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Nov. 2, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:37:27

1195 Sunday Call In Show Nov 2 2008

Agorism, nervousness around authority, ambivalent voting and the free state project...

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	Alright, well thank you everybody so much for joining us.
	It is 4 o'clock, November the 2nd, 2008.
	Thank you, thank you, thank you big, more than air kisses, but perhaps even a little tongue in your ear to all of those donators who stepped up at the end of last month and threw some cash my way.
	My gold lame diamond laptop is currently on its way because I try to use your money as wisely as possible.
	And what is happening is I'm actually having one of my teeth, or I guess a tooth, Replaced with an FM broadcasting device so that I can podcast.
	Well, everything I do will be a podcast.
	It's going to be StephBotCam 24-7, mostly me chewing, stepping back, and kissing myself.
	So thank you so much everyone who stepped up.
	That was just wonderful and made for a good month, which again shall be redistributed to...
	To help drive the conversation forward, thank you again so much to those who helped drive the YeliCast voting video, which has gone, you know, as far as FDR goes, relatively into gold-slash-platinum territory relatively quickly, and that's good.
	Of course, we are still one-tenth of one percent of a cat playing piano, but...
	We're heading up to 10,000 in a couple of days, which is pretty good.
	If you think that if I could give a speech to 10,000 people about voting, that would be something I would go to.
	And according to YouTube, most people are making it all the way through the video, probably because they are paralyzed by fear that a vaguely speckled beluga is yelling at them.
	So thank you everybody so much who's helping to drive that.
	Thanks to Colleen, who had a wonderful conversation about self-attack.
	And that's really, really helpful.
	If you have a chance to listen to that, if anyone remembers the number, I can type it into the chat window.
	I shall done call it out.
	And thank you to Qtron Man, man, man, man, who is an objectivist who kindly offered to have a debate with little old me and was a very exciting debating partner.
	Finally helped me to understand that the true argument Again, thank you to Colleen, who truly opened her heart in an absolutely beautiful way to talk about this challenge that we all face of self-attack.
	So, the debate is available, I don't know, 1193, 1194, something like that.
	It's available on the website.
	You can look at it in high def on YouTube or BlipTV.
	And it's well worth having a look.
	I certainly look forward to having more debates.
	I do enjoy me a good debate.
	And the technology is really making it quite fun to have both parties able to be visible through video.
	If anyone knows, if we have any of the technical wizards who are out there...
	Who know how to...
	Because the way that Uwe records is a big inky mote of blackness around the talking foreheads.
	Actually, just one. And if anyone knows how to recreate the video or sort of expand the video so you can slice off the outside edges and just have the heads, that would be fantastic.
	If you could send me an email. And Theria, my friend, I think you are still going to do me a tasty animated intro.
	To the True News stuff, if you could let me know what the status of that is, I would really appreciate it.
	That's really it for the news and business.
	Greg G, or as he's known in rap circles, Greg E. G, is setting up a conference call, which we're going to all try and participate in, about siblings, how to manage them if you don't have them, and if you're fairly good with a chemistry set, how to create and if you're fairly good with a chemistry set, how to create them using a human hair and So that will be set up for some time this week.
	And that's it for the news and the weather.
	If you would like to, we had a gentleman who just started a little bit before we started, who had questions about how to achieve anarchism and so on.
	If you'd like to say hello and pop out the question, perhaps we can have a collective response.
	Hello?
	Hello?
	Oh, hi. My name is Richard Tardibuono.
	I talked to you on the chat a couple of times and so on.
	I wanted to discuss different methods of trying to attain anarchy and the ideas of Samuel Konkin In his book, The New Libertarian Manifesto, appealed to me.
	And I was wondering if we could discuss that a bit, or...
	Yeah. Yeah, sounds good.
	Let's hear the theories.
	Oh, okay. Basically, well, Konkin...
	Okay, well, Konkin states that if...
	Okay, he has the...
	Sorry. I know, I'm nervous.
	I'm sorry. What he calls the three stages of achieving anarchy in his book, where if I remember correctly, there was stage zero where there's no agorist, there's no one who's doing black market activity.
	Are you familiar with Konkin?
	No, but I'm sure I will be in a few minutes.
	Oh, that's not...
	Okay. Well, basically, he said in his book that if people were to...
	The more people who became agorists, who believed in not supporting the state, in trying to...
	Okay, how do I explain this?
	Sorry to interrupt. I mean, if it's somewhat similar to the agorist idea, is it fair to say that it's related to...
	It is the Igerist idea.
	Yeah, so is it the idea of its voluntary withdrawal from participation with the state?
	Pursuing handshake contracts, grey market or black market activity, all designed and collapsing down your living standards to that which can be sustained through a voluntary kind of under the radar interaction.
	So it's kind of like going off the grid, but it's not the same as going to live in a cave, right?
	Right. So is that a fairly decent encapsulation?
	I know it's a complex theory, but is that a fairly decent encapsulation of it?
	Right. And the purpose of this is that you begin to bleed off.
	In a sense, the farmer is going to go bankrupt if a bunch of cows, or like if a number of cows slither off in the middle of the night.
	And through the non-participation in this coercive system, you can begin to undermine it through not giving it the resources that you otherwise would.
	Is that fair? Right.
	If you can have your own, say, private police force through voluntary interactions, you can stop the state from forcing their taxes on us Oh, I'm sorry.
	That's something I didn't know about the theory.
	I thought it was more that you...
	So the idea is that you would create your own private police force, is that correct?
	And then you would defend yourself sort of a secession through the development of a private militia or a private army, which would then fight against the government, is that right?
	That's what I got from it, yes.
	Huh. Well, I hadn't heard that second part where you basically have an internal revolt against your armed foe, but I'm not sure I would go with that in terms of practicality.
	I can certainly see that the other thing would work on an individual level to give you some level of freedom, but of course it comes at the great cost of turning yourself into a hunted prey of the government, right?
	So you would gain a certain amount of freedom and a certain amount of integrity in terms of not participating or contributing to The statist situation, but it comes at a fairly catastrophic psychological and personal cost, and you kind of have to live in fear for the rest of your day.
	Of course, I'm very much focused on psychological freedom, much more so than I am with economic freedom, because I know that we can do a lot to bring about psychological freedom within our own lives, and that that's the foundation for building economic and political freedom.
	So I'm very much focused on that, which makes us feel free and happy, not to the point of hedonism.
	And so for me, the cost of giving up an open life in a fairly civilized society and going into the gray or black market for the rest of my days is...
	I mean, that's more than I would be willing to do.
	I mean, plus, you know, I've got a kid on the way.
	Christine is helping. And so, condemning my kid, in a sense, to a life as an outlaw, to me, would be more than I could reasonably impose upon that child.
	So, anyway, I mean, those are just my thoughts, but I'm certainly happy to hear more about the theory.
	Okay. I mean, all I read was the New Libertarian Manifesto and the Agrist Class Theory, which came out close to his death.
	Well, it wasn't finished and someone else finished it for him.
	And I just have a general idea of what it is.
	It just, they just want to interact that way and try to have more, sorry, I mean to say that they want to have more voluntary interactions between each other.
	They try to get more.
	They'll sell things to other agorists without being taxed.
	I don't know if it's as...
	I'm sorry, can I interrupt you for just a second?
	To not take any of your taxes or...
	Sorry, can I just interrupt you for just a second?
	Yeah. I'd really like to hear more about this theory, but either because of your nerves or because you're not too clear on the theory, I feel like we're doing a lot of beating around the bush.
	Is that fair to say? Yeah, that's very fair.
	And look, I really do appreciate your call, and I do want to hear more about the theory.
	Perhaps what you could do is prepare a bit of a synthesis of what it is that you'd like to talk about, and we could either talk during the week or perhaps on next week's show.
	I'm sorry about that.
	No, no, don't worry about it.
	It's totally fine. Look, it's a weird and bizarre thing to suddenly talk on a philosophy show, so I totally understand.
	And I really do appreciate, this is with, you know, all due thanks to, because this topic does come up.
	From time to time, and I really would like to have a conversation about it, but I think either because of nerves, which again, I totally understand, because it is a weird thing to do.
	It's like, hey, let's talk philosophy out of the blue.
	Or because it's hard to, you know, maybe you need a little bit of time to synthesize the ideas.
	I just want to make sure that we do the ideas justice, and so maybe we should postpone this chat until another time.
	Yeah. Can I ask you a question though?
	Oh yeah, absolutely. What do you think is the best way of achieving anarchy?
	I know I haven't read your third book, so I'm guilty there.
	Well, you know, not to be too annoying, but that's going to be the next book.
	So, I mean, basically, I'm very much, maybe this comes from my training as a method actor, but I'm very much an inside-out kind of guy.
	So I think that to achieve peace in the world, we need to achieve peace, you know, for want of a more objective phrase, we need to achieve peace within ourselves or within our own hearts in order to bring peace to the world.
	We need to apply the principles of voluntarism to our own lives.
	And of course, in this, I'm very much in tune with the agorists, although it seems to me that they focus much more on the economic aspect of voluntarism, whereas I focus much more on the familial, the friendship-based, the lover and spouse and child-based relationships where voluntarism can be achieved than Without the risk of being hunted down by state thugs and thrown in a rape room for five years, right?
	So you can achieve voluntarism within your personal relationships without incurring the wrath of the state.
	And through that process, you are actually proving the joy and benevolence and practicality Of pure voluntarism in your personal relationships.
	That, to me, means no unchosen positive obligations, right?
	We are not duty-bound to spend time with anyone.
	And no one, of course, is duty-bound to spend time with us.
	And I think that working to free ourselves from...
	Because we're asking society to free itself from history, right?
	To do that, we need to blaze the way and show that if we free ourselves from our personal histories, and that does not mean freeing ourselves from our families.
	I mean, I know that a lot of people focus on this defu thing, like it's some big part of what we do, the separation from the family, and it's really not.
	As I say in the book, out of...
	There have been about 100,000 parents of people who've been involved in FDR over the past couple of years, of which I know of about 20 families of children who've separated from parents.
	So it's a completely tiny percentage.
	But what I mean is that a lot of times within our families and in our personal relationships, we grow up with these historical patterns, much like society as a whole has grown up with a historical pattern called the state, just as it formerly had children as slaves, women as chattel, slaves as slaves.
	And we are asking society to reinvent its relationships based upon moral, practical, ethical standards.
	And the very least we can do is take our theories for a test drive ourselves and reinvent our own relationships free of history and with reference to objective or ideal standards of relationships such as honesty, integrity, virtue, compassion, strength. integrity, virtue, compassion, strength.
	Like all of the traditional virtues, which are not too shocking, to apply those to our own personal relationships, we can then show people how beneficial it is to reevaluate relationships because all the state is.
	fundamentally, is a relationship, to reevaluate relationships from the ground up, to show that to break free from history and to use philosophy rather than the inertia of the past as a guide, It creates a wonderful life and that gives us the credibility to make the case to society that what we are doing in our lives should be what society does as a whole.
	And that's certainly the approach that I've been taking for the past decade and it has been, to me at least, a stunning and stellar success and I'm trying to do my best to goad, prod, beg, cajole people into taking that same approach.
	Okay. Well, thanks a lot for having me on your show, then.
	And thanks. Do shoot me an email through the website.
	I really do. And if there's someone you know who you'd like to talk to me about agorism with, or if there's someone you'd like to tag team about agorism with me, somebody else you know who may have the theories more boiled down, I really do want to talk about it.
	And I do appreciate you bringing this up.
	Just shoot me an email and we'll set up a time.
	Okay, then. All right.
	Thanks a lot. Thank you.
	I appreciate it. And I will talk to you soon.
	All right. Bye-bye. Bye.
	Lovely Christina. Yes, darling.
	We had somebody who wanted to come up next.
	Was it you? Is it about the lawn?
	It's about the lawn furniture.
	Lawn furniture. Oh, yeah. Bring it in.
	We had somebody else who wanted to come up next.
	Is that right? Oh, I thought somebody...
	Hello? Hello?
	Is my mic working?
	Go ahead. It's Jessen.
	Hey, how's it going? Welcome back.
	I'm really nervous right now, so...
	Could you just, sorry, if you could just take the mic a little further away from your mouth?
	You sound all kinds of buzzy.
	Is that alright? Ah, much better.
	Much better. I'm at a Net Cafe, so it's a shitty microphone.
	I just wanted to talk about that stuff I mentioned in an email.
	Sure. I'm not sure what to say.
	Do you want to take a bit of time?
	Maybe you could jot down some notes and get your thoughts together.
	Do you want to read the email?
	Do you want to just plunge on?
	Um... What if I just read out the email and we can talk about that, I guess?
	Sure, that'd be great. Okay, um...
	I wrote, Hi Steph.
	I've kind of been keeping my head down because with those last few emails I felt like I was saying something worse each time.
	I don't know why I felt so anxious.
	What do you think? I think you are right that I was talking around the issue of coming back because I wanted to ask about it and also your perspective on other things like me and Katie for a long time.
	But I felt hesitant to ask and I don't know why.
	And that was the email. Right, and just for those who are not aware, the backstory is that Jessen was around at FDR for 8, 10 months?
	A year? Something like that? Yeah.
	Right. And there was a certain amount of conflict which is not particularly important to go into.
	I asked Jessen to take a break.
	She did fantastic work, went into therapy.
	I mean, you've been working fantastically.
	You broke up with your long-term girlfriend.
	And so, I mean, you've been doing a lot of work over the past, I guess, about six months.
	Is that right? Yeah, I think so. Right. So, I mean, I encouraged you and said, look, I mean, you've been doing this fantastic work.
	You know, I really respect the efforts that you've put into self-knowledge and therapy and so on.
	So, you know, by all means, by all means, come back.
	But that's not an easy thing.
	And I really do respect the difficulty of that, of asking for that, right?
	Because, I mean, in your life, you haven't had a history of having lots of positive responses when you put your needs front and center with people, right?
	Right. Yeah.
	And that's the kind of change that I think is really good.
	You know, and again, just huge props to you for taking that on.
	I mean, how do you feel relative to, say, I mean, the first time we talked was over a year ago when we had a conversation, an RTR conversation with myself and you and your girlfriend.
	I mean, when you look back on that and where you are now, how do you feel?
	What are the differences? Yeah.
	Well, it's like I'm a totally different person now.
	Like I can't even really imagine how miserable I was back then and stuff.
	It's just hard to comprehend it, I guess.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Well, it certainly did seem to be the case that what I perceived through your interactions, mostly in the chat room, was that you were a brittle and you had a kind of persona, if that makes any sense.
	Like, you know, kind of cool and kind of shoot from the hip and that kind of stuff.
	And what I felt, or at least what I thought, or I guess what I experienced, Through our email interchanges was something that I hadn't seen before in you, which was a kind of vulnerability, if that makes sense?
	Yeah. Now, do you feel self-conscious talking in the cafe at the moment?
	Not really, but...
	I'm just nervous about talking on the call, because I've never really talked on a call before.
	Right. Would you rather talk one-on-one instead of in a Sunday show?
	If you think that would be better, that would be alright.
	No, it's really up to you.
	It's just that, frankly, you want to talk, but you're not talking that much, if that makes sense?
	I'm just not really sure what to say.
	Well, what if you were sure what to say?
	Right? Because you had the impulse to talk, and I almost...
	I mean, that always comes from a good place, I think, right?
	So what is the part of you that wanted to talk, and what is it that you want to say?
	You know that, right?
	Because otherwise I don't think you would have had the impulse to talk.
	I don't know. I'm just...
	I'm not a very good talker, so...
	Okay, well, why don't we do this?
	Why don't you listen to the rest of the show, and then you can mull over what it is that you do want to say, and then we can either talk privately or you can call in next week.
	Alright. Okay, and listen, welcome back.
	Again, huge congratulations on the work that you've done to...
	To get out of what I think was not such a great relationship for either of you to go to therapy and do that kind of stuff, I think is just great.
	I know it's a tough road, to say the least, but congratulations.
	Alright, thanks, Jeff.
	Thank you very much. Alright, and don't forget to mute if you could.
	So it sounds like galloping on a horse with 1,200 legs.
	Alright, so we have space for the next question.
	And remember, if you're not talking, if you could mute, please.
	We've got somebody typing who's not muted.
	Yes, somebody just said hello?
	Yes, I did. Do I sound okay?
	Uh-huh. Okay.
	I was just curious on...
	Sorry, just one second.
	I was just curious on what you thought...
	Because I know you made a few podcasts about your work and...
	It academics that and the fact that your work will never be seen in academics and then we just recently your debate was huge on that and I was thinking I was thinking about I just feel very I feel like I feel like I study in science.
	I almost feel like this idea is almost an idea that you share with us that when you're in science you have an idea and you want to find every possible angle to see if you can reject that theory so that you can prove your theory more correctly.
	And I felt sad that, you know, Well, we get Kutron, man, who didn't seem to bring any good points, though some of them, you know, but your theories about UPP and stuff doesn't get as much, how can I say this, attention as, you know, it should so that people could refute it more easily.
	Like, more people see it, then more people can find Things that are wrong to improve it or to dismiss it, and if not, then it becomes more valid.
	Right? So, I always...
	My question to you basically is, if you think...
	If you think besides what you're doing right now, is there going to be other ways where your ideas are going to get more attention?
	Like... If you really think that the academy, like academics, is completely lost on this kind of idea, or what?
	Well, I mean, I think those are excellent, excellent questions.
	I have burned I don't know how many brain cells in hot pursuit of an answer that's even remotely satisfying in that area.
	And if you've not read How to Achieve or How Not to Achieve Freedom, which is my latest book, Then it's going to be a little less clear.
	UPB is ignored either because it's a really bad theory or it's a really great theory.
	Right? I mean, I don't refute people who say that...
	Like, I don't refute Scientologists, right?
	That this H-bombs and lizard men created thetans which have to be...
	I mean, I don't refute that thesis because it's just not a thesis.
	It's a mad, ridiculous, dumbass fantasy.
	So... The thesis, which are terrible, nobody who's got any sort of reputable credentials, nobody bothers with them, right?
	So it could be that people view UPB, as an example, as a ridiculous, vain, amateur, idiotic theory on par with Scientology and the man mountain on Mars is talking to me.
	It could be. I think that the theory deserves a lot more credibility than that, because a moral theory, which in the examples I point out in the book, credibly...
	It distinguishes between aesthetically preferable behavior or politeness or good conduct and moral behavior, and which credibly describes and proves the moral instincts of mankind with regards to the big three, rape and theft and murder.
	And that it does.
	I mean, for sure, it does that.
	And that is definitely a theory that is at least a few notches above Scientology.
	So it's not that the theory is too bad.
	You know, it's what Richard Dawkins says.
	The theory is so bad, it's not even wrong.
	You can't even get a negative out of it.
	That's not UPB. And UPB, in its explanation of the successes of capitalism and the successes of science, which if you'd had UPB at the beginning of the scientific revolution, you would have been able to predict.
	Those things are definitely pretty powerful mental tools that That UPP contains.
	So there's no way that it's such a bad theory that nobody could be remotely interested in it.
	So that to me is not what's going on.
	But I think that human beings, of course, respond to incentives.
	And we have to assume that academia, as far as We have to assume that if these people were hell-bent In search of the truth,
	then a theory which made remarkable claims about proving secular ethics from a guy who has a master's degree in history, has studied a lot of philosophy, some logic, some psychology, you know, from an Ivy League university who has the most successful philosophy conversation pretty much in history, that they would be interested in that as a concept and excited.
	Like, you know, if some new theory of science comes along, some new physics theory that explains some esoteric and not understood aspects of gravity or dark matter or whatever, that people would at least get interested in it, right?
	But that's not the case in academia.
	And so since the theory is not so bad that it's not worth anybody's cup of tea or two cents, then we simply have to assume that the self-interest of academics is not aligned with any interest in this theory.
	Again, we just always try to work empirically.
	The theory's been out off and on for three years now and has received almost no academic attention.
	One grad student wrote a lot of criticisms about how the metaphors were not very good but didn't actually talk about the basic logic.
	And UPP is unassailable in its essence because If you're going to compare UPB to a standard of truth that is objective, that is UPB, right?
	So you can't attack UPB without using UPB. It's one of these shadow boxing situations that you simply cannot best.
	Not because I'm so smart, but just because that's the way that truth and reality works.
	So, you know, and I try to work out sort of why this is more on libertarians a little bit on academics in everyday anarchy and in how not to achieve freedom.
	But basically, you know, these are guys who want to get tenure, who want to advance in their careers.
	And what do they have to do in order to get tenure, to get raises, to advance in their careers, to become chairman of the department?
	Well, pursuing the truth doesn't help them do that at all, right?
	I mean, I have to come up with a convincing...
	Because I'm in the free market, right?
	So I give stuff out.
	Not that that's the free market, but I'm, you know, the charities are like way on the free market edge because I have to try and create value for people and I have to pursue stuff that is credible and true because that's the kind of audience that I have.
	So it is in my self-interest to work as hard and as feverishly and as positively as I can to create the most powerful, compelling, exciting, interesting truths that I can because that's my self-interest.
	But it's not in the self-interest of an academic at all in terms of career or income or job security or job stability.
	In fact, it would be a pretty black mark, I think.
	Because what they do is they float all of the stuff around FDR.
	It's psychological. It's all about self-expression.
	It's like est, you know, all that.
	So if you can get that kind of stink around FDR, then that's all you need to do for most people because then they won't examine the actual thoughts and ideas themselves.
	So sorry for that long-winded answer, but, you know, the short answer is that why would they?
	There's no self-interest in it for them.
	Well, I was going to respond by saying, like, I'm still in university, still doing my bachelor's, and there's some pretty crazy profs on my campus who have tenure, so they stay there, that do some pretty crazy activism stuff, usually in the name socialism and stuff like that, but they're not kicked away.
	They still do it.
	And then I would assume that there would be people on the other side, libertarians, that maybe would view your stuff.
	That being said, I'm just curious, why can't you get a wiki page?
	Because you were saying that in the chat today.
	Oh yeah, sorry, I did.
	And sorry, just if you talk, or when you talk, if you could not move as much, your microphone sounds like it's breakdancing with Mike Tyson.
	Well, the problem with the wiki thing, and I did have a wiki page for quite some time.
	Actually, a fellow who was banned from FDR for being trolley initiated, as far as I understand it, a, you know, let's delete this wiki page.
	And I didn't know anything about it.
	It just was gone. Now, I don't really care.
	I mean, nobody searches for me through Wikipedia, and I can't remember a single hit that I ever got to FDR through Wikipedia, so it doesn't matter to me.
	But according to the standards of Wikipedia, the deletion was in accordance with their standards and values, right?
	Because I don't have independent academic verification or discussion or references to My theories, you know, published on Lew Rockwell, Strike the Root, Antiwar.com doesn't really count.
	The novel, of course, is not relevant to the philosophy that I had published through Publish America.
	The self-published stuff through Lulu obviously doesn't count.
	So it is actually in accordance with their guidelines to not have a page about...
	FDR or about me.
	That's good because it means that anarchy and voluntarism is working and it doesn't have any particular relevance.
	People search for my name, which is what the Wikipedia thing was.
	They come straight to FDR. I don't really want them to go to the Wikipedia article anyway because I didn't have any say in that.
	That's the short answer, if that makes any sense.
	As for your socialist professor as well, this is why FDR is such a tough sell.
	Because If you are irreligious or agnostic or atheist, even a strong atheist, as long as you don't openly attack religion as I do, as abusive, in particular as abusive towards children, which is really an abusive virus that attaches itself to the most helpless, tender and innocent members of society...
	So if you attack religion, then you can be accepted on the left, according to the Marxist paradigm, as long as you also attack the free market, property rights, and capitalism.
	So it kind of short-circuits people when I violently attack religion as I will do anything to discredit and attack religion as a completely evil mind virus.
	But I also champion voluntism, the free market.
	Now, anarchists will like you if you are an anarcho-communist, an anarcho-syndicalist, an anarcho-socialist, a kumbaya kibbutz, let's all hug property into one big goo.
	But if you are for private property in the free market, then they kind of don't like it, even though they may accept your hostility towards religion.
	Of course, on the libertarian side, you can be anti-state as I am, but then you can't be openly anti-religious because libertarianism is basically a subset of fundamentalist Christianity and rose politically and was funded politically at about the same time.
	And of course, fundamentalist Christians, a lot of them don't like the government because they say there is no authority but God.
	And that's all mad nonsense.
	And so if you are anti-state...
	And pro-free market, then libertarians will like you until you rail against the mind virus of religion, in which case.
	So, I mean, we are trying to create a new market rather than this buffet of pick and choose that most philosophies end up being.
	So that's, I mean, we're really trying to break ice towards a new destination.
	So there's just no way it fits into people's existing thinking, I think.
	So there's only one grad paper that was written to criticize your book?
	It wasn't a grad paper.
	And I only read a couple of pages of it because it just didn't seem to me to have anything to do with a quality analysis.
	And I did offer to debate the fellow, but he kept not responding.
	So, no, it's somewhere out there.
	I don't know what the link is, but maybe somebody can find it and post it in the chat room.
	It's somebody who criticized UPB, but he just seemed to focus on, you know, I think this metaphor is inappropriate, which is basically like saying, I don't like the theory of relativity.
	I think the theory of relativity is wrong because he's using a serif font and not a sans-serif font, which to me doesn't mean anything, which is not to say UPB is an intellectual equivalent to the theory of relativity, but it's as irrelevant a criticism.
	Okay. Well, thank you.
	Thank you very much. And if you know any grad students or professors who would be interested in taking a look at the book and debating, I, of course, will be happy to send them a free copy, and that would be excellent.
	I'm not in the philosophy humanities department, but what I've heard of that department, they're pretty much all crazy anyways.
	Well, and the guy I debated with, Qtron Man, he's an academic, or at least he's on his way.
	I think he's in grad school, and I think he's studying philosophy, but he's definitely heading that way.
	Well, you know, seriously, I think it would be...
	He seems very intelligent, and I think it would be a good idea if he could even criticize your book, you know, make a paper on your book, because like I said, I think the most important thing is to bring up all of the objections to a theory you have, so that either in your mind you can dismiss it or you can improve on it, Or it becomes stronger.
	So, the more criticisms, the better, no?
	Oh, absolutely. I completely agree with you.
	And I don't think there's any more ferocious critic of UPB than myself, which is why it took me 20 years.
	And there is, of course, a summary video, which I just did, which is like 15 minutes, which goes over the basics of the theory.
	So... So we'll see.
	I certainly would be happy, but I don't believe that...
	I mean, if the theory is new and true, and it's about ethics, then it will take a generation.
	I mean, it just always does, because people get very wedded to their moral theories, particularly people who've had children, who've instructed them in moral theories.
	So it will take a generation.
	This is true of almost every breakthrough or big advance in human thinking that you just kind of have to wait for the bigoted generation to die off before the new generation who's open to new ideas and who hasn't had their thinking calcified by habit comes along.
	That's true of just about everything in the physical sciences as well.
	So... I'm happy to debate.
	I hand out free copies to whoever wants.
	But of course, according to UPB, I sadly cannot force people to review my book.
	So, damn it!
	Damn you, UPB! But we'll see what happens.
	And I certainly am interested and curious to see who would like to come along and debate me on it.
	Alright, well thank you very much.
	We have time for one or two more questions.
	If people have comments, issues, questions, problems, suggestions, mad, rank, praise, bitter, vehement criticism, please feel free to speak.
	You know, nobody ever chimes in with the mad rank praise part, and I thought I'd just give you some mad rank praise on helping me out.
	Very well. Let me just assume the mad rank praise position with peeled grapes on my eyelids, a slowly fanning oiled palm tree slave.
	Ah, yes. I'm ready.
	Yes, that's close.
	No, I want to thank you again for helping me out yesterday.
	I think you have no idea.
	You probably do know.
	You probably do have an idea of how big of a hump you just sort of pushed me over or nudged me over.
	Well, let's take a second about that.
	And just to sell the donating thing, Nate was kind enough to shovel me some money at the end of last month.
	And you had, I think, very generously and courageously expressed...
	your fear of me which I mean is not an easy thing to admit of course that you felt sort of nervous around me And so because you had donated, and this is true of PR, if you ask for a dream analysis, which is time consuming, it helps if you've donated, you know, those kinds of things. So the fact that you had donated certainly helped spur me to spending some time thinking about your issue.
	And then we talked about it in the chat room.
	So if you'd like to mention what you got out of that, that would be great.
	And I certainly am very glad that I helped.
	Well, I got a lot out of it, actually.
	It really ties into a lot of other things that I do that are kind of self-rejecting.
	And it's not as if I didn't already know all of that, because I did.
	It's just... You know what it is?
	It's connecting the abstract theory to the concrete feelings.
	That's tough, right? Right.
	Right. That's always been very tough with me.
	Well, actually, since I posted it, I can tell you right where I think I made that connection is when you said that it was projection.
	Yeah, I'll just touch, while you look for that, I'll just touch briefly.
	So, Nate was saying that, you know, he sort of felt nervous about me, and then the next day I said, I think I know why it is.
	And it's because he had also posted something, when I posted about how well the recent voting video had done, Nate said...
	You know, you're doing very well.
	And I said, no, we're doing very well, right?
	I mean, it's a good video.
	It's a passionate video.
	But it's not me.
	It's the people who promote it, right?
	Who are helping get, I mean, more than half the hits came from external links.
	Which people had posted.
	So I've sort of noticed from that that Nate was feeling sort of outside the community, and that meant that he felt that his relationship to the community was tenuous, right?
	And we all know, at least a lot of us know that from childhoods or dating situations where you feel that your relationship with someone is both necessary and very important, but tenuous, right?
	Which creates anxiety and creates a fear of imminent rejection.
	So I said, well, there's an injustice in If you say that someone is a good person, if you fear imminent rejection from that person, there's a kind of injustice in that, right?
	Because there's basically three scenarios when it comes to rejection.
	The first is bad people reject you, which is not only to be expected, but also to be pursued, right?
	Because you don't want good people to praise you.
	That's not good.
	And so if bad people reject you, that's not something to be scared of, but actually just an inevitable consequence of virtue.
	If good people reject you, then it must be because you're doing something that is not optimal in terms of virtue or honor, right?
	So you're doing something that's kind of a little dishonorable or maybe a little sleazy or maybe a little manipulative.
	And, you know, I do it and we all do it, right?
	So there's no big sin, right?
	But it's just if good people reject you, then that's because you're doing something dishonorable.
	If you say, I'm a good person, you're a good person, and I am terrified of you rejecting me, then that equation does not work out.
	Because good people don't reject good people.
	Rather, we embrace and hold them close to our heart and respect and love them and so on.
	So, if you say, Steph, you're a good person and I fear your rejection...
	And you're not doing anything dishonorable, which Nate wasn't doing, of course, right?
	Then you are actually doing something dishonorable, which is you're saying, Steph, I'm a good person, but I'm afraid of your rejection, which puts me in the light of being a not-so-good person or unjust or arbitrary or capricious or something like that.
	So we were talking about those distinctions.
	Nate, did you find what you were looking for?
	Yes, actually. You ran right over it just now.
	Where I made the emotional connection was when you said, which means a precarious relationship, which means nervousness around an authority figure, a need to praise, placate, and appease in order to maintain your status.
	And I said, yes, that sounds like my whole life.
	And that was my entire childhood.
	That's been my whole life.
	So that hit me emotionally right then, and it brought tears to my eyes the moment you said that.
	But I think that's where it all clicked.
	And you've felt better since then, right?
	Oh, loads. How do you feel talking to me at the moment about this?
	Relaxed and in control, like I was saying earlier.
	Right. And that's why, A, we need to be good ourselves, which is great, and B, we need to surround ourselves with good people because otherwise we simply have no reliability or stability in our relationships.
	We have nothing to trust in relationships but virtue.
	There's nothing else which we can trust.
	We can never be sexy enough to ensure a continual bond because, you know, sexiness decays with age.
	We can never be smart enough because then we are all about creation and performance.
	We can never be witty enough because then we're about entertaining.
	We can never be good karaoke singers enough because lots of times we're not doing karaoke.
	We can never be anything other than virtuous enough to ensure stability and trust within a relationship.
	That's why you have to be a good person, which doesn't mean be a perfect person, but it means RTR, honesty and integrity as best you can.
	You have to be a good person and surround yourself with good people.
	Then you get relationships that you can trust where people aren't just about to turn around and turn on you and suddenly savage you or there's not going to be this instability.
	It's not going to run hot and cold.
	And we talked about this with Ned, who I think maybe some congratulations are in order for, but we'll see.
	But we talked about this with Ned in the recent conversation on how to know when you're in love.
	I mean, one of the reasons I try to encourage virtue in people is because it creates this bond, this security, this security in relationships.
	Christina is never going to leave me.
	I am never going to leave Christina.
	You know, Mason and H-bomb, I'd be coming back like a zombie, right?
	But we know that for sure because, you know, we are each other's highest ideal.
	There's nothing but worship on both sides and love and tenderness and so on.
	And so I know that. I know who I'm marching off to my grave with.
	There's no... Actually, that sounds a little sinister, but you know what I mean.
	So there's not that thing that we have in relationships, which is, well, how am I doing today?
	Am I liked today? Am I going to be liked tomorrow?
	Are they going to turn on me the day after, right?
	The reason that I encourage virtue is you can create and sustain relationships through choosing good people and being a good person that have that kind of basic trust.
	So sorry for the ramble tangent, but I'm all ears now.
	Oh, no, no, that was great. I managed to incite a speech.
	Yeah, that's like drilling for oil in an oil tank.
	Yes, it all just spews out.
	No, that's all I wanted to say, just mad rank praise, and I feel tons better.
	It's like... This is it.
	Hi, Nate, it's Christina.
	Hey. I just wanted to comment, you and I haven't chatted, I haven't heard you on the FDR Skype chats or anything like that, but since the last time we talked or since the last time you had any conversation on a Skype call or anything like that, you sound enormously more relaxed.
	Thank you.
	that you had with Steph yesterday or if it had to do with a lot of the other things that you did throughout the summer months.
	But you sound so much better, so much more relaxed, so much more yourself.
	Right.
	To make a really gross metaphor, I think what I did over the summer and over the past fall has been like squeezing a zit.
	And I think Steph sort of lanced it yesterday.
	so Congratulations. So it's quite a release there.
	Yeah, and this is the FDR guarantee that some of the people who plagued your life in the past, actually all of the people who plagued your life in the past, will give you a completely wide berth and an entirely different type of people will come into your life from here on in, And as long as you continue to pursue this path, and that really is, of course, the greatest gift, is to surround ourselves with loving and happy and positive and imperfect but striving people.
	That is a relaxed and happy place to be where you can form relationships that you can trust for a lifetime.
	Right, right.
	Well, that's it for me. Thanks, thanks.
	No, it's great, and it is amazing.
	I mean, just to reinforce what Christina said, the amount of work and progress that you've put in and achieved, even since the barbecue in the summer, is just wonderful, so congratulations.
	Thanks. You definitely are going to be Mr.
	August. August?
	Oh, I think.
	Christina will be...
	We'll be Miss April, because as we all know, April is the cruelest month!
	And since she has started working outside the home, my breakfast tray has been discouragingly absent from breakfast, so we'll talk about that perhaps in a Sobfest in the future.
	Yes, and my dinner tray?
	Completely missing when I get home.
	I was hoping to reuse the breakfast tray.
	Alright, so we're not going to glare at each other anymore.
	Perhaps we could move on to the next question.
	Or comment. Alright, on to baby furniture.
	We have bought, would you like to tell everybody what we've bought, sweetie?
	We've bought lots of lovely things.
	I don't know that everybody wants to know what we've bought.
	Oh, they want to know. They want to know.
	We bought a beautiful crib that turns into a day bed and then a double bed so that it has multifunctions with a gorgeous dresser.
	Oh, and sorry, just to mention, this was, I guess you could objectively consider this a step up from my initial suggestion of a laundry hamper and duct tape.
	And we'll ignore that.
	Today we actually bought the mattress for the crib.
	Actually, I didn't know this about baby mattresses, but they come where you flip them.
	The one side is quite firm for the first few months until the baby can sit up.
	And then once the baby can sit up, you can actually give them a softer mattress that will help them with balance and muscle strengthening.
	So we bought that today and we bought a glider, which I assume that I'm going to have to battle Steph for.
	It comes with a little husband taser to get the husband out, which of course takes about four days to charge up.
	Yeah, Steph didn't want to leave the store.
	He was just kind of sitting in the glider thinking, okay, show what show?
	Lunch? Who needs lunch? I have a glider.
	The whole purpose of the sales clerk was simply to get me into the chair because then you have to buy it because it has been stained and, in fact, has been embedded.
	Greg has asked what's a glider.
	It's a type of rocking chair.
	It doesn't actually rock on curved legs.
	But it's set up on, I guess, some kind of hydraulic system where you rock back and forth.
	And it has an ottoman that also has the same kind of glider system so that your legs move with your body.
	It's actually quite nice.
	It's very smooth. It's very safe.
	There's even a lock function so that you can prevent it from gliding if you want to get up and up.
	And it's for breastfeeding, right?
	So it's primarily, right?
	Because you breastfeed the baby, did you say 8 to 10 times a day?
	As many as 12 times a day within the first few weeks.
	Right, so it actually will be the same schedule as my eating, or my feeding, I guess, as we know in the family.
	And breastfeeding can take up to an hour each time, is that right?
	Yeah, so you're basically breastfeeding every two hours for an hour.
	Right, so you need a comfortable place, and the rocking is very good, so the baby can, you know, hopefully fall asleep after it suckles and you've burped and so on, so...
	Yeah, I'm getting a lot of, oh my god, oh my god, I had no idea.
	I had no idea either. I just started reading all this stuff within the last few weeks and so I'm trying to catch up on my sleep now because I think I'm going to be quite sleep deprived for the first few weeks.
	There's not much that Steph can do with the breastfeeding.
	He's going to be very helpful in other ways.
	He's glaring at me, honey, are you going to start lactating?
	Is that your plan?
	I do notice that when babies cry, my nepples do start sweating, but I don't think that's going to be enough, quite enough, for what the baby needs.
	I mean, certainly salt delivery will be fine, and it comes with its own floss, but other than that, no.
	So, Steph's going to be responsible for my breakfast tray, and my dinner tray.
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	And what else? Well, everything that we as new parents have forgotten, I will be constantly running out to get.
	I'm sure that will be it, right?
	The baby will have more hair than Steph.
	I think that it's quite likely that the baby will...
	Because on both sides, on both the maternal sides of our family, that's actually pretty good hair genes.
	So, absolutely, the baby could be born with that Smurf Malvis Mohawk that Christina is so well known for.
	Yeah, I was born with a very full head of hair.
	Apparently, I was the only Mediterranean baby in the nursery.
	There were a lot of fair-haired parents that had bald children.
	So the nurses were just amazed at the amount of hair I had.
	So if the baby takes after me, then we're going to have a bushy dew.
	And if not, then we're going to have some peach fuzz.
	Well, and certainly my hair cycle was kind of like a blip.
	I was born bald, but then from about the ages of 11 1��2 to 12, I had a pretty good head of hair.
	Sure.
	So what else do we – we bought a stroller a couple weeks ago.
	We bought a diaper pail.
	Oh, for when the baby needs to wake up to feed, we got the ear horn.
	I think some of the cutest things that we have bought are the little tiny...
	I didn't know this, but babies have quite sharp nails as well, so they need baby mittens.
	So we bought some baby mittens, a couple of caps to keep his or her little head warm.
	And some tiny little booties and socks and my god, they are just, they're edible.
	Oh, and the first, what was the first thing that we bought for the baby?
	Oh, we went away for a weekend and we just went into some arts and crafts shops and that kind of thing and we bought a beautiful little wall hanging that says, I'll let you say what it says.
	I love you to the moon and back.
	Oh, it was beautiful. And of course, we completely burst into tears.
	And we had to be hurried into the store and put into the back with some hydration.
	So, yeah, no, there's some beautiful, beautiful stuff that's out there for babies.
	So, yeah, we're doing really great.
	And baby, and people have asked how I'm doing and how...
	I think Greg had asked me, how's the renter doing?
	The renter. Renting my space.
	Yeah. I wouldn't want to stretch the concept of voluntarism.
	Frankly, it's a parasitical hijack, but that could also be described as the marriage, so she's used to that.
	We're doing very, very well.
	Growing and babies kicking and keeping me awake at night, so I guess the sleeplessness is starting now.
	Yeah, and the baby tested about 10% over average weight, was it?
	No, just above the 50th percentile.
	Right, and unfortunately three quarters of that was forehead.
	The rest of the baby is completely anemic, but on balance it seems to work out.
	Seven weeks? Seven, yeah, 48 days until due date.
	So it could be earlier, it could be a little later.
	So... From here on in, it's, you know, the heavy lifting is done, so to speak, as far as worry and all that goes, everything.
	I mean, the baby's born tomorrow.
	It's going to be fine, right?
	So he's gotten there. His lungs are fully developed and so on.
	So now it's just a matter of...
	Yeah, fattening the baby up at this point.
	The baby's internal organs are all developed and at this point it's just a matter of getting some fat under its skin and growing in size.
	Yeah, and a baby's ears are fully developed.
	The baby responds to sounds.
	It responds to my singing with the predictable response of attempting to strangle me.
	Yeah, well, if you shine light on the baby's face, it will turn its face.
	And its brain is sucking its thumb, right, in preparation for both feeding from the nipple and a possible adult life as an at-home philosopher.
	So, it's lots of things that it's doing that are just absolutely and completely cool, and it is on the verge of personhood, absolutely.
	Alright, enough baby boredom.
	Is there anyone else who had any questions or comments that they wanted to bring up?
	All right.
	Sure can. Wow.
	It's been a surreal experience, I gotta tell you.
	I stumbled across you about a month ago, and I've since watched most of the YouTube videos, and now I'm on podcast like 90, starting from the beginning.
	So I've been listening to you speak for about 200 hours in the last month.
	Christina gets that in about a day, so you could actually consider it just seems that way to her.
	Sorry, go ahead. But you speak really fast, so you get 200 hours into 24, right?
	But no, it's kind of like listening to the Feynman lectures, but then getting to call Feynman up afterwards and say, hey, that was pretty cool, so how's it going with you?
	It's going good. I wish I could bongo drum, although, of course, I hope my wife has a much better faith than his.
	But yeah, no, I appreciate that.
	I mean, obviously, that's a very exalted company, and I appreciate the compliment, but...
	So how did you, I mean, how did you come across things?
	And it's interesting because I don't actually often talk to somebody who's watched the videos first.
	The videos are sort of like a side dish or an appetizer.
	But you went through the videos first, you were saying.
	It's a side dish from your perspective because they came last.
	But I hang out on the Ron Paul forums and one of the users I have the most respect for posted a link to your Empire Strikes Back video.
	Which I found awesome.
	And then I think maybe I might have seen one more that finally decided to set me off and see what other videos you have.
	So then I started browsing somewhat randomly, getting more and more hooked.
	And then I sort of started at the beginning of the YouTube videos and started going forward, watching most of them.
	I skipped some of the stuff that I didn't know, didn't expect to be extremely relevant, like the one about job interview.
	Right. And...
	I skipped a lot of the call-in shows because I just wanted to sort of focus on what your message was without any sort of noise.
	And then finally, when I sort of got most of the way through that, I decided, okay, I really got to start at the beginning.
	Because by watching the videos, I learned about this whole other podcast collection.
	So now I'm doing that.
	I've downloaded them all and I'm on like number...
	90 or so. So that's how I basically got here.
	I'm living off savings right now, so I've just been listening basically from morning till night for the last couple of weeks.
	That is pretty intense rewiring, I must say.
	I mean, what is that like for you?
	Because, I mean, that's really concentrated, not anything to do with me, but that's really concentrated stimulation of your philosophy center, right?
	I mean, it's like, you know, those late-night ads for the sit-up electrodes.
	It's like you have, you know, 4,000 volts per brain cell going into your philosophy center.
	What's that been like?
	Oh, I'm loving it.
	I mean... I've tended throughout my life to go on to intellectual binges.
	So I've read a lot and I've watched a lot of documentaries, but not consistently.
	Usually it's a month or two a year.
	It'll just sort of catch me.
	And a lot of the ideas I'm familiar with, especially because I moved to New Hampshire a year ago as part of the Free State Project, and I immediately jumped into the Ron Paul grassroots movement.
	So, as a result of being here, participating in politics for the first time, and talking to people, and having lived off savings, I've had a lot of spare time as well.
	I've read about 40 books, watched about 40 documentaries.
	It has been the most intense educational year of my life.
	I've probably had my mind blown.
	At least a hundred times in that year.
	You know that deep, not just the simple, oh, I learned something like, you know, solved a formula or, you know, I figured out this code or something, but that your body feels heavy and you're sort of a spectator watching the rest of your mind trying to decide...
	Whether it's going to go into paralysis or burst into flame, sort of like a penny on a blade and it's not falling either side, then second by second.
	You know, that really profound mind-blown when you learn something really profound.
	Oh yeah, I know what you mean.
	For me, it's like a combination of ecstasy, epilepsy, and being roundly punched in the head.
	So it is a very exciting moment.
	It is like your whole brain lights up.
	I mean, I would love at some point to do a podcast, particularly one of the more passionate ones, on a brain scan.
	I would love to see what the hell is going on in my brain when this happens because, you know, I'm just riding the horse, so to speak.
	It'd be... Hard to do in a controlled environment because you'd have to give the patient something or the test subject something profound to blow his mind.
	So, you know, you'd have to make sure they haven't listened to FDR yet.
	No, no. I mean, for me, while I'm podcasting, to have that brain scan, I would just love to know what happens when I get that Feeling from the base of my spine to my fingertips of just trembling energy.
	I would love to know what's going on in my brain and if there's any way to bottle it and sell it as a highly illicit drug.
	Well, there is some primitive equipment that you could get.
	I'm not sure how useful it would be, but there's some.
	I looked into it briefly.
	So what you're saying is, yes, you can plug electrodes into your brain, but they're relatively primitive.
	That may not be the best nails job I've heard today.
	I was thinking more like an EEKG, because I did some very, very, very brief research into this, because I had an idea for an alarm clock that would only wake you up in between cycles, rather than smack in the middle of REM. Right, because I think the alarm clock that breaks up smack in the middle of REM is called a newborn baby.
	So just have the opposite of whatever a newborn baby does, and hopefully that would work.
	I'm sure that's guaranteed. But the point was, I had already been...
	Pretty much a constitutionalist, but not one that was well-read.
	I knew enough to have figured it out on my own, just by thinking rationally, but I wasn't well-read, really.
	And then in the last year, all the constitutional literature, anarcho-capitalist literature, the Federal Reserve, the whole conspiracy side, 9-11, true history.
	I had my mind blown 100 times this year.
	And then in the last month, I had roughly the same quantity and intensity just from FDR. So I guess you're responsible for half the times my mind was blown in the last 12 months by that calculation.
	Excellent. So that was all very wonderful.
	Now, sorry, you could not mind me asking what, you know, without wanting to ask a leading question, because maybe this is, you know, it hasn't, but did you, because if you're on the Ron Paul forums, how is your approach to or involvement in or respect for the political action side of how is your approach to or involvement in or respect for the political action side of things, has it changed or where That's an excellent question.
	So when I got to New Hampshire, I would say I was a constitutionalist, biologic, but not deeply read in history and economics.
	Although I pretty much figured out all the free market stuff mostly on my own without actually reading any of the Austrian stuff.
	But reading the Austrian stuff afterwards was Still mind-blowing, you know, because it's obviously much better than what I came up with informally.
	So I was a constitutionalist when I got here.
	I probably finally made the switch to anarcho-capitalism around March.
	I would say about 90% of that was reading The Market for Liberty.
	Are you familiar with that book? I haven't, but I haven't read it yet.
	Well, it's pretty good, and it's also very short, so I highly recommend it.
	It had been explained to me in discussions.
	There's this really short thing that I would really highly recommend.
	That's very interesting.
	Damning with faint praise. But sorry, go on.
	No, I just mean it's not a high cost.
	That's what I meant. But what was I saying?
	Sorry, we were just talking about how politics has changed for you since you got involved in this more philosophical approach to truth and freedom.
	Correct. So it started with conversations when I first got here and started meeting with people in the Free State Project.
	And that was my first real experience having extended dialogues with anarcho-capitalists.
	So they were presenting me the ideas, but I was still skeptical because I've always worked from Sort of taking things for granted as the assumption, but always being open to changes from there.
	So I still assumed that government was necessary for, you know, courts and police and all that, but I was open to the ideas of how that might not be true.
	So that got me about 10% of the way there.
	Then I read the Market for Liberty and got the hard mechanical details.
	And being a software engineer, that's how I think is, you know, how is it going to work?
	What are the mechanics? So that got me to 95.
	And then just hanging out with people and talking over the last few sort of ambiguities or emotional hurdles that I had took me that last 5%.
	So I was already at anarcho-capitalism.
	And once I got there, then raises the question of, okay, well, what about voting?
	I want to get to anarchy, but in the meantime, is it correct to continue voting?
	So that I've been struggling with off and on for the last six months.
	In the meantime, I was intending to vote until I solved that problem because so many of my friends are running for office now.
	Ordinary people that I hang out with that are part of the movement.
	But then I stumbled across your videos, and obviously the first thing I noticed was the playlist for Ron Paul, that six-part set.
	And I watched that, and it was harsh criticism, but I knew that it was...
	I don't want to say true right away, as in, oh, you're absolutely right and I'll change my mind.
	But, you know, I could not refute it on the spot.
	I recognize it as something that I would be forced to consider seriously.
	Well, I mean, I think that's perfectly right.
	I mean, obviously, you don't want to be, oh, there's a new wind, I'll go that way.
	And I think that that approach of skepticism is right.
	But there's two aspects, right?
	I mean, one is that they are important questions to ask.
	And the second is that they're not being asked, right?
	So those two things in conjunction tend to strike some people a certain way.
	Correct. And in my case, they were being asked, but you presented the issue much more, you made it more real for me.
	Oh yeah, no, and I didn't mean for you, I just mean in the movement as a whole, or in libertarianism as a whole, and I talk about this more in this new book, How Not to Achieve Freedom, the questions aren't being asked, right?
	And that's, it's almost more important to look at what's not being done or what's not being asked rather than what is, but it's so easy to focus on what is being done and the assumption that that will work.
	That does match my experience in the Ron Paul movement, but less so in New Hampshire itself.
	There is quite an amazing diversity of pro-liberty people that make up the Free State Project.
	And all views are represented there, including your own, very strongly.
	It's very, very interesting.
	That is wonderful.
	That is wonderful. I mean, I hope.
	I mean, if I didn't have kids, I would probably go down and try and speak, or if I wasn't about to have a kid, but that will have to wait a bit, I think.
	So does that mean you're not coming in March?
	I have an invite to come down and speak, but I can't give an answer just yet.
	I mean, I don't know what life is going to look like, but hopefully I will be able to at least give an answer early next year.
	Okay, that'd be great, because I very much look forward to having you here and being able to talk to you in person.
	Thank you. And because I want your message to be presented.
	Sorry, I keep losing my train of thought.
	We were talking about politics and voting, that you watched the series on Run Paul?
	Correct. And that was a while ago, by this point, since I've seen 200 hours since then.
	So at this point, I've arrived at the fact that you are correct...
	Relative to all previous historical examples, I'm still trying to fully penetrate the possibility of the Free State Project being an unprecedented example.
	So I'll be developing those thoughts more in the future, and I'd love to talk to you about them another time.
	I was actually hoping to talk to you about that at Liberty Forum.
	But basically, there's going to be an election on Tuesday.
	I have social commitments to go help out, so I'll be going to help out, and I will probably be voting, but this will probably be the last time that I ever vote in a state or national election.
	I may continue to vote at the town level because of the Freetown Project, which is a town of 1,000 people that already 30 of us have moved there.
	And at that local level, I still want to flirt with voting and participating there because it is such a strong effect and I literally am part of a community and I will actually be interacting with people that I see regularly when I go to the town meeting.
	So I want to continue to flirt with that, although I might eventually apply it strictly down to that level as well.
	So that's where I'm at right now.
	That is fantastic.
	I mean, what an amazing thing.
	And it is wonderful to have the leisure, right?
	I mean, the time that you're spending, as you say, you're living off savings.
	I've done that myself before FDR, more and more to write books, fiction.
	I used to be a fiction writer. And taking that time to really work on developing your concepts, your integrity, your devotion to truth.
	I mean, the integrity you've always had, right?
	But they have better tools for achieving that.
	It is absolutely wonderful.
	You know, people will take four years to go to university to get a degree, which doesn't give them a smidge of extra wisdom.
	But people look at you funny when you say, I took a year and a half off to learn about myself and to read books.
	In a sort of, you know, based on my pleasurable pursuit of knowledge, people look at you like that's kind of weird.
	And of course, that is where the real growth and happiness in life, in my experience, really occurs.
	I agree. It's been the greatest year of my life.
	And as for college, I dropped out in the middle of my second year.
	And, you know, rationally, you would expect that you would regret that as a rash decision as time goes by.
	But every year, I regret that decision less and less.
	Yeah, I quit two colleges before I found one that works and I certainly didn't regret any of those.
	It's inertia. People regret inertia.
	They don't regret the decisions they've made fundamentally because you always make, if you're a reasonable person, you always make the best decision you can with the best knowledge that you have at the time.
	And what people end up regretting, at least as I've seen in my life, are the opportunities, the things that they let slide.
	Well, I didn't really want to be there, but I just didn't want to make it.
	It's the wasted time, not the decisions that maybe could have been better, not that I'm saying this about any of yours, but any decision is better than inertia because at least you're then moving in a self-propelled direction.
	I agree. You actually did a video recently, I think, where you talked about how maybe I've been right the whole time.
	You know, maybe all my decisions were right at that time they brought me here.
	Well, until I got married. And then every decision I make that agrees with my wife's decisions is correct.
	I did do a video series.
	It's not even really a video series.
	I did a two-parter on voting, which you might be interested in having a look at if you're going in series.
	Oh, I've been posting links everywhere.
	I'm sorry? I've actually been posting those links everywhere.
	I hang out on Dig, mostly to try to educate people, not so much because it provides a lot of value to me.
	And the voting videos have been very, very useful because they're so relevant, because there's so many articles that I can post it into.
	Oh, okay. Because of election season.
	That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much.
	I mean, as I was saying earlier, half the hits to that video have been coming from outside of YouTube, and that's entirely the work of people who are posting the video.
	So I really, really do appreciate that.
	Thank you. Absolutely.
	It's much easier to post links than to actually go out in the world and try to convince people directly the way you do.
	So you saved me a lot of effort.
	But I actually had a question that I was calling you about tonight, although I feel a little out of place because the calls tonight have been so personal.
	And this one's about completely abstract theory.
	And it's, in fact, about abstract theory that you mentioned earlier that your next book is on actually achieving anarchy.
	Yeah. So this next question is probably two books, premature and abstract.
	So it feels a little out of place.
	No, no, go for it. Look, I mean, we like to have the n-dimensional philosophical conversation, you know, to move from intensely personal to abstract to philosophical to emotional to psychological to relational.
	I mean, we're trying to encompass, because philosophy is the all science.
	It's even bigger than physical sciences, right?
	So there's nothing that's out of place in this conversation as far as I'm concerned.
	Correct. Interdisciplinary is the way to go because everything is connected.
	Basically, because I've been listening to the podcast in a somewhat concentrated way, three separate ideas from different podcasts ended up coalescing into a question.
	The first one was about how, as we were just discussing, the idea that trying to limit the state or reduce the state doesn't work because it'll always just grow back.
	That's the nature of it, so that that's rather pointless.
	And then the second theme was how often you stress that morality is the most powerful weapon in the world.
	And then lastly, a podcast that I just heard this afternoon, which is when this question occurred to me, you were talking about how, in your younger teen years, you had realizations about empathy and sympathy and morality, and how if you have empathy, then you can be exploited by those who do not have empathy, and how morality is sort of a tool that they can use.
	So to tie those themes together, When you talk about morality as a weapon, it was mostly in the context of institutions, God, government, and family.
	But then there was this third podcast where morality became a tool used at the personal level, but in roughly the same way.
	So, this coalesced into sort of a question of assuming that we achieve a rational society.
	You know, a miracle happens and it spreads like wildfire and all the governments of the world collapse because...
	Actually, as the end of The Market for Liberty, the book I mentioned, explains, the last two chapters are about how If a critical mass could be reached, like if a country as big as the United States could achieve a stateless society, it would cause incredible chaos around the rest of the world.
	And within five to ten years, everyone will have been forced by natural forces to adopt the same philosophy.
	It's a really interesting analysis.
	So assume a miracle happens and we achieve the global, rational, stateless society.
	Is personal morality, the fact that it can be used as a personal weapon, does that mean that that will continue to be a threat?
	And is it possible Once we achieve a rational society, for the evils that exist now to come back to life.
	In other words, is a rational society self-sustaining by natural forces?
	Once we achieve it, it will always continue to exist because rational people will have rational children.
	Or are there opportunities for evil people To try to start their old tricks up again.
	And if so, what method would probably be most successful and how successful could it be?
	Or what is its probability of success?
	And additionally, what then do we need to do besides natural forces to prevent that?
	Like, for example, some kind of instruction that is passed down and where that becomes the weak point if that instruction is somehow disrupted.
	Through circumstances or malicious intent, does that then create the window for evil to come back?
	Does that all make sense? Oh, totally.
	Yeah, that's a fantastic question.
	Maybe this is my training as a historian, but I always try to look at examples in the past to see if there's anything close.
	And the closest thing that I can think of is to say that Something like slavery, people don't advocate the return of slavery as it existed in history, right?
	The physical ownership of another human being.
	And people don't in America say, what we really need now is a landed family-based aristocracy, right?
	So people don't try and resurrect directly the exploitive institutions of the past because they just lose so much And of course, the classes that have replaced them so much condemn the earlier modes of exploitation that it's almost impossible to resurrect them.
	There's a great line, I think it was Thomas More, I can't remember who, but it was some I think an English poet who said, treason doth never prosper.
	What's the reason? Why, if it prospers, none dare call it treason, right?
	So if you win, if you overthrow the king, it's not treason.
	So I don't think that we would, when the state is discredited and dismantled as an institution...
	I don't think we have to worry about the state coming back.
	But that is not to say that liberty will be secure.
	And so it's true that the direct ownership of slaves ended throughout the world from the 18th to the 19th centuries, mostly.
	Certainly throughout the Western world.
	There's still pockets where you can have this evil practice.
	But unfortunately, you could make the case that the reason that slavery ended...
	It was because better slavery emerged, right?
	Because a guy who owns a bunch of slaves has their care, their upkeep, he has to physically restrain them, and their productivity is very low.
	But if he can't own the currency and if he can own the tax revenues and have a nominal free market, that is a much more efficient human farming mechanism than direct slavery.
	So slavery is gone, but the enslavement of I mean, So I don't think the state will come back, but there will be pockets of it.
	Now, I mean, I think you're right to say that children will be raised rationally.
	And that is, of course, by far the biggest bulwark against exploitation is secure, happy, confident, rational, loved children.
	That is going to make it very hard.
	That having been said, the evil genius theory, which basically states that a man of stupendous talents and malicious intent can do a lot in the world.
	Now, he's not going to be able to sway really good people, but, you know, there's people in the middle, right?
	There's a bell curve of, you know, really badly raised children, some people in the middle and really well-raised children.
	And if you look at somebody like a demagogue, an evil man like Hitler, the man had astounding skills, right?
	I mean, he was a A magnetic and disastrously compelling speaker.
	He tapped into the collective psyche of the Germanic people in a way that hadn't been done since Bismarck.
	And he had, not just that, he had incredible skills in political organization.
	He had incredible military skills.
	I mean, this was a guy who had simply been a foot soldier in World War I who ended up taking over half of Europe.
	You can see the same thing with Napoleon.
	There are these kinds of evil geniuses who possess these incredible skills which just pop out of.
	It could be, even in a healthy society, that someone who has those astounding abilities just happens to be raised by a mother who is mentally ill.
	Right? And who has visions.
	And of course Hitler's mother, Eloise, was disastrously depressed and violent and so was his father.
	So even if people are raised well, you just could get this evil genius who has had this bad childhood in a sense through nobody's fault but just through bad luck.
	And he may sway some people, but I think that all he would be able to do in a free society is create a semi-successful cult.
	I don't think, I really don't think that he would be compelling enough to resurrect any kind of institutionalized or large kind.
	So I think that's as far as it would go, and then I think it would be really hard to sustain that, although it may be sustained for a while.
	But in the absence of a religion...
	When you have private schools who are responding to the preferences of rational and mentally healthy parents, there would be too much of an immunity, I think, to...
	I think you'd still need philosophy and you'd still need to, in a sense, keep your eyes peeled.
	The philosophers would still need to keep their eyes peeled, but I think it would be...
	I can't think of a scenario wherein we would go back in time to something more primitive.
	So that would sort of be my answer, if that makes any sense.
	Well, I hope that's correct.
	Yeah, me too. I mean, it would sort of suck to build this house and then have it fall over.
	Especially since it takes a few generations to build.
	That was my concern, because your identification of morality being used as a personal tool sort of alerted me to that concern that that weapon will always be there, that lever in the mind will always be there.
	And so it seems there will always be the possibility of using that, and that led me to be concerned about how greatly that could build.
	No, I mean, just to give you a final example, I mean, one of the biggest genocide in the world is infanticide, which was practiced...
	In every culture, infanticide and the cannibalism of children was practiced in every culture and throughout the Western world up until the early, like sort of late Middle Ages period after the Quattrocento into the Renaissance.
	Now it's happening economically.
	Tell me what you mean. Now it's happening economically.
	We're cannibalizing our...
	We're economically, but through debt, we're cannibalizing our own.
	You could say that we're cannibalizing our own children.
	Sure, but I mean direct.
	And again, the eating children is more primitive, but certainly, and this is testable through the male-female ratio throughout history, that you just know a lot of infanticide is going on.
	Normally in every family there would be two children killed by the mother, usually for a variety of reasons.
	And that was such a widespread practice, this killing of babies, that it wasn't even commented on.
	You couldn't walk down a street in early Middle Ages in Europe without, you know, babies in the gutter, just dead babies everywhere, which of course is a completely sick and twisted environment to be around.
	And that's why they all were so nutty, right?
	But that has fallen away from us, thankfully, right?
	I mean, now children are considered a precious resource and, you know, beautiful things.
	They're not always treated that way, but that's where we're heading.
	I don't think we're going back to that.
	But that doesn't mean that the occasional crazy person isn't going to kill children, right?
	Of course not. It's not free will and individual violations of morality that concern me, of course.
	Right, right. I don't think it's going to...
	I think human beings are great...
	Because, man, it's hard to improve the world, but once you do, it's really hard to make it go backwards.
	That's what makes it worthwhile.
	That's why we fight so hard to drag this corpse of indifferent humanity up to the next level, right?
	Because then it just looks around and say, well, of course, we've always been here, and they don't notice how much effort it took to get them up there, and they're like, well, this is normal, this is natural.
	Of course it's like this, right?
	But, of course, as Nietzsche pointed out, the amount of Blood, toil, sweat and tears it takes to drag humanity even one step up the rung to a more rational morality is something that can't even be noticed.
	But at least when you get them up there, they stay there.
	And so from that standpoint, although it's hell to get the body up, at least it doesn't fall back down.
	And that's, I think, what makes it worth the effort.
	Well, on the topic of dragging everyone up to the next level, let me end with a funny little guerrilla marketing idea I had.
	Imagine sort of a sticker that you can put on a telephone pole.
	You know how you're always talking about how your forehead is so shiny?
	Yes. So imagine a high-res photograph zoomed in just on your forehead, and then the word shiny written across it without an exclamation mark, just a period, so it's sort of deadpan.
	And then at the bottom, freedomainradio.com.
	Right. Just sort of an abstract little guerrilla marketing kind of sticker.
	No, that's interesting. And if we did that from a summer photo of mine, we could also put life on Mars.
	Which could also work out quite nicely.
	But no, that's very interesting. It certainly would be, you know, those things are tricky because nobody knows how they work.
	But if they do work where people become interested in what's going on behind it, I mean, you know, hey, by all means, give it a shot.
	That would be fantastic.
	Yeah, I'm no mimetic scientist, so I would just try it and see if it works.
	Right, right. No, thank you very much.
	And what's your name, first name?
	My name is Ofer, O-F-E-R. Oh, well, very nice to meet you, and I'm very glad that you are finding such use in the podcast.
	Thank you so much, of course, for your efforts to spread the word, so to speak, and I hope that you will dig into the latest book.
	I think in particular for where you are, it will be quite fascinating to have a listen and to have a – or a read, if that's the way you like it.
	Yeah. Actually, I just ordered the full set, so hopefully they're in the mail already.
	Oh yeah, that reminds me. Thank you for reminding me.
	I was thinking of offering the FDR library, including Revolutions, because my Publish America contract has just expired, a sort of package deal.
	But no, you can download the audiobook of the PDF for free, but I was thinking of offering a package deal because people might be interested in handing them out at Christmas that time of the year, which I'll have to post pretty quickly so that the mail can get it out.
	Yeah, time's running out.
	Time's running out, that's right.
	Let's milk this Christmas thing.
	Lord knows the Christians milked us long enough.
	So, thank you.
	I really do appreciate it. Excellent questions.
	And thank you again so much for the work that you're doing to help promote this conversation.
	Oh, it's pure self-interest.
	Thanks for having me. All right. My pleasure.
	All right. I guess we can do one more quickie, quickie, quickie, quickie, quickie, quickie one.
	If anybody has anything, but...
	Huh?
	Somebody typed something.
	Oh. Is it a phone?
	I think I'm going to try and write a song for FDR 1200.
	It will be...
	Pranks to rap is what I'm going to try and work it in as.
	And you'll see what that is when you see me rapping with the bells and the costume.
	But we'll get more into that later.
	What does the philosopher do on Christmas?
	What the philosopher does on Christmas...
	This is after the baby is born.
	What the philosopher does on Christmas...
	He says, gee, I really have got to go to the gym and hopes the wife doesn't see the air quotes.
	And then he makes sure to take the keys to the wife's new office, which has couches.
	That is the theory of what the philosopher is going to do at Christmas.
	And he will come back strangely refreshed with crinkle cushion marks running down the side of his face, which he will have to explain as some sort of yoga move.
	Um, let's do the dream, uh, no, I think not just now, um, because it's been a two-hour show already, so if you don't mind waiting, that'd be excellent.
	All right, well, thank you everybody so much for your time, uh, this week, and thank you again so much to the fantastic crew who is, uh, organizing some email harvesting, um, and, uh, To get people who would be interested in the conversation to send out a single email invitation.
	If you're interested in joining in, if you haven't donated and you don't have a lot of money, And you're not good at massages, and you don't live nearby, or have a couch for me to sleep on when the baby is around, if you could send me an email, I will put you in touch with the right people who are actually having quite a lot of fun.
	We had a call on Saturday, which was, I think, quite a lot of fun, figuring out how we can help get more people interested in this conversation.
	And that's just because the advertising dollars have diminishing value.
	The low-hanging fruit is done, and it's not like you get 10 billion people a day coming new onto the internet.
	So... If you are interested, if you have some time and are willing to help out, we have a pretty good way of getting you involved.
	And, you know, we're not going to spam anybody.
	I promise we're just going to send one email invite saying, hey, based on your blog or based on what you're doing, this would be something you'd be probably interested in.
	And that's all. We'll never contact them again.
	So don't worry about it.
	We're not going to do anything unfriendly.
	But if you can't donate in terms of money, and there is still some advertising going on, but you do have some time and you do want to, you know, basically people sit on calls and talk to each other about what they're doing.
	It can be quite social as well.
	And what it does is it gets...
	Contact information for people who we genuinely believe would be interested in this show.
	It's not spam because we don't charge anything for the show.
	But if you would like to shoot me an email, I'll put you in touch with the right people.
	And I would really appreciate that.
	That is a fantastic way.
	And, you know, think of these as real people.
	I mean, it's not just emails, right?
	I mean, we contact someone, as we just heard from the fellow who was talking.
	Somebody gets involved in philosophy and It will change their life, right?
	This to me is the equivalent of, you know, you wouldn't step over somebody on the sidewalk who'd fallen over, right?
	You'd see if they were okay, go through their pockets, see if they had a lot of cash, that kind of stuff, which was my job, really.
	But, you know, it's a UPB thing.
	You value the conversation.
	Therefore, if you can help other people to get involved in philosophy, it will change their lives.
	It will change their relationships.
	It will change the way they Our parents, whether they become parents in the future, our parents now.
	Just a woman posted on the board today that someone gave her a copy of On Truth.
	She was so excited. She read it all in one sitting.
	She has talked about it.
	She had her daughter, 15-year-old daughter read it.
	They sat down and talked about it, had those open discussions.
	What philosophy is all about is really it's about bringing people closer together.
	It's about developing those honest and intimate and beautiful relationships where we can truly open our hearts to each other.
	And so if you get someone's email and they come to the site and it will change their life if they get into it, not because of anything I'm doing, but because of the way it will light up their own thinking.
	So... If you have some time, you know, half an hour a week, an hour a week, if you have some time, you can really do a huge amount to change someone's life direction.
	And that is such an amazingly satisfying and wonderful and beautiful thing.
	Until you've experienced that, it's indescribable.
	But it will bring you joy, I guarantee you.
	So that's it so much.
	Thanks to everyone for continuing in this conversation, the participation.
	Thank you to the people who over the last two days have signed up for subscriptions.
	It is absolutely the most beautiful thing in the world, what we are doing here.
	I truly believe that from the top of my scalp to the bottom of my toes with the eerie similarity close-up that the two represent.
	But we are really doing the most amazing and beautiful thing here.
	This is the most successful philosophical conversation in history.
	This is how we change the world.
	From the ground up, from the inside out.
	With love and reason and strength.

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