a long time.
	I want you to talk about the MECO system and my question is what does it mean to be yourself?
	I think it means to be in balance with competing resources.
	You know, like an economy is...
	Generally, it aims to be in balance, but there's always disruptive things happening, right?
	Like the balance between supply and demand tends to even out, but then according to Say's law, supply creates its own demand.
	So the demand for telephones was kind of evening out, and then someone comes along with a cell phone, and that changes a whole bunch of things and so on, right?
	So I think we aim for some sort of equilibrium with the various parts and competing aspects of ourselves, and we recognize that that changes...
	Over time, when I was younger, I wanted to know what I wanted to do with my life.
	Now, I know what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life.
	So there's things that will change, but I think we want to listen to all of our competing selves.
	And some of those selves come from our history.
	I have the inner mom alter ego.
	I'm sorry. I have the inner dad alter ego, siblings, friends, people from my past teachers and so on.
	But I also have my future self.
	I mean I don't want to get fat because my future self would like to have knees that don't hurt and a back that doesn't hurt and stuff like that.
	So balancing sort of between present and future wants and needs and so on.
	There are times where it's important to say to negotiate a yes with my daughter.
	There are times where it's important to negotiate a no and so all that kind of stuff.
	So all of that balancing, I think we just kind of want it in equilibrium and we want to keep listening to the parts of ourselves that can see.
	The future that can see deeply into other people and make sure everyone has a seat at the table and everything is negotiated because every aspect of herself has this impulse for domination, I think, at least based on our histories.
	We're so much – maybe not with you.
	We're a lot of people.
	And I think we want to keep listening to ourselves.
	Try and be in equilibrium.
	And I think peace comes when everyone feels heard.
	I think that's generally true in life as a whole.
	If I'm having a conflict with my daughter, it's because she doesn't feel heard or because I don't feel heard because she's not listening to me.
	There's a great relaxation in feeling heard, which doesn't mean that people agree with you.
	But this is why I try to sort of repeat back to people what I think they're saying to make sure I've got it right because I want people in the show to feel what it's like to really be listened to and then viciously disagree with not to be listened to because if you're listened to, there's a great relaxation of tension.
	And then usually if you listen to all the parts of yourself, then they will generally be behind whatever consensus can be hammered out.
	But if there's parts that you just, well, I don't listen to you or you're wrong or whatever it is, right?
	And understanding where each of the parts come from.
	But my mom's alter ego is very, very helpful in figuring out people who are like my mom.
	Anyway, sorry, go ahead. Yeah.
	Well, understanding where all those aspects come from so you understand really where all the layers that you've accumulated along the way in your experiences, where they all come from and how they make up who you are today.
	And then I think also to add to what you say, having all those different aspects of yourself and then doing something cool with them and putting that out there on the table of the world and being proud of it and sort of that being yourself, being proud of everything that you are and understanding everything that makes you you and doing something unique.
	Yes, I think that's important.
	The only way to do something unique is to not self-attack.
	And one of the great blessings, if I can put it that way, one of the great blessings of having a good relationship with your alter egos is that you don't self-attack.
	And so much of what you do in the world is you putting stuff out there and then people trying to provoke you into self-attack.
	I mean, that's just tragically, that's just where the species is right now.
	People just try to provoke you into attacking yourself and if you have that relationship with yourself where self-attack is an option, it is very hard to get anything sustainably good done in the world because it just keeps accumulating.
	Yeah, we just condemn yourself. Well, and even if you can shrug off one people or ten people or a hundred people at some number, you know, like that Coney guy, you're going to end up masturbating in a street corner while psychotic, right?
	Because at some point, you know, like, oh, a little bit of breeze is fine.
	Oh, a little bit more breeze is fine.
	Oh, a little bit more wind is fine.
	Oh, my God, a hurricane is blowing a Volvo through my head, right?
	So that's not good.
	So you have to have deactivated self-attack in order to Yeah.
	Yeah. I don't need to attack myself because I'm going to listen to myself criticisms.
	So attack occurs when someone is not listened to, at least in the internal system.
	It's not always the case externally.
	But attack happens when you're not listening.
	Now, because the parts of myself that are critical of myself, which I value, because I will listen to them, they don't need to attack me.
	And of course people attack others because they feel that self-attack themselves and they need to displace it and blah, blah, blah.
	But does that sort of make any sense?
	Yeah, yeah, that really does.
	Definitely. So thanks so much.
	It's been really fun. I'm really happy I got to talk to you finally.
	It's funny like... Oh, it's a real pleasure.
	...to your voice, but you're actually answering back to me rather than me just listening to you constantly.
	If that happens in the podcast, please call me.
	If that means I need to upgrade that for everyone.
	That would be pretty cool.
	I appreciate that. Thanks for the call.
	It was a real pleasure. Of course, you're welcome to chat anytime.
	And best of luck finding the person of your dreams.
	You certainly deserve something.
	I can't wait to be a mom.
	Can't wait to be a mom.
	That is where I'm going to shine.
	Thanks. Thanks, Emil.
	Thanks, Mike, again for hosting the show.
	Thank you for you, my dear delectable listeners who I would like to Thank you so much for your listenership.
	I hope that you will share the video that I just put out.
	Even if you're not particularly interested in bitcoins, I think it's really important to understand...
	At least my arguments and, you know, they're mostly arguments I crib from other people.
	But the true value of Bitcoin, what you really need to know, which was published on 29th November, I hope that you will share that because I think it's really important for people to understand Bitcoins for reasons that I explain in the video.
	So I hope that you will check that out.
	So have a wonderful week.

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