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Dec. 3, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:48:51

539 Call In Show Dec 3 2006 4pm

Government corruption and workaholism

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	Well, thank you everyone so much for coming.
	It is Sunday, December the 3rd, 2006, 4.09 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time, Greenwich Mean Time, minus 8, minus 5, minus 5, I think.
	So thanks everyone for joining.
	I really appreciate it. The way that we'll work is I'll do a short introductory speech, and I would say short even by my standards.
	So I appreciate your attention for that, and then we'll open it up to questions.
	We're going to refrain from discussing the topic of prostitution because I certainly need a break.
	And so there's still a debate, I think, going on on the board about certain aspects of that, which you are more than willing – sorry, more than welcome to join.
	So this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, www.freedomainradio.com.
	Thank you so much for dropping by and spending a chunk of your Sunday afternoon slash evening with us.
	I really appreciate it.
	I think it's wonderful that everyone's by.
	And I'm going to start with an interesting article that I'll just read a short...
	A couple of excerpts from.
	This is an article from Maclean's as of December the 11th, 2006.
	Maclean's is like Time Light.
	It's like the Time Magazine for Canada.
	And here it says, the gravy train is still out of control.
	Reforms to how Ottawa, which is where our national government is, reforms to how Ottawa procures are being stalled or even ignored.
	And I'll just read a little bit from this article because I think there's quite a number of interesting package generalizations thrown in here.
	So it starts off, Fraser's report also touched on a systemic, not to mention costly problem, the awarding of government contracts.
	Fraser found that two contracts awarded in 2004 for $150 million to relocate members of the RCMP and Canadian forces had, quote, serious shortcomings, and that the winning bidder Royal LePage relocation services benefited over competitors through prior connections with the government.
	It was yet another black eye for the already bruised Public Works Department of the government's spending arm.
	When the Conservatives came to power last January, they vowed to do away with the kind of free-flowing, non-competitive contracts first uncovered by Fraser in her scathing review of the sponsorship scandal in 2004.
	This was just a huge multi-hundred millions of dollars mess where people were just sort of bribed and so on.
	But efforts over the past year to reform how public works buys goods and services have been stalled, frustrated, or altogether ignored.
	The error of the large, untendered contract appears to be alive and well in post-ad scam Ottawa.
	So here it says, according to a review of McLean's of contracts over one 12-month period, the government awarded 4,700 non-competitive contracts, it's contracts that don't go out for tender or bids, worth $1.9 billion, and those are only the largest ones worth over $25,000 each.
	The contracts, which include a sampling from before and after last January's federal election, range from the predictable to the obscure, awarding for everything from the purchase of missiles and bolts to opinion polls and underwear.
	Avis Rent-A-Car, for instance, holds a three-year, $5 million non-competitive contract to supply the military with cars at its secret base in Dubai.
	All in all, 10% of the money spent on procurements by Ottawa in a typical year is handed out on a non-competitive basis, as if the rest of it's not entirely skewed as well.
	Now, the reason that I think this is interesting, and it gives, I think, quite an instructive view into the mindset of most of the people, at least in the media, because you do read this stuff quite a bit, most of the people in the media...
	Who talk about government contracting and federal spending or state spending and say that the system is flawed because it awards, on a non-competitive basis, contracts.
	And the implicit premise in that, of course, is that the spending of the government exists to serve the needs of the community, and therefore, when it doesn't do so, it is flawed, which is something that I would say is a premise that is itself flawed.
	The one thing that I think is absolutely hilarious about this, and I think the most telling thing, there is a contract that was put in place which was supposed to...
	A company, in 2005, a consulting company called AT Kearney Limited was contracted to recommend ways to reform the procurement process.
	But in September, Public Works Minister Michael Fortier was forced to drop the company's main recommendations following a backlash from suppliers.
	Many argued the recommendations would see contracts awarded based on the cheapest bids rather than the ones providing the best value.
	To add to the Conservatives' headaches, the ATU Kearney contract was horribly over budget.
	The $1.7 million contract, which is supposed to help control government spending, ended up costing $24 million.
	It wasn't the first misstep.
	In April, the Tories were forced to cancel an untendered contract aimed at reforming the procurement process when it was discovered it was awarded to a consultant who'd worked on the Prime Minister's transition team.
	So here's sort of two examples when the government tries to reform itself.
	Number one, the...
	Yes, I am a businessman to the person who's just asked.
	The government not only awards the contracts on how to make the awarding of government contracts less preferential, less nepotistic to somebody who has helped in the transition of the newest government team, and also it is, what is that, 1,000% over budget from $1.7 million to $24 million.
	Yeah, it's about 1,400% over budget before it's shut down.
	Like, Lord knows where it was going from there.
	So this to me underlines a very important thing That is going on in the government that it's sort of very important to understand, I think, that the government does not exist to provide services, but exists to transfer money to friends, right?
	The government exists to transfer money from taxpayers to those with power.
	And so constantly crying out that the government needs to reform itself in order to better perform its services is quite funny when you think about it, because, of course, it seems to me that it is perfectly well performing its services, right?
	It's perfectly well fulfilling its intended purpose.
	So, for instance, if you have a surgeon who says, I want to save patients, but every time he gets a patient on his slab, he accidentally, quote, accidentally beheads the patient.
	Then, after this happens about, you know, say 500 to 1,000 times, You may have some question about the intentions of the surgeon.
	And if you look at the statistics going back over government contracts, I certainly know that the ones going back to the early 20th century, so a little over 100 years, there has been a perfectly consistent overbilling of government contracts and government quotes.
	There has never been any reform in the system that has achieved anything.
	They are many multiples of times more expensive and have been ever since they've started to be tracked in North America, at least in the 20th century.
	So when the surgeon keeps beheading the patients at some point, it seems to me quite funny and really quite sad for people to say, well, the government really isn't fulfilling its intended purpose, and it needs to be cleaned up, you see, and not noticing anything about the history of it, that this is really its intended purpose, and the idea of cleaning it up is sort of ridiculous, right?
	It's sort of like saying the mafia is not as customer-centric as it should be.
	And therefore, the mafia should try to reform itself.
	And what we're going to do is we're going to hire a bunch of mafia goons to reform the mafia and then feel that we're doing something.
	And this kind of non-solution, this kind of silly babbling idiocy that you see in the media all the time, that the government is basically sound, but it has problems, right?
	That it's a sound concept, but there are some bad apples in it.
	And I think that's what's interesting is that the media, of course, is heavily bound up in this kind of stuff with the state because they report on all the stuff the state does and they need their contacts and they need this and they need that.
	I think what's very interesting, what I've sort of been noticing, both in the emails that I've been receiving and just in general conversations that I've been having with people, It's that the amount of cynicism that's out there about the government really is at an all-time high.
	I've been debating this stuff for over 20 years, and I've never seen cynicism towards government at this kind of level.
	I can't remember for the life of me, even among People who are statists, even among people who are kind of socialists, I have not for the life of me heard of somebody last suggesting a large government program to solve a problem.
	Because of course, well, there are very few government programs, sorry, there are very few problems left in society that haven't had a large government program thrown at them.
	But I can't remember the last time that a problem came up In society, and I heard people say, well, what we need is a large government program.
	And that, to me, is rather remarkable and quite an enormous change from what used to go on in these kinds of debates.
	So I just think that's a very important thing to understand.
	The danger, of course, is that when you fail to believe in the ideals of the society that you live in, because they're obviously so contrary to the reality that actually occurs...
	When you no longer believe in the ideals of the society that you live in, the great temptation is to fall into a sort of pit of cynicism and nihilism and hostility and skepticism In other words, everything that I was told was not true.
	Therefore, nothing is true.
	And that is certainly something which you can see going on in England among the young at the moment, but in other areas as well, I think.
	And I won't bring it up with regards to the debate we had this week, but I would say that it's an important thing.
	This is why I think it's so important to be out there and to be positive.
	And to be pleasant and to enjoy ideas and to show people, not just in the content of your ideas, but in the way in which you communicate them, in the happiness and the pleasure that you take in ideas and in the strength that you take in the concept of virtue and honor and dignity and so on, that just because there's an enormous amount of fatuous bullshit in society doesn't mean that nothing is true.
	Because that is the reaction, sort of the reaction formation to some degree, to use a slightly technical term, that occurs for people when they realize when their idealism, sort of quote, idealism in their society...
	It gets blown away bit by bit, sequence by sequence, that people see that those in power are not honorable, that those who taught them lied to them or at very best obscured things for their own personal petty gains.
	And the great danger that comes out of that is people throwing up their hands and saying, well, that's it.
	Nothing is true. Everything is nonsense.
	And losing their ambition, losing their pleasure in thinking and believing that The substitute that is reasonable for misguided idealism is black cynicism and that the antidote to a wisdom that turns out to have been false is an abandonment of all of the pursuits of wisdom.
	And I think that it's so important that philosophers like us put out a viable alternative to believing in the nonsense that's out there in society or Going out and thinking that everything is nonsense, everything is permitted, nothing is true, nothing is real, except that nothing is real and so on.
	That kind of nihilistic cynicism that's out there, the radical relativism, I think it's just important that to whatever degree we can, we can put out a positive alternative to the cynicism that is really flowing through society among the young, I think more so than the old.
	The older people are still a little bit along like they kind of roll their eyes and say, yeah, well, you know, we know the government's nonsense, but what can you do?
	Whereas the disintegration of social norms that is occurring, I think, among the young in particular, is something that I think we need to combat almost as much as statism, because it really is a rather desperately negative thing to have brought into a debate that nothing is true, right? So you've been earnestly trying to find some sort of wisdom or some sort of peace of mind or some sort of conclusion about ethics in society and politics and life.
	And somebody comes along with a nihilistic viewpoint that it's all nonsense, it's never going to work, you know, you're just, it's mental masturbation, nothing means anything, and, you know, grab whatever pleasure you can, and to hell with everyone else, and all morality is a lie inflicted upon the weak by the strong to keep the weak weak, right? I mean, this is the sort of Nietzschean view of the master and slave morality.
	It's a very, very hard thing to fight, this kind of nihilism, because it really isn't a fight.
	It isn't a fight at all. All it is is saying that there's no possibility of victory or non-victory and that all thought and all philosophy is a form of manipulation and that all thought and all philosophy is a form of power grabbing, is a form of keeping other people down and that when the leaders don't obey their own morality, which is very clear, Then people say, well, all morality is simply put in place to keep the weak weak.
	And that's a very hard thing to argue against, and I'm not sure.
	I can't sort of think from my own life whether or not I've ever been able to successfully I think it's kind of cancerous.
	I think it's kind of rancid.
	And I've never really had any luck.
	But it's still worth engaging with a nihilist if there are other non-nihilists around who might be swayed in some other direction.
	So that's just something that I would sort of suggest as a useful approach.
	All right, so that's my brief intro.
	Good heavens, it was only 14 minutes.
	That's shockingly brief, but I needed to take a breath.
	So I'm going to open the board up, open the show up to any questions or criticisms, comments.
	Again, if you could do me a favor and lay off the prostitution thing.
	I don't particularly want to revisit that at the moment, but if you have sort of any other questions or issues, I would really appreciate that, that...
	If you would like to click on the request microphone, then I would be more than happy to open up the mic to you.
	We do have a gentleman who is requesting the microphone.
	Let us see if we can't get him in.
	Are you available? Yeah.
	Hi, how are you doing? I'm fine, how are you?
	Very well, very well. What can I do for you?
	Just asking, how's the weather?
	The weather here in Canada is pretty grim.
	My wife and I went for a fairly lengthy walk this morning because the last time we went for a walk we saw both deer and beaver.
	So we're going animal hunting now and it was a little on the chilly side here in Canada for sure.
	Yeah, in Sweden we have a heat record.
	It's the warmest in Sweden ever since the 50s.
	Really? Yeah, we have like 8 Celsius.
	So it seemed to me that you owe us some heat.
	That would seem to be the reasonable conclusion to that.
	Huh? I think you might owe us some heat.
	You've stolen heat. Yeah, sure.
	Well, I don't want heat.
	I want cold. I want snow.
	I want it to be a white Christmas for once.
	Are you a skier? No, I'm not a skier.
	I'm a nerd.
	Well, I hope that you aren't totally exclusive, but I appreciate that.
	And you haven't called in or listened to this show before, have you?
	Never. Ah, well, welcome aboard.
	This is a show about philosophy, particularly anarchistic philosophy.
	So the weather is certainly an interesting topic, and we've had a couple of interesting chants on global warming, but I don't think anything specific to the weather in Sweden.
	Okay. Well, the weather in Sweden, I don't know.
	Sweden's fall or winter, it's, let's just say, it's rainy in Sweden.
	And in summer, it's like some days it's really hot.
	Some other days it can rain forever.
	Right. When I grew up in England, I'm aware of that for sure.
	Yeah, okay, England.
	It's not so far. Right.
	Now listen, I've got a couple of other people who want to join, so feel free to come back if you have any questions about what we're chatting about.
	Thank you so much for listening in.
	Yeah, I'm going to listen now.
	I appreciate that. Thanks.
	Ah, I think we have a U-boat come on.
	Alright, sorry about that.
	That's somebody who had their question raised but has the microphone right next to the speakers, so I'm afraid we can't.
	We can't do that. Mr.
	G, did you want to talk?
	You had a... Alright, let me just do that.
	Who am I asking, as if it's not?
	Oh, I don't see you in our...
	Can you see it? I don't have...
	There he is. Ah.
	Do-do-do-do-do.
	Ah, there we go. All right.
	Yes, my friend. All right.
	There you go. How's it going?
	Hey, not bad. Yourself?
	I'm very well, thanks. Just two questions on your little dissertation there.
	You know, whenever you use the word little, that's not usually a good sign.
	Sorry about that. No problem.
	Is this trend away from reliance on government as a tool for correcting social ills, do you see that as linear or cyclical?
	By linear, I mean...
	Do you think that this is some sort of a continuous linear trend from more statism to less statism in the minds of the population in general or do you see it more as a There's a cyclical trend where people are just kind of swinging between faith in government on one end and cynicism in government on the other.
	Well, I can sort of tell you what I think and then you can tell me if it makes any sense to you.
	My sort of experience and thoughts about this is sort of like this, that It's kind of like dieting.
	So people who have problems with their weight, every now and then, usually after Christmas, they'll go and buy an elliptical machine or go to the gym and they'll work off some pounds that they might have gained.
	What is it? The average person gains like seven pounds over Christmas or something like that, which is fine if you're in England and it's currency, but it's not so good in North America.
	I think that people will go on diets and then when they have achieved their goals, they will then stop dieting and they will then start to resume their original eating habits, right?
	So there is the cyclical thing with a lot of people when it comes to dieting that there's a specific thing that they want to get, right?
	So they put on 10 pounds or they put on 20 pounds and then they say, gee, that's no good.
	I better lose that 10 or 20 pounds.
	And then they work to do that.
	And as we all know, right, diets don't...
	Fundamentally work, right? It's one of the big sort of problems with dieting.
	It doesn't work at all.
	In fact, it's generally better to be 10 or 20 pounds overweight than it is to keep gaining and losing 10 or 20 pounds.
	So I think that for a lot of people, it's sort of analogous that government's too big and they support the restriction of government, but only because certain problems have crept up, right?
	If inflation is too high, then they'll say, well, the Fed should have less power or should have less ability to print money.
	And so they'll say this, and when the deficit gets too large and it's eating up too many interest payments in terms of consumption of the tax dollars up here in Canada, it was like 48 cents on the dollar was going to interest payments.
	And then people say, well, obviously we have to cut spending or we have to whatever, right, raise taxes.
	So I think that people look at governments and the situations that governments create, and they look for specific solutions that's like, oh, well, we've put on some weight, let's lose some weight.
	I think that's one kind of thing that occurs, and that's not a very rational or philosophical approach to the problems of statism.
	On the other hand, though, I think when people get diabetes, they change their diet.
	Like when people get diabetes or they end up with some sort of health-related issue, like, I don't know, a very fatty liver or something like that, when they end up, when their eating has caused them to have some significant negative health benefits, then people are more open to doing more than just tweaking their diet, but actually changing their lifestyle, right?
	So my wife, when she got lactose intolerance, once she figured out what was going on, Totally changed her lifestyle as far as eating went, right?
	So, whereas before, you know, it was, oh, you know, maybe I'm eating too many, you know, milk products or whatever, you know.
	But I think when people kind of hit the wall in a way and things become a lot, then they're open to more structured approaches, right?
	I would say it is both.
	And I think that we have yet to hit the kind of problems that are going to send people scurrying to more comprehensive solutions to the problems of state power.
	Right now, people think that it's a beast that can be written, right?
	And so I think people are looking for incremental approaches to the problems of state power.
	But when people really get that there are significant problems, when we sort of economically contract diabetes or something, then I think people are going to be more open to this kind of solution that's much more structural and much less of a sort of tweak.
	Does that analogy make any sense?
	Yeah, actually it does.
	Did you hear the surprise in his voice there?
	I did. I heard, yeah, you know, it does.
	I'm going to write this one down, because this is, what is the date today?
	This is the date that Steph's, anyway, go on.
	I'm taking notes right now.
	I would. It may not come again.
	So... So you don't see right now, really, as a moment in time when something like your argument for morality can really have any...
	Well, it has effect at the moment in that it gets me donations.
	No, it has effect at the moment insofar as it is a tool that people are willing to debate.
	Now, it doesn't really strike people to the core yet, which is why I keep pestering people about family and so on.
	It doesn't strike people to the core just yet, but you...
	By the time it becomes absolutely essential, then it's too late if you don't have the ideas out there.
	If there was no such thing as the science of nutrition and very little warning or very little science about how to change your diet...
	To deal with problems caused by diabetes, and tomorrow you went to the doctor and the doctor said, you have this thing, we'll call it diabetes, that would not be the time to start studying about what diet you should try and change to if you get diabetes, right?
	So you want to have the knowledge ahead of time disseminated as widely as possible so that when people do get the diagnosis of diabetes that they have some nutritional advice to turn to, if that makes sense.
	Um... Okay, then...
	Oh, where was I going with this?
	Let me just put one other thing in there, just in case you were about to regain your train of thought, which was, if you notice, the Austrian school gained a great deal of credibility by, I mean, for like 40 years, it lay in abeyance after the rise of the Keynesian philosophy, for want of a better word, until the stagflation of the 1970s, which only the Austrian school predicted, right?
	So, if you do have...
	Some viable knowledge.
	It has to be out there prior, and it has to be maintained prior to the circumstances proving it correct.
	So I think there's lots of times in history when you can look at an intellectual movement that stayed in abeyance, and certainly classical liberalism has been out of favor for over a century.
	When a theory stays in abeyance, it's because the circumstances haven't proven that theory correct, and people don't like to change, particularly their theory of government and their theory of social organization, because, you know, as we can see from the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution and many other revolutions throughout history, if it goes wrong, it goes, like, horribly wrong, right?
	So people don't really want to change their...
	Their social system, you know, if there's any other conceivable way to do it, right?
	In the same way that somebody who's addicted to a particular highly addictive drug doesn't want to change their behavior and almost always has to hit bottom before they will.
	So this story then from Maclean's is an example of how most folks still don't realize they have diabetes.
	Right, right. So they are, well, I don't see, I don't know, because I don't know if this is, this is a whole problem with the media, which I don't have any clear answer for, but in business it's called like a push market or a pull market, right?
	So a push market is nobody knows what the hell you're selling, and so you have to keep going out and educating people and so on.
	And then once people finally get educated, they go, oh, I get it.
	I know what you're selling. This is sort of my job at the moment, right?
	I know what you're selling. That is useful.
	I just didn't even know it was a problem before, right?
	And so that's called a push market.
	And I don't know if the media, or sorry, a pull market is like Bill Gates doesn't have to phone you up and say, hey, you want to buy a copy of Windows, right?
	I mean, it just comes on your computer and gets cursed by Linux people.
	So I don't know with the media, is it because it's a pull market that this is the kind of stuff that people want to read?
	And that the media is just catering to them, or is it a push market in that this is what the media says, for a variety of reasons we've talked about on the show before, and people would just kind of go, yeah, well, maybe, maybe not.
	Like, I really don't know whether it's a push or pull market, and I don't know that there's any particularly good way to tell.
	So I don't know if this is what people believe, or just what people in the media believe.
	Sorry, go ahead. But in either case, whether it's a push or a pull story...
	The implications are not that we should get rid of government, but simply that it needs to be healed in some way.
	Right, right. Well, I certainly would never expect a mainstream media, any mainstream media, to talk about getting rid of government.
	That would just be absolutely unthinkable.
	That would be...
	I mean, you might as well expect them to ask for the reintroduction of slavery or a beneficial article towards theft, other than the state kind.
	It is... It is something that would just be far too shocking for people to receive.
	It is not something that the mainstream media is going to put forward as a viable alternative.
	It's just kind of like a business, right?
	The great thing about this article is it gets both the small government people and the big government people, right?
	Because the small government people are like...
	Wow, that's really bad.
	You know, this gravy train is really bad.
	We should take away power from the government to do all this spending.
	And so they're happy.
	And then the big government people are like, yeah, that's bad.
	We should reform that and make it get better, you know.
	So they really do sort of try and play both sides of the fence.
	But, you know, less slavery or more slavery isn't the same as yes or no to slavery.
	And I think that's where the debate has yet to arise.
	I guess there's a timeout, Greg, if you don't regain your train of thought that quickly.
	Ah, he's coming back.
	Okay, sorry. So while Greg withdrew in disgust because I wasn't letting him get his question in, we have now a moment if anybody wants to.
	No, they're not gone. They're coming back, I'm sure.
	They're coming back.
	Did I say something that offended people, you think?
	Was it me? We shall see.
	He's back. Alright, and...
	Do you want to try again?
	Mr. G? Yeah, Alan.
	Okay, go ahead. So you felt that disconnecting was the only way to stop the endless stream of words and actually get your own thoughts in order, right?
	Sorry about that.
	I don't know why I dropped it.
	Um... And now, yeah, I can't remember what I was saying, so...
	The push-or-pull market, was that anything to do with that as far as...
	Oh, yeah. Yeah, the push-or...
	Whether push-or-pull, either way, it's still indicative of the fact that we're not...
	that nobody gets it.
	That the problem isn't, you know, that the tree needs to be pruned.
	The problem is that the tree needs to be uprooted.
	Yes, no, that's entirely right.
	That's entirely right. And, you know, I certainly don't know how to change that other than through volume to the people, like through the volume of podcasts and board postings to the people who were on the fence, right?
	And the funny thing is, for me at least, the great challenge with communicating the idea of a stateless society in a way that was...
	Convincing to people or has been, I guess, relatively convincing to some people is that I had to spend 20 years getting comfortable with the idea myself, right?
	So the funny thing is, is that most people...
	Won't judge the logical content of an idea.
	They're certainly not up front, right?
	What they will do is they will judge the emotional content of the speaker or of the person who's presenting the idea.
	And what I found to be very helpful was I put forward the idea of a stateless society and I've received, I can't tell you how many emails from people who say, like I can't believe that you're pleasant and friendly.
	You know, about this kind of stuff.
	And so, because it doesn't freak me out, it's less likely to freak other people out, if that sort of makes any sense.
	Right, but even so, you have to be, I guess, ready for it to a certain extent.
	I mean, for myself, you know...
	It was a combination of both my willingness to hear the argument and your willingness to present it in a logical fashion combined that made it so convincing.
	So how do you get that on a grand scale?
	Are we stuck in a situation where the only The only possible way to do that is to wait for complete collapse of the economy or the government or what have you before we even have a chance at making the case and then in an environment like that where things are so chaotic, could you even hope to?
	Right. Well, sorry, let me just dig myself out of the black hole of depression.
	I just tripped in there for a moment.
	But I'm back. I'm fine.
	Greg's often the geyser of goodwill and joy.
	But no, listen, I mean, you're absolutely right.
	It is a, let's just say, it is at best a touch-and-go proposition.
	No question. I mean, there's no question whatsoever, right?
	I mean, in a sense, it's like you're in the plane, and the plane's going into the side of the mountain, and the mountain is snowy, and do you jump?
	Or do you not jump, right?
	So... For sure, if you don't do anything, you're going to die.
	And I hate to sort of, this is overdramatic, right?
	But certainly when the government goes wrong, it goes very wrong in history and across the world, we can see that.
	So my sort of particular position is that if we don't do anything, then for sure, you know, the freedom won't do well, right?
	There's no question of that.
	In the absence of action, state power grows, entropy against personal liberty, civil rights, property rights, and so on.
	All of that tends to decay over time.
	So without strenuous effort, you know, you don't get healthy by sitting on the couch, right?
	So without strenuous effort, for sure, entropy as far as human freedom is inevitable.
	And the best that you can do is to act vigorously and proactively.
	For sure... You know, there is a crunch coming, you know, and that's not just my opinion, and it's, you know, this, and it's fundamentally the crunch is demographic.
	It's not even state-based, although I believe that the demographics result from state policies, right?
	So this, this, my big fat Greek wedding, if you ever saw that movie, a complete fantasy.
	The reproduction rate in Greece is like 1.2 children per couple.
	I mean, it's, It's ridiculous, right?
	There is, and throughout the Mediterranean, throughout Western Europe, the reproduction rate for the sort of Western societies, the sort of the ones who were there, not just necessarily the immigrants or other cultures who've come on board, the reproduction rate is ridiculously low.
	The same thing is true here in Canada.
	That's partly for a lot of reasons, right?
	People get married a lot later and so on, and so, you know, the chances of having big families, or sometimes any family, is lower.
	And so there's this demographic issue wherein we have an enormous bulge of population that's going to retire, and there's not an equivalent bulge of population that's going to be available to take care of them.
	And that is going to cause an enormous crunch when it comes to...
	And if you compare that, say, with the reproduction rate of the Muslim world, which is like lunatic at Lehigh, You know, there's definitely going to be a fiscal crunch coming.
	And the one thing that is new, though, that has never been around before, which is something that I, of course, have a great deal of interest in, is that there has never been the capacity for people with unusual ideas or non-mainstream ideas to get together and to sort of spread the word in ways that are convenient to people. is that there has never been the capacity for people So, I mean, there were libertarian journals starting from the 60s and so on, but podcasting and videos, but podcasting in particular is just an enormously new and different phenomenon.
	And since the progress of the species is all about the dissemination of ideas, There has never been a forum that has existed before.
	You know, like I got a guy posted sort of recently on the board.
	I won't go into his personal story, but he was saying, I work nights at a gas station, and I can listen to six podcasts a night.
	And I think he meant mine, and I apologize for that to begin with, but...
	How could that have been? He wouldn't have been able to read stacks of libertarian journals, and it would have been not that interesting to do it.
	And it's not because their ideas aren't good.
	They're fantastic. But there's something about, you know, the way people have radios on in the background, the way that people listen to Walkmans, the way that they can listen to them in their cars.
	There's just never been a medium for disseminating the information in this way before.
	And I'd like to think, I certainly do believe, that if a difference is possible, it's going to come through that.
	This is the one new factor that has never been around before.
	And we know, all the way from the invention of the Gutenberg Press, that the technology for communication has an enormous effect on society.
	Okay, so then...
	Maybe what we represent and other groups like this, we're the force that keeps the pendulum swinging in one direction, while the apologists for statism are the force that keeps the pendulum swinging in the other direction.
	I think that's very true, and I think that because our position is far more consistent both with reality, with evidence, and most fundamentally with the way that people live their own lives, even the status and so on, because our position is so fundamentally, has such a fundamental degree of integrity with how people live their lives, That's why I really focus on a couple of things, right?
	Like I'm trying to accelerate people into accepting the philosophy of, you know, that we talk about the sort of scientific approach to philosophical examination.
	I really try and focus that on people so that they'll try and get it to accept it as quickly as possible, not because I want to bully anyone, but just because I don't think that there's, you know, we don't have generations to get this thing done.
	And that's also why I focus on the personal relationships, because it's very hard to be convincing in a philosophy that you're putting forward if you are not living that philosophy consistently yourself, right?
	Because then everything you put forward is kind of like a question, right?
	You kind of know you're split within yourself.
	That's why I sort of say to people as well, if you're going to go down the road of philosophy, have some idea what you're getting into, right?
	Because it's going to make you miserable if you don't leave it consistently.
	So don't even start if you're not going to go the whole way with it.
	And I really do want people to be convincing and to get the happiness that a rational philosophy can bring to people's lives.
	That does mean, of course, that if you believe in good and evil and that the non-aggression principle is a definition of a good and the advocation of violence against another human being, while not necessarily evil, is certainly not a good thing to do.
	That's why I really want people to take ideas seriously.
	And if you're talking to a statist who says, yes, I support that if you don't pay your taxes, you get thrown in jail, To get people to understand that to make it real for that person, this is not an abstract thing they're talking about.
	They're talking about powder burns and cops wrestling you to the ground and rape in prison.
	They're talking about really fundamentally ugly, vicious, powerful, horrible things and not to take it lightly.
	And in order to do that, we have to stop taking it lightly.
	That means that we have to introduce this use of violence into our conversations with those around us, not in a hostile way.
	But just in a way that says, hey, you kind of are talking about me getting shot here, right?
	Or to the Christian, you know, well, you do believe in a book that says I should be put to death.
	And it's not our fault that people believe this stuff, but...
	If we can't point it out with those who are close to us, then it really doesn't mean that much.
	It's just an intellectual exercise, right?
	Right. And there are times, sorry, the last thing is, there were times for certain people and for everyone in the pursuit of philosophy, there are times for certain people when you hit a core issue that is very hard for you, right?
	And we saw this on the board last week.
	There are certain issues which are just going to be core for certain people and are going to be very hard to stomach for certain people.
	The prostitution issue is one, and there will be always, and this has occurred for me as well in the pursuit of philosophy, there's stuff that comes easily and then there's stuff that just comes very hard.
	And that's the stuff which we have to work through because then we can be convincing when we talk to others and not to mention just sort of being happier ourselves after the initial discombobulation.
	So maybe this personal aspect of philosophy, then, is really the key to keeping the pendulum from swinging back in the other direction.
	But because of how...
	Oh, can you hear him?
	I think I lost him.
	Unfortunately, the FBI crows are probably chewing through his wire as we speak, though I think he had the actual answer.
	Let me just read what he wrote here.
	Perhaps the personal aspect is the mechanism that keeps the pendulum from swinging back, but that aspect is exactly what sends people screaming in the other direction, so we're stuck in a kind of conundrum.
	Well, I don't, and I'm sorry, when you get back, we'll sort that out, but I don't believe that we're stuck in a conundrum at all, because the purpose of philosophy is not primarily to convince other people.
	I think that having integrity within your own self is going to make it more likely that you're going to convince other people.
	But the purpose of philosophy, of course, is the pursuit of wisdom and the acceptance of truth and having an objective standard for determining true from false propositions and so on.
	But I don't think it's a conundrum.
	You know, we can't control other people.
	That's a fundamental aspect of my opposition to the state, right?
	You can't control other people.
	And We can't make people free.
	I mean, that would be a conundrum.
	That would be a real contradiction, trying to force somebody to be free.
	We can't make people free, but we ourselves can at least be free from people who themselves are not free.
	And I think that's the fundamental part that I try to talk about in taking a personal approach to philosophy.
	Politics isn't about the state.
	It isn't about some distant entity that rules the land in a benevolent or not-so-benevolent fashion that's very abstract.
	The state is a hot gun and a taxpayer.
	The state is police kicking in the door.
	The state is throwing people in jail to get raped.
	The state is brutal.
	And it's hidden by the fact that we have lots of propaganda about it, and it's also hidden by the fact that there's a lot of compliance, right?
	So if a guy comes up to you and says, I'll shoot you if you don't hand me over your wallet, and then you hand over your wallet, no violence has occurred, except that it has, right?
	So I would say that bringing this, the reality of the violence that is inherent within the nature of a state-based relationship, bringing it to the reality of people's lives is the only way that we can turn people away from violence.
	If we shield or hide violence from them or pretend that it isn't happening, Then people are going to be much more accepting of it because it's not real for them in a way.
	But when people really do get that the violence is occurring, then that's going to put the burden of proof on the people who are defending the use of violence, and that's, I think, the biggest weapon that we have.
	The most powerful thing in the world is the truth.
	And the truth is, of course, that a vast amount of what goes on in society is violence of one form or another through some sort of state-based or through a corporate use of the guns of the government to achieve their ends.
	that's an enormous amount of what goes on in society.
	And if we don't talk about it frankly and openly, and if we don't condemn it frankly and openly, and if we continue to associate with people who suggest that the solution to social problems is violence, then it really doesn't mean anything in particular.
	So...
	Is he back?
	Can you hear me?
	I can hear you.
	Sorry about that.
	My router is freaking out.
	I was just on my last point.
	All I had to say was that the one thing that really is the clincher that keeps the pendulum from swinging in the other direction is the one thing that people run from the most.
	Right, right. So that was basically it.
	All right. Well, thank you.
	Was there any other questions that you had that came out of this week?
	Well, I mean, I've got like three or four other questions.
	Let me just pause.
	Pause, have a look over those.
	I'll just throw it out to anybody else.
	If you want to ask a question, make a comment, criticize, or something like that, I'm more than happy to hear.
	If you would like to raise your hand, you can click on the request microphone, and I will mail one to you.
	And then I will see that here, and we'll give you the mic.
	If not, we will continue with our good friend, Mr.
	G. So I'll just give people a second to respond to that.
	Wake up, everybody.
	Don't be to saddle you. Pull your head up from the keyboard.
	They're going to end up with QWERTY-itis, right?
	That keyboard face that you get when you faceplant on the keyboard.
	All right. Greg will come back.
	Mr. K, go ahead. Hello.
	Hello. Hello. I just have a...
	First of all, I thank you for taking me in, although I wrote to you earlier...
	And you talked about the holy aspect of people being able to believe in something and use that as a way to connect and somehow what I came to think about was that and people that were really believers in it would do it like it should be done but I was thinking about priests That they believe in God,
	they believe in Christianity, but they don't necessarily hold themselves under the Ten Commandments or whatever the religion might dictate them to do.
	But still, we believe in those, and people still go to churches, even though we know that there are some people that are representatives of God that Don't necessarily keep their dignity to the religion self.
	Yeah, but that's certainly true.
	Did you have a question about that, or is that a comment that you wanted to make?
	That was the first comment about that.
	Sorry, I'm not trying to undermine anything you said, even though it sounds like it.
	The other thing is that the thing about the pendulum, that the world is That we're afraid of it being repeated and that when we're trying to do come up the opposite that it will cannot be the self-inflicting circle.
	But as I see the world is a circle and everything we do will have a adverse effect of whatever we're thinking about.
	So what I think is that the circle itself is it's kind of a closed system which The only way to open it is to break our own boundaries.
	But in my perspective, the boundaries are the religion.
	And with Shu came on to say that the religions are some people's feeling or belief that that's the only truth there is.
	And without the only truth or without having the ability to believe in something else, I mean, you really cannot Change anything in this world because people cannot truly be wise if they cannot be open to new ideas like, for instance, Muslim being able to realize or acknowledge a religion such as Christianity or vice versa.
	Okay, I mean, you've got a lot in there, some of which I can't exactly follow, but let me sort of, if I can, I'll just jump into the first two points, sort of the first and the last point that you made, and sort of give you my thoughts on it, and then you can let me know what you think.
	The first thing is that it's impossible to be a Christian, because this sort of idea of Christianity that people have in their minds as a unified kind of belief simply does not exist, right?
	There is no such thing as a Christian because Christianity is a belief system that is full of so many contradictory commandments, right?
	Thou shalt not kill.
	Well, but God kills all the time in the Bible, and so does Jesus Christ advocates the murder of people.
	You know, honor thy mother and thy father, and yet it says that if they then are not Christians, you can kill them, right?
	I mean, there's tons and tons of these, right?
	The problem is that Christianity, by its very nature, is a bunch of randomized cherry-picking out of a highly contradictory and nonsensical text that people simply call themselves Christians because they're taught a whole bunch of fuzzy things without actually going through and reading the whole Bible, and then there's this whole cottage industry that sort of sprung up to try and reconcile contradictions within the Bible, and so on.
	So the problem is that Religion is never put forward as a coherent idea, and there's no way to be for or against an incoherent idea, right?
	It's a lot of sort of like saying, would you like to ride my unicorn?
	It's like, well, I don't know, because, you know, it doesn't really, like, what you're saying doesn't make any sense.
	And not you, I mean, talking about religious side of things.
	So I certainly think it's of great value to be open to new ideas, but the ideas have to have what's called a null hypothesis or a testable proposition.
	So if I say, you know, do you like my unicorn?
	That's not a testable proposition because the unicorn doesn't exist.
	And that's not an idea in a sense that I would be open to because it just wouldn't make any sense.
	So I think it's very important to be open to new ideas, but it's more important to have a strict methodology for determining whether new ideas are valid, are invalid, or true or false, are useful or not.
	From that standpoint, I've never heard, and it sort of would be innately contradictory to hear, a proposition that comes from a religious context that has any kind of logic or form or sense to it.
	It's just like it's a cultural bias.
	It's like somebody coming up and saying, I like jazz.
	Is that true or false?
	It's like, well, A, it's not a falsifiable thing, really, and B, who cares, right?
	So the problem with religion is that it's not a coherent philosophy.
	There's no null hypothesis.
	Everybody's completely isolated in their own religious beliefs because everybody's religious beliefs are around specific texts within highly contradictory and fragmented works.
	Yeah, but if you say it like that, I mean, mathematics and chemistry only works because we came up with a unified idea of how to describe them.
	So how can we be certain that those are true as well?
	Well, but that question is, I don't think that chemistry and biology and the other sciences are valid because we have better ways of describing them.
	They're valid, and true always means true relative to what, right?
	Like if I say there's no unicorn, it's true relative to what?
	Well, it's true relative to empirical reality.
	And so when science claims to describe empirical reality, and then it comes up with predictions...
	That says, you know, a ball is going to fall to the earth at 9.8 meters per second per second or something, and then it turns out that the ball does in fact fall that fast, then science has accurately described the properties of matter.
	And so the truth or falsehood within science is always relative to the behavior of matter.
	Yeah. And there's nothing like that in the realm of religion.
	Yeah, but if you keep on looking back at science as it were, And times as it may become, they said this faster than a horse could run would never be achieved.
	Well, they made the steam machines.
	They said you would never be able to escape from Earth's gravity.
	They built the moon rockets and so on.
	All the time they put the boundaries of what's possible, even though it, in a sense, shouldn't be possible because it was described.
	In a sense that, if you look at the books, or, sorry, my name is just in that book right now.
	No, it's doing fine.
	So if you look at things that should be true in the way we think about them now, because we have all this fancy mathematics, chemistry, and science, And maybe ten years in the future, it would be obsolete because we came up with a other way to describe them that would make more sense.
	Sure. You mean sort of like how Einstein's physics superseded Newton's physics and now there's the superstring stuff?
	Yeah, exactly. For sure.
	For sure, but all of those advances are considered to be advances because they more accurately describe the behavior of matter.
	So they're not advances in the scientific method itself.
	They're advances of knowledge within the scientific method.
	So it's one thing to say there are mathematical formulas and algorithms that have not been invented yet, for sure.
	I mean, no question, right? But it's not illogical to say There will be no mathematics in which 2 plus 2 will equal 5.
	There will also be no geometry in which there will be a square circle.
	That's not a controversial decision, because those are basically self-contradictory facts in and of themselves.
	The round circle in 2 plus 2 is 5, since, of course, 4 is just another way of saying 2 plus 2.
	So you're saying A equals the exact opposite of A, or A equals non-A. There are advances within science, of course.
	That does not invalidate the scientific method, and none of those advances within science lead anywhere towards religion.
	Well, what if science came up with a way of mathematically describing God?
	I know this is far-fetched, but if they came up with a method of describing a religion, No, but that wouldn't be a matter for mathematics.
	That would be a matter for biology, right?
	And physics. Because the idea of God is the idea of consciousness without physical form, of energy without matter, or actually of existence with neither energy nor matter that can be detected.
	It is life with neither birth nor death.
	It is consciousness without the acquisition of knowledge.
	It is all of the things that are basically biological concepts completely contradicted, right?
	So the reason that I say that science will never, ever prove the existence of God and that every advance in science takes us away from the idea of God Is that what you're saying is that every time mathematics is successful, it gets one step closer to proving that 2 plus 2 is 5.
	But of course, mathematics is only successful because it rejects the idea that 2 plus 2 is 5.
	So if we suddenly found that there was some consciousness floating out there, it would only be because it was measurable in some way.
	Like we could point the spectra detector at God and we could see God on some sort of X-ray or Z-ray vision thing.
	Yeah. In which case it would be a matter of physics and biology, it would no longer be a matter of religion.
	Yeah, but you will not be able to see what you're not looking for.
	Oh, I think that human beings have spent an enormous amount of time and energy looking for God, and I think that that search will continue.
	But once they find God, then it will no longer be a religious entity, right?
	The religious entity is automatically described as that which cannot be perceived.
	The moment that God can be...
	Let's just imagine that in the next...
	Okay, let's go really far out if we're going to.
	Let's imagine that in the next show that I do next week, I get God to phone in, right?
	So it's going to be... It's going to sound quite a bit like my wife, perhaps.
	So maybe God-esque.
	We'll get really heretical here.
	And... Then, anybody can dial into my show on Sunday afternoons and ask any question of God, and because he's God, he can have all six billion people on the Skype cast that can answer every single one of their questions about everything.
	Then, there would obviously be no need for religion then, right?
	You just... You don't need a librarian if you can go and look up the book yourself, right?
	So if people would be able to talk directly to some omniscient consciousness, there would be no such thing as religion.
	There'd be no such thing as the Bible, right?
	Because you would just go and talk to God directly.
	Again, all of these things, I think, the more real that they get in the realm of tangible reality, the further we get away from any concept of religion at all.
	Okay. I think, thank you very much for...
	Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
	I just wanted to add a comment to what we talked about.
	And it's a small anecdote about Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, and Einstein.
	And it was about the time they came up with the superstring theory, and Einstein dismissed the theory and said, God doesn't play dice.
	Back to the... Right.
	So, thank you very much.
	Right, right. Thank you very much.
	I appreciate that. Einstein was a depressingly quotable fellow, obviously a great genius when it came to physics, but people, and no disrespect to you, my friend, but people do quote Einstein and so on, and his work in sort of philosophy, or he was a socialist and so on, and I don't think that they would...
	I mean, a philosopher sort of listens to Einstein with the same respect that Einstein would listen to a philosopher's pronouncements on physics, right?
	I mean, both philosophy and physics are very complicated and deep and difficult subjects that take years or decades to even get close to being good at.
	And Einstein spent his time and his life studying physics, more power to him.
	He was fantastic at it, of course, perhaps the best ever.
	But his pronouncements on philosophy should be taken with no seriousness whatsoever, any more than my pronouncements on physics or other people like that should have anything to do with being taken seriously.
	So I appreciate that, but a quote is never a proof, right?
	That's one of the central problems that occurs.
	So... This is Free Domain Radio.
	For those who are just joining, thank you very much for joining.
	This is a show on philosophy, using particular rationalistic and Socratic methodologies for approaching the pursuit of wisdom and truth and falsehood.
	Oh, string theory has been pretty much discarded.
	You know, I think I was actually right about that.
	I think I was talking about G-string theory, though, which was a little bit different.
	It was more of a request for Greg.
	But this string theory I put forward as a – there's this element of science that I'm going at completely on a limb here.
	So if there are physicists on board, feel free to click on request Mike and shoot me way down.
	But to me, there are sort of two kinds of R&D that go on in the world, right?
	The one kind of R&D... It's really focused on producing goods that people want, right?
	I mean, this is stuff like MP3 players, Skype chats, microphones, podcast technologies, refrigerators, and all that kind of stuff, right?
	So there's one aspect of R&DR of science that's really focused on producing what it is that people actually want.
	And I consider that to be a wonderfully positive and benevolent aspect of science.
	There's another load of whack-off science that is basically a bunch of government people looking to get funding.
	And that's where you get all of this, you know, 23 dimensions and all this sort of string theory stuff coming out.
	I view this as a kind of scholasticism.
	Scholasticism was a sort of species of, quote, philosophy in the Middle Ages.
	Wherein theologians would get into these unbelievably harsh and lengthy and eternal, it seemed like, debates about the question like, did Adam have a belly button?
	Believe it or not, this was a massive controversy in the Middle Ages in religious circles, in Christian circles.
	The reason, of course, why it was such a massive debate and bone of contention was because Adam is made in God's image.
	Adam is made in God's image.
	Adam can't have a belly button because a belly button comes from the umbilical cord as we know.
	Therefore, God can't have a belly button because God was not born of anyone.
	So the question is then, does Adam have a belly button?
	Because if Adam has a belly button, then he's not in the image of God, because God doesn't have a belly button for sure.
	Now, if Adam didn't have a belly button, but we have a belly button, then we're not in the image of God, right?
	There has to be a belly button transition in there somewhere, which breaks the chain of causality between human beings and a deity.
	And this kind of stuff was, you know, the amount of energy that was put into this sort of stuff as well.
	Just enormous, right? And, of course, then people would get all screwed up about, well, there's Adam and there's Eve and then there's Cain and then there's Abel.
	And so where did the next generation come from?
	You've only got one woman. Is there incest involved?
	People would just go nuts with this kind of stuff, right?
	Because this is what happens when people don't have real jobs that are focused on the free market.
	and I view the same thing as going on within certain realms of academia, particularly in the sciences.
	Let's see here.
	Can you maximize that? I'm just going to read a little bit that someone put in here.
	Both authors, let's see here.
	NewYorker.com forward slash critics forward slash at large forward slash articles forward slash 061002 C-R-A-T under bar at large.
	Now both authors also detect a cult-like aspect of the string theory community with Witten as the guru.
	Perhaps it has been joked physicists might have an easier time getting funding from the Bush administration if they represented string theory as a faith-based initiative.
	And interestingly enough, Freedom Aid Radio is a faith-based initiative because we dislike it so much.
	Smolin deplores what he considers to be the shoddy scientific standards that prevail in the string theory community where long-standing but unproven conjectures are assumed to be true because no sensible person, that is, no member of the tribe, doubts them.
	The most hilarious recent symptom of string theory's lack of rigor is the so-called Bogdanov affair in which French twin brothers Igor and Grishka Bogdanov managed to publish egregiously nonsensical articles on string theory in five peer-reviewed physics journals.
	Was it a reverse SoCal hoax?
	This is in 1996.
	I use this in one of my novels, The Physicist.
	Alan SoCal fooled the editors of a postmodern journal, Social Text, into publishing an artful bit of drivel on the hermeneutics of quantum gravity.
	The Bogdanov brothers have indignantly denied it, but even the Harvard String Theory group was said to be unsure, alternating between laughter at the obviousness of the fraud and hesitant concession that the authors might have been sincere.
	So this is the kind of postmodern nonsense.
	Postmodernism is simply government-funded, just for those who...
	We do have some doubts about this, right?
	Postmodernism simply is another word for government-funded, i.e.
	not market-focused, i.e.
	a species of violent fraud.
	And so maybe there is something with two-string theory and quantum physics and time travel and all this kind of stuff.
	But it seems that that and things like global warming are scientific methodologies highly corrupted by enormous amounts of money being hurled at scientists, right?
	We would not expect an advertiser to be objective about his clients products, right?
	We would not say that Somebody who was running an ad for Coca-Cola products would be objectively evaluating Coca-Cola products in some sort of peer-reviewed overall sense.
	We would just say, well, they're there to pump, you know, the value of Coke products.
	I mean, that's what they're paid to do and that's what they do.
	And the same thing, of course, we recognize this very clearly in the world of advertising.
	It's harder for people to see this in the realm of science because there's still a certain amount of vestigial respect left over for the white-coated brethren of the horn-rimmed glasses.
	But it is, of course, exactly the case.
	You would not expect a scientist who was being paid by the government to pursue a particular theory to abandon that theory any more Then you would expect an advertising executive representing a Coke ad to go out on the media and say that Coke is like garbage that rots your teeth and damages your esophagus and gives you gas,
	right? So we sort of very, very clearly get in the realm of the free market that those who are being paid by a client and who have dedicated their whole lives and careers to pleasing that client are not going to speak out against that client, right?
	This goes back to the McLean's article that I read at the beginning.
	We very clearly get all of this when it comes to somewhat like advertisers and so on.
	If I pay Michael Jordan $10 million to be the spokesman for Free Domain Radio and continue to pay him $10 million a year, and by the way, if he's not a spokesman for me, he doesn't get to be a spokesman for anyone, he's not allowed to hold a job at all, of course he's going to say nothing but good things about Free Domain Radio.
	It's even weirder when you get to understanding the motivations of advertisers and those who are beholden to the government.
	Because an advertiser, if he decides, you know what, I'm sick and tired of representing Philip Morris cigarettes as wonderful lung-clearing nicotine dispensers.
	I'm sick and tired of it.
	I feel gross. I feel like I'm pumping unhealthy stuff out into the world and making it look good.
	Then that guy can quit.
	He can say, you know what, I'm sick of this.
	And someone else will give him a job, right?
	If you're a government scientist and you've devoted 20 years of your life to string theory, that's all you've got.
	You've got nothing else.
	There's nothing else that you've got.
	And so if you then say, hey, you know what?
	This string theory is a load of nonsense.
	I can't believe we got away for this long.
	Well, that's it. You've got to go back and go back to school and learn some other kind of physics, right?
	So even where we recognize in the realm of advertising that advertising executives may get sick of a client and decide to trash that client in public, And then get a job somewhere else.
	There's simply no possibility whatsoever that a scientist is going to do that or somebody in the media who's, of course, just about everyone in the media throughout the world and the sort of general public media.
	They're all, you know, they need information from the state.
	They're all regulated by the state.
	They all get subsidies from the state, even if those subsidies are nothing more complex than subsidized postage, which is certainly the case in Canada.
	They're not going to speak out against the state.
	It's absolutely unthinkable.
	It's just never, ever going to happen.
	You know, you dance with the one that brung you.
	Whoever calls the piper pays the tune, right?
	So, sorry, whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
	And that is something which we fully recognize when it comes to parents and the intelligence and beauty of their newborn children.
	We recognize that when it comes to appetizers and so on.
	But there's still a kind of blind spot when it comes to people like public school teachers, scientists, people in the media.
	And of course, they put a great deal of effort into pretending to be objective when all you have to do with most things in life, you just have to follow the money.
	That's All you've got to do is follow the money.
	And whoever's getting paid by, you know, you look at the agenda of the person who's paying them, and that's all you need to do.
	It's not a whole lot more complicated than that.
	And there's an enormous amount of gunk, sort of mental gunk that's out there in society, which people try to pretend that this money source doesn't exist.
	And again, this is back to the article that I read at the beginning.
	People are just shocked that people like to give money to their friends and get kickbacks.
	And we're not shocked, of course, that I go and give my time to an employer and I get paid a salary.
	So I go and give something and get something back.
	That's sort of well understood.
	We understand that companies, when they put out a press release, are praising themselves.
	And we understand that Executives in an ad company are going to be pro their clients, and if they're not, it's going to be quite unusual.
	And this is a common thing, right?
	This is the very basis of the economics profession that people respond to incentives, right?
	You don't put on a white coat, a lab coat, and suddenly become a non-human being who doesn't respond to incentives, right?
	You want to get paid like everyone else, and you know exactly which way the wind blows, right?
	This is why political correctness takes hold so strongly in academia.
	Everybody knows that as soon as governments get into paying academia, there's no possibility that academia is going to be objective.
	It's simply, completely and totally impossible.
	If the cigarette company is funding all of the studies for lung cancer, we know for sure that there is going to be a bias.
	Well, Steph, if that's true, should we question all research then as self-serving?
	Well, heavens no! Heavens no, that's the beauty of the free market, right?
	So certainly there are certain kinds of research that could be self-serving, without a doubt, right?
	But the thing is, I guess, I mean, I would sort of like to have a world where I don't care about research.
	Like, why would I care? I would really love to have a world where I don't care about research.
	Like, for instance, do I care the market research that is done by Starbucks to open up a new Starbucks store?
	I could care less. I don't care.
	I would really like to not care about anyone's research.
	I don't care about the market research that General Mills is going to put into producing a new breakfast cereal.
	I don't care. I'd really like to not care at all.
	I'd really like to not care about polls.
	Like, why would I care in a free society?
	You don't care what anybody else thinks.
	The only reason why it's sort of scary that 70% or 80% of Americans believe in a Christian God is because they vote and they get through the government to impose their will on you.
	I could care less what other people believe.
	That's why I want a stateless society is because I don't care what other people believe and I don't want to be at the mercy of other people's opinions.
	Of course, a vast amount of stuff that's done in the world is done to manipulate public opinion so that the government can use its weapons with less fear of repercussion.
	So I would really like to not have to care about any of that sort of stuff.
	But yeah, certainly in the realm of science, in the realm of academia, I wouldn't even say question it.
	I would just say that it's all complete nonsense.
	The stuff that comes out of academia in the realm of economics and social science and so on, it's either funded by the state or it's funded by the university, which is itself funded by the state, or it's subjected to state power.
	So, no question.
	I wouldn't even look at that stuff fundamentally.
	Just because, you know, you look at the source, right?
	I would no more go to try and figure out the health effects of Coca-Cola.
	I would not go to the Coca-Cola website, right?
	Because, of course, they're paying for the website.
	They're paying for the research.
	You're not going to get objective information there.
	I wouldn't necessarily go to IHateCocaColaItRapedMyDog.com or anything like that.
	If I really wanted to find a health effects, I'd go to somebody who was not paid by either the pro or the anti-groups, and you'd sort of figure out, well, how did they get paid and so on.
	It's just a skepticism around follow the money.
	But I, you know, and so to find out about the government, I certainly would never go to academia.
	I mean, to find out what's going on in society, I would never go to people who are paid by the state.
	It would just be irrational.
	I wouldn't even be doubtful about it.
	I wouldn't even bother. Let's see here.
	So then corporate research today, you're saying, is biased because of state influence and not because of self-serving desires.
	Well, I don't know. I mean, there's corporate research that goes into, will this breakfast cereal make money?
	Well, that's great, but who cares, right?
	I mean, that's not something that really affects us.
	I mean, if you like the breakfast cereal or whatever, right?
	There's market research that goes into, what do they call it, the Nielsen ratings, or at least they used to, where they'll go and rate a television show and find out how popular it is.
	Well, that's great, right? Why are they doing that?
	Because they want to sell, you know, I mean, television is about delivering you to advertisers, not about delivering shows to you, right?
	It's all about delivering eyeballs to the advertisers, and that's why they want to find out how many people.
	And I trust that research, because the advertisers, like, wherever you have a conflict of interest, you will get closer to the truth, as long as you have a common methodology, right?
	So, of course, the...
	The advertisers want to pretend that there are lower numbers of people being delivered to their ads because they want to pay less.
	This is a DRO situation, right, for those who've been following any of this anarchistic philosophy of how disputes get resolved in the absence of government.
	If I want to go and advertise on Christina's television show, then I want to say, well, you only have five watchers, so I'm going to pay you five bucks.
	She's going to say, well, I have five million watchers, so I want five million bucks.
	And we're going to have to find some third party that we both trust who is going to give us the accurate numbers.
	And we're both going to be watching to make sure that the numbers are not either too high or too low.
	That's how the truth gets found out, or at least a decent methodology to truth gets implemented.
	That's the scientific community.
	That's the free market.
	This is how you get to the truth.
	They have to be two people, ideally, with opposing agendas and a third party that they both watch like hawks.
	That's the only way that you can get to the truth.
	That's why the board is so valuable to me.
	And that's how you get to the truth.
	There's simply no other way to do it.
	There's no other way. Everyone else is just biased, right?
	And even the people here are biased.
	But what you have in the idea of advertisers, and this is why both the advertisers and the networks have a third party that they both trust, Is that now the third party has a bias as well, but the third party has a bias towards accuracy in that if either of the two parties that they're collecting information for ends up saying you're full of crap and your methodology is biased and you got bribed by the networks to increase the numbers, then they're out of business, right?
	So you have to have somebody whose bias is in the truth.
	And that's why when General Mills does research on whether a breakfast cereal is going to make it, They are interested in the truth because they have to invest their own money to make this breakfast cereal, right?
	So you have to have somebody who's got a financial interest in the truth.
	And that's not public school, right?
	That's not academia.
	That's not the media. In fact, they have a financial incentive in not telling the truth in that if they do tell the truth, you know, they're going to get rather badly stiffed by the state in one form or another, right?
	So... All right, so enough of my rants and enough of me reading from the board.
	But if you would like, there is a button on the Skype chat.
	This is Stephan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Thank you so much for joining. FreeDomainRadio.com.
	There is a request mic, a request microphone, which you can click on, and it will...
	Let me just make sure everyone's muted, because if you're not muted...
	Then you won't get to see that.
	I don't think you'll get to see it.
	If you have a question, or an issue, or a problem, or a criticism, or another way of approaching things, I would really appreciate if you would click on Request Mike, or you can type in the chat window.
	We do have one person who wishes to talk.
	Yes, please go ahead. lovetolive.info Yeah, it's dj1ness, lovetolive.info How's it going?
	Yes. Are we hearing each other?
	Yep. Let's hope so.
	Let's keep the peace. That's what it's all about, keeping the peace.
	And that's where this notion of, and God comes in, because God is good in providing life.
	It's simple. And that's within us all.
	We have a creative to create.
	And we get that ability from our minds.
	So it's in the connection with the almighty power within our own being.
	Sorry, I'm going to have to interrupt you for two reasons.
	One is that you're cutting out quite a bit.
	The other is that this is an atheist show.
	So coming in with, you know, and there's no reason why you would know that, so no disrespect intended, but coming in with generic statements about the existence of God, if you have sort of logical, rational arguments, if you want to type them in the chat window, I'm certainly happy to hear them, but I can't follow because you kind of, you sound a little bit like you're sort of underwater, like you're bubbling sort of in and out.
	But I certainly did catch enough from what you were saying to understand that you were talking about, you know, God is peace and God is good and God is virtue and so on.
	But those are not philosophical statements that can be evaluated and certainly would not be evaluated positively in a group of atheists, right?
	So I'm certainly happy to listen to arguments about the existence of God.
	You know, sort of simple statements about equating God with positive things like peace and virtue and so on, not really a very philosophical approach.
	And you may have more sort of lack or receptivity among people who are already religious because it doesn't do much to the conversation here.
	But certainly if you have other arguments, you can tag them in the chat window.
	I'd be happy to have a look at them.
	So if there's anybody else who has a question or a comment or an issue to chat about, we've had a nice, juicy, wide-ranging discussion today.
	Is there anything that you wanted to...
	So, yeah, just click on the request microphone there, and I will see it show up here, and we'll be more than happy to demute you, to unmute you.
	If anybody has any questions, I don't have a huge amount of more topics that I want to get into before the end of the show because I have a couple, but I want to sort of save them for podcasts this week.
	So if you have questions, feel free to ask them now.
	Otherwise, I certainly am not going to.
	It won't be the end of the world if we end a little bit early today.
	We certainly had some shows recently that have gone on until, I guess, the wee hours for some people in the world, but certainly two to three hours.
	So I'm just going to see.
	There's a couple of people who are here.
	I'm waiting. I'm waiting.
	All right. I don't know who that person is.
	All right. So if you would like to click on Request Mike, that would be great.
	If you have anything else, you can put it in the chat window.
	If nobody has anything else, no biggie, no problems.
	Oh yes. Oh yes.
	The Jack Welsh conundrum.
	This is interesting and I'll certainly put out some thoughts or ideas.
	The Jack Welsh conundrum.
	Why should a man so screwed up personally be trustworthy as a businessman?
	Well, that's an excellent and interesting question, and a very complex one, which of course would be very interesting to discuss at more length.
	Let me just unmute you, Mr.
	G, and we will be able to...
	You can maybe pose a little bit more.
	I only know that he's had like three marriages and so on.
	I don't know much about his...
	His life other than that, so if you'd like to sort of give us a bit more of a lowdown on the gentleman, that would be good.
	Can you speak? I'm not sure if I've got you on yet.
	Hello. Yes, go ahead.
	Okay. Well, I actually don't know much about him either, but I was just thinking back to Podcast 500 on that one, or I guess it would be 501.
	I was going to say, I don't think I worked it into my song.
	Jack Welch, G-E-M. G-E, sorry, not G-E. G-E, not G-E. He's the CEO of General Electric, or was for many years, considered to be one of the most successful CEOs in history, added like, I don't know, $10 billion to G-E's market cap over the course of his tenure, and I've listened to two of his audio books just on general business topics, but I don't know much about his personal life, so go ahead.
	Right. Neither do I, but in the talk you had on who's smarter than whom in 501, I'm still trying to figure out exactly how to phrase this question,
	but I guess it just seems to me that I'd be a little bit, I mean, as successful as his business was, personally, I'd be a little skeptical of taking any kind of advice from someone who you used in the podcast, anyways, as an example of somebody who isn't exactly personally all there.
	Well, sure, but it would depend what you're looking for, right?
	I mean, Van Gogh would be a great person to paint your portrait, but you wouldn't necessarily want him to be your marital counselor, right?
	So, I mean, where people have particular skills, we do definitely want to go and talk to these people.
	The challenge arises when, and I sort of very basically get the idea that this has something to do with religion as well, right?
	Yeah. We don't get the opportunity costs that are involved with the acquisition of a particular skill.
	So it's like, yeah, Jack Welsh made a lot of money, made GE a very profitable company, turned a company around, did some great things, which meant that he was traveling nine months a year, and all the time that he was spending.
	At his job, he wasn't spending doing other things like learning philosophy or learning economics or learning how to not have a marriage crater on him or learning how to have his kids like him or something like that, right?
	So we can respect, at least I can certainly respect some specialized skill that somebody has achieved.
	But generally, the better they are at that thing, The less you want to hear about anything else from them, right?
	Because I had this thing at work the other day where I used the term margin versus profit incorrectly.
	And I later heard that the CFO was, you know, appalled, right?
	The chief financial officer was appalled that I'd used the term margin incorrectly.
	And, you know, to me, it's like, well, sure, you know, of course he's the CFO, so he spent all this time studying accounting and studying business finance and so on, and that's great, so he knows all these terms, and that's wonderful, and I used the term incorrectly in a white paper that I was writing.
	And it was like close but not quite right.
	And of course he's appalled because for him it's perfectly obvious, right?
	But of course what I've been doing is learning how to sell and learning how to program and learning how to manage and all these kinds of things.
	So would it then be if he used a technical term incorrectly would I then think that he was, you know, well that's appalling or that's really bad?
	Well of course not because he's learned technical, he's learned financial terms and I've learned technology.
	So it's just a matter of recognizing that whatever we're good at is everything else that we're that much worse at.
	And when someone's really good at something, like, I don't know, when you are, I don't know, like this Josh Groban fellow or some singer, right?
	If you're like just a fantastic singer or performer or whatever, Freddie Mercury or whoever, then...
	The fact that you're really good at that one thing is going to suck you more into doing just that one thing, right?
	So Einstein then becomes very big in physics, right?
	In the land of physics, because he's so good at it, right?
	That's what he's going to do. And that means that he's going to be proportionally, like where somebody has a real bulge inability, they have a proportional...
	Disbulge. Wherever you see a mountain of ability, everything else is a canyon, right?
	Because you get drawn towards that, right?
	So what the CFO should have said to me was, Steph, all this time that you're spending doing podcasts, you're not spending learning about our business.
	That would have been a far more relevant criticism, right?
	And they certainly do know that I run podcasts on the side.
	So, yeah, everything that I, and all the time that I spent doing this stuff has made me stupider in everything else, right?
	Because I could have been doing other stuff that, you know, who knows what would have made me calmer, speak more slowly, take a breath, who knows?
	So, that's just something, you know, that's why I try not to give up.
	People are saying to me, like, can you tell me how to run my portfolio?
	And it's like, no, for God's sake, don't listen to me, right?
	Because I spent my time on philosophy and economics and art and so on.
	Which means that then I don't get to learn all this other stuff.
	Now, maybe if I'd been really interested in being a financial consultant or, you know, a stock advice guy, which would be a total fraud, but let's just say, then, yeah, I would have been able to say, do this with your 401k and do that, you know, like Harry Brown did all that kind of stuff, right?
	And so he missed out on philosophy.
	Similarly, a friend of mine who's writing a book on economics is very knowledgeable about certain aspects of economics.
	Does he know smack about what it's really like to be an entrepreneur, the kind of decisions?
	No, of course not, because he's spent his life in academia.
	So similarly, I couldn't write as good a book on theory, but I sure as heck could outpace him when it comes to entrepreneurial economics, because I've actually lived it, like certain aspects of it.
	So... Wherever there's a great bulge in ability, it means that I'll go to that person for that ability, but I'll be much less likely to go to them for anything else at all.
	Right, but I just wonder how much overall good you're doing in a situation where you're so incredibly lopsided in that way that for every inch of good you do in that one Monumentally experienced area, you're doing three inches of bad somewhere else, right?
	Well, I don't know that it's necessarily the case because, you know, let's say you're a surgeon and you're a surgeon like 12 hours a day, well you're saving a lot of people's lives, you know, assuming you're not that beheading surgeon we were talking about earlier.
	You're saving a lot of people's lives and that's a good thing, right?
	Let's say that you're single.
	So you said, I'm going to be a surgeon, I'm going to operate 12 to 14 hours a day, then I'm going to go home and I'm going to eat, I'm going to sleep, and then I go back to be doing a surgery.
	Well, it's not that you're doing harm in any other way relative to all of that.
	Now, there is a weird kind of calculus that sort of pops into my mind about someone like Jack Welsh, right?
	So his own personal life is screwed up, two or three divorces, kids don't talk to him, and that kind of stuff, because, you know, why would they?
	He's just some big flashy guy on a business week who doesn't actually spend any time with you or read any bedtime stories.
	But, so, you know, his own family is screwed up.
	Now, if he hadn't, and I'm not saying he should, but if he hadn't gone to run GE, then maybe, you know, 50,000 people would have gotten laid off.
	And what would that have done to their family life, right?
	Who knows, right? There would have been a great destruction of capital and jobs and careers and so on.
	So, you know, in a sense, it's like you break your own finger to save 500 people kind of thing, right?
	So in a sort of weird utilitarian calculus, he's done more good by saving the company and destroying his own family than if he'd saved his own family and the company had gotten destroyed.
	I mean, I'm not saying that would ever be a reason for anyone to do something, but that's a way that it could be sort of calculated.
	Yeah, and isn't that sort of the...
	Doesn't that sort of contradict the whole notion of...
	Personal ethics, though?
	Oh, totally. And of course, this is where utilitarians start spontaneously touching their own nipples because it's just such a wonderful idea for them that you can have some sort of calculation that then forces this guy to be a good CEO. But of course, if you forced him, he wouldn't be a good CEO. So it never works that way.
	But you certainly could say that if I were him and I would be desperately clawing at a justification for my own life, there's a reason why after he quit GE, he went on these endless speaking tours rather than try to rebuild his family because it was way too late to do that.
	And like everyone, as he gets close to the end of his life, he's kind of got to look back and say, okay, let's sum this puppy up, shall we?
	And let's see what I did and didn't do.
	And unfortunately, you know, the stockholders and the executive team and the people whose jobs you saved through your heroic travel and efforts They don't exactly come to your bedside when you're sick and make you soup.
	So there's a sort of personal aspect to life that career success doesn't cut and cover.
	And I think that's when people get older, they have that kind of problem of looking back and saying, well, I sure spent a lot of time at the office.
	And that's good, I guess.
	I did a lot of cool things and I had a really great career.
	But I think for a lot of people, there's a big problem with all of that in that that stuff fades, and of course, the money can't buy you love, right?
	So, yeah, I had a lot of success, had a lot of money with the big man on campus, but, you know, my personal relationships were a total disaster.
	And at the end of your life, you know...
	People are only going to want to speak to him because they want business advice, not because they care about him as a person.
	So I think it gets sort of sad.
	It's a question about whether to follow this man's business advice because he's a good businessman and not to take advice from him on other matters.
	I mean, I think of Bill Clinton, who is running the country or who is running the United States, whose personal life and his moral philosophy or his ethics were just abhorrent.
	And he's telling the world how to live.
	And so I'm just wondering if that's the comparison that's being made here.
	But you tell me how to live. Sorry, we're just going to go offline for a moment here and chat about this?
	We'll be right back. No, I'm kidding.
	Go ahead. In part, that's part of the criticism.
	But there's another layer to it, too, in that I wonder if...
	The need to be so spectacularly successful in one particular thing is really more indicative of a life out of balance.
	I guess a more well-rounded approach to knowledge and wisdom to me seems more Seems like it's more capable of doing more good, even if only locally, than to be something like an Einstein, where you're the smartest physicist on the planet, but you're...
	Oh, yeah.
	No, his life was a complete mess, and one of his kids turned out to be insane, and his wife killed herself.
	It was just awful. It was just an absolutely wretched life that the man lived at a personal level.
	His last marriage, he wouldn't even talk to his wife.
	She had to slide his dinner under his study, right?
	And my goal of getting Christina to work with more food hasn't paid out at all, because she's all about these little profiteroles and Eiffel Towers.
	Anyway, we don't have to get into all of that.
	No, it's a total mess, right?
	And there's certainly, there's a common kind of wisdom out there in the world that everybody pays lip service to and nobody, or almost nobody sort of acts on, which is that success is not the same as happiness, or professional success in particular, right? There's that old song.
	It's on a Sinet O'Connor album where she does old standards.
	Success has made a failure of her home.
	And that, of course, is quite the case as well.
	You see in the realm of arts, right, every actress who gets an Oscar gets a divorce, you know, within a couple of months, right?
	And so this kind of success, it's not, you know...
	If success and beauty and fame and money brought you happiness, then Marilyn Monroe would be alive and happy.
	Or maybe not now. She'd be pretty old.
	But Elizabeth Taylor wouldn't have gone through eight marriages.
	Richard Burton wouldn't have drunk himself to death.
	Freddie Mercury wouldn't have screwed around until he got AIDS and died like a dog.
	This stuff doesn't make you happy.
	It's a thrill and it's addictive.
	And the problem with somebody, I think, like Jack Welsh, and this is psychologizing at a distance, but I think it's fairly true that what happens is work is relatively uncomplicated, like relative to a marriage and raising children.
	Work is, it's got real external measurables.
	You get lots of plaudits.
	People applaud you when you give speeches or they get mad at you.
	And there's an objective Non-negotiable kind of thing, right?
	So in my job, like I have to come up with a lead generation program, which I've started on.
	It's got to produce a certain amount of leads or it's a failure, right?
	There's no big argument about it, right?
	Either we make money or we don't.
	And that's sort of how things work in business.
	So I'm not saying that business is easy, but relative to personal relationships, business is relatively uncomplicated.
	You put stuff forward and that stuff can be very complicated and creative, but it either works or it doesn't, right?
	Assuming that you're not in some sort of government industry, right?
	And so from that standpoint, you know, you put it forward, it works, and you tweak it, and this and that.
	And you get lots of positive feedback and so on.
	But how to raise children is quite a lot more complicated, right?
	And how to have a happy marriage is quite a lot more complicated.
	At least that's certainly been my experience.
	And so what happens is somebody who's got a talent for business They are drawn towards the business arena.
	And this is true of people who have talent in music or talent in anything, right?
	They're drawn towards the arena where they get lots of positive feedback, they get lots of praise, they get lots of money, they get lots of people who want to call them and spend time with them and they feel very popular and so on.
	And so they spend more time doing that and less time at home with their family, right?
	So then what happens is their business career goes really well and they get more money and they get more praise and they get more positive feedback.
	While at the same time, their marriage and their relationship with their children gets worse.
	And so then you get to this tipping point where you don't want to invest in, like you want to follow what makes you feel good, right, in this sort of drug-like way.
	And so you go and spend more time on the road, you travel more where people want to see you, where they're happy to see you, they'll take you out for dinner, they think you're the best guy ever, and so on.
	And you don't want to come home to your sullen and disappointed wife and children.
	And so it becomes a real vicious circle, and I would not be at all surprised if that's what happened to Mr.
	Welsh, right? So much success and positive feedback that people...
	If you're useful to someone in business, they will praise you, they will give you money, they will give you anything to keep you on and to...
	I mean, I'm not going to sort of say it's exploitation because he's a big boy and so on, but you have to watch that stuff in business, and it's so easy to get sucked into that.
	I've known people who...
	Like, I'm sort of a 9-to-5 guy.
	I did my 70 hours a week in my 20s and early 30s.
	Like, I'm sort of a 9-to-5 guy.
	I want to come home and be with my wife.
	There are people I've known in business, they have...
	Three children under the age of five.
	I've known a couple of people like this.
	And they're in when I get in at 8.30 in the morning or whatever.
	They're there. If I get in even earlier, they're there.
	And they're there even if I'm working late and I leave at 6 or 7.
	They're still there. And part of me is like, dude, you've got children at home.
	Go home.
	Spend time with your family.
	You know, I read an article many years ago which sort of had an impact on me.
	As this woman said, she was cleaning out her desk at the end of her career, right?
	So she was 65. She was retiring.
	She'd been an executive for many years.
	And she's gone through all her filing cabinets, right?
	And she pulls out this one report and she's like, oh man, I remember this.
	This is the report that I ended up missing my daughter's 13th birthday for.
	And she looked at the report and it's like, this means nothing.
	I'm shredding it.
	I'm throwing it out.
	This was nothing.
	It seemed like life and death at the time.
	Now, it's nothing.
	And she's gone through all of these reports.
	Oh, this panic. This is when I couldn't go on vacation with my husband.
	He planned it for me and I couldn't go because it seemed so important.
	You know, this client is gone.
	They've left. This company went out of business that I tried to save.
	They're gone. Everyone's relocated.
	And she's just throwing this stuff into the shred of this stuff that's 10, 20 years old.
	That screwed up her whole life at the time, which she thought was so important.
	And that really stuck with me, you know, just as a fundamentally not good way to prioritize your life, right?
	That, yeah, you've got to earn a living.
	You've got to make money and you've got to be good at your job.
	Otherwise, it's a kind of fraud.
	But, you know, you've got to keep that life in balance.
	You just have to keep that life in balance or I think that your life turns into quite a lot of regret.
	Oh, yeah. Yeah.
	And that's kind of what I'm saying is that if If you're so super specialized that this one thing is all you can do, then you think you're doing good on the outside, out there somewhere, whereas in here in your own house things are collapsing.
	You're doing all kinds of bad and if everybody's doing that, then there really is no good being done because it gets cancelled out because whatever it is out there you think you're doing is illusory because where you should be doing good is at home.
	Right. Well, I certainly agree with that.
	I certainly agree with that. I mean, philosophy is lived in the personal sphere primarily, and through that, the larger sort of social organization grows.
	And I think that the people who've made those kinds of mistakes, and I know one person who's going through this right now.
	I mean, he was an entrepreneur when his kids were very young, and he spent two or three weeks a month on the road for a couple of years when they were very young.
	And now they're going into their teenage years, and they're messed up.
	They're messed up, right?
	They're two daughters. They missed bonding with their dad in many ways, right?
	I mean, he wasn't the worst dad in the world, but they missed it, right?
	And now you can't go back and re-parent, right?
	You cannot go back and re-parent.
	There's this other guy. I'll just talk about one other sort of situation just very briefly that struck me.
	This guy I know at work, he's saying that, hey, you know, I moved a cup on his desk, and he said, that's my daughter's cup, right?
	And I said, oh, why?
	And he said, well, I kind of snapped at her this morning because I told her not to spill her juice, and I was running late to get to work.
	I had a meeting, and my wife had already left.
	She works, too. And so I snapped at her because I had to, you know, and then she was, I had to put her in the car and drive her to daycare, and she was trembling, and I had to run, and this and that, and Right?
	So she spilled the juice and I got mad at her and then this sort of spilled over and so on, right?
	And he's like, oh, you know, and then like last night I come home and I'm making their dinner and then the phone rings and it's like, oh, your daughter has a piano lesson.
	Where is she? And I'm going to rush and get these kids into the car and get her to the piano lesson.
	Whereas last week it's because I forgot she had brownies and this and that and the other, right?
	And I just said, I said, dude, so not only are you got two parents working and you have two kids who are young, but you got them in activities, too.
	Like, what are you thinking? You know, like, with all due respect, what is so important that you're not going to have one of you stay home with your children?
	Why, why, why have the children?
	It's something I've never fundamentally understand.
	Why have the children?
	And then hand them off to other people.
	As I write in The God of Atheists, yeah, it takes a village to raise your children now because the real parents are so rarely to be found.
	Because they're off what?
	They're off getting positive feedback from other people who want to use their skills and resources.
	The children aren't going to exploit you.
	They just want to spend time with you.
	Whereas your employer is going to want you to come in and go to work, right?
	So are you going to live with your inner standard of integrity, or are you just going to please those people around you?
	That's in almost, that's what Hart is, right?
	He just pleases people around him, rather than living with an inner standard of integrity, as does Tom for most of the novel, but...
	You have to have your own inner standards of integrity, because if you just respond to the needs of the people around you, then the most manipulative and destructive people will always get their way with you, and the people who are the nicest and the kindest and the most, the least imposed, they impose upon you the least, those people get screwed, and those are almost always the children.
	Yeah, people don't want to have to make a choice.
	They want both. They want...
	They want what everybody else has and they want what they want to.
	They don't think they should have to choose between the obligation that they've committed to with kids and the obligation they've committed to with their own professional aspirations and what not.
	Right, right, right. And of course, if their children choose this later, this is the problem, right?
	One of the things that I sort of figured out in the DFU process was that I didn't owe anything more.
	Like, what I owed my parents was justice, right?
	And what I owed my parents was what they had provided to me, right?
	I mean, I do believe in an intergenerational debt, right?
	And if your parents are good to you and they cared and loved and supported and raised and did right, they're not perfect, but, you know, like nobody's perfect, but...
	If your parents did a good job by you, then, yeah, I think when they get old and decrepit, you should do the right thing by them.
	And that seems to be just, right?
	I mean, that seems sort of a fair thing to do.
	But one of the things that I kind of got was that, you know, I owe my parents what I received from them, right?
	And so this meant that I get to make up for not having had the best of childhoods by at least not having to take on a whole lot of obligations now that I'm older, right?
	Because, you know, as you get into your 40s, for a lot of people, especially if their parents had them a little bit later, I mean...
	There's the problems of aging parents coming into the world, right?
	Going out of the world, I guess, slowly, right?
	So that's a big problem for a lot of people.
	And so for me, it's like, well, okay, I had a crappy childhood because my parents were like crazy, mean, bad people.
	And then if I also had to wipe their asses when they got older, too, it'd be like, well...
	What the hell does this mean, right?
	Why am I taking on a standard that's so completely non-reciprocal, right?
	I mean, that would be not just, not good in a fundamental way.
	And, of course, people get appalled, right?
	They say, well, you're not taking care of your mother.
	She's like, you know, whatever.
	And they're appalled, right?
	And it's like, why? So you say that not taking care of someone who's dependent on you is a bad thing.
	Well, she never did that to me, so...
	The problem is the hypocrisy, right?
	So you can go and do your career stuff.
	This is the Cats of the Cradle song, right?
	You can go and do your career stuff, and then most parents, when they're old and they need their children, then if the children say, I'm sorry, I'm too busy, right?
	I've got to travel. I can't come and look at the nursing home with you or come and visit you or whatever, right?
	Then they're just appalled, right?
	And you reap what you sow from that standpoint.
	It's the hypocrisy, I guess, that bothers me the most.
	And to bring this back to the Jack Welch example, that's one of the reasons why I don't think I would take advice from a guy like that because the advice he's going to give you is ignore your family, work 80 hours a week and go on lectures when you're 60 years old.
	Right, right, right.
	No, and I think that's kind of sad.
	I really do. I mean, I have a great respect for what the guy did from a business standpoint.
	But I, you know, and I used to have a lot more respect when I thought that economics was about maximizing returns on investment and about growing the economy the fastest.
	And now that I'm older and I understand that that's not at all what economics is about, right?
	That economics is about allocation of resources.
	And over-allocating resources into your career and under-allocating resources, it might grow the economy quicker, but that's not the point, right?
	The point is not to just make as much money as humanly possible, otherwise we'd be out there simultaneously selling a kidney and giving blood and working on our Blackberry, right?
	But the point is to live a life of wisdom and balance and to be responsible within your career and to be responsible within your intimate relationships.
	And I think that that's generally impossible if we have historical obligations with our family that are unjust, right?
	So the one thing that makes up for having a bad childhood is not having obligations when you get older, right?
	That is the one thing that makes it not a net loss, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, yeah. Makes perfect sense.
	All right. So now that the two fatherless people have solved all the problems of family, perhaps we can talk a little bit more if anybody else has any other sort of questions or issues.
	Sorry, the other thing, too, is that, as we all know, and I mentioned this way back in a podcast on feminism, that the great tragedy, of course, is that In order to maintain their lifestyles, you now have to have two people working where formerly, like in the 50s, a guy could buy a house and a car and support a wife and two or three kids on a middle-class salary, right?
	I mean, even a factory guy could do that.
	Maybe not a very nice house, but it used to be the case that a single earner, male or female, but usually male, Could keep a family running, no problem, off a decent income, had job security and so on.
	And now, with the price of real estate and the amount of taxation and so on, you need two people, right?
	And this is one of the reasons why the birth rate has just gone down so much, right?
	And there's so much taxes. High taxes always diminish birth rate.
	There's no question. The children are too expensive.
	They're too stressful, right?
	So where people might have had three kids in the past, now they have one kid and they barely manage to survive having two with all the stress that goes on with two parents working.
	The last thing they'd ever want is to have more, right?
	So at the very best, people are replenishing.
	And this is why, you know, a third of people go through life now without having kids, right?
	I mean, it's nothing wrong with it if it's your choice, but these state policies do end up having significant effects on some basic fundamental things like the joys of family and so on.
	So this is where, you know, these sort of government policies both diminish the size of families and raise children with very high time preferences, which we can talk about perhaps another time.
	All right. So if we have any sort of other questions or comments, if you'd like to click on...
	Give me the mic, man.
	I'll be happy to take any sort of final questions or comments.
	Thank you for a very, very interesting and exciting show.
	I appreciate the feedback, and thanks, of course, to Greg and the others who have commented and given some great food for thought.
	If you have any other questions, I'll just give a last look over.
	I'll just give it a second for Skype to pop up if anybody else had any sort of questions or comments.
	Christina's clicking on it, but I'm going to ignore it.
	So, all right.
	Well, listen, thank you so much, everyone, for listening.
	I appreciate it. We'll be just slightly ending ahead of schedule here, which I'm sure won't be the end of the world for people.
	Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to chatting with people on the boards, continuing with that.
	www.freedomainradio.com.

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