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May 16, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:40:52

1663 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show 16 May 2010

An Izzy update, an analysis of the BP gulf oil leak, the stock market in a free market, kids and morality, the family as a template for the state, and is beauty shallow?

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	Well, thank you everybody so much for joining us.
	It is the 16th of May 2010, and yes, indeed, we are 10 days past the third year anniversary of me quitting my cushy, well-paid executive software gig to yell at my computer full-time.
	Who would have guessed it would be a paid gig?
	There are many people who yell at their computers every day.
	I'm just very glad that this yelling is productive for you all, and thank you so much.
	For subscribers and donators for keeping this essential conversation afloat.
	And if you haven't donated for a while, and I hate to ask, but the recession doth grind on.
	And as I'm sure you're aware, the two biggest sources of my donations are America and England, who have been the most hard hit by the recent recession.
	And of course, it's not like FDR, it's not like this show appeals to a lot of the people who still have jobs, i.e.
	government workers. Do you have any extra cash floating around?
	I would hugely, hugely appreciate it, and I look forward to hearing from you, and I look forward to your donations at freedomainradio.com forward slash donate dot aspx.
	Hey, isn't that a user-friendly domain?
	We should probably make that a little bit more friendly.
	Gimme, gimme, gimme.com, perhaps.
	Anyway. So I hope you're doing fabulously.
	A wonderful week I hope you had.
	This week up here was good.
	I did some work on some videos.
	Thank you. I also wanted to put a thank you out to the tireless workers and linguistic experts who are giving me just wonderful translations of my videos, which I have a German version of The Matrix.
	I'm just about to upload a Spanish version of the story of your enslavement, which has pushed over 100,000 views in a little under two weeks, which I really think is great.
	And thank you, everybody. Who has helped promote that video.
	It's getting a lot of feedback and I appreciate that.
	It's getting a lot of good feedback, a lot of you, so I appreciate that.
	And at least I hope that the translations are good.
	I don't really have any way of telling.
	So hopefully they're not, please accept the gizzards of my firstborn in payment for your donation or something like that.
	So hopefully that's not the case.
	And up here, yeah, things are great.
	Izzy is progressing marvelously and magically.
	She has just started to sound out letters.
	F-U seems to be quite particular.
	She's just started to sound out letters.
	I have been...
	Talking with another libertarian, we'd like to do a show on parenting, and he made the suggestion that I teach her the phonetic alphabet.
	So instead of A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, M, which I think is actually a pretty good idea.
	So you teach the sounds that the letters make rather than the names of the letters.
	Because it doesn't do much good for a child to look at the letter cat and say C-A-T. But if you say K-A-T, then they can make the word much more easily.
	I haven't really spent much time teaching her the alphabet as in the A-B-C, but I've really worked hard to give her the alphabet in the F-G format.
	And that seems to be paying off.
	We've got some flashcards and cool stuff like that, which she really seems to enjoy.
	And so she's just starting to sound out the letter W and the letter S and the letter C and so on.
	Which is really just unbelievably cool.
	She is, I guess, two days shy of going into her 17th month or being 17 months old.
	So that is just fantastic.
	A shout out to Wilton Alston, who is a writer for Lou Rockwell, who was up here in Mississauga.
	For a marathon. And I was a bit confused because when he said marathon, I thought he just meant listening to all the FDR podcasts.
	But apparently, and I did look this up on Wikipedia, there are other kinds of marathons and he's running one.
	So he is in excellent shape.
	I did not offer to arm wrestle him and he was kind enough to carry me up the stairs to the restaurant.
	So we had a bite which was great and it was really, really nice to meet him.
	And if you get a chance to check out his Writing, he is a very, very good writer, in my opinion.
	He's very good at colloquial writing, which is certainly not my area of expertise.
	So he writes like he speaks, and I think that is a really interesting thing.
	So it's sort of like a transcript of somebody who's just chatting with you, and I think that's a really challenging way to write.
	It's something that I quite envy, and he's a really good writer.
	And he has dozens and dozens of articles on Lou Rockwell, so you might want to check those out.
	He's well, well worth reading.
	And so it's Wilt Alston, W-I-L-T-A-L-S-T-O-N. So I hope that you will check him out.
	And actually, it's nice.
	They've got some listeners rolling through, so I'm going to have a bite to eat with a listener on Tuesday as well.
	And, you know, if you listen to the show and you're passing through Toronto, you know, feel free to...
	To give me a shout, and if it's at all possible, perhaps we can meet for a drink.
	I always love to meet listeners.
	I really do. You guys are wonderful, and I've never had an encounter with a listener that didn't leave me feeling void, optimistic, enthusiastic, and very happy.
	So do let me know if you're coming by, and we can sit down and chew der Fattel.
	Alright, so I'm not going to do any kind of a big intro other than to say I am doing some work on...
	A historical piece.
	I would like to do a short documentary on the causes of the First World War.
	I know that may sound a little esoteric, but most of the issues that we face as a culture and as a civilization today can be traced directly back to World War I. And World War I was the complete turning point of human history and produced the slaughterhouse of the 20th century, destroyed vast portions of my family on both The British and the German side.
	It is something that has always been profoundly moving for me emotionally.
	I've been doing some very interesting research into the causes.
	I think you really can't understand the modern world unless you understand the First World War and what happened thereafter.
	And really look at the First World War and the Second World War as the suicide of Western civilization as it stood in the 19th century, as it stood post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment.
	It was the suicide of reason through statism.
	And it really was a 30-year war with a 20-year armistice.
	And it really is very fascinating to look at what happened and how and why.
	And I also, of course, am looking to detonate some of the myths of the good war.
	You know, like the First World War is generally considered a pointless bloodbath, but the Second World War was the fight against fascism and so on, and is often cited as the reason why we need governments and national defense, and that, of course, is all pure nonsense.
	Even Winston Churchill called it the unnecessary war.
	So I wanted to do...
	It's going to take a little bit of work, and I appreciate your patience as I work my way through that, but I think it's very, very important to understand, I mean, the First World War...
	It laid the grounds for statism as we know it and incidentally destroyed almost the identical amount of wealth that had been generated from the late 18th century through the Industrial Revolution was almost completely destroyed by the First World War and Western civilization started from scratch but with an enormous number of dependents on the state through the wounded and the pensioners and the war widows and so on.
	The government could never ever return to its 19th century size After the First World War.
	So I think it's really, really important to understand.
	And so I appreciate your patience as I'm sort of piecing that together.
	It will take a little while, but I think it will be very important.
	And I hope to give people some sense of where we came from and how it happened.
	All right. Oh, don't forget, I'm going to be at Porkfest, which is June 24th.
	I think I'm speaking at 6 p.m.
	Thursday. And I hope to stay for a couple of days.
	We'll see. I'm still sort of working out the details.
	And I hope to see you there if you're able to make it.
	And thank you so much, Richard, for being able to come down and video after the debacle with the debate.
	With Bednarik, I'm really looking forward to having some good quality video, and I really appreciate that, so I'm glad that you're coming down.
	Alright, but enough!
	Enough about me. Let's get to the real brains of the outfit, which would be you, right there, sitting right there, listening now.
	So if you'd like to have any comments, questions, issues, criticisms, problems, whatever you like, I am all ears.
	I just have one non-brainy thing to sort of throw out there.
	For people who are coming to the barbecue around Labor Day, if you're able to make it and you're interested in group rates, I have already started to bid.
	I submitted a request for bids, but if you're still interested in group rates, there's a A thread in the general information forum.
	Just go there, post your interest, and then we can make sure that we...
	And when we're negotiating with whoever it is...
	I don't know yet.
	When I'm negotiating with whoever it is for a block of rooms, we have a good number of people who are going to come by.
	So I just want to throw that out there.
	It's been a week, and so I'm hoping to make a decision or share the decision-making if I need to.
	Yeah, and I just wanted to follow up, James.
	Thanks, James, so much for organizing all of that.
	I really just want to follow up and make a pitch.
	Come. You will remember it for the rest of your life.
	It is a fantastic time.
	I think I can speak for everyone here.
	And, of course, if you've come and hated it, then let me know.
	Welcome to my show!
	Please, if you can come, I will provide the food and the drink.
	That's something that I just carve off the donation list as my way of saying thank you to everybody.
	It's going to be one of the cheapest vacations and I think one of the best vacations you might have.
	I hope that you will be able to come by even if it's just for a little while.
	I would really, really encourage that.
	If you get a chance, great.
	Alright, so questions, comments, issues.
	Crowd, my ears, my brethren and sistren.
	Hello. Hello.
	Hey, Steph.
	I had a couple of really interesting discussions this week in the chat room, and they all thought that was kind of valid and I should bring it up to you.
	Because basically, recently this week and this past two weeks, I've been discussing with my economics professor and my English professor this whole idea, you know, amazing theories on economics and in general about the state and stuff like that.
	And the English professor has been Yeah, I think it's, if I remember rightly, sorry to interrupt, if I remember rightly, it is the analysis of a corporation using DSM-IV mental health criteria, and I think the result is that the corporation is deemed sociopathic in its intentions and actions.
	Yeah, but at the same time, they bring in a lot of very interesting points about corporations in general, which I'm going to bring into my own discussion.
	And also my economics professor, who based on what your talk should be completely, you know, throw free market all the way, no government interference and all that.
	And he just completely attacks me like crazy.
	He doesn't like your theories on this at all.
	And basically, between the two of them, I want to discuss what they think.
	So basically, what they're trying to bring up is that there are a few issues with the free market.
	All of them are kind of pro-free market in some way, because capitalism right now is probably the best thing that we have, and no one's disagreeing with that.
	But the thing is that on the screen, Free market ideas is just not what any of them agree with because they think that there has to be some sort of a control.
	I think you brought that up too.
	You want it to be some sort of insurance of some sort, but in some sort of checks and balances of some sort.
	But basically, they say, based on proof, because nowadays we have kind of the most, I know we still have the state and all that, but we have a lot, a lot of free market going on.
	And we see based on the evidence about how that works.
	What happens when there are kind of limited controls or no controls and based on that we can kind of decide whether we can keep those controls or let them do their thing.
	Because the thing is that government has over completely no regulation It's that at least now there's some sort of accountability.
	Of course, that accountability, you know, if you give the managers, you know, completely, you know, let a market become the managers of the free market, that's going to be really bad, as we see right now.
	Basically, the state is some sort of like, they do their thing, they don't really care what we say, even though they call it democracy.
	As you're saying, you know, you're trying to give a better idea for some sort of a controller, you want it to be feedback, whatever it was, which is great, but the point is that there has to be some sort of a constraint, some sort of control, to make sure that there's going to be some sort of accountability,
	because if we just see that it can be completely privatized, What happens is that it's owned by that company and we have no say at all because no matter how many people want to have some sort of change in the company like in oil or whatever it is, I'm sorry.
	Wait, wait, wait. Sorry. I want to deal with the issues as they come up, if that's all right.
	Sure. Let me just give you a short response.
	If you could just mute for a sec because there's a bit of static coming from your side, I'll tell you what I would say to this professor.
	And look, if your professor wants to come on and debate, please tell him.
	I would be more than happy to give him a chance to air his views and debate with him.
	So invite that. This idea that we need control over private capitalist organizations is so completely irrational that...
	I mean, people are so irrational in this area that this is why I started looking at family stuff.
	Because there's just no way that anybody could look at a blank page of any kind of logical diagram and say the following.
	We need control over social institutions...
	And so let's create one social institution, arm it to the fucking teeth, have it able to steal at will and imprison the population.
	And the population has zero control, economically at least, over this entity.
	And so we need to create an entity which is completely involuntary and all-powerful and has complete control over the citizenship, And we need to create this entity because there are social agencies that the citizens are afraid of not having control over.
	I mean, that is just so completely insane that no rational human being with more than four and a half brain cells to rub together would ever come up with that as a solution.
	It's like saying, I'm afraid of dating, so I want to get raped.
	I mean, that just makes no sense at all, right?
	So that's the first thing that I would say.
	Human beings, citizens have no control over the all-powerful government.
	So the idea that we create a government in order to control dangerous social institutions like free market companies is insane.
	Because the huge difference between me dealing with...
	Some local grocery store is that if I don't like that grocery store, I don't have to do a goddamn thing.
	I don't have to get off my couch.
	I don't have to take my finger out of my nose or my other hand off the remote, let's say.
	I don't have to move a muscle or take a breath if I don't like the grocery store down the road because I just won't go there.
	So inaction going about my day is everything that you do in a free market.
	That is not involved in giving money or time or services to a particular organization is a complete vote against every other corporation in the world, right?
	So if I go out and I buy an iPad, that is a vote against every other $600 worth of consumption that I could have made.
	So I'm voting for an iPad.
	I'm voting against every other possible use of that money, including saving it.
	And so I don't have to do anything if I don't approve of a particular corporation.
	On the other hand, With the government, if you don't agree with what the government does, you're fucked.
	You're completely and totally...
	If you don't like what the government does, what are you going to do?
	Well, you have to go marching.
	You have to try and get into office.
	You have to spend a lot of money.
	You have to risk going to jail if you don't want to pay your taxes.
	In other words, the government compels you to obey and the cost of disobedience is unbelievably high to the point where most people, and I think reasonably so, just won't risk it.
	On the other hand, if I don't agree with what some corporation is doing, I don't have to do anything.
	I can just sit there and suck up the Doritos dust from my chest as I continue to watch another season of Lost.
	I don't have to do anything.
	And this difference between positive and negative action is something that people don't understand.
	The idea of creating a monopoly of violence in order to solve a multiplicity of voluntarism I'll just give one very brief point and then I want to get on to your next point if that's okay.
	The next thing that I would say is there's this bizarre belief that corporations have something to do with the free market.
	That corporations...
	It exists somehow wildly independent of the government and the corporations are the spawn of the free market.
	They're the spawn of volunteerism and they are controlling the government and bribing the government and influencing the government and all this, that and the other.
	And that is all complete, ahistorical, propagandized nonsense.
	I mean, you couldn't jam more bullshit up somebody's vocal cords if you had a plunger.
	If they think that corporations have anything to do with the free market.
	Corporations are state-created and state-controlled ways of avoiding legal liability for your economic decisions.
	So if you have a corporation...
	And your corporation does well, you take all the money.
	If you have a corporation and your corporation does something stupid or illegal or dangerous or harms people, then the corporation gets sued and you don't get touched.
	So, for instance, there's this terrible Gulf oil spill or this oil leak that's going on at the moment that's just completely disastrous and is going to have effects on the ecosystem of the Gulf for probably years, if not decades, to come.
	I mean, it's completely catastrophic.
	Now, first of all, I mean, I don't want to go into the whole thing about this because it's a big topic.
	I might do a true news on it. But first and foremost, we have to look at everything that happened.
	Why the fuck are they drilling 400 miles below the earth, below the surface of the sea?
	Well, because according to environmental regulations, they're really not allowed to drill on land.
	Also, why are we still so dependent on oil?
	It's because the US government spends so much money propping up corrupt dictatorships in return for oil.
	I mean, they got, what, how many tens of thousands of troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, propping up that dictatorship to get access to oil.
	If none of that was occurring, the price of oil would be higher.
	Or there would have already been reforms in Saudi Arabia and other countries that they prop up through US militarism.
	There would have been reforms that would have lowered the price of oil by introducing more competition and free market.
	But by propping up all these oil-based dictatorships, The US is artificially driving up the price of oil and is reducing the incentives for other people to drill.
	And so this is why they end up...
	Now, the government does not require the backup systems.
	The US government does not require the backup systems that might have contained this spill.
	But finally and most importantly, do you think that one goddamn oil executive is going to lose his house over this?
	I mean, if I crash into someone's car without insurance, I'm going to lose my house.
	Because, you know, assuming they get injured or whatever, right?
	They're going to take my house. I don't think that's unfair.
	But these oil executives, they hide behind this legal shield called a corporation.
	And they don't get any personal exposure to the actions of that corporation.
	You can't go after their houses.
	You can't go after their assets.
	And so when they're weighing the calculations about whether to spend another half million dollars because they're drilling at the bottom of the ocean because of all these other government regulations, they're weighing that decision.
	There's no personal stake in that decision.
	I mean, to some degree, that's a bit of an overstate.
	I mean, they may want to keep working.
	They may want to keep their jobs. They might lose their jobs.
	But they're personal assets.
	The people at the top who are making these decisions are already worth millions of dollars.
	They have more than enough money to live on for generations if they want.
	And there's no personal stake in any of that.
	So they make these decisions knowing that if there's a catastrophe, it's not going to touch their personal wealth.
	It's completely insane.
	It's like I have a fictional friend, and if I do anything good, I get all the benefits.
	And if I do anything bad, it's my fictional friend who goes to jail, and I just get to make up another fictional friend if I want.
	Well, if we had that occurring among citizens, if you could just invent your own personal little alternate corporation hand puppet, and if anything went wrong, you said, no, no, talk to the hand puppet, I mean, we wouldn't have a functioning system at all if that's how it worked at a personal level.
	But this is how it works.
	At a corporate level.
	And it has nothing to do with the free market.
	I guarantee you there would be no such thing as a corporation in a free market.
	A corporation is an entirely state-generated entity and it's a way that the government buys the votes of rich people and gets their donations is by giving them legal immunity from the negative consequences of their bad decisions.
	And that's what a corporation is.
	It's a bribe to the upper classes to excuse them from the liability of doing disastrous things Like screwing up the entire ecosystem of the Gulf with 12 billion barrels of oil.
	But if it was a free market, then they'd still mess up the bottom of the thing.
	Fine, there wouldn't be a corporation to back them up, but they wouldn't have a government to go and attack them with all these laws and things about how they can't do it.
	As long as they own that land or whatever it is, they'll go drill and mess up the whole world for all they care.
	Well, no, because in a DRO society, if I wanted to go and drill at the bottom of the ocean...
	The DRO, there would be all this insurance.
	That I would have to buy.
	And in order to buy that insurance, I would have to prove, in order to get that insurance, I would have to prove to whatever organization that would be responsible for paying out that insurance, I would have to prove to that organization that it was as safe as humanly possible.
	And this fuck-up in the Gulf wasn't even remotely as safe as humanly possible.
	BP is going to end up paying one one-thousandth of the costs of the cleanup.
	One one-thousandth Of the cost of the cleanup.
	And no executives, I guarantee you, no executives are going to be personally liable for one thin dime of that catastrophe.
	It's all going to get stuck to the taxpayers.
	That would never happen in the free market because there are no taxpayers in the free market.
	Right. Okay, so you're just changing the government for DRO, but the point that I'm trying to make is...
	Wait, wait. Sorry, what did you say?
	Sorry. What did you just say?
	You're changing the check and balances from the government.
	They're basically like a mafia of some sort that we think are democratic, etc.
	There are no checks and balances in the government.
	There is only excuses and predation.
	The government has no checks and balances.
	Oh, definitely, definitely, definitely.
	What I'm trying to say is that we are both agreeing that there needs to be some sort of a check and balances.
	That's what I'm trying to get at.
	Of course, you call it a DRO because that's a good assistant.
	That's what we actually have in mind, you know, as you bring in a lot of your books and stuff about the idea about what the civil wars were really about.
	They're basically, they want a DRO. We want what democracy basically means.
	We want some sort of a, you know, a DRO where we actually can have some sort of a say we can You know, some sort of insurance or accountability of some sort, etc.
	But as you said, you know, the state as it is right now, there is no accountability, etc.
	And I guess that would probably be the same.
	It would be a free economy without any boundaries at all, but it would be just as bad as having a government that doesn't take any, you know, that lets them have some sort of a, you know, a way to do whatever they really want and get away with it.
	As you were saying, you know, you can't just go, and there's a famous story about the guy that he has a boat, he's on a boat, and he buys his little cabin, he takes a drill and starts drilling in.
	And they say, what are you doing?
	And he says, well, I own this little area, so I'm just going to drill in because they don't realize that he's bringing down the entire boat, you know?
	Just the idea of saying, I own this area.
	I'm a free market.
	I have my own company, whatever it is.
	And then you're just going to start wrecking up the whole air and all that.
	I think you can both agree that that would be wrong.
	Fine. We both also agree that the state is definitely not the solution.
	They're basically like libertarians.
	Okay. Sorry. I'm going to interrupt you just because your line is so bad that people can't hear what you're saying.
	But I think I've got the gist of it.
	So let me give you a bit of response to that and then...
	I'm going to have to move on to somebody else, just because your line is pretty bad, so we're having trouble hearing you.
	Look, we've just talked about the corporation side of things.
	How many people do you think in the oil regulatory bodies...
	The EPA, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the people who are responsible for policing these oil rigs and enforcing these health and safety standards, how many of those do you think are going to lose their jobs?
	How many of those people do you think are going to lose their houses because they did not put the proper enforcement in and this disaster occurred?
	And in fact, I will tell you what will happen is that because of this massive catastrophe in the Gulf, more people are going to get more jobs in these regulatory agencies.
	So far from there being negative repercussions to a catastrophic failure of oversight and management on the part of the government and on the part of BP, What is going to happen is the governmental budget for these organizations and the amount of control and power that they have is actually going to increase because people are going to say, well, we need more regulation because these regulations didn't work.
	So by killing the Gulf, they've raised their paychecks, they've raised their power, they've expanded their control.
	It's the complete opposite of any system you would ever design.
	You know, this is something I've thought of often.
	I'll just touch on it briefly here as I maybe do a podcast on it.
	You know, people say about the DRO system or whatever it is that's going to be in a free market, well, you know, there are all these problems.
	You designed the system. What about this, this, and this?
	Well, imagine if we were starting with a new planet, right?
	Starting with some completely blank page.
	And people said, well, I want to create this monopoly of force and blah, blah, blah, and you get these lobbyists and these national debt and they control the currency and they ban counterfeiting because it interferes with their own counterfeiting and so on.
	Imagine the number of objections you'd be able to throw at that.
	It's like, well, the people can vote, but who is it that they get to vote for?
	Well, the only people they'd get to vote for are the people who represent the special interests of the other people who donate the money for their campaigns.
	What would possibly stop people?
	There's a system where if there's a massive environmental catastrophe, the budget of the EPA gets bigger.
	It's like, well, that's the complete wrong incentive.
	How many people at the SEC even lost their jobs as a result of the Birdie Madoff ripoff, which was evident to anybody with 10 minutes and an abacus for many years beforehand.
	In fact, the SEC received numerous Letters from people about the fact that the Bernie Madoff-Ponzi scheme was mathematically utterly impossible.
	And they did nothing for years, right?
	And billions and billions of dollars got hoovered up and stolen of people's life savings.
	Well, where's the liability?
	Did the people in the SEC lose their jobs?
	Did anybody lose their house because they had done a bad job?
	Well, I'll tell you, when I was an entrepreneur, I sound like some old guy on the porch when I was a young whippersnapper.
	But no, when I was an entrepreneur, when we were starting out, I was a poor entrepreneur and the managing partners of the company that I was involved in founding, we personally signed guarantees for tens of thousands of dollars of loans.
	And if we had failed, We would have ourselves been liable for these loans.
	And I was recently out of school without a lot of money.
	That would have been disastrous for me.
	I mean, it would have been really, really bad.
	I would have spent years and years paying off that debt.
	So that was my liability, right?
	That was my... My liability and the liability of the other partners.
	That is something which really focuses your attention on quality.
	And so I know what it's like to labor under a great deal of risk and personal liability.
	And it's really not the same in these other organizations.
	It's not the same in government regulatory agencies.
	It's not the same. In these corporate bloated monstrosities of legal avoidance.
	You couldn't design a worse system.
	To me, it's always funny. I'm not saying you, but when people come up with objections to a voluntary system, it's like, well, let's pretend we were designing a system from scratch and why don't you propose your system and I'll pick holes in it rather than just defending the status quo as if it's somehow normal and rational rather than something that just developed like barnacles or a cancer.
	Why don't we pretend that you're proposing your system and let me poke holes in that because there's a hell of a lot more holes in violence than there is in volunteerism.
	So you might want to track that as a debating tactic.
	Anyway. I have a quick question.
	It's kind of a request for expansion on an idea that I heard in a recent podcast.
	Sure. I can't remember exactly which one.
	I think it was actually a couple of the recent ones where you said something like morality was invented in order to control people?
	Yes. And this is just like a really great question that a couple of friends and I, we spent like a couple hours discussing.
	And I wanted to know, because we were a bit confused on whether or not morality was something that was invented or something that was discovered.
	That's a good question.
	Tell me a little bit more about how you're using those terms.
	Well, yeah.
	If morality was invented in order to control people, I can see how a system of morality would be invented to control people.
	For example, saying that some leader has been Like, given a system of ethics by, you know, some higher power and then passes it on to people as that would be like a system of morality.
	But the thing that we were confused about is whether or not morality is innate in people.
	Like as a, you know, some kind of like evolution of our brains that kind of sets us apart from animals, which makes sense to me.
	Right. So whether it was like fire was discovered instead of invented, or if this system was more discovered.
	Right. That's a great question.
	Actually, I did a podcast on this recently that I haven't released yet, so I'll just touch on it here and then give you the chance to shoot holes in the approach that I'm taking.
	And this is not empirical fact.
	I think there's evidence for it, but it's not conclusive.
	As I see my daughter grow, I can see with blinding clarity the degree to which the human brain is intensely fine-tuned to the development of concepts.
	It is just amazing.
	I mean, she's 16 months old.
	And I think it was around seven or eight months she first understood that she enjoyed food being put into her mouth and therefore I would enjoy having food put into my mouth.
	So she started to feed me.
	She would take some food and give it to me.
	And that's an incredible thing.
	To me, for a baby to do, because she has to recognize that she and I are both human beings, that I have a head hole with teeth in the same way that she has a head hole with teeth, that food goes in and it's nice when it goes in.
	And that her hand is the same as my hand, and that's what she uses to put the food in the mouth and so on.
	And that's a strong degree of conceptualization.
	Now, of course, I understand also that cats can do this with their young and so on, but this is an infant.
	And this has progressed since then.
	I mean, to give an example, right?
	So now... She can name just about all of her body parts, right?
	Toes and fingers and elbow and arm and belly button and bum and all this kind of stuff.
	Thigh and calf and elbow and ears and eyes and nose and hair and all.
	She can do all of that sort of stuff.
	And when we first were teaching her that, it was individual, right?
	So ear meant the ear that we were pointing at.
	And then ear meant both ears.
	And then ear meant both.
	Her ears and our ears and then ear meant a picture of an ear just on its own.
	So there was a continual process of extraction of the essence and extrapolation into concept formation that has been working with amazing rapidity and I'm enormously impressed by the research that has been done on the development of concepts and morality even within infants that has been going on over the last few years.
	And so I think there's very strong evidence that human beings in a state of infancy have an incredible drive towards abstraction and universalization, towards the development of concepts.
	Now, that horsepower that is so innate to the development of our brains, I think, lends us to be naturally susceptible to definitions of goodness, of morality.
	So, when you...
	I mean, the basic essence of morality is...
	Sorry, the basic essence of empathy is I feel and others feel.
	Right? So, when Isabella was first learning...
	And this was an amazing thing to me.
	When she was first learning her own eyes, well, of course, we had to say gentle.
	When she would go to touch her eye or her eyelid or whatever, we'd have to say very gentle.
	I didn't want to hold her hand away because that would just make her want to do it more.
	So, we had to say gentle.
	And then, when she began to identify...
	Our eyes, she was also very gentle.
	So she understood that her eye was sensitive and therefore our eyes were sensitive because we're both human beings and we sort of experience the same thing.
	And that to me is the foundation.
	I mean, if you don't have that basic empathy, and not of course everybody does, if you don't have that basic empathy, then all of your statements of morality are going to be mere manipulation because if you don't have that basic empathy, it's all nonsense.
	So I think that children, because of this incredible innate drive towards conceptualization and universalization, can really be thought of as UPB machines.
	Or definitely UP, not necessarily the B. They're definitely universal preferences.
	And the universalization from the instance is entirely what childhood development is all about.
	I mean, in terms of intellectual development.
	And so, since the UP is there innately, putting the B on the end is very powerful.
	It's very powerful.
	And so, I think that your analogy of fire is very interesting.
	Like, lightning strikes a tree, there's fire, and then you pick up the fire, and for a while you try and keep it going, then it goes out, and then eventually you figure out that if you rub two sticks together or whatever, or you find a Zippo lighter, then you can make your own fire.
	Yeah. I think the innate drive towards universalization makes children enormously susceptible to definitions of morality, which are universal conceptualizations of right treatment and good behavior and empathetic and so on, right?
	And so, I mean, when you look at the word selfish, which is something that is all too often thrown at children, you look at the word selfish, then...
	Selfishness is a UPB violation term because it's saying that you only care about your own feelings and you don't care about other people's feelings.
	In other words, you're creating a special category of entitlement for the satisfaction of your feelings, which is at the expense of other people's feelings, which is invalid because we're all human beings and so on.
	And so that aspect of things is like when you call a child selfish, it's a UPB violation.
	And... When you're saying, you know, you never like to share, again, these are all UPB violations because you like it when other people share.
	And so when children are criticized morally, what's occurring is you are saying to a child, there is something broken and bad about your concept formation machine, the concept formation machine in your head.
	And that is very alarming to children because if...
	Concept formation doesn't work very well for children.
	They're enormously crippled in life, as we can sort of understand from a variety of mental health issues.
	And so I think that children are very susceptible to the criticism of non-universality or the creation of special and exploitive categories just for themselves, you know, like selfish or whatever.
	And I think that is why morality is so useful to people who want to control others.
	And so, of course, and the last thing I'll say just very briefly is that the child finds it very hard to penetrate that because the child is in a state of dependency and the last thing the child wants to do is to provoke rage or abandonment on the part of the parent.
	And The problem with calling a child selfish is that that itself is a selfish action on the part of the parent, right?
	So you're blaming a child for a UPB violation by using a UPB violation, right?
	Because if you're saying to a child, you're selfish...
	You're saying that you're preferring the satisfaction of your own preferences at the expense of someone else's.
	But if you're angry at a child and you call the child selfish, then that's negative for the child.
	So it's acting on your own particular preferences at the expense of someone else's if you're the parent.
	And so you can't teach a child that UPB violations are bad by violating UPB, right?
	That's just not... So in other words, it's a selfish thing to tell the child that he's being selfish.
	And children don't really want to penetrate that because that, I think, provokes a lot of upset on the part of certain parents.
	And children don't really want to risk that.
	So I think they just kind of go along with it.
	I'm sorry. I hope that wasn't too unbearably long a speech.
	But I think that was it.
	Yeah. That makes sense to me.
	And that's kind of something that I was...
	I was thinking it made more sense that it was, like, invented because it's sort of like a survival instinct to, like, seek approval.
	So, like, if somebody says what you're doing is bad, that would trigger, you know, a lot of fear and would kind of, like, I don't think it's necessarily approval that children are fundamentally after.
	I think children are fundamentally after conceptualization.
	And understanding of the physical properties of the world around them.
	And again, not to bore you with tales of my daughter, but at the moment she's going through a phase where what happens if this goes in water?
	What happens if she loves to be under a running tap and she basically wants to grab everything and see what happens when she runs water over it?
	She's trying to understand water because water is a very strange thing for her, right?
	It's neither a solid nor a gas.
	Like, it's not intangible like air, but it's not a solid.
	It's not like gravel, which is kind of halfway between a solid and water.
	So she's really trying to understand water.
	So I think children do have a drive to understand that.
	And she's able to conceptualize water very well, right?
	So we play with the sink and she sees water.
	I took her outside this morning to go to the park and there was a guy who was running his...
	hose, you know, those sprayer things to spray the lawn, his lawn sprinkler.
	And she said water because she saw it flying through the air and glimmering and so on.
	So the drive is to conceptualize I think that's first and foremost.
	But that very drive is harnessed through morality and through the desire to control through morality for kids.
	And I think that is a real challenge.
	So if the kid is going to gain approval for conceptualization, then they're going to be very pleased about that.
	What often happens, though, is that a child will question or criticize the parent in terms of universality.
	and the parent will react negatively.
	It's not always, but it's like a story that somebody I worked with once told me about his three-year-old son.
	His three-year-old son was going through a phase of throwing things, and so the dad said, don't throw, right?
	And then the dad tossed a piece of paper into the garbage, and his three-year-old turned to him immediately, you know, and said, wait, you said don't throw.
	And you just threw. And that is the challenge of universality, right?
	And that is the challenge of giving people moral rules, right?
	Is that if you're going to offer up moral rules, then you, I think, to that degree, lend yourself to be open to criticism for failing to meet them.
	And I think that's what goes.
	And it's much easier To impose moral rules than it is to live by them, and I think that's the hostility that children fear is the pointing out of that hypocrisy if it's occurring.
	Right, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
	I'm sorry, but I agree with you in that parental approval will generally trump anything else, because without parental approval, the kid can't survive at all.
	So that's how we would have developed, I think, our susceptibility to that kind of feedback.
	Right. And just one thing that I'm still not entirely clear on is whether or not that's—do you think the kind of innateness of our sense of wanting to be good or bad is because of that need to conceptualize?
	Yes, absolutely. I'm sorry to interrupt, but yes, that I will say without a doubt.
	Because the reason that I know that it's out of our desire to conceptualize is that it is always put forward as a concept.
	Morality to children is always put forward as a concept.
	I mean, there are a few parents, I shouldn't say always, there are a few parents who will say, do it because I tell you to.
	But almost all parents will try to come up with some reason as to why The child should, quote, be good, right?
	And it usually has to do with universality, empathy, consistency, what I would call UPB. Now, it's clumsy and it's inconsistent and so on because, I mean, the moral framework is, you know, still to be propagated.
	I think something like UPB or something like it is still to be propagated so that we can explain to children...
	What virtue is without resorting to aggression or bullying from authority or threats or withdrawal or punishments or whatever.
	But for sure, children, it's always explained in terms of The universals.
	Selfishness is universally bad, right?
	Hitting is universally bad.
	It's not like, don't hit on Tuesdays.
	It's not like, don't hit that kid, but you can totally hit that kid.
	It's always put forward as a universal, so I would say it has to be hooking in to the universal side.
	And most parents won't start out with, because I told you to.
	Most parents, if they end up there, they end up there because they can't explain, because they're getting peppered with questions.
	And they can't explain or they start to approach their own hypocrisy if it's occurring.
	And they can't get any further.
	And then they say, well, just because I told you so.
	But they don't generally start there.
	Right, yeah. That makes total sense.
	And I appreciate the clarification.
	Hey, I'm glad it was clarifying.
	And if you listen to this and find that there's still stuff that's...
	It's a big topic. So if you find that there's stuff that's still unclear, please bring it up again.
	Okay, thank you. Thank you.
	I mean, conceptualization and the language that it generates is, I think, our greatest evolutionary distinction and advantage.
	So it is something that is very, very powerful.
	And I think, you know, there's this new research about how early children can distinguish social rules from moral rules, right?
	Moral rules like don't hit, don't steal, versus social rules like you should hang your coat on this particular hook, right?
	There is a modern development of research in more recent times about the degree to which children can master that stuff very early.
	But I think that parents and caregivers have always known this, which is why they start with morality when children are very young.
	And I think that they really do get the degree to which children want to be good.
	All right, we have time for another question or two, or 2.3, if you like.
	Hello. Hello. Hi, how are you?
	I'm just great. How are you doing?
	I'm doing great. Steph, my name's Jacob.
	I just wanted to...
	Jacob, are you from the show Lost?
	Can you explain what the hell is going on in that show for me?
	I don't know.
	Hang on just a second.
	I'm getting some feedback on the sound.
	You know, also I've never watched Lost, so I don't know.
	Oh, okay, good. Well, then you're not as lost as I am.
	Okay, all right. I think I've got the sound situation fixed.
	I had a question that sort of deals with a topic that was going on earlier with that first caller who's talking so fast.
	And if I'm talking fast, slow me down, please.
	You talked about corporations and the definition of corporations.
	And I think that's...
	A pretty sound idea of what corporations are anymore and have been in the past, you know, the East India Trading Company and so forth.
	But I think that there's an economic definition of corporation that like Murray Rothbard would have used that I think is a little bit more pro-free market.
	I wanted to sort of throw this at you and just see what you think.
	Okay, so can I present you a situation that maybe I think maybe Rothbard would have come up with?
	Please. Okay.
	The idea of a corporation, just as its basic definition, is the idea that you've got limited liability of owners of capital.
	So let's say you've got some guy, and I'm going to give him $10 to run a business, and it looks like it might be a profitable business, and I sort of leave him to decide what he's going to do.
	And he goes and he takes my $10, and he takes the $10 from a bunch of other people, and then he buys a gun, and he shoots somebody with it.
	I don't think that I should be held liable for what he did, especially if I didn't know, obviously.
	So you give him 10 bucks, he goes and shoots someone, buys a gun and shoots someone.
	Yeah. And I think that liability ends after I've had that sort of transaction with him.
	And he promises me to give me in the future returns on his capital.
	I don't know if that's true or not.
	You can't guarantee that. But I think that's sort of like a small version of the kind of corporation that you might have in a free market, the kind of pooling of capital to build greater structures of capital and have a big firm and everything.
	And, of course, the executive, the guy that I gave the money to, to help own his share, or to help buy the capital, he would still be responsible for any of the bad things he did.
	If he shot people, if he drilled oil and leaked it everywhere, of course, he would still be held responsible.
	I just don't think that I, the shareholder, should be held responsible.
	What do you think? Well, I agree with that to a large degree, but I don't believe that I mentioned anything about shareholders in my earlier speech.
	No, you didn't. And that's what I'm saying.
	I think that there's this definition of a corporation as a common holding of stock, as a shared structure of capital that economists talk about, people like Murray Rothbard and Mises and Walter Block and all these folks.
	They talk about a corporation as being that.
	Not, of course, the kind of status corporations that you have with the Northrop Grumman's and the Boeing's and all these people.
	I understand this correctly.
	Let's say that I invest $1,000 into BP and BP then turns the planet inside out pretty much and spills all this crap in the Gulf.
	Then I can't be held liable for anything more, in a sense, than the loss of whatever portion of my investment that the stock goes down.
	Is that right? Yes, if you're not the executive and you're just the shareholder, yeah, exactly.
	Well, sure, because I'm not exercising any direct control over the corporation.
	I'm simply a passive investor.
	And so, because I'm not making the decisions as to whether or not there are backup systems in that oil rig, I can't be held...
	I mean, where there's no authority, there can't be responsibility, right?
	And since I don't have authority to make those decisions, I can't be held liable for those decisions.
	However, of course, I was more focusing on the executives who were making those decisions who, in my mind, should be damn well personally liable for the results of those decisions.
	Because that's the only way to make people make better decisions.
	Of course, no disagreement at all.
	And I think that – I think you're absolutely right as far as that goes.
	I just think that there tends to be a...
	A blurring of this idea when I talk to Marxists and communists and whatnot and I try to tell them that shared ownership of capital or ownership of capital at all.
	They wouldn't have any ownership, I guess.
	It's not a bad thing.
	What is bad is when you've got violence and aggression and coercion, and you've got the state coming in and shielding liability from executives.
	But limited liability of investors I don't think is a big problem.
	And I think that if you had a market, you would still have large corporations, or maybe not huge ones, but you'd still have large firms, I think.
	Go ahead. No, I quite agree with you that in a free market there would be organizational structures which would be necessary to shield investors from negative results of corporations.
	But to me, I mean, that certainly wasn't why corporations were put in place.
	Corporations were put in place so that if the corporation lost money, the debts would die with the corporation and it wouldn't touch the owners.
	I mean, that's the fundamental aspect of status corporations, as I understand it, is that – and I was very aware of this as an entrepreneur, right?
	So our choices when we were going to get funding after our initial round of blood, sweat and tears was, well, we could go to a bank and we could get a loan at a fairly low percentage of interest if we had any assets and higher interest if we didn't.
	But we would go to the bank and we would get a loan.
	Or we could go to investors and then we would give up some equity and the investors would gain some positive results if we made money.
	But if we lost money and the corporation went into debt, then if we took out a bank loan, And the corporation went into debt, we ourselves would be personally liable to pay back the bank, even if the corporation went bust.
	But with investors, that wasn't the case, of course.
	If the corporation goes bust, the debts die with the corporation and the investors lose their investment, but we don't have to pay them anything back.
	And to me, that was the distinction.
	I don't know exactly where that would sit.
	In a free market.
	I mean, it's a really big and interesting question, the degree to which a stock market would function in a free market, in a truly free market.
	I mean, I know that Von Mises said that, oh no, I think it was Rothbard who said that the one distinguishing aspect between socialism and capitalism was the functioning stock market.
	But in my opinion, right, I'm no expert in any of these matters, but in my opinion, I would say that the role of shareholders would be enormously diminished in a free market.
	Of course, a lot of people end up hugely.
	There would be much, much less investment in a free market for sure because investment is risky and investment is something that requires, if you're going to be good at it, it requires a fair amount of work.
	Why do people invest right now?
	Well, of course, most people invest because the money will be stolen from them if they don't, right?
	Most people end up with their money in the stock market for two reasons.
	One is because inflation is eating away the value of their money.
	So they have to do something with it.
	Otherwise, they might as well just flush 3% to 5% of it down the toilet every year until it's all gone.
	So inflation draws a lot of money into the stock market.
	And of course, banks won't pay you any interest at all.
	It's much less than inflation.
	So that doesn't help you. And of course, with retirement savings plans in whatever form, and I think they're pretty much the same in many ways over the Western world, if you don't put your money into the stock market, into approved investment vehicles, the government will simply take that money from you through taxation.
	Right. There's a huge amount of money that's being herded into the stock market, which is great, of course, for the people who want to make a lot of money, like the whole Wall Street thing is surviving almost entirely because of the amount of money that's being herded into the stock market and has been since this stuff kicked off,
	I think, in the 70s. How many people would want to go and invest a lot of money in a stock market when, like in a free market situation, When their bank would pay them a reasonable amount of interest and guaranteed interest, when they did not have to worry about losing money through inflation, and when they weren't going to be taxed, the money wasn't going to be taken from them if they didn't put it in the stock market.
	I think that there would still, of course, be room for investors, but it would be a tiny, tiny percentage of what it is right now, which I think would be entirely to the benefit.
	So I think it would be a much less important issue in a truly free market.
	Yeah, you'd only have more risk-loving people doing it and risk-averse people would probably...
	Yeah, and it would be a job.
	You would do the research.
	I mean, nobody should invest in a field or a company that they don't know anything about.
	And of course, most people just hand over their money to some financial advisor or some RRSP and they don't know where the hell their money is going or what it's doing.
	All they're doing is shielding it from the tax man and trying to get some money back through to offset the costs of inflation or the loss through inflation.
	And that's not...
	I mean, people wouldn't do that with their money in a free market situation because there'd be no incentive.
	You make your money, you hang on to it.
	It's going to get a small amount of interest and be perfectly safe in a bank or at least mostly safe.
	And you're just not going to want to throw it into the casino of the stock market.
	There will be some people who will do it and there may be some people who like it.
	But the majority of it would be a pretty tight professional way of doing it and reviewing it.
	Of course, that's what you want.
	You want your shareholders in...
	Ideally, you want your shareholders to be knowledgeable, to be proactive, to be invested.
	The smaller amount of larger investors that you have, the better off it is for the corporation in terms of its longevity.
	If you have a million people each putting in $100, they're not going to care what you're doing fundamentally because it's not worth their time.
	So they're going to make $5 or $10 a year.
	And so they've got $5 or $10 worth of time value to invest in figuring out what your corporation is doing.
	But if you have 100 people putting in $100,000 each, then they're going to be very interested in what's going to happen to that money or 100 people putting in $1 million each.
	And so what's happened now is because of the way that the money is all being herded into the stock market, you've got an enormous number of people with very small investments in companies.
	And so it's not worth any of their time to figure out what the hell these companies are doing.
	And so that would be a pretty negative situation in a free market.
	There would be larger investors and fewer of them and thus there would be that much better oversight of the corporations.
	Yeah, and I think that if you have few people investing, then that would drive up the interest that they would pay on it.
	So it would probably be better paying in addition to the greater risk.
	You know, if you have fewer investors, you're right.
	There would have to be more payoff to investors.
	And what that would mean is that the attraction of exposing yourself to personal risk through a bank loan would go higher, which I think would be better as well.
	I mean, at some point, it would end up that these two things would be relatively balanced out.
	Right now, if you can get investment, it makes virtually no sense to take out a personal loan.
	Whereas in a free market, these things as two options would end up being roughly equivalent and there would be particular things one way or the other that you might prefer.
	But it would not be where it is right now that no sane person takes a loan if they can get investment.
	Sure. I find this an interesting conversation.
	I remember one time you talked about how this is sort of getting off topic, what we started with.
	There's levels of conversation and once you finally remove the gun and remove the knife out of the conversation, it's not an argument about how deep we should stick the knife.
	Just get rid of the knife and now we can have a real conversation.
	I appreciate that we can talk like this and there's no knife and we can find out what might happen on the free market.
	Oh, I think it would be fascinating.
	Thank you. And I appreciate you bringing that up.
	And I just wanted to mention that a listener who I trust enormously has mentioned that it was Mises who said that the difference between socialism and capitalism revolved around the functioning stock market.
	So thank you very much for pointing that out.
	All right.
	Thanks, man. It's a great, great question.
	And I mean, I do find this stuff to be quite fascinating.
	I mean, you could write a 10-volume novel on life in a free market, and I think it would be just fascinating.
	But Oh, who has the time as it stands?
	Not I, I will tell you.
	Alright, I think we're just waiting for somebody else to be patched in.
	Sorry for the pause, it just helps me to take out bits that aren't going to be in the final version if I just leave them to be paused.
	Sure, yeah. If you'd like to come back, Jacob, that would be great.
	That would be fantastic. We're just waiting for somebody else to come in, and of course they have to accept the chat request and all that, so go for it.
	Okay, well, I hate to monopolize the show.
	I have one other thing I'll throw at you, and this is maybe a little bit more contentious, I'm not sure.
	It sort of gets back to the whole thing on calling corporations, corporations, and all that.
	I really don't like to demonize the corporations when arguing with people who are for the state.
	Because I think that we have a very good name for an aggressive, violent, property disrespecting entity, and that's called the government.
	So why should we call it big business?
	It's not even really business. It's just theft and robbery.
	We don't call robbery business.
	It's not really a corporation like we would think of it on the free market where you've got all the shareholders and whatnot that we talked about.
	So I really try to avoid...
	Well, I mean, look, language is really tough.
	I just watched a daily show where some guy came on about the end of the free market or the death of the free market or whatever.
	And the language is really, really tough.
	It's like the word anarchy, right?
	The word free market has been completely mutated over the past 150 or 200 years to mean state fascistic corporate capitalism.
	And even the word capitalism there becomes problematic.
	I'm just about nonviolence and property rights.
	I think those two things are pretty incontrovertial.
	Sorry, incontrovertible from a philosophical standpoint.
	And from an economic standpoint, I think it's pretty compelling as well.
	So it is really tough.
	I mean, when people say, I'm against capitalism, a lot, I see this happen to objectivists on the web all the time.
	When people say, I'm against capitalism, and the objectivists say, no, capitalism is good, they're just talking past each other.
	And then if you defend capitalism, it's like you're a big fan of pollution and the exploitation of Singapore children to stitch threads on the Nike clothing.
	So I find it's very useful to not assume that these terms mean the same to others as they do to me.
	And it is definitely fighting a quicksand fog machine to get this stuff because when you start asking for definitions, people generally get kind of oogie on you, right?
	Because they get that they're treading on a cloud of propaganda and they don't want to stick their foot through and feel like they're going to fall forever.
	So I agree with you.
	It's a real challenge when it comes to language.
	But what's your solution to the problem or your approach to that problem?
	Well, actually, I have this conceptual idea that I've been trying to throw out and trying to package.
	Maybe you can help with it.
	One of the things that I hate about our side is that anytime we talk about how the market can solve things and this, that, and the other, and the Marxists or whoever will say, oh, well, look how well capitalism is done, and like you say, they're talking past each other.
	And I say, well, you know, that's not really capitalism, or that's at least, you know, that's not free market, that's not volunteerism.
	And the person will say, oh, well, you know, you're just falling to the no true Scotsman fallacy.
	Are you familiar with the no true Scotsman fallacy?
	I don't believe I am, but so if you can explain it, I might be, but I don't think that the listeners would be, so go for it.
	Okay, the idea is that you've got...
	It's sort of like moving the goalposts.
	What it is is, you know, McDonald opens up Edinburgh Times newspaper and he sees that a Scotsman has been charged for having intercourse with a sheep.
	And McDonald says, oh, no true Scotsman would ever do that.
	Or no Scotsman would ever do that, is what he said.
	And the next day...
	You know, he sees another issue of the paper that says a guy from Edinburgh who's a Scotsman was charged with having intercourse with sheep.
	And he said, well, no, true Scotsman, you know, the definition of true.
	And so it's sort of moving the goalposts.
	And so whenever I say to a statist, well, you know, this is not true free market.
	This is not, you know, that's not what you're talking about.
	The person will say, well, you're just sort of moving goalposts.
	You're falling to the no true Scotsman principle.
	And I think I figured out a way to take care of that as well as take care of the idea of a definition of a true free market.
	And I think that's simply to recognize that...
	And there's a quote.
	I forget who it is.
	I'm sure somebody will think of it.
	But I think that there's a...
	There's the public sector, and then there's the private sector.
	There's the violent sector, and there's the voluntary sector.
	And, you know, those things sort of coexist at the same time, you know, like, I guess sort of...
	Everyday Anarchy talks a little bit.
	Well, I mean, I guess that's sort of what it's about.
	Whenever we talk to each other or go dating or whatever, that's an anarchic relationship.
	That's a private relationship.
	And I think what we need to draw a distinction is that we are rich.
	We do have a lot of stuff anyway.
	And there's a lot of cool things that have all come about because of the private sector.
	And the only reason we don't have more is because of the public sector.
	So I think that When we talk about the wonders that capitalism has brought us, I think that a lot of people need to keep in mind that, you know, that's one part of human action.
	The other part of human action is just violence and wealth destroying and all that.
	So I'm sort of throwing that out there.
	I don't know if I'm just mumbling. No, I mean, I think that's good.
	I think that the words like capitalism or socialism or mixed economy or Government management or regulation.
	All of these things, to me, they're balaclavas over the thief, so to speak.
	I think that for me, it's always important to not speak about the complex effects of simple abstractions, but rather to, as you say, go to the root and say, well, what is the definition of this behavior?
	And there's lots of ways you can do it.
	I mean, I've had conversations with people who say that the government needs to regulate Wall Street.
	And to me, it's like, so the entity that's trillions and trillions of dollars in debt will be responsible for the financial management of others.
	I mean, isn't that like giving the drunk the keys to the distillery and saying, make sure that nothing gets drunk?
	So there are lots of ways that you can approach this, but I think it needs to boil down to these fundamental things.
	Whenever anybody is proposing social organization, which involves force, the initiation of force...
	I think it's foundational to understand that they are fundamentally claiming an extraordinarily deep knowledge of ethics, of virtue, of good and right and true behavior.
	Like if somebody is saying the government should censor hate speech or whatever, right?
	Then what they're saying is, I know how violence should be used to better society.
	I know how violence should be initiated for the betterment of society.
	Well, that's an extraordinary claim to make.
	That is an extraordinary claim to make.
	And if you're saying that you know, if somebody's saying, I know how to initiate force to make society better, that person to me is making unbelievably complex, detailed, and far-reaching claims about their knowledge of morality.
	And of everything else as well.
	Yeah, and of human nature, and of economics, and of motivation, and so on.
	I mean, the wonderful thing about the anarchic position is its humility.
	Because the anarchic position is saying, I don't have the balls or the idiocy to say I know how to use violence to achieve good.
	I just... I don't. I watch...
	Maybe I watched that Mickey Mouse cartoon where he tries to use the sorcerer's spells to get the washing all done for him and it all goes disastrous.
	But that to me is... I don't have...
	The megalomania to think that I can tell society how to organize itself at the point of a gun.
	I think that is...
	I mean, I just don't have the confidence for that in any way, shape, or form.
	And I think it's the humility of the anarchic position that is very tough for people.
	Everybody loves to boss everybody around, at least in the current world.
	That seems to be endemic to human nature.
	Everybody has an opinion about how everybody else should live.
	And if somebody says to me something like, the state should regulate Wall Street, that says to me...
	At the very surface level, it's usually not true.
	In fact, it's almost always not true.
	But it says to me at the surface level, I have an incredibly deep understanding of the state, of the market system that we have, of financial firms, of existing regulations, of how they have failed.
	Because everyone says, oh, well, the reason we had all these problems was because regulation collapsed under Bush.
	It's like, well, what's the proof of that?
	Where's the reason and evidence? Very quickly you find that people are just manipulating words, like magic spells.
	They don't actually have any fundamental knowledge about any of these things.
	They're just repeating something that they heard someone say on CNN or read in the New York Times or whatever.
	They're just repeating nonsense that they don't understand.
	They're just manipulating words.
	When you catch people doing that, they generally get quite upset.
	So this is one of the challenges, of course, of taking the philosophical approach to life and starting with definitions.
	And this goes all the way back to Socrates, right?
	And people would say, well, it's unjust to do that.
	And Socrates would say, wow, if you're able to apply justice to this situation, you must have an extraordinarily deep and wise understanding of justice.
	So perhaps you can tell me what your definition of justice is.
	And of course, they'd be like, bah, bah, bah.
	You bastard, have some hemlock, right?
	I mean, that's the nature of the beast.
	And so, when someone says, I know how to use violence to achieve goodness, I'm going to ask them where their knowledge of virtue comes from.
	What is their definition of virtue?
	Do they understand the difference between voluntarism and violence?
	What is their relationship to violence?
	And of course, you know, 999 times out of a thousand, you would just get a whole bunch of hostile or Distracted or avoidant nonsense coming back your way, and that's tragic, but unfortunately, that is the fog that we have to work with.
	Sure, absolutely, and I think that's especially true.
	You know, what's sad is some of the biggest arguments I've had are with people who are nominally on our side, you know, people who maybe even claim to, you know, go so far as to claim to be voluntarists and anarchists and stuff, and they'll say, Well, you know, coercion, that's the same thing as manipulation.
	So if you've got a smarter person and a dumber person, well, the smarter person convincing a dumber person is actually coercion.
	Of course, I guess they have no idea what persuasion is.
	And that reminds me of the first caller you had today who said, you know, the free market has to have smart people or whatever.
	You know, I that that makes me cringe to think that, you know, people don't realize that that persuasion is not the same thing as coercion.
	You know, so-called manipulation is not the same thing as hitting somebody over the head and telling them what they have to do.
	Yeah, I mean, wearing Spanx isn't the same as raping someone, right?
	Putting on makeup is not the same as, right?
	I mean, there's a fundamental difference between...
	Taking somebody hostage to give you a job is not the same as printing your resume on nice paper, shaving and wearing a suit, right?
	I mean, those are all designed to manipulate impressions, but the fact that people have a great deal of trouble with this, I mean, to me, there's an important kernel of truth in that, in that there seems to be very strong evidence that, say, verbal abuse for children is even more harmful in the long run than physical abuse.
	So, I assume, and this is just my take on it, I don't have any concrete proof, but...
	When somebody says to me, verbal manipulation is the same as physical violence, I simply assume that they experienced verbal abuse as a child.
	That doesn't mean that they did. It's just my assumption.
	I'll try and figure that out with them because it's just such an irrational position to take from an empirical and logical standpoint that there must be some reason why they believe it.
	And this idea, of course, that society is full of greedy people who need to be controlled by a central authority is most people's view of school and parenting and church, you know, that children are just kind of random and need to be controlled and managed by a central authority called a parent and all that.
	And I haven't found that to be true as a parent at all.
	In fact, quite the opposite is true.
	And this is sort of why I say that we have to reform the family before we can get a free society.
	Right, because that kind of treatment of children is exactly how these statists would want to treat adults.
	You know, you don't know what's best for you.
	You can't make decisions about your own values.
	You have to be told what you like and what you should not like or what you should have choices amongst.
	Oh, yeah. And to me, it's a very astute observation, I think.
	And I also wanted to just follow that up by saying that when you start to see the degree to which family metaphors are used to support social hierarchies, I mean, it's such an obvious thesis.
	It's almost embarrassing to actually point it out, right?
	I mean, it's the founding fathers, right?
	I mean, so they're using the metaphor of father.
	A priest is called father, right?
	God is the father. Virgin Mary is the mother.
	Jesus may be the brother.
	I don't know, right? But But the degree to which...
	And when people say, well, if you don't like the rules in this country, you should leave.
	Well, that's exactly the same as, you know, well, if you don't like the rules in this house, young man, you can move out, right?
	I mean, the idea that the government owns the land...
	And we live here if we obey the government is exactly the same as the bad parent argument that I pay for everything in this house and when you live under my roof you will live by my rules.
	There's so many precedents to the way that statists and statism approaches the The hierarchy of power in society that if people who don't see that as coming from a family organization and exploiting the existence of a family organization and then it perpetuates itself, I think that's quite a willful misunderstanding of the basic way that statism is justified.
	That's a pretty disturbing and insightful insight right there.
	Yeah, I think you got it right on.
	That is pretty disturbing, though.
	How so? Well, I mean, it's scary to think about that.
	I hadn't thought of it in those terms, but yeah, that is exactly how people treat it.
	I mean, people really do even call, you know, even the names of these people who want to control you are called, you know, Father and No, you're right.
	Fatherland and motherland, and that generally fits in, right?
	So in Germany, it's more of a patriarchy, so it's called the fatherland.
	And in Russia, it was more of a matriarchy, and that's called Mother Russia, the motherland, right?
	So there is a...
	There is an incredibly strong correlation about the metaphors that are used in society.
	And how could it be otherwise?
	It's not like our parents are going to discipline us when we're two years old by saying, I'm like the government, because we don't know what the hell the government is when we're two years old, right?
	But the government will say, will hook into what's happened to us as children.
	The government will hook into it when it's older, and it will hook into stuff that is similar to the way that we are raised.
	But it can't happen the other way, because children respond to what is immediate before they respond to what is conceptual.
	And so it would have to go.
	It would have to go from the parents.
	It would have to go from the family to the state.
	It couldn't conceivably go the other way.
	And so you don't refer to your father...
	As the president, right?
	Because you don't know what the hell a president is.
	But you will refer to the people who founded your country as the founding fathers because you already know what a father is.
	And it even struck me, and this may be a bit of a reach, but I think it's true, right?
	I mean, the wife of the president is like the mom, right?
	And she's called the first lady.
	And who is the first lady that we all meet is our own mothers, right?
	So it even to me ties in at that level, though I'm not saying that's obviously not conclusive, but it just struck me the other day that there does seem to be that similarity.
	And when you start to see that kind of stuff, It is really, really clear.
	Corporations, as I've sort of mentioned, come into the sibling area and the government is supposed to be the parent who controls the sibling from being mean to us.
	And that to me is the level that most people are working at.
	That's an interesting insight, yeah.
	That's right. But tell me, if you don't mind, just while we wait for the next person, if you tell me a little bit more about what's disturbing, I do find that...
	I mean, to me, it's good news, right?
	Because if we've missed something important in the freedom movement, like the effect of family upon people's belief in the state, that gives us something to do.
	Whereas if it's not that, and maybe it's not, maybe I'm completely wrong about this and it's something else.
	But if it's the one thing we've avoided, but it's the one thing that will work, that to me would be good news.
	Because if we are out of options, right, politics isn't going to work.
	Argument doesn't seem to work.
	Education doesn't seem to work.
	Free books don't seem to work.
	You know, websites like Mises or FDR don't seem to work.
	If there's something that we have missed that's troublesome to look at, To me, that's, I mean, I understand it's disturbing, but it's really good news because it means there's something that we can still do.
	But if it's not that, then I'm not sure what else we can do, if that makes any sense.
	No, I hear you. The disturbing comment, I just meant it as, you know, maybe I should have said strange that these people would take that kind of language onto that kind of thing.
	And I think it really does show an insight into the two connections, like you say, where you've got this...
	Controlling upbringing that translates very well to a controlling adulthood.
	I have to disagree with you about, however, websites not working because if it wasn't for your website and Mises and all of those others, I don't think I would be an anarcho-capitalist right now.
	Works for at least one person, right?
	I mean, that's an empirical data point.
	No, you're absolutely right, and I apologize for not being even remotely clear, and thank you very much for pointing that out.
	What I mean is that the amount of activism that has been poured in, I mean, all the way back from Socrates 2,500 years ago to the rise of classical liberalism 150 or 160 years ago, It has not translated into managing or controlling the size and growth of the state.
	So I agree with you, at an individual level, it can certainly work towards enlightenment, but it hasn't worked as yet at a social level to reverse the trends that we all find so troubling.
	So thank you for that clarification, because I was completely not clear about that distinction.
	No, that's fine. All right, well, I have nothing else to contribute.
	All right, thanks. Jimmy P., we had somebody else who was lurking and waiting.
	It's Mr. B in the call list.
	Mr. B. Hey.
	Hey. Can you hear me now? I sure can.
	Okay. Yeah, let me know if I need to turn it up or down or anything.
	That's good. I appreciate you. Cool.
	I appreciate you taking my call.
	I, uh... Yeah, I've been listening to you for, heck, probably two years now or something like that.
	I really appreciate what you're doing and giving me a chance to talk to you like this.
	This is awesome. I'm excited about it.
	I feel kind of funny about what I'm about to say.
	It's kind of like I've got a guilt complex about my preference of the opposite sex.
	I'll just flat out say it.
	I guess I'm more attracted to skinny girls than overweight girls, and I'm wondering if that's something society has superimposed on me, or if that's superficial and wrong of me to be like that.
	You know, I feel guilt over it.
	And I don't know if that's unfounded or.
	No, that's.
	I think that's a very, very interesting question.
	To some degree, I think it's fairly true that the definition of what is attractive certainly changes.
	I mean, you can look up Rubenesque on the web and look for art galleries, not some of those other sites, I'm sure.
	But to be overweight was considered to be very attractive.
	In general, and this is just my nonsense theories, right?
	But in general, it seems to be that whatever is the exception tends to be more attractive.
	So when food was scarce, then being overweight, which was rare, became more attractive.
	Now that food is plentiful, the exception is to be thin, and therefore that becomes more attractive.
	For instance, if you look at Humphrey Bogart, right, he looked like a bunch of pieces of wet noodles strapped to a chestless wanderer.
	For Humphrey Bogart, when physical labor was the norm, then muscles and a tan was considered to be unpleasant and unattractive because it was so common.
	But now that working in an office is the norm, then muscles and a tan indicate that you have some leisure.
	It's all about what is excessive and what you have access for.
	So if you look back sort of the movies of the 40s and 50s, nobody had any muscles and they all looked like Casper the Friendly movie ghost, right?
	But now to have muscles and to have a tan is considered, you know, you have the leisure time to go and do a beach and to a gym and so that now has become considered to be, now we have six packs and before it didn't matter because you never saw them without their shirts on or whatever, right? And so these things do change over time, for sure.
	And that's not to say that there are no standards of beauty.
	I mean, for instance, a physically beautiful face seems to be pretty widespread.
	Like most cultures will say, that face is more beautiful than that face.
	And it has to do with the evenness of the features, which indicates a good spread of the gene pool, which means that if you have sex and have children with somebody who has a good gene pool spread, in other words, they're not inbred like the royal family...
	Then you have less of a chance of those mutations occurring, which require two pairs of, I think, DNA or chromosomes or whatever to pair up.
	So there are evolutionary advantages to preferring things like, you know, round hips and full breasts and shiny hair.
	And in men, baldness, I think, is the only thing that is evolutionarily adaptive for ultimate male beauty.
	Maybe there's something else I don't know, but...
	Well, I got hair down halfway down my back.
	I have hair halfway down my back, too.
	That's just the only thing. But anyway, yeah, so there's some objectivity to sexual attraction, it seems.
	There is definitely some cultural standards and some subjectivity.
	But tell me what it is that you mean by thinness.
	I mean, do you mean like Kate Moss can slip in through a mailbox if she doesn't have a key kind of thin, or what are we talking about?
	Oh, no. Oh, you know, just anything from average to, you know, just not like, you know, obese, I guess.
	And my situation now is there's this girl I've been hanging out with a lot, and, you know, she's really neat and fun to be around and stuff, but the only really problem I have is that she's overweight, and it's just – It's hanging over me like a wet bag.
	If it actually was hanging over you, then this conversation might be somewhat redundant and actually quite inappropriate in the moment.
	Are you yourself athletic?
	Are you very active?
	I'm very skinny.
	No, I don't really exercise that much.
	But you sort of like to walk or play sports or anything like that?
	No, I guess not play sports, right?
	No, no. I'm not really into any sports at all.
	I played soccer in my youth, but that's about it, really.
	Yeah, because there could be a compatibility issue.
	I mean, if you're really into sports, then somebody who's overweight probably wouldn't be able to participate, right?
	So there would be something less that you could sort of do together, right?
	So there could be some sort of more practical issue there.
	I understand, yeah. Yeah, I don't really think that's the case.
	For some reason I have it in my head that everything is going good with this girl and she's great and everything.
	The only thing is she's overweight and it's not something I can get out of my head.
	It causes me to resist.
	And my whole thing really is, you know, I'm afraid to commit to anything because there might be something else better out there is one big thing I'm kind of thinking I need to overcome or that's just from what I've read is like a characteristic of personality types.
	The anagram, I don't know if you're familiar with that or But, you know, that's like a negative trait in the individualist personality type.
	But, I mean, that's really kind of trying to justify it in my mind.
	So, sorry, are you saying that you might be romantically attracted to the woman if she weren't overweight?
	Oh, yeah. And it's...
	Now, I mean, to what degree are we talking overweight?
	I mean, 800 pounds or, you know, whatever?
	I don't know. Well, I'd say close to, you know, up there in the 100-something, like maybe close to 200, I guess.
	I'm not really sure. But, you know, it's significant.
	Right, right. Do you know why she's overweight?
	Well, you know, people are overweight for sometimes reasons they can't control.
	I understand that. And, you know, I don't really hold her to any fault for her weight or lifestyle choices or, you know, if that even has anything to do with it.
	But really, it's like a preference of mine, even though I have a great time with her.
	We have some really good conversations talking about some of the stuff you talk about, too.
	She's... I introduced her to your videos and it's great to have somebody in person you can actually talk to about stuff like this because it's such a rarity really to have intellectual conversations with people.
	I live in South Carolina. That might have something to do with it.
	But yeah, I mean everything should be great.
	It's just my...
	I don't know if it's a preconceived notion I got from too much television or, you know, society in general telling me overweight people aren't attractive or...
	I don't know.
	I'm still kind of silly about it.
	No, no, it's not silly at all.
	I completely understand.
	I mean, I appreciate you bringing this up.
	I mean, it's a challenging topic and I'm just going to, of course, give my nonsense opinions about it.
	But there is...
	So the first thing that I would do if you're friends with the girl is I would talk to her about her relationship to food, her relationship to weight, and what she thinks and what she feels.
	I mean, if you're friends, right?
	And if you're close. And that wouldn't be any sort of prelude to a romantic thing or whatever, right?
	But I think that's important.
	I'm certainly no nutritionist or expert, but I think my understanding is that the number of people who are overweight for reasons that they can't at all control, there's very few people who are in that category.
	Now, being overweight is not always bad for your health, but it usually is something that is worth looking at and trying to manage or control, if at all possible.
	There have been some studies that I've read that have said that, you know, being overweight is not bad for your health.
	There have others have been said that it is.
	It certainly can be tougher on your joints.
	It can be tougher on your knees, of course, and your lower back and so on.
	So if I were you and I wanted to get to know this person better, I would ask you and say, hey, what's your relationship with food?
	I mean, what's your relationship with weight?
	And to me, that's a very important and interesting question to ask just about everyone.
	I mean, we all have complex relationships with food, for better or for worse.
	And I think it's an interesting question to ask just in terms of getting to know someone.
	I think that's an interesting thing to ask.
	It may be that you will find something out about the person that gives you some understanding, some knowledge of it.
	Maybe her talking about it might help her look at these issues with more clarity.
	Sometimes weight can be, or our relationship with food, can be a bit of a guilty secret that people have and so on.
	So if you like the person as a friend, if you like the woman as a friend, my suggestion would be to ask her.
	And if she gets really upset, then maybe don't, but don't continue.
	But I think it would be something that would be interesting to talk about.
	And you never know where that kind of conversation might move.
	Well, I appreciate it.
	Yeah, you know, the last thing I want to do is make her feel uncomfortable or anything, or make her feel like I'm rejecting her because of that reason, even though that might be closer to the truth.
	Well, no, but I wouldn't talk about your thoughts and feelings.
	I would ask about her thoughts and feelings.
	Okay. Right? It wouldn't be like, well, because, you know, if you were thinner, I would just ask her about her thoughts and feelings.
	Or if you have, I mean, I think we all have something to do with food that's interesting.
	So you could talk about your relationship.
	I don't mean issues or problem, but your relationship with food and so on.
	And you could just bring the conversation around that way.
	I think our relationship with food is interesting and challenging and complex in many ways.
	People use food for a lot of different reasons that don't have anything to do with, I think it's an interesting topic to chat about with friends is relationships with food and with health.
	I'm really seeing this again.
	I bring up my daughter in every context, but I can see this with my daughter.
	She goes through these phases where she's growing a lot, and she eats a lot, and then she doesn't eat much, and it's like, oh, is she okay?
	It's like, because she's just not hungry.
	When she's full, she's full.
	And that is a really great thing.
	She doesn't, obviously, she's not a stress eater, because she doesn't really have any stress.
	And so it's really interesting to see our sort of original relationship with food, which is that it's nice and it's tasty, and when you're full, you're full, and she doesn't snack and so on.
	And to see how that changes sometimes when we become adults, I think it's interesting.
	I think there's a lot of fertile intimacy ground to be covered when talking about relationships with food.
	And I think, again, not to sound overly sexist, if this is even sexist, but I think it's more true sometimes for women than it is for men in terms of the complexity and challenge of the relationship with food.
	Well, I appreciate you talking to me and taking the time to, you know, give me some insight on that.
	You know, I really enjoy the videos you've been making, you know, here fairly recently about childhood and, you know, the brain, the Bomb and the Brain series is great.
	I was just fascinated by that, you know, Gabor Maté and I just really appreciate all you're doing.
	Thank you so much for – Thanks.
	I appreciate you listening.
	I appreciate your kind words.
	And the last thing that I would mention is that – and this is an older guy's perspective.
	You certainly don't sound like you're my age, so I'm assuming that you're younger.
	But what I will say is that when you want to settle down and have kids – If you want to settle down and have kids, you've got to choose the best mom.
	You've got to choose the best mom for your kids.
	I don't mean to sound crude, right?
	But there's a statement, and I can't even remember who made it.
	But it goes something like this.
	For every beautiful woman in the world, there's some guy who's tired of screwing her.
	I can't remember.
	Somebody else said something like, the attraction of physical beauty lasts about three days.
	After three days, it becomes about the person, not about the pretty.
	And we have just, you know, man to man, right?
	I mean, I think it's safe to say that we have dual reproductive drives, right?
	And the one is, bang, the prettiest thing that moves.
	And I think that's a short-term reproductive strategy that's just around scatter your seed to the healthiest looking female possible.
	And that's something that I think we all have within us, but it's not a wise course to take in the modern world.
	It may have been fine in the Bronze Age or maybe even the Stone Age, but not in the computer age.
	I think... When you are looking at a longer term relationship, right?
	Not just, you know, let's hang out and let's have sex and let's go to clubs or whatever, right?
	But when you're looking for a longer term relationship, a deeper relationship, a relationship that hopefully will see you through the challenges of parenting and aging and all those kinds of things.
	You are choosing for your children, right?
	When you choose who it is that you're going to marry or have kids with, you're choosing for your children.
	And given that they don't have a voice in who you choose, I think you have to choose with your children in mind.
	And so if the woman is overweight, but she's a great mom...
	She is. Well, then I think that to me is a very, very important consideration.
	I think that beauty is something that if you're with the right person, it grows on you.
	As I've sort of said before, my wife and I were not smitten with each other physically when we first met at all, but after the first time we went out together, which was a complete accident, everybody on the volleyball team was supposed to come, but people were just unable to make it, so we ended up going out alone.
	After that, we just didn't separate until we got married ten months later, and it's been, I guess, seven or eight years now, and it's better every single day.
	And, you know, there's a couple of phases of falling in love, right?
	There's the phase of lust and all that kind of stuff, and then the phase of genuine affection and deep appreciation, and then there's love.
	But the huge cascade of love for me came when I get to see my wife being a mom, because she is...
	I mean, she is just the most amazing and patient and kind and positive and fun mom.
	I just took a video of her the other day of her waltzing with Isabella in the mall and Isabella just giggling away.
	It is just the most beautiful thing to see.
	And when your precious child is being...
	It's laughing with delight and joy.
	And the moment that Christina comes home, if I'm playing with Isabella, she hurls me to one side like a spent banana peel and races straight towards mom.
	That is an absolutely beautiful thing.
	And that, I don't think, fundamentally has anything to do with the amount of meat on your bones, but the amount of meat in your heart, so to speak.
	So I think that it's really, really, really essential if you're thinking of having kids or Or just thinking of growing old with someone, that you pick someone who is going to be the greatest and most positive and beautiful centerpiece of the family that you can find, because that just makes an enormous difference between happiness and joy and misery.
	I mean, there's no bigger decision in your life as an adult than who you get married to, if you're going to get married, and particularly if you're going to have kids.
	We just did a podcast on this about divorce.
	People's ships go straight into the rocks if they marry the wrong person.
	And that's bad enough if it's just you, but if you have kids too, it's a complete disaster.
	So depending on where you are in life and depending on how this woman is and what you're thinking of, I would really focus on What's it going to be like?
	How is she going to be with my precious children?
	And I think that is a very, very important standard.
	And that takes a little bit of the shallowness out of it.
	And I'm not saying you're being shallow.
	I'm just saying that that is a very, very important aspect of it.
	I appreciate you saying that.
	It gives me some great insights and some stuff to think about.
	I really appreciate it.
	All right. Thanks, man. And thank you, everybody, of course, so much for joining us here on this fine, fine day, 16th of May, 2010.
	I look forward to chatting to the Spanish folks in Malaga who I think are getting together next month.
	And I wanted, of course, to thank everybody so much for your wonderful comments, suggestions, criticisms, and feedback.
	And I really do look forward to meeting anybody who can make it up for Labor Day to chat with us all.

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