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Sept. 17, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:09:59

418.1 Part 2: Call In Show Sep 17 2006 4pm EST

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	Anyway, so that was a great topic.
	Thank you so much, Greg, for sharing.
	I certainly appreciate it.
	I know that it's not the easiest thing in the world to sit there and talk about your own personal life unless you're a complete extrovert like me, but I know it's not the easiest thing in the world.
	I certainly do appreciate it.
	I think that... In terms of the question of human freedom, the question of historical roles, the roles that we inherit through birth order, through impositions from the family and so on, really do inhibit and diminish our capacity to sort of be free with ourselves and to speak and listen openly to others.
	And it does seem to be quite common that We get these roles inflicted on us in our histories, and we don't really very easily get to wriggle out of them, or at least it takes a certain amount of work.
	Jung said, and I think there's a lot of stuff that Jung said was really ridiculous, but one thing he said that's very true, I think, is he said that the human personality is extraordinarily inert, and it almost always takes a great deal of stress or pressure.
	To be able to get the personality to change.
	And so we really do often have to kind of work with this kind of stuff in a very strong way to bring about change within our own life.
	And so the difficulties that you're facing are entirely understandable.
	Your brother did it very quickly, but then remember also in terms of exiting or at least taking a trial separation from the family unit, Your brother did it very quickly, but then remember, of course, he has less to lose.
	I think one thing that's very true with younger siblings in general, that they have less to lose from the family dynamics as a whole.
	This certainly is the case with me.
	My brother has remained in contact with my hellish clan and is planning on going on trips with my father and is seeing my mom every week or two and is still heavily enmeshed in this miserable, miserable clan.
	And I think the reason for that is that he took – and I'm not saying this is the case with Greg at all, but – well, maybe not at all, but he took a kind of authority role within the family and so there's a little bit more false self for my brother enmeshed in the family structure.
	Whereas as the person who was definitely at the bottom of the stairs as crap rolled downhill, so to speak, I have far less to lose in terms of giving up the family authority.
	I didn't have to give up. The only false self part that I had to give up in leaving the family was the fantasy of being loved, which was not that hard to give up once I began to talk about what really mattered to me.
	And I had to give up the fantasy of being lesser than my brother and being lesser than the other people in my family, but I didn't have to give up any fantasies of power, of having authority, of being elder, of being wiser.
	And so it's easier to give up fantasies which are intrinsically humiliating, and it's harder to give up fantasies wherein there's some level of pride or sense of superiority to whatever degree.
	It's harder to give those The people who tend to give up religion tend to be those who had a kind of humiliating religious beliefs inflicted on them.
	Those who believe that God is a sort of kindly old guy in the sky who takes care of you and reunites you with your loved ones after death.
	It's kind of hard for that person to give up religion.
	But, you know, the person who is screamed about hell and so on, it's easier for them to give up that kind of stuff.
	So the false self aspects wherein we have some sort of investment in authority or power or being somewhere up in the hierarchy, those aspects of the personality and those illusions are very hard to give up.
	But the ones where you're at the bottom of the totem pole and all the crap is rolling downhill, so for instance, in this case, Greg's younger brother, It's a whole lot easier because you're not really giving up that much, you know?
	It's like, oh, so you mean everyone gets to stop punching me and all I have to do is say I don't want it anymore?
	Well, it's hard to see a downside to that, right?
	Whereas if you're higher up in the food chain, so to speak, you have to give up a little bit more.
	So I think from that standpoint, four months is not wildly unacceptable or wildly unusual, but I also wouldn't say that it's a complete process.
	Yet, right? It's not going to be the case that this gentleman is going to have a couple of conversations with Greg, write in his journal, and then is going to be free of family influence, right?
	So don't imagine that you can cross this canyon all at once.
	And of course, it is important, so to speak, if you're going to take a run at this canyon, you really want to make sure you're going to clear it, right?
	You don't want to sort of do it prematurely and end up not quite having the oomph to get over the canyon, right?
	Because as we had in the dream analysis that came along recently, it's a rather long way down.
	So I will unmute everyone and you are free to chat as well.
	Please let me know if there's anything else you wanted to chat about or we can move to another topic.
	Can I go? Yes, please go ahead.
	I just wanted to say, sorry, I don't know if you've got any lawnmower noise in the background.
	Sorry, let me just unmute everyone.
	Sorry, you're unmuted.
	Go ahead. I just wanted to say, I saw this...
	I was just thinking about different issues all the time, and I just happened to see this show last night on MSNBC, and it was about this serial killer guy.
	I'll just give the rundown of his story real quick.
	His mother was basically raped by his father, who was in the military when they were both really young, and...
	She always presented that, and, you know, basically her mother forced her to have the kid and to marry this guy, right, who was in the military.
	And so he comes out of the military and is living with her, and basically she's withholding sex from him, and he's, like, you know, hitting her and having sex with her, all the while the kid is growing up two, three, four years old across in the next room through a paper-thin wall.
	So he can hear this thing growing up the whole time.
	He knows exactly what's going on.
	And they live on a chicken farm, and his job is to kill chickens with his Bare hands.
	He goes out and strangles chickens, the ones that are hurt and stuff.
	Well, anyways, no surprise.
	He grows up and later on he kills like 10 young girls by strangulation.
	And I was just thinking, this is a case example of a guy who is like, people are so scared of, oh, in NRT there's this serial killer that goes around and kills random victims, you know.
	But look at the result of where he came from, you know?
	Well, I think that's an excellent point.
	I talked about this a while back when there was a Dr.
	Phil family that quite interested me wherein there was an enormous amount of parental corruption, self-abuse, pornography, intergenerational pornography and so on and you could see very clearly that the father had been in the military And the mother, I think, had a military father.
	So when you look at these kinds of histories, when you look at these kinds of case histories, you can almost always trace it back to some sort of level of institutional corruption of one form or another.
	So it's either something to do with being abused and terrified by some sort of religious organization, or it's a military father, or it's a cop father, or it's a group that profits from bizarre and irrational laws propagated by the state.
	So the drugs, the gambling, the prostitution that most organized crime makes its living off of is an artificial market created almost entirely by state interference.
	So the root of violence is not so much the individual, it's almost always the institution.
	And the institution almost always gains its legitimacy, its funding, and its power from the state.
	And that's a huge mistake that's very counterintuitive for a lot of people, right?
	They think that we need the state, as you say, many people believe, we need the state to protect us from dangerous and violent people.
	But the state is a massive factory that produces dangerous and violent people.
	And that's something that is kind of counterintuitive and it's hard for a lot of people to accept.
	But when you start looking into the history of these kinds of people, you do find out that...
	You know, I mean, they come from either these legitimate state-violent institutions like the police and the military, or they come from some criminal organization that survives due to the state restrictions on free trade.
	Yeah, I mean, yeah, I agree.
	I was just thinking that, you know, this is like a really good example of what people are scared of, but you can see totally where it comes from, and you can really pretty much figure out that, well...
	Without the stupid parents of this woman and without this guy having this military background and all this stuff, The result of their, you know, the kid is not going to be like this in a free society.
	Well, there certainly will be fewer of them.
	I mean, I think it's possible that there could be some genetic component that produces psychosis and what we would call evil in people, but that's got to be so rare as to be ridiculous, and you don't, you know, you don't found the entire shoe industry on people having six toes, right?
	It happens, but it's pretty rare.
	What evidence is it that it's genetic?
	Well, I'm just saying I think it could be possible.
	I mean, I'm just saying it's a theoretical possibility that there could be an antisocial gene.
	I don't have any evidence that it's genetic.
	I'm just saying it could be possible.
	But that would be such a rare occurrence, and it would be hopefully treatable, and it would be something that would be diagnosable and so on.
	But yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
	I have no evidence that any kind of antisocial behavior...
	It's genetic, and certainly when you look into the histories of these kinds of people, you find an institutional violence in there somewhere, always.
	It's like, oh, well, they went to boarding school, or they were raised by nuns, or they had military fathers, or cop dads, or whatever, and it's this whole festering underworld that...
	That is sort of planted and grown by the state.
	And it's nothing to be paranoid about.
	It's perfectly inevitable economics, right?
	The state is there to sell you protection.
	And the same way that when you hear ads on the radio, right, you know, you hear ads on the radio from Alarm Force, you know, this is the name of the guys up here in Canada, and they will sort of have this dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum music, you know, there are criminals coming out of your jam jars, your wife could be a criminal, your children are planted with explosives, you need Alarm Force, you know, 24 hour response, you know.
	And so, they're not going to get anywhere by saying, crime hasn't risen in 20 years.
	99.999% of people are perfectly safe.
	Give us 50 bucks a month to protect you, right?
	I mean, anyone who sells you protection is going to have a natural desire to make you think that you're in danger.
	I mean, it's completely...
	You know, like the Coke wants you to think that you're thirsty.
	It's not evil, it's just natural.
	I mean, and we recognize this when it comes to advertisements, that people have a natural incentive to make you feel a heightened need for the product that they're delivering.
	There's nothing mad about that, it's just inevitable.
	And it's the same thing with the government.
	Of course, the government has the power not just to convince you that you need a certain form of protection, but to actually generate the danger that it's supposed to protect you from.
	And of course, the parallels with this kind of understanding to what is going on with the war on terror is too obvious to even, I think, make the connections here.
	Now, it's a very exciting Skype day.
	I'm just going to unmute everyone.
	I'm not sure who can hear me or not.
	Oh, we're back. So, if anyone would like to add anything else, feel free to now.
	Well, I think a common objective to what you were saying about Andrew's example is that If you look at the immediate circumstances, to say that the state made that guy like that would be to ignore his familial circumstances.
	It was really his parents that made him like that, right?
	Not necessarily the state.
	Well, I certainly do understand that, and we certainly are in a complicated topic here, but the good thing is that I'm sure in a few minutes we can polish off the whole free will versus determinism thing, which everyone's eager to get back to, I know.
	But I certainly would say that the general laws of supply and demand, combined with the general social approval problem, Will tend to increase Certain behaviors.
	This is a really bad way of putting it.
	If you pay for soldiers, you're going to get more soldiers.
	If soldiers aren't paid, there won't be any soldiers.
	Anything that you subsidize, you're going to increase.
	Anything you tax, you're going to decrease.
	And so, it's certainly true that human beings have free will and so on, but they certainly do respond to cues.
	So, of course, if you can get a ticket to Hawaii for a dollar, then you're probably going to take it and use it.
	Whereas if it's $5,000, you're probably going to hesitate.
	So, the fact that people are heavily subsidized to be soldiers and are paid enormous amounts of money and given massive amounts of educational funding and also are given early retirement.
	I mean, I know a guy who worked at my last company.
	The guy retired with a full pension at the age of 45.
	I mean, that's pretty damn sweet as far as that goes.
	Now, of course, he had to be a military robot for 20 years, so he was retiring as a bare shell of a human being, but...
	From a pure financial standpoint, that's not too bad at all.
	So the subsidies are going to dramatically increase vile and problematic behavior like the kind of authoritarianism and soul-destroying conformity that goes on with the army, not to mention, of course, the subsidized violence and willingness to kill, which is not particularly healthy for the development of human soul.
	But I think, sometimes I think, and I'm not going to make an argument that this is objectively true, But sometimes I think that it's the social approval that's almost more deadly than the money.
	And I'll just talk about that relatively briefly.
	If someone comes over to your house and says, oh, I'm a hitman, right?
	That kind of kills the dinner table conversation, right?
	And quite often you say, oh, that's very nice.
	I think that I'm not feeling well and everyone's going to have to leave.
	And by the way, I think I might call the cops later.
	So somebody sits down at your dinner table and says, I'm a hitman and blah, blah, blah, right?
	Now, if somebody sits down at your dinner table, at most places, and we'll just talk about the United States, so this could be true, I'm sure, for England as well, and says, I just came back from serving my country in Iraq.
	Most people are going to say, you're a hero.
	In one way or another, they're going to say, our soldiers are the hero.
	Our cops are the thin blue line.
	They are what divides civilization from chaos.
	It's a tough, dirty job that's hard to do, that's full of confrontation, but people do it because they believe in...
	In serving their country and they believe in defending freedom and blah blah blah.
	It's the social approval that to me I think is the most fundamentally corrupting influence that society brings to bear on things like the police and the military.
	So when somebody says, and this is why the gun in the room argument is so volatile, because when you talk about the gun in the room, what you're doing is you're withdrawing the moral sanction for violence.
	And this takes us right back to the beginning of our conversation today where we were talking about, gee, look how volatile the Muslim world is, right?
	So some soldier sits down and says, I've just come back from serving my country in Iraq, and you say, well, you're going to have to leave my...
	I certainly am not going to allow a man to sit down at my table who's a hitman, right?
	The amount of volatility that is in that moment makes the Muslim world look relatively calm, I think.
	Unless he's John Cusack.
	Unless he's John Cusack?
	Wait! Culture reference I can't figure out?
	Sorry, go ahead. You didn't see Gross Point Blank?
	Oh, that's right.
	Yes, that's true. If you are witty and charming and can pull off an act like John Cusack, then yes, you absolutely will say, that's a great story.
	Tell me about what Making High Fidelity was like.
	But to me, it's the social sanction.
	You could get rid of the military and the police within about a week if society simply held them with the same contempt and scorn that we would hold any criminal.
	If they were excluded from any civilized and decent society, you could get rid of a lot.
	It's a bit of a hyperbole to say you could just get rid of it.
	But if we were morally clear about the nature of state service, which is saying, I'll point guns at whoever you tell me to and pull the trigger...
	If we recognize that for what it is, which is to be the enforcers for a certain kind of criminal gang, then we would not respect and have honor bestowed upon these people.
	We wouldn't drape them in flags.
	We wouldn't get tearful at their funerals.
	We wouldn't put them on the front pages as heroes.
	We would just recognize them as the enforcers for our political masters, and whenever our political masters say, this is now the rule, go shoot people who disobey it, whatever that rule is, these mindless, gross, idiotic zombies will go out and pull the trigger at whatever.
	I have never once heard of a policeman saying, I'm not going to enforce that law because it's unjust.
	There's a scene in From Freedom to Fascism where they have to go up and down in New Orleans, the cops, to take away the weapons from everyone, right?
	Because God forbid they'd be allowed to defend themselves from looters, right?
	And this guy is standing there and he's saying, oh man, you know, you go up and down this, you're kicking in doors, you're confronting your citizens in your own country.
	Man, you just got to not think of what you're doing in order to get it done.
	Well, you bastard!
	Think about what you're doing!
	You're taking money to go and kick people's door down, point guns at them, and if they don't hand over their weapons, you're going to pull the trigger.
	That's called being a hitman.
	And if we take away the social sanction for these people, and we treat them like criminals, which of course is what they are, then that's going to do a whole lot towards getting rid of this kind of mentality, because we can't stop We can't stop the taxation, but at least we can treat these people in a morally realistic manner, and that's going to do a lot, but of course it's an incredibly volatile thing to do.
	And the last thing, of course, that I'll say about this is that...
	You don't have to do this with soldiers, right?
	I mean, they're well-armed, so you might not want to do this with soldiers.
	But what you can do, of course, is with people like those who advocate public education or whatever, it's still a question, right?
	So if I don't support public education, you support me getting shot.
	And then just saying, look, if you support me getting shot, then I'm going to throw you out of my house.
	I'm not going to sanction this by pretending it's a nice, pleasant debate that we're having.
	If you support somebody pointing a gun at me and pulling the goddamn trigger, then get the hell out of my house.
	That is the way that you try and change society.
	I think it's very difficult.
	It's very volatile. It's a hard thing to do.
	But if we really do care about freedom, then to me, this is sort of what I was talking about in podcasts recently, if we really do care about freedom, we need to keep pointing out that there's a gun in the room, and if people continue to support the gun in the room after any kind of reasonable doubt has passed, then you've got to throw them out of your house and throw them out of your life.
	Right? If you care about freedom and you're interested in nonviolence, otherwise there's not really any point going down this road at all.
	So what would you say then to people who would, to bring this back to Andrew's example, to people who would object that there are plenty of military parents who don't raise mass murderers?
	Well, I think that's a very interesting question.
	There are plenty of military parents who don't raise mass murderers, and there are plenty of people who rape their own children who don't raise pedophiles.
	And, of course, there are plenty of people who beat their children whose children don't grow up to be beating others or to beat their own children.
	That doesn't mean that beating children is okay, of course, and a lot of people who have military fathers end up in military or paramilitary occupations, right?
	So if you look at a lot of people who serve in the military, it's a military family, right?
	My uncle, my dad, and the same thing is true with cops.
	So when we say that there's a lot of military and police families who don't raise I think if we include the fact that a lot of people raised by military and police families end up in these occupations, then I think that the statistics go up just a little bit in terms of raising mass murderers.
	So the fallacy in that objection, then, is actually excluding the occupation itself?
	Sure, yeah. I mean, if taking money to kill people is wrong, In the Mafia, then surely it's wrong for soldiers.
	What they do is they raise disciplined and obedient mass murderers.
	They don't raise random and chaotic mass murderers usually, which is almost more scary.
	I'm not scared of serial killers.
	I'm scared of the IRS. I'm not scared of someone breaking into my house.
	I'm scared of what happens if I don't pay 50% of my money in taxation.
	I'm much more frightened.
	I'm almost infinitely more frightened of the organized killers than the disorganized killers.
	Sorry about that. I left everyone muted for a sec.
	Did you have anything else to add to that?
	We have another request for a topic.
	Ron Paul Fan Not too many times I'm going to use the phrase Ron Paul on this show.
	Yeah, how much can a thief even steal from you, right?
	That's quite right. Now, sorry, just before we get to Ron Paul's question, Andrew said, so tell us, Steph, why you won't talk with Michael again.
	Well, it's not that I won't talk with Michael again.
	I'd be perfectly happy to talk with Michael again.
	But the sort of two things that I would need in order to be able to have a productive debate with Michael would be, first of all, that he had spent a little bit of time...
	I'm not necessarily listening to my podcast or reading my articles, although that wouldn't be a bad place to start, I think.
	But this is the gentleman who joined us the last two weekends.
	He ended up with the statement or the general position that when it came to whether or not the state was an agency of violence, we were going to have to agree to disagree.
	Now, of course, in philosophy, it's not possible to agree to disagree.
	In questions of metaphysics and epistemology, you do have to have the same methodology, right?
	You don't sort of say, well, I believe that the world was created by the finger of God 6,000 years ago, and then a geologist says, no, it's 5 billion years old, and then the creationist says, well, we're just going to have to agree to disagree.
	It's not a valid proposition, so we would need to figure out Whether or not Michael was able to accept the obviously counterintuitive proposition that the state is an agency of violence, because if he wasn't willing to accept that, then there wouldn't actually be a problem to be solved.
	I mean, if the doctor doesn't admit that gangrene is a problem, then there's no point discussing a cure.
	So that would sort of be one standpoint.
	And the other is that...
	I think that, I mean, Michael wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, what our solutions would be and how we would start off.
	And I would sort of say from that standpoint that there's lots of stuff he could read about that, that there's no need to have a debate.
	Because, you know, now that we're all getting well versed in these kinds of ideas, it's sort of like asking a graduate program in physics To go over the basics of the scientific method again, right?
	I mean, it may be valid for an introductory course in science to go over the scientific method, but once you're at sort of a graduate level in physics, somebody coming into that course and saying, I need you to go over the scientific method for me, it's not really appropriate for the level of knowledge that's in there for the people who are participating.
	And so, you know, it might not be the best, you know, I'd sort of say, listen to a bunch of podcasts, or read some Murray Rothbard, or read some of me, or read whoever, right?
	And then, you know, figure out where the questions are, where the gaps in knowledge are, and we can talk about those.
	But I certainly wouldn't want to interrupt the conversations that we're having to go over some of the two plus two of a rational philosophy.
	So that would sort of be my perspective.
	Does that sort of answer?
	Oh, we got some nice basting.
	That's good. Okay, I think we've got a...
	All right, well, we'll spend just a few minutes helping out our good friend Rob Paulfan with the question of rent control.
	Rent control is sort of defined as keeping really bad musicals off Broadway.
	Oh, that's such an inside joke if you've ever seen that.
	That's probably even more of an obscure reference than the one to gross point blank.
	Good film, by the way. But rent control, which we've never really talked about, but which we can...
	Talk about very briefly here is the process of not allowing people to raise rents when they have apartment buildings and to some degree even more expensive properties.
	And someone, I can't remember who, I think it may have been Thomas Sowell, an economist, said that rent control is more effective than bombing in destroying cities.
	And the statistics do seem to bear him out.
	So, of course, those of us who know this kind of stuff, it's all very clear, the process that occurs when you start with rent controls, right?
	So what happens is you say, okay, to landlords, you say, okay, you can't raise your rents any more than 3% a year anymore.
	So what happens? Well, of course, people stop building rental units.
	That's the very first thing that happens.
	Because when you say to somebody, you can't ever raise your rents, then the first thing they're going to do is they're going to start building condos instead of rental units.
	Now, of course, this doesn't show up for quite a while.
	The government always loves to start screwing around with things where the effects don't show up for a while.
	The other week when I was asking Michael, what's more important, education or food?
	Well, the government doesn't get involved in food distribution because the population would starve to death in about two months.
	What they'd rather do is get involved in screwy long-term ventures like education where the harm is sort of semi-visible and vague and so on.
	And the same thing is true of rent control.
	If you put in rent control, then all of the people are going to vote for you who have apartments because they're doing great.
	They're happy. It's like, hey, great, my rent's never going to go up particularly relative, maybe a little for the standard of living or whatever.
	So all the people who have apartments are going to be happy.
	They're going to vote for you. And the people who are out in the street...
	Who would have gotten apartments if rent control had not been put into place?
	In other words, if the incentive to build new rental units had not been taken away, then people would have continued to build rental units.
	So the poor schmo who has to live in his mother's basement or the newly married couple who have to live with their parents because they can't afford an apartment, they don't know that they've been screwed, right?
	Because there's no parallel universe where you can compare the effects of not imposing these kinds of things on the population.
	So they don't know that they've been screwed.
	They just sit there going, man, you know, I can't find an apartment because nobody's moving out.
	And I can't afford a condo because they're so expensive, right?
	And so they just get stuck.
	So it's again, it's visible gains, right?
	Which is always the problem of economics.
	Visible gains, the people who are in apartments are very happy.
	And then you have invisible losses, right?
	The people who could have had apartments at a reasonable rate otherwise.
	And what also happens, of course, is competent managers get out of the apartment business because they can get, right?
	If you don't allow people to raise their rents, then they can't pay their employees more.
	So they can't retain any decent people to run their apartment buildings.
	So you get these idiot superintendents and slumlords who are like jerks and idiotic and cruel and mean and greedy and corrupt or whatever because they're getting substandard wages, right?
	And they're getting substandard wages because you can't charge more.
	And so it all flows throughout the whole organization.
	And so you get a lot of bad problems there as well.
	There's also very little desire to improve your properties at all.
	If you can't charge any more for rents, then you're not going to upgrade your water heater.
	You're not going to replace your pipes.
	You're not going to do this. You're not going to do that.
	And so what happens is the situation gets worse and worse and worse.
	People also make pretty significant decisions based on not having to pay more rent over time.
	And one of the decisions that they make is to not be quite as ambitious, right?
	I mean, if your cost of living don't go up, I'm not saying it's good that they do, then you're going to set up your life so that you're kind of comfortable in this particular environment.
	And what that does is it causes people to fall short of their full potential.
	A friend of mine has lived in a rent-controlled apartment.
	It's been rent-controlled since the late Stone Age, I think.
	And he's paying like a ridiculously small amount of rent.
	So it means that he doesn't really have to get as educated as he could be.
	He doesn't have to be as ambitious as he could be because there's no way he's going to make the leap to a condo.
	The gap is just too large.
	And maybe we could go on and on about the horrible effects of rent control, but basically what happens in the long run Is that the buildings fall into such significant disrepair that the landlords can't afford to keep them up.
	The landlords can't afford to effect repairs that are needed.
	And the buildings are then declared unfit for human habitation.
	You can see this in New York and Chicago and places like that.
	So the buildings then get declared unfit for human habitation, which means everyone gets thrown out into the street.
	So what has happened?
	Well, a bunch of people for a couple of years have gotten substandard, have paid below market rates for rent, and they've sort of diminished their capacity to earn based on the smaller amount of rent they have to pay, and then they get their ass kicked out of the home eventually, and what happens then is that the people who own these buildings, they just vanish.
	I mean, they just vanish.
	Basically, they take the keys to the building and they have to continue to pay property taxes on these buildings, even though they're not occupied.
	And by the way, you may not be aware of this, and most people who rent aren't, the property taxes per square foot are higher.
	For apartment buildings than they are for houses, even though apartment buildings are proportionately much less expensive to supply services to, right?
	Because it's like one big spigot off the main sewage line and the water line, the electricity line, rather than having to string it out to all these suburban houses.
	But because the property taxes are buried into the rent and not paid separately, the renters think that it's expensive because of the landlords, right?
	Because, you know, they're economically retarded because they went to state schools.
	So, these people say, oh, well, Mr.
	Government, you've got to lower our rents.
	It's like, well, that's pretty freaking easy.
	Just cut the property taxes.
	No, no, no, no, no. That can never be allowed.
	Government will always choose more power over less power.
	That's inevitable. And so what happens at the end of all of this is that the houses, the apartment buildings get so run down, they get so pillaged, the people don't care about keeping them up.
	They become havens for welfare, for drugs.
	And then what happens is that they get declared unfit for human habitation.
	The landlords don't want to keep paying property taxes on income that they can't let anyone rent in, so they basically just throw the keys down the sewer and they vanish.
	So then what happens is you end up with block after block after block of dilapidated, broken down, destroyed housing that nobody can find the owners.
	In fact, it's impossible to find the owners.
	They sort of cover their tracks.
	And so nobody owns them.
	Nobody's going to invest in them because of rent control.
	And these people then, where do they go?
	Well, they say, well, you've got to have a place to live.
	And so the government then increases taxes more to pay for public housing, that gem-like Shangri-La that we all know so well.
	And so this is just sort of an inevitable escalation that comes, right?
	I mean, any use of power, particularly institutional power, is always like the sort of Mickey Mouse film, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, where things just get worse and worse and worse until there's a collapse.
	But rent control is particularly pernicious, because it really screws the poor, right?
	I mean, it really, really hurts the poor.
	But, of course, it's just a short-term vote-buying exercise, like just about everything else in democracy.
	So let me know what you think of that.
	The mics are open. Hi, this is Lapafax.
	Hey, how's it going? Yeah, fine.
	Yeah, just a question.
	Let me just mute everyone else and give you the unmute.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, just a question about...
	Well, something I heard on the radio the other day on Free Talk Live.
	It's just a question about market anarchy and...
	Well, basically they were saying...
	Well, someone called in to ask whether in a market anarchy you could be denied access to your own property by your neighbours, say...
	Well, yeah, say...
	Since all property will be privately owned, would it be possible?
	Right, so you can have a situation where somebody, they build a road to your house, right, and then they say, well, you can't use this road anymore and you can't go over anyone else's property, so they effectively block access to your house.
	Is that correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, no, I appreciate you bringing that up.
	That is a common objection that you will hear.
	And I remember Christina and I talking about this a couple of years ago.
	And just for those who are not aware of this particular objection, it's something like this.
	So I buy a house at the end of the street as a private citizen and as a private road company and so on.
	And they build the road to my house.
	And then one day I get a letter which says, you can no longer use the road that leads to your house.
	And then I have to sort of stay and starve to death in my house because there are all these other houses around me and I can't go out through there because it's private property.
	Or if I'm away from my house, I can't get to my house and this kind of stuff.
	Well, there's sort of two responses I'd have to that and then I'll turn it back to you.
	The first is that nobody would do that.
	Nobody would do that. The question of reputation is not that important in a mercantilist society or a semi-fascistic society that we have now, where if customers get mad at you, if you're big enough, you can just run to the government for preferential legislation and you don't need to please your customers, so your reputation... It's not that important.
	Like, the reputation of Boeing, to me, they don't care about my opinion of them because they get like 90% of their income.
	I'm just making this up. I don't know, right?
	But they get a huge amount of their income from selling to the U.S. Army, right?
	So what do they care about me, right?
	So reputation becomes much less important when you're hanging off the tit of the state, so to speak.
	So in a free market society, if you were a road company and you did something as stupid and destructive as not allowing somebody to use their road and effectively rendering their property useless, you would get so badly ripped apart in the public market of opinion that nobody would ever use your services again.
	So if I'm ABC Road Company and I do this thing that you're talking about, Then the next time somebody wants to buy a house and have someone build a road to it, they're going to say, I hope you are not using this ABC company because the last time I read about them, they screwed some poor bastard at the end of the street by not even allowing him to get into his own house.
	So I don't want you to have anything to do with that road company.
	So that would never happen.
	There's no upside to somebody who's going to work their whole life building up a road company to then end up with some weird personal vendetta against somebody at the end of a street and destroy the entire reputation of their own road company.
	The first thing that would happen if anybody did that is the shareholders would kick the CEO or whoever made that decision out and they'd replace him with someone who would restore that right to use the road and pay a fairly large amount of damages and then they would put it in their contract That they would never, ever do that again.
	And if they did, they would pay you X amount of money and here's my private resolution organization to back me up and so on.
	So that's sort of one side of the answer.
	And the second is, given that that is a risk, and this is something that it's good to get the hang of when you get these kinds of questions about a free society, given that it's a risk that everyone thinks of.
	Okay, well, I buy this house.
	What happens if they shut off access to my roads?
	Or what happens if they shut off my water?
	Or what happens if they shut off my electricity?
	Or whatever, right? Or what happens if none of the road companies will let me drive my car on their road?
	I just bought a car for nothing. So given that that's a risk, the first thing that you're going to want to do when you hire someone to build a road for you, or you buy a house that's had someone build a road to it, is to make sure within that contract that you sign, there are provisions that say, by the way, you're never going to shut off access to my house.
	I mean, the risks that people come up with around a market society, a free market society, are all risks that can be remediated by contract, right?
	So, you know, it's sort of like saying, well, what happens if I get married and my wife stabs me to death in my sleep?
	Well, first of all, don't marry a woman who's going to do that, right?
	People don't just get possessed, right?
	So there's ways of preventing that kind of thing.
	Never disagree with her. Don't have your own thoughts.
	Obey everything she says. All the things that make a marriage so wonderful.
	But... Sorry, that's a bit facetious, but A, it's never going to happen.
	B, if it did happen, the shareholders would revolt and kick out whoever made that decision and pay damages.
	And C, if people felt that it was a risk in terms of it happening, all they would do is make sure that their contract specified the penalties that would be paid if it did happen.
	Does that sort of answer the question?
	Well, yeah.
	I can understand in terms of private companies.
	That they'd want to safeguard their reputation.
	But what about if the road were owned by a private individual as opposed to a company?
	What would happen then?
	In your opinion, what would happen then?
	Okay, so ABC Company is just some guy who owns a road, like he's some billionaire and he's bought up a bunch of roads, right?
	Is that your contention?
	So he's sort of immune from public opinion and so on, right?
	Well, with public opinion, well, I suppose most market anarchists would highlight social ostracism as, well, as a deterrent to doing certain actions in the market anarchy.
	Would the same apply to an individual as well as a company or profit-making organization or Well, sure.
	I mean, if I were to buy a road, I would need somebody to enforce contract, to enforce my property rights, to help me with restitution issues in case somebody came along and just dynamited my road.
	I'd have to have insurance. I'd have to have liability insurance.
	There are lots of contractual things that I would have to enter into in order to buy a road.
	And nobody would end up supporting me buying that road if I didn't guarantee the access to the people who the road led to.
	For a number of reasons, right?
	One is that if you end up buying this road and you obviously expect to profit from it, and of course if nobody's allowed to use your road, then you're not going to profit from it, so there's going to be some risk there for the people who are insuring you and so on.
	But also, the risk of, you know, the one thing that free market societies are going to want to do, and we talk about the dispute resolution organizations here, the one thing they're always going to want to do is prevent violence.
	Violence is very, very, very expensive, right?
	If violence is not subsidized by the state, violence is very, very expensive.
	If you are a dispute resolution organization, the last thing you want to do is have a situation erupt into violence because it's unpredictable, it's uncontrollable, the liability is immense, and you also, just in terms of your own enforcers, right, so you're going to have to hire your own cops or something like that as a dispute resolution organization, it's one possibility, let's say.
	Well, you want to pay these people as little as possible.
	And if you can keep exposing them to dangerous and violent situations, their wages are going to have to go up.
	So you're absolutely going to want to make sure that you pay your own enforcers as little as possible, which means that they're going to have to go and give people a stern talking to, but they're not going to end up in situations where there's a shootout.
	And so if I were running a dispute resolution organization and some eccentric, crazy-ass billionaire came and said, you know, I want to buy this road and then shut off all of these people on the other side of this road from ever having any access to food or water or whatever, then I'd say, no thanks, even if you're going to pay me a lot of money, because these people are going to get desperate and it's possible that they might try and shoot their way out if you try and stop it.
	And that doesn't make us any money.
	I'm not going to get involved in a situation where people are going to get desperate enough to start shooting.
	So there's going to be an enormous amount of checks and balances in this kind of thing.
	And plus, you know, in the sort of final analysis, what could conceivably be the motive for some rich guy to buy up roads and prevent people from using them?
	I mean, it wouldn't really make any sense.
	Does that help?
	Yeah, it does, yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, the last thing I want to do is try and say that, you know, we can sort of philosophically work out everything that might happen in a free society.
	But generally, whenever people have significant issues or questions, then people will always make a profit and work to resolve those things.
	And of course, you don't design a hospital by saying, okay, well, what if there's a spontaneous plague of head exploding?
	How are we going to build this hospital from the ground up to deal with a spontaneous plague of head exploding?
	And what you do is you say, okay, what's statistically the most likely illnesses?
	Well, we've got some childbirths, we've got heart disease, we've got cancer, so we're going to need oncology, we're going to need maternity, we're going to need whatever, right?
	Cardiology. So that's how you build a hospital.
	A growing government, a catastrophic national debt, wars, welfare, the war on drugs, 2 million people in prison, and ever-escalating state power and control over the individual.
	So, yes, certainly could happen, but that's like saying to somebody who's...
	Who's in a plane that's going down at high velocity into a mountain and saying, you know, I've got four parachutes strapped to you.
	I'm an experienced parachuter.
	Are we going to jump? And that person says, no, I'm going to take my chances on the plane because I'm afraid of heights, right?
	I mean, yes, it's certainly possible that you could crash and survive, but it's not very likely relative to you jumping off.
	And so, yes, there are risks in a free market society, but compared to where we are going as a society at the moment, I think those risks are non-existent.
	We have a question. That interrupts the rant.
	Hmm. Where did Podcast 400 go, sweetie?
	The government censored it, yeah.
	Podcast 400 was the podcast that if you listened to it, the government evaporated.
	So it's a real shame, really.
	I forgot to save it.
	No, Podcast 400 is something that Christina and I are working on, but we just haven't had time to finish it up.
	I've been obviously spending a fair amount of time putting the videos together to try and lure people in from YouTube, and it's going pretty well.
	We've had over 3,200 video views so far, and they've only been up for about two weeks, so that's good stuff.
	Vaporize. The correct term is vaporize.
	Thank you, Andrew, Anal Andrew.
	That's wonderful. I really appreciate that.
	Lars says, 2,000 of those video views for me.
	Did anyone hear the latest one?
	I picked up a $140 microphone, which I think sounds...
	I'm not using it right now, because it's something I have to sort of hold, like a Vegas lounge singer to my mouth, and I haven't got the hang of it yet.
	But I used it for the most recent videocast, and I think it sounds quite a bit better.
	Everybody's muted. Well, that seems about right.
	Is it made of gold? Absolutely.
	Absolutely. Mute everybody.
	Okay, so the mics are open.
	If anybody else wanted to add anything?
	Yes, me again.
	By any chance, have you heard of any of, well, I think it's called the Security and Partnership Act that George Bush signed, I think, last year?
	No, I haven't, but just based on my experience of government words, I bet you it's the exact opposite of security, and it's not a partnership of any kind.
	What's it about? Well, I think it's an agreement signed between the Prime Minister of Canada, the American president, and the Mexican president.
	Basically, well, some people think it's going to create a North American Union, which will be based upon the European Union.
	If this is true, then what's your opinion on that one?
	Well, I don't really, I mean, I don't care too much if that sort of makes any sense.
	The mics are open.
	I don't really, to me, the sort of details about what's going on in the newspapers every day, I don't really pay too much attention to because that would be a disconcerting amount of facts and I, you know, as you know, prefer to just fill the air up with mostly opinion and rant.
	In all seriousness, it doesn't really matter.
	If you're working on a cure for a plague, then you don't necessarily need to check every day about how many people have died of the plague.
	You know the plague is a bad thing, you know the plague is going to get worse, and you know you've got to work as hard as you can, if that's your desire and you have the ability, to try and come up with as great a cure and as quick a cure as possible.
	So for me, following the minutiae of every single state decision is not particularly important.
	I know that the state is an evil and corrupt institution.
	I know that it's going to continue to grow until it destroys society or self-destructs.
	And I know that it's crucial over the next couple of years to get as much information about rational and peaceful alternatives So that when the state does crash, people don't say, well, what we need is a bigger state.
	So they say, okay, well, some people saw this coming and they have a solution that maybe we can put into practice, right?
	Because if people don't know that there's a cure, right?
	If the water they drink is making them sick and they think it's, you know, the fact that they're dehydrated that's making them sick, they're just going to drink more water, right?
	And so if somebody says, no, it's the water that's making you sick, then maybe they can change.
	So for me, you know, okay, they'll sign this, they'll sign that, there'll be some other stupid law that comes into existence, and so on.
	I don't really care too much, you know, the European Economic Union.
	I think the only value with these kinds of things is that the more initiative that the government makes...
	Or takes, then the more resources they're going to consume and the quicker they're going to self-destruct.
	So, from that standpoint, you know, the European Economic Union is probably moving the eventual liberty of Europe forward by at least a decade, right?
	Because it's just another layer of overhead and bureaucracy and taxation.
	And so, yeah, you know, to me, whatever speeds along the death of the beast is fine.
	Yeah, I was just going to say, it's one of those things, like, they get this act that, you know, they...
	What it basically does, this act, it allows them to exchange, you know, information about terrorism, you know, and stuff, and also to extradite terrorists, you know, and other criminals, I guess.
	But, like, what they're doing with it is, you know, last July they went and, you know, basically the DEA has wanted to arrest Mark Emery for years, but they couldn't do it until they got this new act passed, which this guy had mentioned.
	And then they just call up the RCMP and say, we need you to invest Mark Emery.
	And they are legally down to do it now.
	There's a lot of Canadians now having this whole thing about Canada's losing sovereignty and stuff.
	No, I agree with that for sure.
	And I don't want to get all into this.
	It's a very complicated topic, and I certainly don't claim to be any sort of expert on it.
	But I certainly do believe that if you look at sort of international banking, The international bankers view local, i.e.
	national governments, as sort of a nuisance and sort of an annoyance.
	And so it certainly doesn't surprise me that there is a movement afoot to bring worldwide or larger and larger governments around.
	I mean, if... If international bankers could have one currency, it would be so much easier to fleece everyone.
	So it certainly doesn't surprise me that sovereignty is beginning to dissolve under the pressure of people needing to find additional profits now that governments have kind of run into the wall of having too much national debt.
	And not being able to print money for fears of raising inflation.
	So the governments kind of hit a wall in terms of revenue generation.
	And so whenever you hit a wall in terms of productivity, you need to find some creative solution to make yourself more efficient.
	And for people who work from an international finance standpoint, The existence of local sovereign governments is a massive inefficiency and they could get quite a bit of additional revenue out of breaking down those barriers to moving money around and having local laws.
	Local laws are pretty inefficient relative to the amount of profit that can be made.
	I'm not too surprised that there's this general movement for consolidation.
	Of course, it's got nothing to do with the war on terror, and it's got nothing to do with trying to help the populations.
	And we may never know what the genuine real motives are, but the people in the government, they're kind of like you and me, except maybe not on quite the right side of the fence.
	But most people sort of wake up and say, well, how can I advance my own interests today and how can I make more money?
	And this is sort of what people do, right?
	And people who are international bankers do exactly the same thing, except, of course, that they generally control currency and they generally control interest rates and so on through the power of the state, right?
	Through the power that governments have to shoot anyone who is an alternate counterfeiter to themselves, right?
	So, yeah, these things, it doesn't shock me too much that sovereignty is being diminished through these kinds of regulatory pressures because there's no – you can make more money for those who work in this kind of sphere, in this sort of international finance sphere.
	you can make a lot more money when the individual sovereignty gets broken down to some degree.
	I mean, sort of one example that just while people are collecting their thoughts, one example of this, of course, is Ireland, that after being an economic basket case for about 30,000 that after being an economic basket case for about 30,000 years, ended up lowering its corporate tax rates and attracting a lot of corporations to set up particularly high-tech corporations to set up shop there.
	I was actually on a conference call about a year ago, I think, with a whole bunch of senior people from Intel, And they, you know, it's like, oh yeah, we all live in Ireland now, right?
	Who knew? And I was born in Ireland and spent a lot of summers there, so for me, the idea of Ireland being an economic powerhouse is sort of like listening that Zaire has won the International Ice Hockey Championships.
	And of course, what happens, as somebody's pointed out in the chat window, is that the last thing that people who have international finance profit motives want is individual governments competing in the realms of tax rates, right?
	As governments begin to run out of money, then they have to try and attract new customers.
	One of the ways they do that is lowering regulatory, lowering taxes, which causes a brain drain, which upsets international finance and so on.
	And so if you look at the amount of pressure that the EEC is bringing to bear in Ireland to bring its tax rates in accordance with everyone else, it's what government does.
	It uses violence to try and eliminate competition so that it can further exploit people.
	That's sort of inevitable in the paradigm.
	I just wanted to make a comment.
	I just wanted to say that I enjoyed the Skype cast and I have a general interest in everything that you've been talking about.
	So I think I'll be around and listen to your stuff.
	And can we get your social insurance number?
	Sure, yeah. No, no, just kidding.
	Don't put it out there. We'll just take a DNA sample.
	If you could just lean into your webcam a bit.
	Excellent. Where do I sign?
	Oh, you don't need to sign.
	We've already got your biometric readout.
	Well, yeah, thank you for the content on the Skypecast.
	Oh, listen, I really appreciate it.
	I thank you so much for listening in.
	We actually have quite a few people in today, which is near the end, too.
	Of course, everyone does join near the end, either, because I'm wrong.
	You've got a sense of humor, which is good.
	Oh, thanks. Yeah, well, I try to keep the deaf and evil topics as light as I can, because otherwise it really does get quite dark, so I appreciate that.
	Thank you. Yeah, well, I'll shut up now.
	Oh, yeah. For those who've joined and who haven't heard this, we do have a website.
	Well, we have video, which I'm sort of excited about.
	And the reason I'm excited about the video is I can actually track how many times people watch it, which I can't really do as easily with the podcast.
	But you can go to www.freedom.radio.
	A-I-N radio.com, one word.
	Or you can go to YouTube, Y-O-U-T-U-B-E.com forward slash free domain radio.
	And the board is at www.freedomainradio.com forward slash board.
	B-O-A-R-D. Not the other one.
	So I just wanted to put that out.
	The mics are open. If we have any other things to hear about, please talk up now.
	Questions, comments, issues, problems, translations of Ovid into foreign languages.
	Go.
	No pressure.
	I don't think we've heard back from Michael today.
	So that's it.
	That's what it means. Of course, what it means is that I've either explained everything really, really well or really, really badly.
	Either it's perfectly clear to everyone, or what I'm saying might as well be in some Swahili clicking language.
	So that's good.
	I'm going to go with the former, that it was a perfectly luminous explanation.
	Everybody's entire view of politics in the world is perfectly altered to match rational objective freedom metrics, and we're good to go.
	The revolution starts now!
	Now, sorry, it's just someone who's got a comment and says that, is there any possibility that we could get more subforums on the website?
	Because they feel that about 1,200 subforums isn't quite enough.
	And I think this is somebody who has about 1,400 personalities, so each one would like their own subforum.
	It's absolutely quite the case that we have a slight proliferation of sub-forums on the board, and we are working at trying to consolidate those into one big forum called Everything That Steph Says Is Right.
	And we're just trying to find... Of course, we have to massage a good deal of the text because there's some people who haven't come to this conclusion yet.
	More shame them, of course.
	But we're going to try and merge them all into the one forum, and that one should be...
	The one that everyone goes to and agrees perfectly.
	Christina's not allowed to post in that forum.
	I think she'll set everybody straight.
	So yeah, we're going to work at trying to get those a little bit sorted out.
	The mics are still open. If you have any other questions or issues, it's ten past six.
	So if people are winding down and don't have any more questions or issues, then we can wrap it up for this week.
	But I'm certainly happy to keep chatting if there is more grinding curiosity out there.
	Just a couple of suggestions for future podcasts.
	Yes. I'd like to hear one on your view on decisiveness.com.
	Oh, I'm not sure when I'll get to that.
	Oh, I can't believe I made that joke.
	I'm so sorry. Oh, you know, that joke appeared in my head, and I'm like, this could be a fork in the road for everyone's respect for me.
	But then I thought, how could there be any left?
	So, absolutely.
	I think decisiveness is, you know, decisiveness is one of these questions that's like, it is the Aristotelian mean, there's no clear answer.
	It's like courage versus foolhardiness versus cowardice.
	So yes, if you are over-decisive, you're kind of a rash fool, and if you're under-decisive, then you're kind of a dithering waiting guy, and somewhere in between.
	I certainly tend towards self-doubt.
	I think, like you, I tend towards self-doubt, and I also tend towards an over-examination of questions, which may not be at all evident in any of my communication.
	But I think it happens in there somewhere.
	So it is certainly something that I have to struggle with quite a bit.
	And so I think it would be a very good podcast.
	I will make a note of that. You said that there were a few?
	Yeah, the other one on humiliation.
	On humiliation, do you mean like a spank cast?
	I'm not sure what you mean in terms of the topic in general.
	Well, earlier in today's chat, you were talking about...
	How humiliation played a role in the formation of your view of your family and some of the decisions you made later on on defooing and all of that.
	I was just curious to hear more about that.
	Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely.
	I would be more than happy to spend an hour or so on personal humiliation.
	Are there any others that you'd like me to get into?
	Just kidding. No, you said you had some more.
	Were there other ones that you wanted to?
	Just in case anyone's not aware of the earlier part of this conversation, this is Greg's passive-aggressive attack back on me for asking him personal questions earlier.
	So, okay, humiliation. Go on.
	Just kidding. Just kidding.
	Go on. Self-flagellation, got it, okay.
	Taking a ping-pong paddle to my own forehead, got it, okay.
	Christina's certainly smiling.
	No, just those two things kind of stuck out for me today.
	Okay, no, I appreciate those.
	Decisiveness is definitely a real challenge.
	It's hard for me to know.
	The shit or get-off-the-part scenario is a long fulcrum that I walk to the tipping point, and it is a tough challenge, so maybe I can talk about some of the ways that I've worked on that, because it is really a...
	It's tough. It's tough.
	You know, there's so many people in the world, and Christine and I were just talking about this when we went bike riding today.
	There are so many people in the world whose ideas are just so patently bad, illogical, silly, and downright corrupt, who have, you know, a bazillion followers because they're completely certain, right?
	Certainty to me is not the goal because certainty is a very dangerous thing, right?
	Their certainty is so much associated with dogmatism and so on.
	And as I say, I'm really certain of my conclusions.
	I am certain of the methodology.
	But I'm really certain of the conclusions, and there are so many people who are certain despite having no methodology and completely insane conclusions, but where they are certain is they're certain in the...
	In the way that they communicate, they have passion, they shake their fists in the air, like you see Reverend Al Sharpton or whatever.
	I mean, these people are great orators, they have great passion, they sound very certain, and they're deeply deranged.
	So, certainty is not something that I particularly aim for, because it's a very dangerous thing to have.
	Right, and I mean, the opposite side of the poop or get off the pot argument is, of course, you know...
	You don't want to just close your eyes and run into a dark room either, you know?
	Right, right, and you don't want to get off the pot and then poop, right?
	So absolutely, it's delicate for sure.
	Now was there, sorry, is there something else that somebody else would like to ask or comment on?
	Hello? It's the man calling from Foggy Bottom.
	Could you speak up a little?
	little?
	I just couldn't quite catch that.
	Hello?
	All right.
	I'm so sorry. If you'd like to type in the chat window, I can't catch what it is that you're saying.
	We are in the cutting edge of technology, and this may be where we've got a bit of a paper cut.
	So I'm not sure if anyone else can hear and translate, but I can't quite hear that.
	I think it might be Turkish.
	um Aloha. Aloha.
	I hear mumble too.
	I'm glad that other people are hearing it too.
	I thought that my own inner voice was starting to mumble once I started to talk about personal courage, so I'm glad that other people heard that too.
	Steph, can I update the site?
	No, I like the shade blue that you've put in there.
	It's beautiful. And thank you so much for bending your aesthetic sense to the template that I spent some money and time putting together.
	I really appreciate that. This is, for those who aren't following this, the gripping aesthetic debate about how the website and the board should look.
	It's just beyond exciting.
	It makes religious nitpicking look like NASCAR racing.
	And I really appreciate that you've put some time into making that shaded kind of stuff.
	I kind of like the blue.
	And so, yeah, let's move that over and then we can start to finish up the new RSS feeds and so on.
	So I really appreciate that.
	I think it looked fantastic. Yes, I do like the site.
	I'm no HTML coder, and so I ended up buying a template for the website and adapting it to my own uses, but I think that it does.
	The old one just looked a bit kind of dinky, and I think the new ones are just a bit more dynamic and appealing, so I'm certainly happy to do that.
	Okay, great. Yeah, thanks.
	That would be great.
	Someone's just saying that he'll do it.
	Just one suggestion. Instead of shows, you might want to say, listen in.
	Do you mean on the website, Adi?
	I'm not sure what you mean by that. Yes, the menu.
	Okay, I will make that change for sure.
	All right. Now, is there any other last chance to get in?
	Questions, comments, issues, problems?
	Comments about the sides of my forehead?
	Any job updates? Yes, I start tomorrow.
	I start my job tomorrow.
	I've taken a month off between jobs.
	You may have noticed that the video production was fairly high.
	Of course, I took this month and mostly did this...
	I don't know, like 12-part Introduction to Philosophy series, which I've sort of been meaning to get off my chest for a while.
	Well, for a couple of reasons, I wanted to do that.
	One is that I think it's obviously very important to work from first principles.
	Otherwise, if you start arguing from midstream, you sort of assume a whole bunch of stuff and just start arguing at the end of it.
	Then I think that it's a big waste of time.
	So you need to sort of establish principles.
	And I've found sort of over the years that arguing politics with people doesn't really help.
	But I have found that arguing first principles and then applying them to politics does help.
	Because if people aren't going to follow you through the somewhat tedious and nitpicky side of first principles, then whatever political stuff you come up with later isn't really going to make any sense.
	To get that off my chest, and it wasn't something that I ever thought I could sort of do nights and weekends.
	I needed a concentrated amount of time to prepare and do those, and it was never, rarely one take to get them done.
	So I'm glad to get all of that stuff done.
	And so, yeah, I've had the last month off, and now I'm going to start my job tomorrow, which should be quite a lot of fun.
	The comment is, the sunglasses made you look like Terminator.
	Ah, yes, it is eerie, except, of course, I'm not yet Governor of California, Peter.
	Thanks for the audiobook continuance.
	That's very nice. Do you have a mic there?
	Because I'd like to hear some feedback on that.
	I was curious. That's another thing that I've been doing in the time that I've head off, is for those who have donated some shekels, I have given them the audiobook version, and I had done the first 16 chapters, and now I think I'm up to chapter 52 or something, which is about three-quarters of the way through the book, and I will get the rest of it finished soon.
	But, yeah, so for those of you who are interested, and I don't mean to be a vile commercial pitch, but I do take donations to sort of pay for the site and to pay for, you know, my on and off again drug habits and so on. you know, my on and off again drug habits and And aspirin, really.
	But I do snort it.
	So I feel that that's sort of a bit more edgy.
	And so, yeah, for like 50 cents a podcast or like, you know, if you listen to it, for 50 bucks you'll get a copy of my novel in PDF.
	And for 100 bucks you get, you know, any other novel plus the audio book and so on.
	So it's a good book.
	I'm very, very sort of pleased with it.
	Reading it again after about a year and a half or so of not reading it, it was very sort of interesting.
	And I also have found that by reading the characters out loud, I've sort of realized that they're pretty good characters.
	They have good distinct voices and so on, and they're sort of easy to read, and I don't sort of get stuck up and all that kind of stuff.
	For more than $100, do you get a podcast with Stefan Hash?
	Actually, for more than $100, you can just write me anything that you want me to do, and pretty much I'll do it.
	So the only limit there is your imagination and physics.
	Hello. That's right.
	There's my new YouTube video.
	Hello. Hello.
	Hello. Hello. Publish a version with pictures.
	That's right. That's right.
	Stiff with a go to rub a glove and four vats of baby oil.
	Got it. All right.
	Well, I think on the burst in of the Turkish Parliament channel, we'll wrap things up for today.
	Thank you so much, everyone, for dropping by and having a listen.
	Freedomainradio.com. Have a listen to the podcast, YouTube, forward slash, Freedomain Radio.
	Have a look at the videos, and we will chat with everyone next week.

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