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Nov. 13, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:45:24

2029 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show 13 Nov 2011

An overview of the first annual Liberty Cruise, what is the value of a college education, can you reason with a narcissist, and is it worth fleeing the country?

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	Well, everybody, hello and welcome to The Sunday Show.
	It's the 13th of November, 2011.
	If you want to check out my recent Remembrance Day show, I tried something new, which was I just tried sitting down.
	And talking from my heart rather than writing something or doing something.
	So I just sort of, I lay down, closed my eyes with a headset on and just tried it that way.
	And I transcribed it later and I think it came out quite well.
	I think it's a useful and interesting experiment.
	Also, also, also, I wanted to say thank you so much, so much to Tanya for organizing the Liberty Cruise, Tanya and Brian.
	They just did a fantastic job.
	We left from...
	New Jersey. And we sailed and sailed on a ship that was really about as large as a Death Star.
	It was very big.
	And we went to Bermuda.
	It was a little bit rocky.
	I didn't have any nausea, but there was only one member.
	It was very tilty.
	That's right, Boo. There was music on the boat.
	There was music on the boat. Do you remember dancing, Boo?
	Yeah. Yeah, that was fun.
	It was so much fun.
	Yeah, and you jumped down. Do you remember, Boo?
	And I picked up the children to dance too.
	Do you remember? Did you like that?
	No. I did.
	You did? Yeah. Yeah, and we went to the ice skating show.
	Do you remember? Yeah, and I cried and dad picked up in.
	Yeah, you did cry. You didn't want me to pick up the other children.
	And my boy was crying.
	You were crying, and what happened? Daddy came.
	Daddy came, but gave you a nice big hug and a mic, yeah?
	And my boy was crying.
	You were crying, that's right, Boo.
	My boy said, do you want me to be talking about cookies?
	Would you like a chocolate chip cookie?
	He said, yeah.
	And do you remember there was a big giant machine with golf balls that went up and down?
	Yeah. And we went into the hot tub.
	But it was too hot, yeah.
	It was too hot for you, that's right.
	And we got ice cream. And the food was fantastic on the ship.
	I wanted to get ice cream too.
	You did get ice cream in a cone, do you remember?
	And Mama said, okay, you can have some ice cream.
	And I got some to Mama too.
	Where did Daddy sleep, boo? On a shelf.
	It was on a bunk bed that came down from the ceiling.
	It was very cool. And so, yeah, highly, highly recommended the Liberty Cruise.
	We'll be going next year in October, and Wes Bertrand was there, and Mark Edge from Free Talk Live, Wes Bertrand, of course, from Complete Liberty.
	And so, yeah, we talked philosophy, we danced, we saw shows, we went to Bermuda and enjoyed the Approximately 400 mile an hour winds, which was all very exciting.
	The important thing was you couldn't raise your arms, otherwise you would effectively be turned into a sky-hooked flying squirrel, which also was pretty cool.
	And so that was a lot of fun.
	And so I'd highly, highly recommend it.
	And yeah, I guess things are fairly quiet.
	I don't have any speaking engagements until early next year, which is kind of nice because I do like to hibernate for most of the winter.
	And... Sorry, suddenly it comes along in waves.
	Alright, I must put my feet in some very hot coffee.
	Anyway, enough introductions.
	I want to make sure that the show is tuned to you, sitting right there.
	Please put some pants on. It might as well be one of us.
	So, James, we have some callers in.
	Yeah, we have Juan and or his friend.
	Alright, now you guys, if you're doing multiple calls, then you have to do only one word at a time, and the next person gets the next word.
	So, I'd like to see where this goes.
	Hello. Hi.
	Oh, is one on the line?
	Sorry, if it's one and your friends, then it's actually more than one.
	Oh! Bet you never heard that joke.
	Never. Never heard it.
	That's white humor at its finest.
	Oh, and also I wanted to mention that on Boat, we did karaoke.
	And if you search on the internet, there is a version of me with a slightly sore throat from a fading cold doing a rambunctious version of Hey Jude.
	And you can brave it if you dare.
	But anyway, Juan, what can I do for you, my friend?
	Hi, guys. Yeah, I'm here too. I'll just listen in the background for a bit.
	But I'll jump in when necessary.
	We wanted to have sort of like a three-way call, per se, because it's an interesting topic, and I'm very interested in it as well, so hopefully that's okay.
	Well, boy, if I had a dollar for every time I was offered a three-way.
	Anyway, go on. I'd have no dollars.
	Actually, I would have one, but that's a story for another time.
	So, go on. You want to go ahead?
	Okay. Well, basically, this began a few weeks ago.
	And I was going along with the university over here, doing my thing and all that, and working part-time alongside that.
	This is post, after leaving my family, so I'm pretty much financially independent and doing my own thing right now.
	But I began having a lot of doubts about going to university, going to college, and I'm now taking a history degree.
	And this degree, this Uncertainty has been building up over time, and I got some really bad grades from some essay at some point, and I felt really upset about it.
	I talked to my friend from Free Domain Radio, Juan being one of them, and eventually, with their persuasion and my own thoughts to the subject is that I don't I'm not really interested in continuing university anymore.
	And that's mostly because of the reasons that my heart's not in it anymore.
	It costs an awful lot of money with those student loans and all those things and books and whatnot.
	Really, what I'd rather be doing right now is going out there and making money, being entrepreneurial.
	But it's always a back and forth in my mind.
	And so far, I've planned to take a year off in the coming year.
	Just take a year off and see if I want to continue with university or not.
	But right now, my thoughts are at the point where I do not want to be university.
	And I found that even today, when I'm working on an essay, I really don't have the motivation for it anymore, and I'm constantly distracted.
	It's like my conscience is saying to me, we don't want to do this right now.
	We're not interested in doing this right now.
	It's like walking through a hurricane right now.
	There are fears of going out there, of being in the entrepreneurial world.
	I don't know if I have the energy or the passion to make it out there, but right now, my mind is telling me that I don't want to do this.
	I don't want to do university. Well, let me ask you this.
	Where are you in the arc of your degree?
	Second year. Halfway through second year.
	A second of four, is that right?
	Yeah. Why did you choose history?
	I chose... I originally came in choosing political science.
	I left my city on the other side of the world to come over here and then pick up political science, but I found out I wasn't interested in arguing with states all the time.
	I turned to history as a major and I found that it was very fascinating what I could learn from history, the information I could glean from it, like I took a 19th century history course and learned all these fascinating things about the Industrial Revolution.
	At the same time, there's a lot of reading to do and there's a lot of contrary opinion that I could deal with.
	Yeah, that certainly wears me down.
	But history is quite fascinating, and it's something that I pursue at a leisurely pace.
	Like, I listen to a lot of music podcasts, a lot of your podcasts, of course.
	Sorry, just to help me understand, sorry to interrupt, why do you need to go to university to study history?
	I don't. I don't.
	University has helped me learn a lot of parts of history that I haven't gotten into, but I guess history is something I do at my own pace and at my own leisure, usually outside of university.
	But yeah, it just facilitates that university.
	It's not necessary for it.
	Are you planning on going all the way to getting a doctorate for At this point, I don't think I can even raise my grades enough to make it into the secondary degree level.
	I'm not sure if I want to do that.
	I have a master's in history.
	I did two years of theatre school, two years of English literature, and two years of history, and then another year for my master's.
	You could call me a renaissance man or a dilettante, I guess, whichever you like.
	And I have...
	I found that...
	I mean, what was interesting to me was the only time that I really enjoyed university was when I was doing self-study.
	So when I was working on my thesis and I was basically just studying my own goals.
	Which is, of course, what I do now.
	I certainly continue my study of history through the show here.
	And my study of philosophy continues.
	So... So if you have a commitment to lifelong learning, then you don't need to do it in a formal environment.
	Now, history, of course, is one of these things that is really tough because there's a lot of propaganda in history.
	History is the future, as we all know.
	If you believe the standard line that the free market caused the Great Depression of 1929 to 1943, or 40 really, 42, I suppose.
	If you believe that it was the free market and that it was government intervention that saved it, then whenever you hit rocky roads economically, then you believe that you must repeat the same believed to be cures, but actually mistakes.
	Right? So, history is the future.
	This is true in law. Precedent is judgment.
	It is true in medicine. That which worked in the past is going to work again in the future.
	So, the past is really about the future.
	He who controls the past, as George Orwell said, controls the future.
	And I think that's Very true.
	Society has a death grip on history because history is permission or power to the ruling classes.
	The lessons that are selected from history are always those that benefit the ruling class.
	That's true even of philosophers.
	The philosophers who have floated to the surface of history are those who benefit the ruling classes.
	So we hear about Socrates because Socrates said obey the law.
	And we hear about Plato because Plato said that the rulers need more power.
	And we hear about Aristotle because Aristotle said government is legitimate, man is a political animal, and slavery is valid, and women are vastly inferior.
	So that which serves the ruling class is that which is selected from history.
	History is a vast wealth of information that is mined by the ruling powers, like a man looking for blood diamonds, literally blood diamonds, because whatever serves power is that which is selected from history.
	And so if you go in with philosophy, which is the universalization of ethics, which is the destruction of political hierarchies, at least morally, then you are vastly opposing what the purpose of history is.
	The purpose of history is to legitimize and expand the power of the rulers.
	And philosophy is that which minimizes, constrains and dissolves the power of the rulers.
	And so if you are a philosopher or interested in universal morality and you begin your study of history, then you are attempting to reverse a machine that has only one direction.
	And so it is a very tough thing to do.
	And it can really exhaust and weary you to continue to fight those uphill, upstream battles.
	So, I mean, basically, the rational study of history is the attempt to take away a gun from a thief, and it is a huge problem.
	So, that is a great challenge, and that's something to be very cognizant of.
	So, From that standpoint, you're going to be setting yourself up for a pretty miserable time if you want to get a degree in history because you're going to need to find people.
	Certainly, I mean, maybe undergrad is not so bad, but you're going to either find that you're going to face a lot of trouble getting marks or you're going to have to bend your views and submit to the power of the professors.
	So that's a big problem.
	It is, of course, unnecessary.
	To pursue formal education, to be educated.
	That's a pretty new idea.
	And one of the things we can understand about this is almost in the field of history, almost everyone that you study in history does not have a degree in history.
	Right? So if you look at the ancient Greek historians, none of them went to formal 22 years or 18 years or 16 years of formal education, emerged with a PhD and taught in universities.
	Those that can't do, teach.
	And so everyone you study in history are people who never formally studied history.
	And that's very, very important.
	How many novelists that we study in history completed a master's in creative writing?
	None, right?
	So everyone you're studying when you're studying history are people who did not study history in the way that you're learning it.
	So if you don't want to make history, study history.
	That would be my suggestion.
	So I just sort of put that out there.
	Of course, you know the financial arguments.
	There's the direct cost. There's the indirect costs of the opportunity cost of the money you could be making if you weren't in college and so on.
	So that's, you know, if you want to be self-employed, then I believe that College is far less necessary.
	Unless, I mean, if you're going to study something specific like engineering or whatever, then you're going to kind of need that certification, but that certainly is not true in the realm of history.
	If you're going to be self-employed, it's really not that important.
	If you're going to work for other people, a degree can be very helpful.
	It can be very helpful.
	It's just a prejudice that is alive and well and seems virtually impossible to fight, but it's just something that is there.
	If you have a degree, you tend to move up in the field of managerial stuff faster.
	So that you can make a decision just placed purely on economics, that if you get your degree, it's just an investment.
	And it can be a valuable and worthwhile investment, not just in terms of money, but as you move up in an organization, the jobs tend to get more interesting, less boring, less repetitive, less dumb.
	So it's a good investment in keeping your interest in your career.
	But of course, I mean, the greatest entrepreneurs, right?
	Who are the greatest entrepreneurs? How many of them have an MBA? Right.
	I mean, just off the top of my head, right?
	I mean, I can't think of one.
	A famous entrepreneur of the 20th century.
	I'm sorry? Yeah, not Bill Gates, not the Hewlett-Packard team, not Steve Jobs, and so on.
	Oh, by the way, I've started his biography.
	It really is quite fascinating.
	It's fascinating in the details, and it's fascinating in the details that nobody seems to understand, which is, I guess, pretty typical, or they understand but ignore.
	Henry Ford, I don't believe he got an MBA. All the people who started the Industrial Revolution, very few of them had engineering degrees and very few of them had MBAs.
	Anyway, you can sort of go on this, right?
	So if you want to be a self-starter, then education becomes much less important.
	If you're going to work for other people, then education becomes more important and it's an investment in a return on investment, right?
	So it can be... I can't remember the details, but I think over the course of your life, it can add up to a million dollars of your income.
	Which is good. And it makes your jobs more interesting, which is good.
	So there's a financial argument to sort of grit your teeth, get through two more years and make more money and have more interesting work.
	But if you're interested in any kind of entrepreneurial activity, then it is much less worthwhile.
	If you're an entrepreneur, you're making tracks.
	You're not driving on tracks.
	You're making your own tracks. And so there's really not much point.
	Having a map, if you're going to go exploring the unknown, it doesn't really do you any good.
	So those are sort of my arguments.
	You know, of course nobody can tell you what to do, except you.
	But those would be sort of my pros and cons.
	Does that help at all? Yes, it helps very much.
	On history, I completely get what you're saying, my sentiments exactly.
	It's what I think every time when I go to lecture or when a TA hands me back and that's what I don't like.
	That's the conversation I was having with Juan here, and this is where he comes in, I guess.
	It's that I do want to go out there, but I'm not sure what I want to do with my life.
	There's some thoughts that I want to be an entrepreneur, I want to start a business, but I feel like I don't have the guts to do those sorts of things.
	I was thinking I might go into sales and marketing and do business.
	That sort of thing, because I worked in that over summer, but then I also have doubts about that because I'm excited about it, yet when my experience in sales is that I wasn't very good at it at all.
	When I spoke to you About this during the barbecue, that I had a sales job.
	I was not making enough of those cold calls and not doing enough to build up my pipeline and all those things.
	And I felt that I left that experience not very enriched by it.
	So it's a toss-up.
	What do I want to go out there to do?
	Do I need a degree to go out there to become a salesperson?
	Do I need a degree to go out there and build a sufficient income to I do what I want eventually to build up enough capital for a business or whatever project my life takes on.
	Basically, Juan has knocked down a lot of my assumptions about college because I was raised in this academic family full of doctors and lawyers and engineers and telling you, you're going to be a failure if you don't go to college.
	If you don't go to college, you can't have a nice house, you can't have a nice car and all those things.
	Yeah, after Free Domain Radio, I'm much less concerned about those things, but those messages still play themselves back in my mind.
	And Juan and the other friend have helped me deconstruct this, so I guess...
	Well, listen, I would certainly suggest...
	Look, freedom is one of these words that I don't really like to use too much, although it is in the name of the show.
	But I don't like to use it too much because it means so many different things to so many different people.
	But I will say this.
	I'm a big fan of money.
	I'm a big fan of money.
	I scrimp and I save and I budget and I try to make as good a set of decisions with regards to family finances as I can.
	And so you say, well, you can't have a nice house and this and that.
	And I understand, life's not about having a nice house, although a nice house is not bad.
	But there is something that is liberating about having some income that is reasonable and all that, right?
	Your choices just diminish if you're broke.
	And, of course, to provide for kids, to provide for your wife if she doesn't have any income while she's having kids, if that's something that you want.
	Think about money.
	Think about an income. Think about that.
	I mean, there is an anti-materialism to youth, and I distinctly remember going through my master's on about $600 or $700 a month and living really close to the bone.
	And, you know, I had a room in a house with six other people for it was $275 a month, all inclusive.
	And I biked everywhere, didn't even have bus tickets, didn't get new clothes and all that kind of stuff.
	So you can live lean and close to the bone, and that's a fine thing to do.
	I don't think there's any problem with that.
	It certainly takes away your fear of that kind of stuff.
	But as you get older, I mean, plan a little bit for your 30s and your 40s.
	About what kind of life you want to have.
	So I think it's worth building up your skill set.
	It certainly is true that entrepreneurial tends to be, it's like playing the lottery, right?
	So if you have a good idea and you're at the right place at the right time and you work harder than you can conceive of, then you can build something great.
	And even if you fail, you've still built something great in terms of your work ethic and your knowledge of what it means to fail, which can improve things for the next time and so on.
	But I know what you mean. You want to be self-employed, but you don't know what to do.
	And that's tough.
	You can't pull ideas out of nowhere.
	You can't just make things happen.
	So, until you know what to do, it might be worthwhile doing this.
	This would be sort of what I would suggest.
	I mean, I was lucky that I found my passions very early in life.
	Or rather, they found me.
	I mean, the very first time I saw my math teacher demonstrate an Atari 400 in a math class, I remember they played...
	They showed off Star Raiders, which was one of the most amazing games of all time, given that it fit inside of 8K of RAM. It's just amazing.
	And yeah, so I learned how to...
	I would go every Saturday, learn how to program computers.
	When I got a little bit of inheritance, I went out immediately and bought a computer, and I still remember paying 80 bucks for 32K of RAM. K, that is.
	But I learned sort of very early what my passions were.
	It was philosophy and computers or electronics.
	And so, in a weird way, that's been my whole life.
	Whether it's been in IT or it's been in free-to-main radio, electronics and philosophy have ruled my life.
	And I think that's great.
	Now, I've known lots of people who can't figure out what they want to do with their life.
	And I find them...
	I hate to say this. I'm just going to be honest with you because I'm just going to tell you my experience.
	I find it annoying because what I find with people who don't want to know what they want to do with their life is that they won't submit to something like, well, I'll just go get a job and I'll just try different things and sort of flail around until I sort of find something that works for me.
	So they say, I want to be an entrepreneur, but I don't know what to do.
	And you understand that puts other people in an impossible situation with regards to giving you advice.
	So I'd be careful about that aspect of things.
	My suggestion would be to, if you're going to continue in school, and I think if you don't have a good idea of what you want to do outside of school, it's not a bad thing to continue.
	But you can try every single hobby club in school.
	You know, they have everything. Ballroom, dancing, photography, gymnastics, rock climbing, debating.
	I mean, there's so many different.
	I joined the debating club.
	And first year, I was eighth best in Canada.
	I toured all over Canada doing debates, and I had a real talent for it.
	And of course, I mean, I did work really hard at it, but I still do.
	But just join every conceivable club that you can find.
	Chinese clubs. See if you like learning Mandarin.
	I don't know. But join every single club, because it's a very unique and wonderful opportunity to have a fair amount of time on your hands and virtually free access to a wide variety of Of hobbies or disciplines or whatever.
	Try Aikido. Try Tai Chi.
	Try whatever. Maybe you'll become a yoga instructor if you like it.
	But try a wide variety of things and see which clicks.
	Sometimes finding your passion can be like you've got a big, big-ass set of janitorial superintendent keys hanging off your belt and you've got one lock called the future.
	You've just got to keep trying a bunch of different keys until you find one that turns to tumblers.
	So that's one thing that I would suggest if that helps at all.
	Well, I have some ideas about what my passions are, but I was wondering if Juan had any thoughts, because essentially I could take a lot of time going out freelancing and just stay in university and keep on working on these passions or deciding what I'm interested in, but the question I really want to answer is do I want to continue with this university?
	Yeah, I do have a thought.
	Thank you, yeah.
	So, I mean, I really like the idea of just going on and as far as finding your passion, right?
	Because if you don't know what to do, then it's kind of hard to take the next step, right?
	But as far as sort of finding your passion and trying out a lot of things in college, I think that's a great idea.
	That was sort of where my suggestion or my sort of pulling out of the opportunity of going out on your own and taking a year off kind of came in because I see a lot of people...
	I see sort of my life and I see some people that I've met that have gone through university and it just seems like people get hurted into high school, right?
	And then just get told what to do all their lives, right?
	For eight, nine years, right?
	And then at the end of high school, they're like, oh, now you got to go to college.
	I got to go to college. And you see these people with these pallets being like, make a right to college, right?
	And kids just sort of jump around, go to college with pressure from parents, right?
	And so they get to college and they really have had very little time to sort of get to know themselves, I think.
	And I'm not saying this for everybody, but I think that the time that I've taken out to just get away from my parents that I had, getting away from school, the time that I did, that I have, that up to now I've been about two years out of high school, right?
	I've really loved it and I found, I found, I found it very nurturing for myself and I feel that I have Well, I feel that I have more knowledge of what I want to do, but I know that I want more time to figure out what I want to do and try out stuff.
	So that was sort of why I suggested that option.
	Also, as far as it being impossible to be employed without a college degree and sort of hire up jobs, I don't know.
	I don't know about that. Sorry, sorry.
	I don't think that I said impossible.
	I heard the word impossible, but sorry, go ahead.
	No, no, it's harder.
	It's harder to move up without it.
	I didn't say it was impossible. Listen, I'm really, really, I really try and scrimp and save on words like impossible because they're just death.
	You can always find exceptions to impossible.
	Yeah, I clinched the word earlier.
	Go ahead. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
	Okay. And no, I was just thinking like there's lots of ways.
	I mean, I haven't really tried this, but I expect to at least will give it my best shot.
	If I want a job, there's a job that needs to be employed, right?
	And I believe that I can do it because I have the skills.
	I just don't have the licensing or the piece of paper.
	Then I sure as hell plan to...
	Like, just set up a really funky resume.
	Be like, here's all my experience here.
	If this job is about business, here's the little side business that I had, here's how much money I got in it.
	I'll intend to prove my skill set, right?
	And the effects of my skill set in order to get that job.
	I don't expect to, you know, I don't expect the lack of this paper to get me.
	Yeah, look, it certainly is true that even if you're going to work for someone, to work for someone Who requires that piece of paper is probably to work for someone who doesn't have a lot of creativity, imagination, or capacity to take risks.
	I remember just reading the book of Jobs, Steve Jobs' biography.
	He worked for the guy who founded Atari, and he showed up basically unshaven, like with a long-ass beard, He stunk because he was a fruitarian, so he just ate nothing but fruit with the idea that this would not make him smell like fruit rinds that had been left in a sewage ditch for about a month.
	And he stunk and he basically showed up and demanded a job.
	And they called up to the guy who ran Atari and said, there's some strange smelling hippie in here.
	Like, he smells really bad. He's unkempt.
	And he's coming in here demanding a job.
	Should I call security? And the guy who ran Atari, who actually later founded Chuck E. Cheese, interestingly enough, the guy who founded Atari said, bring him in.
	Ended up hiring the guy. He smelled so bad, Steve Jobs smelled so bad that they ended up putting him into the night shift because nobody would work with him because he kind of made their eyes water.
	Now, of course, that's a story where, I mean, of all the things that you would do when you would say to somebody, go for a job interview, you wouldn't say, just go and demand a job when you haven't showered for about a month and you're not dressed for it and you haven't shaved and you don't have a resume and you've got no experience.
	Don't go up there and just start yelling and demanding a job.
	But he got the job, but of course went on to become one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the last generation or two.
	So, you know, but of course the problem is that if you have genius, you get to do a lot of things.
	But you wouldn't want to extrapolate general rules from people like Steve Jobs who are geniuses.
	So, I mean, definitely the people who require you to have a degree are going to be less imaginative and less interesting and less entrepreneurial.
	than those who won't but the degree is not but the degree is not a bad thing to have obviously taking a year off as i took a year off after high school not because i didn't know what i wanted to do i was just flat ass broke because i've been kind of on my own since i was 15 and just didn't have the money to go to college so i went and did gold panning for a year more than a year really in the northern wastes of ontario and thunder bay But I repeat myself.
	Oh, here I'm going to get some angry letters from people from Thunder Bay, eh?
	Look, the sleeping giant in the bay does not make up for the minus 500 degree weather.
	Anyway. So yeah, there's lots of things that you can do.
	I think it's very important to remember that life is not a script that you can productively follow.
	The script that you're given is usually a series of mistakes made by other people that they want to replicate.
	Nobody's more interested in getting you to do stuff than people who want to cover up their own mistakes by getting you to repeat them, which is really the story of statism in many ways.
	Just remember, it's not a script.
	There's no shoulds. You don't have to be in school.
	You don't have to be out of school.
	You don't have to be an entrepreneur.
	You don't have to complete your degree.
	You don't have to do any of these things.
	If you want to take a year off, then do it.
	I would suggest take a year off and try a bunch of different jobs.
	Travel a bit. Try and figure out what really works for you.
	Maybe you'll travel and find that you really like travel writing.
	I mean, who knows? But I think just sample from as wide a set of experiences.
	Like a guy who's woken from a coma where he's had some memory damage and he doesn't remember what the hell he likes to eat.
	What's the first place you suggest he go?
	A buffet! And sample everything on the buffet and you'll very quickly find out what you like and don't like to eat.
	So that would be my suggestion.
	That sounds very good.
	And looking around the Freedom in Radio community, it's a very varied community because there are some people with a lot of formal education experience.
	And then there are other people who are rather hippy-dippy.
	They go out there and they freelance and they do all these great things with their lives as well.
	Right now, I just really want to get out there and try that for you.
	Oh, yeah. Freedom in Radio blows my mind.
	The community. I was just reading the other day.
	Some guy asked. He sort of made this statement.
	It blows my mind. It blows my mind.
	He said, why do we need to wash our hair?
	You see bears in the wild, they don't need to wash their hair and put conditioner in every day and stuff like that.
	Why do we need to wash our hair?
	It doesn't make any sense. The scalp is a self-cleaning entity or organism or whatever.
	And he's like, oh, I haven't washed my hair.
	Maybe a little lemon water from time to time, but I haven't washed my hair in 20 years and it looks fantastic.
	And I mean, people say you don't need to brush your teeth with anything except a little bit of soap.
	I mean, this shit blows my mind.
	I don't know if it's right or wrong, but it's just things that I would never, ever have thought about.
	You know, I'm radical in some ways, but I'm unbelievably conservative in other ways.
	And I just... So yeah, definitely it's a great community for...
	Challenging your preconceptions.
	It happens to me just about every second time that I go on the message board, for which I'd like to thank everyone.
	But yeah, it's a pretty great community for opening your mind.
	All right. Well, I'm sorry.
	I'm going to have to move on because we've got a bunch of callers in the queue, if you don't mind.
	But it's a great question.
	And if you get a chance, do either write on the board or drop me a line and let me know what the story is more than glory, because I'd like to know how it works out for you.
	Great. Have a good day. Thanks, man.
	Thanks for the chat. You're welcome.
	It'd be so much easier if I was the kind of guy who just told people what to do, wouldn't it?
	So much easier. Anyway, who's next?
	David. Hello, can you hear me?
	Yes, loud and clear, my friend.
	What can I do for you? Excellent.
	Lantam, this is the first time caller.
	I guess I started listening to you, Steph, probably about 18 months ago.
	And I think I was at that point where I was having sort of moved out from home and I was having a bit of a family crisis.
	And I think listening to your podcast got me into some much needed therapy.
	Thank you for that. You're very welcome.
	And I've been seeing in particular a somatic psychotherapist And I've sort of gone through a lot of, you know, self-discovery and no doubt your podcasts have helped fast-track that process.
	And I've reached the point now where I've worked through a number of things and opening up awareness and getting reconnected to my emotions.
	And I've reached this point where I've, and this is something else I've been struggling with on and off, where I feel like I'm in this in-prison state.
	I feel like I've left the physical prison, which was my parents' household, but mentally I was still walking around with this prison in my mind and a lot of it was things like feeling like I was missing out in the sense that I can see I'm in my mid-30s now and a lot of my friends are now married with kids and I'm still very much on my own with no real sort of ability to maintain any sort of healthy relationship and things like that.
	Wait, sorry, just to interrupt.
	You said that you're friends and then you said no meaningful relationships.
	I'm just wondering if you could help me parse that out.
	If you say you have friends, I assume you have some kind of reasonable relationship with them, right?
	Oh, no, sorry. I meant as in relationships.
	Romantic. Okay, got it.
	A lot of them were either based around sex or there was just this, there was no real way to have a real emotional connection.
	As a result, none of these relationships lasted long or they were just very empty and the like.
	As I kept working through this, I started to work through some of my friendships as well and started to realize my own self-value and self-worth.
	I'm sorry, I can hear somebody typing on the line.
	It's kind of distracting. I'm not sure if that's you or somebody else.
	I don't think it's you because you're talking, but whoever it is, if you could either not type or mute yourself.
	But sorry, please go ahead. Yeah, no problem.
	And I guess as a part of this process, I've sort of also been identifying people that, you know, where the relationship may have not been balanced and approached some of them to talk about it and, you know, the whole RTR thing.
	And I had one experience recently, which I sort of suspected that this guy was a narcissist.
	And I guess I got my suspicions confirmed when I'd emailed him in an open and vulnerable way and saying, here's how I'm feeling.
	Here are some experiences as to why I feel this way and wanted to get his thoughts where he basically wrote back and was very insulting, condescending and invalidated my feelings and outright attacked me.
	And it sort of got me thinking, okay, so there was this person here that was a narcissist and it got me thinking of all these other people that had these narcissistic tendencies.
	And then I sort of traced it all back saying, well, where's this all this coming from?
	And I traced it back to my mother.
	And I'm sort of in a bit of a dilemma, right?
	Because I started this process and a bit of my background history is that I was...
	You know, heavily sort of physically abused, you know, by my father in terms of, you know, beltings and, you know, within sort of like an inch of my life.
	It was really awful. And then I'd go to my mum, you know, the next day pleading for help or please do something.
	And it was quite ironic.
	She'd always end up turning it around and saying, oh, you're not being, you know, understanding, you know, you're not, your dad had a really rough childhood and I look back now and I just think of how much of a mindfucker was.
	It's interesting because I'd seen an experience recently that really showed me that my experience, I guess, versus what one of my siblings experienced was very different.
	I'll be specific.
	I have an autistic brother who's about five years younger than me.
	And I was, I mean, we sort of all lived in the same area and a couple of suburbs away.
	And I was in an area where I was picking up some takeaway and I'd seen him walking and I saw him in the distance.
	And I saw him at the lights waiting to cross and he turned and he was completely blasé about it, but started talking to this girl next to him.
	Now, I'm sure as you're aware, you know, autistic people can't seem, don't always have the ability to be able to pick up feedback from other people in terms of their emotional response and whether they're interested in things like that.
	So he sort of spoke to this girl for a little while and she's responded once or twice, but then after a while he walked off and she thought she wasn't interested and he walked off.
	And I sat there and I was actually even anxious watching him do that because my entire life I've always been absolutely terrified to approach women.
	And it sort of made me realize, and I understood, and I've heard in your podcasts, and I've even spoken to my therapist about this, that guys who feel this sort of strong anxiety and sense of terror in approaching women, it's because they've had a lifetime of rejection from their mothers in their childhood.
	So I sort of got to see that, well, my mum obviously accepted and embraced my brother, and maybe it's because she had sympathy for him because he was autistic.
	Obviously, that wasn't my experience and I can think of experiences going way back to being 18 months old.
	This is late 70s and I remember actually, at one stage, going behind the TV, I was that desperate for attention.
	My mum was obviously not giving me the attention that I needed.
	And I actually went behind the TV and pushed the TV over at 18 months old and broke the TV as a desperate cry for attention.
	And throughout this process, I think once my dad found out that I was in therapy, he basically defood me.
	And my mum, I've asked her for my space and she's never respected my need for space, never respected my need for anything that I've asked through this therapy process.
	Sorry, I know this is a long-winded intro, but I guess what I wanted to ask is, and just identifying this narcissistic quality in her, is there any sort of way to reason with a narcissist?
	Well, I just, you know, obviously we're using these words in a non-technical but rather general usage way because, you know, we're neither qualified.
	But... I think it's a great question.
	Let me first of all just address something that you said earlier about your brother was more favored.
	Is that right by your mom? Yes.
	Can I tell you what more favored means in a lot of families?
	More favored means less skeptical or threatening to those in authority.
	Who is the favored child?
	The favorite child in a family tends to be, in dysfunctional families for sure, tends to be the child who does not oppose authority, who is not skeptical of authority, who does not fight for individuation from authority.
	In other words, as we talked about earlier, the philosophers and the events that are plucked out of history and injected with moral meaning are those which serve the interests of the rulers.
	It's no different in Many families.
	Who's favorite in the family?
	The one who threatens the illusions of the parents the least.
	I mean, we can understand this.
	Who is the favorite choir boy in church?
	You know, sexual jokes notwithstanding, the favorite choir boy is not the choir boy who says, wait a minute here, says thou shalt not kill here, and God killed everyone except for Noah, even children.
	How's that fair? Well, if God can't do anything wrong, then why did God make a rainbow after the flood and promise never to do it again?
	That doesn't make any sense.
	And if it is the case that the stuff in the Old Testament is less good and the stuff in the New Testament is more good, then God is clearly capable of making an error.
	And why does Jesus, who acts more morally, get punished when God, who acts less morally in the Old Testament, is rewarded with our praise?
	So, I mean, this is not anybody's favorite choir boy, right?
	So I think it's really, really important to understand that favoritism in a dysfunctional family is not a medal of honor.
	And I think it's very interesting that you say that, because I think those times after those beltings I received and I'd approached my mom, I think she actually sort of pushed me back into the lion's den, so to speak, because it gave her a way of, and this was really hard to process when I first discovered this, but It gave her a way of being able to control my father because my father was very controlling.
	But she knew that if my father belted me, then it gave her some emotional control.
	And I think examples you've given in the past is when you might have an abusive couple and the wife gets beaten, then she knows that for a period of time she has some control over her husband.
	And this example is also very evident with my sister, where at one stage my sister was actually Fighting my mom's battles with my father on her behalf.
	So it's very interesting that you say that.
	It almost seems to me that it's...
	Because I've spoken to a few times recently about all of this, trying to challenge it, and they're just like a slippery eel.
	It's just... They just seem to refuse to take any sort of accountability and...
	Yeah, it's...
	I guess for me, it's like if I'm going to have any sort of relationship with her, the first thing is obviously taking some accountability for what's happened and then seeing what happens from there from an ATR perspective.
	But as far as I'm concerned, if that sort of accountability can't happen, then I'm quite frank, I'm not interested in having a relationship.
	But it's also at the same point that she can't seem to respect my boundaries and needs.
	I guess I'm somewhat answering my own question.
	Well, look, there's ways to parse this out logically so that you don't have to rely entirely on instincts, right?
	Because if we only needed instincts, we wouldn't need philosophy.
	Instinct is certainly important.
	But your question was, can you reason with a narcissist?
	Well, reasoning is the act of bringing consistent arguments and evidence to bear on somebody else's perspective.
	And it only works if somebody is willing to submit their opinions to external authority.
	Right? I mean, obviously, right?
	I mean, you can't reason with somebody who won't change their mind based on evidence, right?
	Yep. Yep.
	Yep. And I tend in my life not to look to abstract questions first.
	I mean, this is my approach to voting, right?
	Let's take over the federal government.
	Well, you know, let's start with a local gang of car thieves and get them to start washing cars instead of stealing them, right?
	I mean, that's my... Forget the abstractions.
	Let's look at something more local, more immediate, more perceptual before we start dealing with the abstractions.
	And... So the first thing that I ask when it comes to things like can I reason with someone is I ask myself what is the evidence that they are willing to subject their own preferences to external rules?
	Right? Yeah.
	Of course, and I approach this topic with all of the sensitivity of knowing that it's still a smoking crater in your heart.
	But when your father was beating you, was assaulting you, as you say, to within an inch of your life.
	Tell me, was this in public?
	Oh, God, no. No, of course not.
	I bet you he was all sugars and smiles in public, right?
	Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.
	All right. So, and of course your mother, let's say that you'd been at a family dinner and you had brought this topic up of the violence inside the home and the assaults upon you.
	Who would people have criticized in their hearts in that moment?
	Who would they have thought worse off?
	Who would they be upset at?
	Sorry, I'm starting to fog up, but I'd probably say myself.
	Yeah, of course. Of course.
	The victim speaks up.
	Well, that means that people are then confronted with the potential for moral action.
	And what they are then confronted with is the knowledge that they've had that this has been going on for years and they have done nothing to help save the innocent child.
	And people don't want that mirror held up to themselves, right?
	As I said before, vampiricism is a metaphor for narcissism.
	And we can see, of course, that as narcissism grows in the world, the popularity of vampire movies grows, right?
	And see, vampires can't see themselves in the mirror, right?
	You hold a mirror up, and the mirror is philosophy.
	The mirror is objectivity.
	A reflection back on yourself in a mirror is looking at yourself objectively as other people see you, which is empathy.
	Empathy. And narcissists lack empathy.
	Of course, vampires lack empathy.
	And so when you hold a mirror up through honesty to the narcissist...
	They cannot see themselves, right?
	Or they refuse to see themselves.
	And that's because to a narcissist, history is imaginary.
	History is a mythology.
	History is a fairy tale with no reason that they can create and manipulate at will.
	So, my question is, if you're asking, can I reason with a narcissist?
	I would say, well, what evidence do you have, if you're going to call these people narcissists, what evidence do you have that they have been willing to subject in the past...
	They're immediate preferences for the sake of universal rules.
	Yeah, I can actually think of one specific example that's evidence of the exact opposite, which is I'd actually asked my mum when I was speaking to her last, what did you do to try and stop speaking?
	I'd actually asked my mum when I was...
	I'm sorry, what did you do to try and...
	Yeah, sorry. Yeah, so I'd actually asked my mom, I said, what did you actually do to try and stop the beatings?
	And she goes, I begged and pleaded with your father.
	And I said, that's interesting. What did you say to him?
	And I was shocked when I heard this, but she said, I told him, look, please stop beating because one day, you know, someone is going to see the belt marks on his body and they're going to take him away from us.
	And it was, I'm like, my God, it's all about you.
	It was just such a shock.
	I was speechless when she said that, thinking that that was her way of trying to help me.
	Right. Right.
	And that is, I mean, that's just horrifying.
	And of course, right, then when I say that history is a fairy tale for certain types of people, what I mean is that, well, what evidence is there that this ever occurred?
	Right. You know, the word of somebody's commitment to honesty is less important than their commitment to non-violence, right?
	So if somebody allows to continue the beating of a child in the household when they have the perfect legal right and ability to protect and save that child, right?
	Just a couple of photos of the beatings straight to the police.
	The guy is a court ordered.
	Events spring into motion.
	She gets a divorce. She gets a restraining order.
	The guy could be forced to go into anger management or something like that.
	And, you know, this could have been dealt with in, I'm not saying it's easy, of course it's not easy, but this could all have been dealt with.
	So, you know, my question is always, what are the visceral immoralities that you have to deal with before the abstract ones?
	So, you know, if it were my mom who was saying, I begged and pleaded with him to stop, I would simply say, well, I don't recall that.
	I don't recall ever you saying that to him.
	Well, I said it to him in private.
	And then I would say, okay, well, so you're saying that.
	So you didn't stop the beatings.
	So what were the consequences to dad if he didn't stop the beatings, right?
	And clearly there were none because you stayed and you did nothing to protect me.
	So what you're saying is that for him there were no consequences.
	And then I would say, but for me, if I did things that were bad or wrong, were there negative consequences for me?
	And of course, I never did anything even remotely as bad or wrong as beating a child to within an inch of his life, right?
	And so were there consequences for you when you did bad things?
	Oh, it reached a point that I was completely terrified to express preferences or do anything.
	I was literally terrified of my old man at that age.
	Absolutely terrified. But what about, did your mom give you punishments for doing things that she disapproved of or didn't like?
	Not that I can recall, but I think that's sort of...
	Wait, wait, wait. Okay, hang on.
	Hang on a second. So what you're saying is that your mom had no, there were no negative consequences to you for disobeying your mom from your mom.
	I'm starting to fog up, but I think it's sort of a...
	Well, did she ever threaten to tell your dad?
	I honestly cannot recall.
	Well, I think that's a productive area of things to recall, right?
	Because if...
	Sorry, go ahead. No, no, I can just...
	I guess her tact was to play the victim.
	And I think she would play the card of manipulation...
	And played the victim and try and get me to either submit through shame and guilt more than anything else.
	I just think any sort of memories like that have been overpowered by the beltings themselves.
	But for me it's more she's been like a slippery eel and always played the victim Card.
	Very much. Right. Because, of course, the real victim in a household where children are being beaten, the real victim is the other parent, right?
	I mean, that's not a very sustainable story, right?
	No, that's right. That's right.
	Now, look, I think you've given me a lot to think about, Steph.
	So thank you very much for that.
	You're very welcome. And we do have some other callers, but I just wanted to really, really express...
	Oh, just an unbelievable depth of sympathy for the violence you experienced.
	It's terrifying. It's horrifying.
	It shapes us in ways that we don't want to...
	I mean, I've spent a good deal of my life breaking out of the icy fist of historical violence, and sometimes it's a fight, and sometimes it's a warm breath to melt it, and it is a real challenge.
	So I just really wanted to express my huge, huge sympathy.
	For what you went through. It was absolutely wrong.
	It was absolutely not your fault.
	It was a shitload of bad luck to be born into that kind of brutality.
	And I really want to compliment you on going to see a therapist, on asking these essential questions and doing the work that you're doing.
	That is brick by brick, the way that we take down the wall that leads to the peaceful world of the future.
	And I just really, really wanted to express my sympathy and deep, deep admiration for the work that you're doing.
	I appreciate that very much.
	Thank you very much, Steve. All right.
	Next. Match.
	Matching. Matching.
	Matching here. Is that me? Yes, go ahead.
	Great. Hey, I'm from Brooklyn, first time on the show.
	I had a question about something you said recently, or at least something I heard recently from you about the confusion between ethics and aesthetics.
	You said at one point that you don't really want to make a lot of the same mistakes that maybe Ayn Rand did with confusing the two and saying something like Beethoven's music is the logical equivalent of death and therefore don't listen to it.
	It seemed like a ridiculous idea when I heard it from her and then to hear you mention it.
	Kind of got a few things turning.
	But then I just recently heard something.
	I think maybe you posted it in the last day or so.
	And you kind of go into how you feel about, you know, sports.
	Sports in the fast and smooth.
	Falling teams is a little ridiculous and so on and so forth.
	Sorry, but just to differentiate between sports as a personal activity and sports as a state-subsidized activity.
	Irrational attachments, life-wasting, money-wasting, and youth-wasting activities.
	I just want to differentiate between those two things.
	Yeah, and I definitely do, too.
	I'm one of these guys, you know, I'm pretty...
	I enjoy sports.
	I'm good at the ones that I choose to play, but I'm just talking about sort of the fascination and the following in, the team following, so on and so forth, whether it is or is not, you know, subsidized by the state, because I'm kind of convinced that people are still going to like these things in the absence of Well, sorry, again, just to be really clear, right?
	So the only way that you can care who wins in a sport is if you ignore the rational reality of the fact that your support is entirely arbitrary.
	So, I mean, if you were to randomly assign to people who went to a sports event, if you were to say, well, you're going to flip a coin when you come through the gate and that's who you're going to cheer for, how popular do you think those things would be?
	Yeah, probably not very popular.
	That's the reality, right? It's random.
	It's a coin flip where you're born or where you happen to move and all this kind of stuff.
	But anyway, go on. Could you, I mean, well, that's honestly a lot of the root of it.
	I do... I kind of leave room that there are, I don't know, this is kind of far-fetched, and I understand it just before it comes out of my mouth, but I don't know.
	I mean, if there's going to be, maybe as it is now, you know, the players could be traded in a year, and it just moves on to somebody else.
	It's completely arbitrary, and you know what?
	I don't want to spend too much time on this question, because it's not really the only one I didn't want to spend a lot of time on it, but anyway, I'm just imagining that there probably are alternatives where you still have Whether it's just from the...
	Even if it's not just like your hometown team or whatever, something that's sort of arbitrary that you never really choose to begin with.
	I can still imagine there being some...
	You really care about this group of people or I don't...
	You know, this is becoming more and more arbitrary as it's coming out of my mouth.
	And maybe this is sort of like what I need to work in my head just to kind of get out there.
	But I guess... Is there any chance that...
	I don't know, that rooting for a team, I mean, is that, do you believe that is just all something that would, you know, with a little bit of self-knowledge of self and so on and so forth, that's something we wouldn't expect to see?
	Or is there like a legitimate place for that?
	At least I'm getting a little bit of red flags that that might be a little bit of a confusion with ethics and aesthetics, and I don't really just want to chuck out the whole sports scene, even though I don't even really care about it myself.
	It's just I don't want to be too quick at...
	I mean, following a sports team is not a matter of ethics.
	It's not like it's immoral.
	It's irrational, but I mean, there's tons of stuff that's irrational that's not immoral, right?
	Championing the fact that the earth is flat is irrational, but it's not immoral.
	It's immoral, I would say, more closer to immorality to teach things To children that are false.
	In other words, to teach conclusions without reason, or to teach reason that is incorrect, or not to expose children to a wide variety of arguments so that they can form their own knowledge, I think that is destructive.
	I mean, we're so concerned about nutrition for a child's body, but the most essential nutrition for a child's mind is philosophy.
	And so... So, no, I mean, if guys want to paint themselves blue and, you know, suck up cheese like a pig in a trough on top of Doritos and go and shake their shaven man nipples at a bunch of steroided maniacs in funny costumes on an artificial piece of grass paid for by theft, then that's fine. You know, go for it.
	It's not immoral to do it, but, you know, the thing that troubles me And I got lots of letters after I did this little rant about sports.
	Lots of letters from people. And let me just see if I can dig one up, because I think they're quite important.
	And remember, I really like to read letters from people who agree with me.
	Let me just see if I can find it.
	Not the one about my arrogance and cynicism.
	Not the one about me sounding gay.
	Not the one. About me hating freedom.
	Let me just see if I can find it.
	Because it was a really good letter.
	And it was something that said...
	It was sort of like this.
	So the guy said...
	I've had a family member for 14 years.
	And this guy is really crazy into sports.
	He tries to catch everything that goes on.
	And at the same time, I haven't had any kind of...
	Serious conversation with him over the past 14 years about anything, and he is ignoring his significant marital and career issues while pursuing all of this sports stuff.
	And that is, to me, quite telling.
	And I got a bunch of emails about that.
	And, of course, a bunch of people who were saying that, you know, thank you for articulating what I've never been able to articulate, but it's always bothered me about sports.
	I couldn't kind of figure it out.
	But it is a huge distraction from the necessary...
	The importance of rational intimacy.
	And that's my concern.
	When I was in business, this is long before, when I was in business, I'd have to socialize with clients and I would usually prefer to talk about something important rather than something that's less important, obviously.
	And whenever people would start to bring up sports, I mean, I could feel this massive, gaping, stretching, carp mouth yawn begin to arise from my bowels and creep up my spine.
	And I'd have to find some way to chew it off or, you know, you do that inner mouth yawn where you widen your cheeks a little bit, lower your throat and widen your nostrils.
	And, um... And every now and then somebody would say, hey, is that Nino Yorn?
	I'd be like, oh yeah, man, I gotta tell you about sports.
	I mean, it's really bad.
	Watching sports is like being a eunuch and watching porn.
	It just, maybe it gets you going, but you can't do anything with it.
	And so I just find that sports is boring because sports is fake.
	Sports support is fake.
	It is a... It is a caricature.
	You know, it's like I knew a guy who was on my volleyball team many years ago, and he had this story about, you know, he was a party guy, and he had this story about how he dozed off at a couch with a beer in his hand.
	And then when somebody tried to take that beer from his hand, that's what woke him up, like, hey, where are you going with my beer?
	And this was a story that he told with grinding repetitiveness, and this was a story that was like an advertisement for his false self.
	And to me, sports are just like a big advertisement for a false self, right?
	So, you know, my sports team, yay!
	Your sports team, bad!
	And it's like, well, it's not your sports team.
	They're a bunch of parasites, right?
	They're a bunch of roid-crazy parasites.
	They don't earn their own money.
	They don't. And it's like watching Christians cheer for the Romans in ancient Rome.
	You know, where the lions line up for a taste of delectable, Christ-tainted flesh.
	It is ridiculous.
	And it is boring.
	And it's a way for people to interact where they don't have to talk about anything personal, where they don't have to talk about anything important, where they don't have to talk about anything they truly think and feel.
	It's just like a bunch of idiot fencing stuff.
	And it's true about a whole load of topics.
	And politics, of course, falls into exactly the same category.
	My team good.
	Your team bad.
	My team moral.
	Your team immoral.
	My team economically productive.
	Your team socialist.
	I mean it's just – it's exactly the same thing.
	And it's just a bunch of nonsense that allows people to pretend that by hurling syllables at each other they're actually connecting.
	And that's what bothers me, is that it's the opportunity cost of what people could be talking about if they weren't getting swept up into this nonsensical stuff.
	Well, yeah.
	Well, that's definitely a lot of your perspective.
	So I guess you would say you probably have never met and don't imagine to ever meet somebody with something interesting, something original to say, who still...
	Love the hell out of this, you know, seemingly arbitrary team camaraderie or whatever.
	I mean... No, of course.
	Look, somebody can have stuff to say that is interesting if they follow sports.
	To me, I mean, again, personality is complex, right?
	So, I mean, I think that...
	What's his name? Jon Stewart can be funny.
	And occasionally he could even be insightful.
	And I remember Wyatt Cenac having a great go at public sector unions who hired people that weren't covered by union to protest against something that somebody was doing against the union.
	And it was just fantastic. Very insightful, very intelligent.
	It was at Walmart. I think so.
	And There was a fantastic bit that Asif Manvi, I think his name is, he's somebody who came up with something so jaw-droppingly great that I've watched him for off and on years afterwards, hoping he'd come up with something nearly as good, and I haven't really seen it. But at one point, I think Donald Rumsfeld was talking about in the war in Iraq a couple of years ago.
	He was saying that, you know, there's lots of, you know, okay, so Fallujah is burning and parts of Baghdad are burning, but there's lots of the country that is not in this kind of situation and so on, right?
	And he said, yes, exactly like right after 9-11 when all of the U.S. government officials got on board and pointed out that most of America was not burning and most of the buildings weren't falling down and therefore it wasn't such a big deal.
	And that was just such a jaw-droppingly great bit of rational empathy.
	No, I mean, I don't know.
	I mean, Jon Stewart is a sports idiot too, you know?
	Jets or whatever it is in New York, I suppose, you know?
	And it's just boring, ritualistic, entirely predictable.
	Yawn-inducing, non-intimacy, non-honesty, non-rationality.
	But that doesn't mean that somebody can't have something interesting to say in some other area.
	I happen to quite like the fact that the members of the Band of Queen happen to be mostly atheistic, which is, I think, very...
	I think that's quite good.
	And I think that informed some lyrics that were good.
	I don't know what their politics were in particular, but people can have lots of interesting things to say.
	It just tells me that the interesting things that they have to say are accidental and probably aren't original.
	It just means that they haven't applied things consistently if they haven't questioned something like sports addiction, which is such an obvious one to question if you're into reason and evidence at all.
	And it's, I mean, it's, again, anything which is obvious to me, At four or five years old, I expect somebody in their 30s to have at least thought of briefly.
	You know, I think that's a reasonable standard to have.
	And so, yeah, I mean, that's sort of my approach.
	Great. Well, thank you. I'm going to give it up to somebody else, but thank you.
	Thank you. I appreciate the call.
	Great questions. Great comments.
	Great calls, as always.
	You people. You people! You honor me with your words.
	We have... Sorry, let me just get a question from...
	The chat room for the people who don't have Skype.
	I don't want them to feel left out and I do touch into the chat room to see.
	So, a question. Somebody said, Steph, isn't the whole question of minicky versus anarchy an irrelevant, superfluous and meaningless one?
	Once the moral principle of the non-initiation of force or fraud is observed, And through, say, computerized ostracism, and you attach the word company after the word government and subject them to the same free market dynamics of value-oriented profit-seeking competition and voluntary exchange.
	That is quite a sentence, I must say.
	And computers have certainly made a step forward to anarchy.
	Anarchy is best when there's a sharing of information, which is why people who come out of historical anarchy tend to look at small things.
	Communities like the left anarchists and so on because in small communities everybody knows everybody's business but in larger communities or you know citywide or countrywide communities for want of a better word you need better information and the fact is that so for instance eBay you know if somebody's had a complaint against someone immediately and that can be worldwide and it's you know right away because I need to use the word immediately twice but um No, minarchy versus anarchy is not an irrelevant question.
	Because if you say, well, if you attach the word company after the word government, subject them to the free market.
	But that's like saying, if you just...
	So, it's the question of only some rape versus no rape.
	It's irrelevant if you simply redefine some rape as voluntary lovemaking.
	Well... No, you can't do that, because that's not what rape means.
	And what government means is a group of people with the moral right, obligation, and legal capacity to initiate the use of force against others.
	And so if you say, well, let's just redefine the government as a company, and blah, blah, blah, well, then all you're saying is they no longer have the legal right to initiate force against others, and therefore it's no longer a government.
	Redefinition is not an argument.
	It is simply muddying the water, so that's my opinion.
	Hello? Hi.
	Hi, I'm calling in with my girlfriend.
	I called in one time before, and she was there as well.
	I don't know if you remember.
	It was about...
	She had...
	Her parents are farmers, and we had...
	The lampshade!...about me not turning in the light bulb the right way.
	I don't know if you remember that. That's right.
	I remember it very well.
	I remember making a huge amount of bad jokes at your expense, which I would like to apologize once more to you, Bob.
	Apologies accepted. Yeah, thanks.
	Well, the issue we have, and it's been an issue for the past months, is that I would like to move abroad because I think there's a better...
	Wait, wait. I don't like you referring to your girl as abroad.
	Sorry, go on. I don't know that word.
	Sorry. Okay, don't worry.
	If you're a native English speaker, you will find this 3% funny.
	But anyway, go on. You would like to move abroad?
	Yeah, well, because I just think there's a better future there for myself and the family I would like to raise.
	And while my girlfriend, she agrees with most of the arguments I bring forward.
	I'm just reading what I wrote, a little summary.
	But then she finds the idea of moving emotionally very difficult to the points where she thinks we'll need to break up if I hold on to my desire to move and if I would actually do so.
	And so we're leaving very soon on a trip, both of us, to explore some of the countries I think are moving to.
	So I'm very, very grateful.
	I mean, she gives me the opportunity of actually sort of presenting my case.
	But still, it's...
	It's a very difficult issue and we put a lot of time in it and still it seems like I wonder sometimes if we're asking the right questions and that's why I'm calling.
	Maybe there's some insight you could bring, some direction we could start working in.
	Well, first of all, I mean, if you want her to move, then you can get her to go abroad and then shred her passport and then she can't return.
	Wait, is she listening? She is.
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	I didn't mean that at all.
	I must have misspoken. I mean, oops.
	Okay. Well, sorry to speak to your girlfriend like she's in the room.
	What is it that you don't want to move, right?
	No, I don't. And what's...
	Obviously the reason is you're happy where you are and you like...
	Is it your career? Is it your friends?
	Your family? All of these things that makes it less...
	All of these things? Well, I'm sure there are a lot of irrational reasons, but I don't think they have to be ignored.
	I agree with my boyfriend.
	All the arguments he uses make sense.
	They make completely... I'm sorry, what are his arguments as you see them?
	Well, maybe you can explain it.
	I can say very briefly.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Because you're the one, you've got to explain them, because he already knows them, and you're the one who thinks that they're not encouraging enough.
	I'm not saying they are, but I just want to hear them from you, if that's okay.
	Okay. He thinks the economic situation in our country is going really down.
	How do you call it?
	He thinks the standard of living we have now will go down as well.
	There will be violence. There are a lot of taxes here to pay.
	The freedom will be restricted that we have now.
	He thinks there are a lot of health reasons as well because there are nuclear plants all over the place and time is ticking before some accident happens with it and he wants to move to another country where there is less risk for an accident.
	He wants to give his children a future with a lot of opportunities, and he thinks that it won't be possible in our country, at least in the situation we will get in in the future, it won't be possible to give them enough opportunities.
	Let me think.
	Is there something else?
	That's the most important thing, I think.
	For me, yeah. All right.
	Yes. And I'm going to make the opposite case.
	So I'm going to take the girlfriend's side.
	Not because I'm going to convince anyone, but I'm just trying to sort of make a case.
	Are you guys interested in having kids at some point in the future?
	Yes, definitely. All right.
	So being around family, it's pretty helpful when you have children.
	Yeah. Right? Yeah.
	That's not an insignificant thing.
	So having extended parents around who can help out, extended family, these are all very useful and helpful things when you have kids.
	Because freedom is around time, fundamentally, right?
	And if you have extended family around...
	Now, I mean, there's other things you could do.
	You move someplace, you can develop friendships with people who have kids and all that kind of stuff.
	But, you know, it's kind of built in with the family, which is a pretty good thing.
	So there's that aspect of things.
	The amount of time it takes to move to a new country is significant, right?
	There's lots of paperwork, lots of waiting times, lots of forms.
	And it may or may not work, so all that kind of stuff.
	But you guys are in Europe, right?
	Yes, we are. Alright, so, you know, if you can find a non-burning house in Greece, you could, right?
	But moving to another country, there may be, I assume you'd move someplace where, you know, they speak English or at least your native language, but otherwise you have the...
	No, no. Learning a new language thing is a pretty big deal, right?
	Yeah, it takes, you know...
	10,000 hours to become good in a new language, and that's a pretty significant time investment.
	That's a tax, right?
	So you're going to have a tax on childcare, which is to not have family around if you raise kids.
	You're going to have a tax on learning a new language.
	You're going to have a tax on learning a new skill set.
	You're going to have a tax on trying to navigate a new culture.
	All of this is time subtracted from your life, right?
	Which is pretty...
	Pretty significant. And again, it's not to say that this argument for or against, but I think if you're going to weigh the pros and cons, I just want to make sure that you weigh the cons pretty significantly.
	Now, of course, nuclear accidents, these are all things that are worth considering, right?
	But I think that's... There's ways to evaluate that risk, historical risk, look at the precautions, learn a little bit more about it, maybe move a little further away so that you're not in some sort of blast radius, but you still have access to family, hopefully not Three-headed, mutant, radioactive family members, but some access to family.
	But there's a significant tax, and I think it would actually be worthwhile, you know, it's a pretty big decision, you know, write down everything and say, okay, well, let's say that my family can take care of kids for 10 hours a week.
	Well, how much would that cost us, and is it even possible to get that kind of quality childcare from strangers or just friends?
	So how much does that add up to over, let's say, the first 12 years of the children's life?
	Well, that's That's quite a lot.
	I'm sort of in my head, 5,000, 6,000 hours.
	So 10 hours a week, that's 520 a year times 10 years, 5,200, 12 years or whatever.
	So 6,000 hours right there of built-in childcare.
	That's pretty helpful.
	Very helpful indeed.
	And how much time is going to be to add up the hours it's going to take to move someplace new and add up the...
	The hours it's going to take to possibly learn a new language or how long is it going to take to figure out taxes in the new country?
	You know, all you have to do.
	I mean, it's not a certain thing, but it's worth doing just from an exercise, saying what are the actual costs?
	Because you never want to make decisions in life without fully evaluating the costs and the benefits.
	Just moving to a new country is like, well, it's kind of exciting and this and that.
	But I think if you add up all of the costs that are involved in moving to a new country, you may find that they don't necessarily outweigh the benefits.
	So what are the taxes in the new country?
	What are the regulations? What's the national debt?
	Are you going to end up being, you know, if you move to Greece, which has a Population replenishment rate of 1.2 children per couple, anybody who moves to Greece is basically going to end up as a semi-slave of the elderly ruling classes as they pay off pensions from here to eternity, right? So look at the demographics, right?
	Is there a lot of immigration?
	Well, I mean, if there are immigrations in Europe, particularly from Islamic cultures, you may be booking yourself onto a slow cruise into religious war.
	At some point down the road, right?
	So you can look at the demographics, see where the country's going, look at the national debt, and look at the grey market of the underground economy and all of these kinds of things so that you can figure out what...
	You know, the other thing too is that, of course, a lot of people in Greece are tax evaders, right?
	So they did a recent flyby of a bunch of residences where I think only 3% of people had reported having swimming pools, which you have to pay tax on.
	It's like 50% of people had swimming pools.
	Now, if you grow up in a culture in Greece, you may be a lot more comfortable with tax evasion.
	I'm not recommending it as a strategy.
	I'm just saying that the reality is knowing what you can get away with in a country, knowing what laws you have to obey and what laws you kind of don't have to obey, is not something that strangers can really understand.
	Or, you know, because, you know, the accountant can't legally tell you, here's how to not pay taxes.
	But if you grew up in that culture, you'll know a whole bunch about that stuff.
	If you don't, then you won't.
	And so you may end up paying a lot more.
	And of course, as people don't pay taxes, the people who do pay taxes get screwed more and more.
	So all of this kind of stuff.
	I think this is all just really, really important to understand.
	All of the costs and benefits that occur.
	And of course, right, I mean, the ultimate one is that if it doesn't work out and you come back, then it's just been a massive waste, at least to some degree.
	Well, yeah, depends how you look at it.
	But one of the things maybe is interesting to talk a little about is an argument I've found quite frustrating to experience, or at least a rebuttal, which is quite frustrating to hear, to me is...
	The fear for condemnation by the family, which is, I don't fear that, but it's something that comes back quite often.
	You mean from the girlfriend's family?
	They'd be mad if you left? Yeah, of course.
	Of course they would. Yeah, they would.
	Yeah, I mean, of course they would, right?
	I mean, because... They want you around, and they want to be around grandkids, right?
	I mean, yeah. I'm not saying it's not the whole reason for making the decision.
	And us to be around as well.
	You know, look, I mean, this is to the boyfriend, right?
	So if your girlfriend left you, you'd be sad, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, and you've known her for a hell of a lot less time than her parents have, right?
	Yeah. So they're going to be way more sad if she leaves than you would be if she left you, right?
	Well... It's kind of strange.
	It's a bit strange to...
	No, it's not strange. Look, it's not romantic.
	I'm just saying that, you know, there's more to relationships than romance.
	But no, I mean, if she leaves...
	Let's put it this way.
	So if she moved someplace a thousand miles away and you still continued your relationship, you would view that as a negative, right?
	I'm sorry, I would view that or who would?
	Yeah, you would view that as a negative.
	I'm just trying to help you to empathize with the parents, right?
	Yeah. Which is, you know, the parents raised her, the parents want her around, the parents love her, and the parents, you know, I'm making all these assumptions, but, you know, the parents want to be around the grandkids, they want to help out, they want the extended family thing.
	I mean, it's a big deal.
	So, of course, they're going to, you know, talk about how they don't want that, right?
	I mean, that would be dishonest for them not to.
	No, but the thing she brings, what I say, for example, is that, well, we could, because we're actually trying a little bit now, even though it's not comparable, I mean, it's hardly comparable to travel to a place, to actually moving there, but at least it's a little, you know, dipping of your toe into what could be.
	So what I say is that, well, if we try, say we do make a move and we rent a place so we can go back, I work on the internet, I can continue working, she can come back and find a new job, which is very likely to be very possible, quite easy for her.
	What she says is that, I mean, she'll be actually, what is the word?
	Like in the Middle Ages, when they would ban you from the city, she feels like she would be banned from the family of Because she would have betrayed the family.
	Oh, like banished from the family if she moves away?
	I'm sorry? She would be banished from the family if she moved away?
	No, if she moved away briefly and then come back.
	Which I find, well, quite...
	You mean if she went on vacation?
	No, but say she says to her family, well, I want to try and move.
	We both agreed on trying to move because we want to find out if this really is a better place, a better solution for us.
	She does make the move, and then 12 months later or 6 months later, we do come back.
	She feels right now that they would...
	I think they would be happy that I would have come back.
	But they'd be upset that you were gone, of course, right?
	Yes. Of course. I mean, look, I think if they didn't care, that would be even worse, right?
	Yeah, that's true.
	If they're like, well, we don't care if you're here or 5,000 miles away.
	Well, that's not a very good thing, right?
	Mm-hmm. I mean, if your girlfriend moved away a thousand miles and said she was leaving permanently and then she moved back a year later, how would you feel about it?
	Would you feel like there would be no negative repercussions to your relationship?
	There'd be no lack of, right?
	I don't know. If my child would do that, I would be sad, of course, but I'd be happy if he comes back.
	I mean, I would never want my child to feel guilty about, you know, having tried to make a change in his life and then making another change after that.
	Well, are they trying to make you feel guilty?
	Is that correct?
	Well, it's something that's been...
	Wait, no, I'm asking the girl.
	Excuse me.
	Sorry, could you repeat that, please?
	Are they trying to make you feel guilty?
	Is that an accurate statement?
	Well, I know for sure that they will.
	I haven't really talked about that we are really planning to move.
	I've just told them that my boyfriend wants to move and they have made a case for me to present to Tyr, to convince them not to do.
	So it's clear that they don't want me to move.
	And for this moment, I think they trust me that I won't.
	Right. Now, you said that...
	Sorry, this is to the fellow. I'm sorry for referring to you as a girl, obviously.
	This is to the fellow. You said that you work on the internet, so your job wouldn't particularly change if you move, right?
	Yes, and hers would.
	Yeah. Of course.
	I studied... Right. So your economic arguments don't make much sense for you, right?
	Well, it would make for the family.
	It would make... No, no.
	I didn't say for the family.
	I'm just... For you.
	It doesn't matter where you live, right?
	No, it doesn't matter. Okay, so the economic argument is not particularly relevant for you, right?
	Now, if you guys are going to have kids, the economic argument for, hopefully, your then-wife, your current girlfriend, your then-wife, for her to move for the economics of someone who's about to spend a huge amount of time raising children makes a little less sense, right?
	Like, let's have better economic opportunities for the person who's less likely to have a job.
	You mean that, yeah, if we would have two kids and, I mean, she's been raised with a mother who was home most of the time?
	Yeah, you should be home. I mean, look, I'll tell you, honestly, if you're going to have kids, be home, right?
	Don't dump them in a daycare.
	That's bad for them. And it makes parenting a pretty nasty and, I think, miserable experience for everyone involved.
	So if you're going to have kids, stay home, which means you're going to have two kids, let's say, so you should probably raise them to at least school age.
	So we're talking, what, seven or eight years?
	Without a job? Mm-hmm.
	So to move economically, saying, well, my job makes no difference, but your job, which you won't have for seven or eight years, could be slightly better.
	Well, I don't think that's a very compelling argument.
	I never got that argument. No, that wasn't a reason.
	Well, no, but the first argument you brought up was you said that economically things would be better elsewhere, right?
	Yeah. No, what I'm thinking personally is like, for me, tax-wise, it would be a lot better already today, but also for what I... I think for my children, it would be very beneficial if I were to actually put in the time,
	the 10,000 hours or whatever it takes to learn the language, to get to know the cultures, the whereabouts, so that they can grow up in a culture or in an economy where there's actually possibilities and not some socialistic hellhole.
	And I may be exaggerating, but...
	Well, but I mean, by the time they get to...
	I mean, now you're starting to figure out what tax policies are going to be like in countries almost 20 years from now, right?
	Yeah, I don't know. That's true.
	It's a guess, obviously.
	Your country might go through a freedom renaissance in the place you might move to, right?
	I mean, this is the ironic thing.
	I mean, I point this out from experience, right?
	One of the reasons that we left England, I mean, not the real reason, but the stated reason, was because England was becoming socialist.
	And... And so we left to come to Canada because Canada was a land of free market opportunity, of course.
	And then Canada got all kinds of socialists and who came into England but Margaret Thatcher, right?
	So who, you know, took on the public sector unions and tried to roll back some sides and power of the state.
	We all see how well that worked out.
	But... But that's sort of the irony is, you know, what you're trying to do is you're trying to say, well, I'm going to make my decisions now based upon what kind of economic situation is going to exist in two countries 20 years from now, right?
	Well, I mean, I mean, there is some, I think, some reasonable arguments, like, are there any resources in the ground?
	How many nuclear power plants are there in the radius of X amount of kilometers?
	How old are they? I think those are valid arguments looking 20 years ahead.
	And I would feel a lot more comfortable betting on two cultures, which, I mean, obviously, me and my girlfriend are going to take along the cultures we grew up in.
	And if things get better, it's a lot easier for us to move back, say that the country we live in now is going to, you know, flourish and it's going to become the new Dubai or something.
	Then, well, we can move back.
	But the other way around, if we're kind of dug in, You're not looking at the full picture, right?
	Sorry to interrupt you, but the full picture is how much money and time are you going to save having built-in babysitting from your family versus how much time and money are you going to save by paying less taxes?
	You pay less taxes without family around.
	You're just going to pay more in childcare.
	And the childcare, if the parents are good, and I'm going to assume that they are, the childcare is going to be bad relative to what family can provide.
	Again, this is the full picture thing.
	If you're going to make the financial argument, I think that your argument...
	The practical financial argument is to stay.
	Because your job doesn't change either way.
	And you're going to save a lot more time, money and energy by having family around to help you raise the kids than you're going to save in having a couple of extra bucks in your bank account.
	You're also going to have to try and predict where tax policy is going to go at a time in Europe when God knows what the hell is going on with all these policies at the moment.
	And you're trying to make an argument that economic opportunities for your kids, which they're not going to have to figure out for another 20 years, So who knows what's going on with that?
	And also again the last point which I'll repeat is that if your job doesn't change and your wife is going to significantly benefit from having family around, I'm going to assume this again to put the issue to the woman, I'm going to assume that you would much rather raise your children with your family around.
	Of course, of course and I will need my family not only for the children but also I imagine when you get pregnant for the first time it's nice to have your mom around to ask all sorts of things and Oh, absolutely.
	The other thing is I'm afraid that my boyfriend will keep on running for a lot of reasons, even reasons or arguments that we haven't had in our mind now, and that meanwhile life passes and you will keep on running and get old.
	I mean, at a certain point I want to make a decision and settle down and To cope with whatever comes on the path then, rather than traveling the world and trying to find a place where it is always better.
	I mean, the grass will always be cleaner on the other side.
	I don't know if it's an expression in English, but...
	Can I come back to the family thing?
	Please. Right, well...
	I think it's something that I have an agenda and my agenda when it concerns family is that I expressly I don't want my well specifically my parents involved in the in raising my children that's something I really feel very strongly and I've been struggling a lot with it in the past and I do want to.
	So, but my issue is, of course, I don't want to, what is it, to convict my girlfriend of some kind of thing.
	I'm just, I want for myself.
	Right, right.
	Now, I mean, I can't speak to that.
	I don't know anything about the history of that, to my knowledge, but these are sort of boundary issues that you can set up without having to flee thousands of miles.
	Yeah, that's true. That's true, and I have to be, I agree, I have to be aware of that.
	Yeah, I mean, if you want to teach your children boundaries, then you can set those up.
	You also, I mean, look, you may not know how you feel in a couple of years with regards to, again, I don't know anything about your situation.
	So, I mean, I'm just going to say that I believe that I'm still a fairly significant believer that people can change.
	I don't mean you. I mean other people who've done you wrong.
	I believe that the odds go down as time goes along to the point where they're virtually close to zero.
	But you're guessing a lot about where you're going to be emotionally.
	And look, you may be right. Maybe your parents are the worst people in the world.
	I don't know, right? But But you're guessing a lot about where you might be down the road.
	But see, if you don't want your parents involved, obviously you can't make that decision for your girlfriend, right?
	And you certainly can't say that because I have a bad relationship with my parents, I'm not going to...
	I'm going to encourage us to move away from your parents as well.
	I think that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.
	Sorry. I know you're not native speakers.
	I hope that... That's making her parents suffer for what your parents did, which I think is only to extend the problem, not solve it.
	Oh, yeah. I guess...
	Well, I would argue that her parents don't exactly have a clean slate either.
	Nobody has a clean slate.
	And I don't want to get into it, because that's a long discussion, but sort of close to the end of time.
	I'm just trying to, if you're going to have arguments about practicalities, then you need to quantify those.
	You know, decisions in life usually aren't that complicated if we quantify things correctly.
	And, you know, the mistakes, the reason that people make bad decisions, and I say this as a guy who's made bad decisions in my life, but the reason that I've made bad decisions in my life is I've just not sat down and quantified everything, right?
	And if you're going to make decisions based upon practical arguments, then you need to sit down and go through all of the ramifications.
	And you can do this. Say, okay, how long does it take someone who moved from my country to...
	You can find this information on blocks or whatever, right?
	So how much... How much time did it take for somebody to move from this country to another country?
	Okay, so let's say it takes two years to move from one country to another.
	Well, that's a significant amount of time.
	And it's also kind of a time where things are on hold in your life, right?
	Are you going to make new friends in those two years?
	Well, probably not, right?
	You're not going to get heavily involved in some new community aspect of your society in those two years because you're planning to move.
	So it's two years where a lot of things are kind of on hold and in limbo and so on.
	And that doesn't even count the time.
	So it's just really, really important to focus on all of the real costs, the direct and indirect costs of looking at this decision, if you're going to make an argument from practicality.
	Now, if you're going to make an argument from, I don't want to see my parents, or I don't want my parents involved in my children, then...
	In a sense, you've got to look at how this is going to affect your kids.
	At some point, you're going to have to tell the truth to your kids.
	I say, well, why do we live so far away from mommy's parents?
	Well, because I had problems with my parents.
	What does that communicate to your children?
	When I brought it up, Personally, I don't feel like it's the reason why I want to move.
	But I do want to be aware of it so that I don't push my own hidden agenda in this thing.
	So for the moment, I'm still convinced that the other arguments are the real reason why I do want to move.
	And I'd be happy to explain to my children why I did or why we, if eventually that's what we do, why we made the decision.
	Yes, but the thing is that It's the person who gets...
	It's the person who is going to pay the most who should have more of a vote in couples decisions, in my opinion.
	So you mean my girlfriend would have to...
	She has more votes because she wants...
	Like, she's going to be the one having to raise kids away from family.
	Which is a much...
	Look, it's a much more significant decision for your wife than it is...
	Sorry, for your girlfriend than it is for you, right?
	Because as you say, you can work anywhere, your career doesn't get interrupted and so on, but if your wife is going to be the primary caregiver and you're taking her away from her support...
	I mean, that's a pretty cold-ass way of talking about it.
	But if you're going to take her away from her family, and so she may have to experience motherhood without being able to talk to her mom about getting pregnant and being born.
	And, you know, I'm telling you, there'll be times when your kids are both up sick at 3 o'clock in the morning.
	Ain't nobody coming around except your parents or your family.
	You know, call friends and have them come over that time of night, right?
	I guess it depends.
	Can I ask you? No, come on.
	Family has those kinds of bonds, right?
	Particularly if you, I don't know what the woman's parents, where they are in life, but particularly if they're retired, they may come over and they may help out for the first six months.
	That's pretty invaluable.
	I mean, to have experienced parents around while you're wrestling with first-time parenting, I mean, that's huge.
	That's on-the-job training. Live in on-the-job training.
	And that's something that is going to be much more important, assuming that you're going to breastfeed, which, of course, I would strongly suggest for a number of reasons.
	Yeah, so, I mean, you need that.
	You know, you're going to be the one up at night, and it would be great to have a family around to help out with that kind of stuff.
	So I, you know, and I say this as a guy who did not have family around during infancy and child raising.
	And it's, you know, it's a lot harder.
	And so, in my opinion, right, I mean, I think you could make a strong objective case for this.
	But the person who the decision affects the most is the person who gets more of a vote.
	But, so, are you saying that you regret the decision you, I mean, you and your wife took for your own family?
	No, no, not at all.
	But, I mean... I regret that it had to be made, but no, I don't regret the decision, but that's a different situation, according to what your girlfriend-slash-fiance-slash-wife-slash-mother of your children wants her family around.
	That's a different situation, right?
	And I was curious about, because there's all the practical issues you bring up about moving, if I got it right, I think I heard it in one of your shows, that at some point you were considering moving again.
	Is it something you have been considering and now decided against, if you don't mind me asking?
	Oh, I don't mind you asking.
	I just, I mean, there's not too much to talk about it.
	I mean, nothing has particularly changed in that area since I've talked.
	I mean... I think everyone has that sort of feeling or thought, you know, that there's a place out there in the world where you can be more free.
	And I think everybody who's interested in that, I mean, there's no utopia in the world, right?
	I mean, there's the governments everywhere.
	And there's religiosity just about everywhere.
	So, you know, there is no obvious paradise that you can get to.
	And so I think it just becomes a matter of practical calculations.
	I mean, I wish it were easier to move in the world, but it's not, unfortunately.
	And so I think it's really, really important to do just a full-on, top-to-bottom, back-to-front cost-benefit analysis.
	And I think that the benefits of having family around when you're raising kids is...
	It's fantastic. I think that's a really good point.
	I mean, it's so obvious when people are in business that they make these, you know, practical cost-benefit analyses, but I mean, we often tend to forget that the most important things in life, they might deserve to have that as well.
	But can I say something? On the other hand...
	I'm sorry, we're talking about your life, but I don't think that you should actually have an input in.
	Sorry, go on. That's okay.
	But I think if he would stay here, that my boyfriend would be very unhappy.
	So that's not good for a relationship.
	No, he won't be unhappy.
	I guarantee you this.
	He's a philosopher or he's interested in philosophy, right?
	So if there's a rational case to be made for staying, then he will adjust and he will be happy because he prefers reason to unreason and he prefers evidence to fantasy.
	And therefore, you can just hold him over and say, If you're unhappy about something that is rational, bad philosopher!
	Bad philosopher! And what you do is you hit him with a rolled-up newspaper or a rolled-up copy of Atlas Shrugged.
	Actually, you can't roll that up.
	It's too damn thick. But just, you know, give him that.
	And then what he does is you don't give him any kibbles, and he has to sleep in the basement.
	He's a bad philosopher! Not accepting reason and evidence.
	And just keep repeating that until he comes around.
	And then I'll learn. Well, I agree.
	But you have valid reasons, I know that.
	It's something, yeah, I gotta say, I'm surprised by the things I heard, and I think it's definitely something we can work with.
	I don't know what you think. I'm surprised it was so easy.
	She was the one worried before we called.
	Hey, hey, if there's one thing that I've been told, it's that I'm easy.
	So, I hope that that's been clarifying for everyone.
	Yeah. I didn't hear it.
	Is that you? Sorry. Oh, if there's one thing that I've been told about myself, it's that I'm easy.
	And so I hope that that's been helpful.
	Yes, it was. All right.
	Good. Thanks so much.
	Keep me posted as always.
	Let me know how it goes down.
	And again, I mean, I know that's not the end of the conversation, but I would really just focus on combing out all of the details about how this is all going to work.
	And I think that you guys will come to a decision.
	Again, recognizing that in the world that is, there is no perfect decision.
	The perfect decision would be to open up a portal 200 years into the future, bring those we love with us to a free society and live in paradise.
	But that is not an option that is available to us.
	So... I hope that you'll be able to come to some compromise.
	But, you know, recognize that if you're going to have kids, the reality is that all of your decisions are going to orbit around what benefits your children.
	And that's what's going to make you happy in the long run.
	And I would make a strong case for family support of child raising early on.
	If, you know, again, assuming that this is a beneficial thing and that, I mean, obviously, you want it, I say to the ladies, so good for you.
	And I'm glad that you have that.
	All right. Thank you very much.
	You're very welcome. And thanks again for bringing it up.
	It was helpful, right? It was useful?
	Yeah, it was useful. Thank you.
	I like that note of surprise in your voice.
	Yeah, it was actually. I thought for sure you're going to side with my boyfriend, but I can't believe you said.
	Anyway, go on. I was just saying I'm gritting my teeth right now, but I think it's always good to have some argumentative headwind and then to sleep over it and reconsider.
	So thanks a lot.
	You're very welcome. And thank you so much, everyone, for these great calls.
	I'm sorry that they've been a little bit spotty lately.
	And I'm also sorry I haven't got the October cast up yet.
	I've been meaning to get to them. But time has been tight.
	Baby, it's tight. And we are going to, of course, release some material from the Liberty Cruise.
	I had a very engaging debate with Mark and Wes about the morality of voting, which I know is a hot, hot, spicy hot topic for Libertarians and anarchists, of course.
	And we had lots of great, great conversations about parenting and other juicy, wonderful topics.
	So I will be releasing those once they get processed.
	And the debate was actually videoed, so we'll get that up on YouTube as well.
	And so, yeah, thanks everybody so much.
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