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Feb. 5, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:55:33

2091 Freedomain Radio Sunday Call in Show, Feb 5 2012

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	Alright, hi everybody. Stefan Molyneux.
	It is the 5th of February, 2012.
	Remember, I will be speaking at LibertyFestWest.com in about a week or so.
	And I hope you can join me.
	And I will also be speaking through webcam at the Georgia State Convention for the Libertarian Party sometime after.
	You can Google that if you like.
	And that's it. I've got a couple of intros, but if we have callers on the line, let's roll the dice and see who we get.
	James, would you like to dumbwaiter up the first bright caller?
	All right. Well, first up, we have Economics Junkie.
	Oh, dude! How are you doing?
	Hi, Steph. Good. How are you?
	Great. Thanks. No intro?
	No. Okay.
	So I had a conversation last night with a woman and some interesting things came up that I wanted to hear.
	Wait, sorry. I just wanted to pause and let the Free Domain Radio community absorb the fact that a guy interested in economics and philosophy had a conversation with – sorry, how did you pronounce that again?
	It's shocking. Anyway, go on.
	So, first of all, about the argument that all threats are ultimately threats of murder, what if cops were to just tase you and not shoot you ever?
	What would you say to that?
	Well, tase you and do what, right?
	So, I don't know what tase you.
	But it puts you down on the ground for a couple of minutes, right?
	And then they're going to do what?
	They're going to put you in a car, and then they're going to put you in a jail cell, and what happens if you try to escape?
	What happens if blah, blah, blah, right?
	Well, I can't escape because it's a cell, basically, and there's bars, and at some point they release me, probably.
	Then if I do something again, they tase me again, so it's just a continuous cycle of dragging me into a cell, and I get released, and it's totally violent.
	But what if you attack the guy who's dragging you to attempt to bite him?
	I mean, I guess they could try, right?
	But clearly, tasers are less valuable than guns, otherwise...
	Or what if you run away? Taser's got a range, right?
	I don't know what, 10 feet or whatever, right?
	So what if you're a little further away?
	Clearly, tasers don't do as well as guns.
	Otherwise, police would only have tasers, right?
	Or tranquil and dark, or something like that.
	Well, okay. But at some point, it doesn't work, right?
	So, I mean, if you think of the Waco situation, right?
	I mean, if they wanted to go in, they wouldn't want to go in with tranquilizer darts and tasers, right?
	Some sort of armed compound or something like that.
	There is – I mean, these people are armed.
	They have guns. And they have – I don't know all of the reasons why, but I assume they know quite a bit about how to control people.
	And so they have their guns for a reason.
	Again, you and I can speculate as to what those reasons are, but I think it would be mostly speculation.
	But we know that they need more than tasers because of this issue.
	And of course tasers can be fatal anyway, right?
	Okay. I mean, somebody has an underlying heart condition or whatever, a taster can kill you.
	This happened in, I think it was in Canada, in Vancouver or something.
	They tased some guy, and he just is basically, I think his heart just exploded.
	And so, yeah, so I mean, there is a risk of that.
	Let me give you the example why this came up.
	So basically, we're in San Francisco, and every other week, somebody jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge.
	And so we're talking about, she was telling me, I would want to do whatever I can to...
	To save that person, to prevent that person from jumping off the bridge, and so she considered it just a right to, for example, tase him or tranquilize him to prevent him from killing himself.
	What would you think about that?
	No, I mean, the reality is that I don't think it's great to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.
	I mean, you could land on someone who's on a boat underneath who doesn't want to die, right?
	I mean, suicide is a massive tragedy and something that should be strenuously avoided at all costs, but if people want to do it, then they should do it in the privacy of their own home where they can't harm other people.
	But as far as you can use violence against someone who wants to kill himself or herself, well, you have the right – I mean, you just have to go back to principles, right?
	You have the right to destroy your own property, right?
	I can buy an iPad and I can put it in a blender or whatever it is, drop it off a balcony and break it, and I don't go to jail for that, right?
	Sure, but this kind of scenario is one where she would tell me, okay, you would let that person kill himself, so it's sort of a little more, I guess, a little more of a touchy subject.
	When it comes to somebody taking his own life, so I felt kind of put on the spot there, I guess.
	Yeah, I mean, it's interesting where it's like you would let him, right?
	Yeah. I mean it's not really in your power.
	I mean let's say you wrestle the guy off the bridge and you strap him to the roof rack of a cab and you went – then he's going to be alone at some point.
	You can't stop someone who wants to kill himself unless you lock him up.
	Sorry. Even people who are institutionalized or in prison or on 24-hour suicide watch can find ways to kill them.
	They swallow their tongue. They find ways to do it.
	Sure. I mean she was just saying she would want to know that she did whatever she could to have that person not kill himself I guess.
	But I understand your argument.
	Let's play it out. So look, you have the right to destroy your own property and you own yourself.
	So you do have the right to destroy yourself.
	I mean I think that that's pretty inescapable.
	Now, does that mean that we want people – no, of course not, right?
	Any more than – we don't want people to destroy themselves.
	But prevention is much better than cure.
	And we want to find ways to intervene in how the children – We want to find ways to intervene in how the children are educated.
	We want to find ways to intervene on how teenagers deal with depression and anxiety and rejection and heartbreak and all that.
	We want to find ways to intervene.
	There's so many steps that lead up.
	I mean, we assume that this is suicide not based upon, I've got a terminal agonizing illness that no one can cure, and I can't get enough painkillers in my system to reduce the agony.
	I mean, that may be a medical decision.
	I mean, I'm not one to judge that myself.
	I can't really judge how much pain somebody else can stand.
	It seems like a fairly subjective thing.
	But there's so many ways to prevent suicide that society doesn't really do much about at the moment.
	So, for instance, there was a guy named Spalding Gray, who was an actor, and he did a one-man show called Swimming to Cambodia, which is good, and he showed up on sitcoms from time to time.
	He wrote a huge novel called Monster in a Box.
	I think it was 1,600 pages.
	And then he wrote a novel about writing the novel and trying to get it published.
	An entertaining writer, smart guy, and he killed himself.
	And if you know anything about his history, which there's no reason why you would, his mother killed herself.
	And as a boy, as a child, as a young boy, as a young child, he would go in and he's got one, I really remember He would just go in and his mother would just sort of sigh and put down the newspaper and say, you know, basically, how am I going to do it this time?
	Should I use pills? Should I jump off a cliff?
	How am I going to get it done this time?
	She would openly talk about self-slaughter in front of her child.
	And it's not too hard to see how that kind of Intentionality, the death wish, thanatosis, Freud would call it, the death wish would be implanted in someone.
	We talked about Amy Winehouse the other day.
	So there's a huge amount that people can do to prevent...
	Suicide that I think in a free society would be much more acted upon than it is now.
	But yeah, people have the right to end their own lives.
	I mean, that's moral, but it's also practical.
	Because that's just a reality, that they can.
	I mean, if you're living with somebody who wants to kill you, you can have that person thrown in jail, you can move away from them.
	But if somebody wants to kill themselves, they can't move away from themselves, right?
	You can't. I don't see that you can...
	Now, I mean, if you sort of go from the theory to the practice, let's look in a free society.
	Let's say someone's on the Golden Gate Bridge about to jump off.
	And I wrestle them back and hold them down until some healthcare workers come here.
	And this guy is really, really angry.
	And, you know, he wants to sue me for not letting me kill him.
	For not letting me kill himself.
	Sorry, not letting him kill.
	I don't know why I'm having problems with pronouns today.
	He wants to sue me for not letting him kill himself.
	Do you really think that any agency is going to uphold that?
	Because it could be – I don't know what his history is.
	It could be that he's got a brain tumor and he believes he's being chased by a pack of rabid wolves.
	He could be on hallucinogens and believes that space aliens are shooting lasers from right above that culminous cloud that looks like the left nutsack of Don Rickles.
	I don't know. So he may not actually want to kill himself.
	He might just be in a disturbed state of mind for some medical or pharmacological reason.
	In which case he would thank me.
	You know, he may be having some sort of epileptic attack and just doing the fast jig off towards the edge.
	So if I just come across that situation and I wrestle someone back who appears to be going over the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge, I can't imagine that any society that was fair and just would find me in some way criminally liable or liable from a civil standpoint.
	And so in a free society, your friend that you were talking to would be able to try and stop that person.
	And if she wanted to, she could become his friend.
	And she could work on trying to get him or her to find better ways of dealing with problems than, you know, taking the swan dive off the Golden Gate.
	So there would be nothing to stop it.
	But, you know, would it be institutionally necessary to, you know, enforceably confine that person?
	I don't believe that that would be fair or just.
	But I also believe that suicide, I mean, suicide is pretty rare now, but suicide in a free society when people are raised well and peacefully and positively would be so rare that I can't imagine it would be much of an issue to worry about.
	So there is a situation where somebody could actually use suicide Mild aggression.
	And we would probably consider it okay, I guess.
	Yeah, of course. Look, I mean, not okay, but good.
	I mean, if someone's got headphones on and, you know, they're walking along the side of the road and some guy has a heart attack in his car and drives up on the sidewalk, and I tackle that guy and knock him over a hedge and break his leg...
	I mean, I've aggressed against him, right?
	No, I don't agree. But no, this is a similar sort of situation.
	Now, I don't know.
	Maybe this is an elaborate scheme that's been set up by the driver and the guy to get insurance money.
	I don't know, right?
	I don't know. But I'm going to do the best that I can with the information that I have, which is I'm going to assume the guy on the sidewalk doesn't want to get creamed by a truck.
	And so I'm going to wrestle him over.
	In the same way, if I come across a guy trying to jump off, I'm going to assume that this is not necessarily – I don't have the right to assume, I think, that it's intentional suicide.
	It could just be delusion.
	He could be dehydrated.
	He could be having some sort of brain seizure.
	He could be having a stroke and hallucination.
	I don't know, right? Yeah.
	So I'm going to try and help him.
	And if then he goes home and swallows all the pills in the world, then I guess I've got my answer as to what he was trying to do.
	But I wouldn't assume that. I just want to point out one thing.
	I see a fundamental difference in somebody walking in front of a car with headphones and somebody actually...
	Wanting to kill himself.
	No, no, no. Sorry. You're describing intention, which can't be known.
	This is my argument. You can't know if somebody's trying to jump off the bridge.
	You can't know if they are intentionally suicidal.
	Because we don't know their intention.
	We can see what they're doing, but we can't gauge their intention.
	But if I compare it with a headphone guy, isn't it much more likely that the suicide guy has the intention?
	Sure, but he may not be sane at the moment.
	But let's say we know he's sane at the moment.
	Sorry, your lady friend, sorry to keep interrupting, but your lady friend said, I would want to stop that person.
	We don't know if he's sane at the moment because you have to act, right?
	You've got three seconds to see whether you tackle the guy trying to jump off the bridge.
	You have no way to gauge whether he's sane or not, whether it's biochemical, whether it's pharmacological, whether it's a stroke, whether it's a brain tumor, whether it's whatever, right?
	We don't know. Or he's on drugs?
	Yeah, that's what I mean by pharmacological, right?
	He's either on prescribed or non-prescribed drugs or whatever, right?
	So he could just be having a really bad trip.
	And when he comes to, he'd be like, thank you so much.
	I would have died. Right.
	And if he's not, then next time he does it, you probably don't want to save him because...
	Well, the odds of you being there the next time he tries to kill himself...
	I mean, if he really wants to kill himself and doing it in public...
	Ah, it's an interesting thought actually.
	Yeah, so he's going to do it privately.
	If he keeps getting interrupted in public, he'll do it privately.
	But there could be an argument to say that if somebody is doing it in a public way, part of them may want someone to intervene, right?
	Right. That would be an argument for intervention.
	Sorry, go ahead. I guess in a free society – to take this further, I'm just thinking a lot.
	In a free society, everything would be privately owned.
	So maybe the owner would have restrictions on the use of their property in the sense that they wouldn't allow people – or they would make a condition to not commit suicide on this property.
	And then they would actually have the right to stop you and remove you from that property, I guess.
	Well, sure, yeah. And they may put up, if this is a common place for suicidality, they may put up barriers so that it's, you know, there's a bridge in Toronto where people keep jumping.
	And they put up these mesh barriers so that people can't, right?
	Yeah, they have these fences there now.
	And I think, but as far as I understand it, and I'm really quoting off memory here, so if anyone in the chat room knows better, please let me know.
	But I think of people who attempt suicide, only about a third of them go on to actually kill themselves.
	So two-thirds of them don't, and those are the statistics that you're working with.
	Some actually are crying out for attention, but those that are crying out for attention choose a method that has a big, big opening for an intervention.
	Yes, that's right. They take the pills and call 911, right?
	Exactly. Right.
	And I would not necessarily say, you know, sort of the vying for attention thing might be a bit of a non-empathetic way of putting it.
	I mean, maybe people do it for manipulative purposes, but I think there's more crying out for empathy and crying out, not just attention, but empathy or help or something like that.
	Someone that really wants to die chooses a method you can't intervene with.
	They jump off a building, they shoot themselves, they do something like that.
	Yeah, and I think if I remember rightly, men do the irrevocable suicide thing far more often than women do.
	Yeah, men make it as gory as possible because they want to make a big guilt statement.
	Women like to do something like cutting their wrists so they'll leave a good-looking corpse and make people feel guilty.
	I think I may detect a slight lack of sympathy, but that's all right.
	No, I haven't actually worked with these people before.
	I've not, obviously. I've not worked with these people before.
	And I've been on both sides of the question.
	Right, right. So, yeah, I mean, so statistically, a good number of people who are tempted to kill themselves go on to not want to die.
	And so, you know, I think intervention is important.
	But that having been said, there would, of course, be negative repercussions to killing yourself in a free society, right?
	I mean, say, well, how do you punish the dead?
	Well, obviously, insurance would not pay out.
	And this is, of course, the case now as well, right?
	I mean, life insurance doesn't pay out if you kill yourself.
	And so those kinds of things, there would be other negative repercussions, I'm sure, which would try and create a disincentive for that kind of behavior.
	Great. Does that help?
	I had one last question, then I'll just...
	Oh, please. You've always got great questions.
	So she was saying, if somebody's doing drugs in front of his very young children every day, Would it be okay – or she said it would be okay to remove the children from that household forcefully.
	What do you think about that?
	That's – I mean this is – yeah, this is a really challenging area.
	So I really wish I hadn't taken your question.
	Yeah. No, this is the question around – no, it's a great question.
	It's a great question. These things need to be thought of.
	I mean we need to have some approximation of an answer.
	Obviously, we can't work it out in every detail, but we need to have some approximation of an answer.
	So somebody is, you know, some sort of – is shooting up heroin in front of its kids and – I assume that it's not the shooting up of heroin in front of his kids that's the problem, but the bad parenting that results.
	I mean, obviously the shooting up is not good, but shooting up by itself is not.
	I mean, if he's diabetic, he may have to do that.
	He may have to do that in front of his kids or whatever, right?
	So it's not so much the shooting up as the negative effects of the drugs.
	Is that right? The behavior in front of the children and making it part of their daily routine, I guess.
	Right, and I think we can assume that somebody who's shooting up heroin and who is a parent is...
	Is a bad parent.
	Yeah, is not doing exactly the best by their kids, right?
	Of course, yeah. Now, of course, there's one of two – so we have to sort of play it out the way it works now.
	So there's one of two possibilities.
	Either people know about this, right, or they don't.
	Now, if they don't know about this or if only the kids know about it and they don't talk, then the problem is not solved in any society, right?
	Right. Because it remains an unknown?
	Mm-hmm. Now, so we're going to have to assume that the problem is known to people who are willing to talk about it.
	I mean, I think we have to assume that.
	Now, if that's the case now, of course, a lot of children don't want to report their parents because they really fear the consequences, right?
	Right. Right.
	They fear going into foster care, for which there is ample – I'm sure many foster parents are great, but there's lots of stories of pretty horrifying things around foster care.
	And where in Canada, again, to sort of speak locally, where the government has taken over the care of children, there has been unbelievably monstrous occurrences going on.
	So there was a huge scandal.
	Yeah. In Canada that went on for decades when Aboriginal children were taken from their parents to be assimilated and put into these state homes where – I mean raped and beaten and sadistically tortured.
	I mean the conditions that these children had to endure in the tender care of the state were just unbelievably horrifying.
	And so, you know, the problem is that the kids, you have to create some sort of environment where the kids feel that their lives will be improved by reporting the behavior of the parents.
	And at the moment, I don't really think that's the case.
	I think that they feel that there is – I mean there's two major problems as far as I can tell.
	The first is of course that they – a fear that they're going to be put in a worse environment.
	With childhood, a lot of it is better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
	So they fear they're going to be put in a worse environment.
	The other thing that they fear is because there does seem to be a tendency to attempt reuniting of families no matter how dysfunctional.
	And therefore, you know, they're terrified that, you know, A, they're going to go into some bad environment, and B, even if they don't, if they're then handed back to the tender care of a crazy parent, that they're going to get such unbelievable negative repercussions that, you know, it's like I'm way worse off than if I'd ever reported it.
	Does that make sense? Right, right.
	So how does a free society deal with this?
	Well... Remember, of course, that ostracism is about the most powerful tool, right?
	I mean, I've been sort of yammering on about the against me argument and things like that for years, and very, very few people, even people who strongly believe in a state and a society, or even people who are libertarians, they won't use the against me argument in their personal relationships because they fear ostracism, which is an amazing proof for anarchy, right?
	Right, right. I mean, the fact that people fear ostracism so much, even within the libertarian community, means that they...
	They've really just made a huge case for why we don't need a state.
	The existence of the state is the best proof against the necessity of the existence of the state.
	Or people's fear of ostracism is the best argument against the need for a state.
	Because if libertarians won't...
	When we have very strong moral opinions, or hopefully more than opinions about the use of violence and statism, we won't stand up against statists in our personal life.
	That's a fantastic argument for a free society.
	So... I'll just touch on this stuff briefly because I've got an article in Practical Anarchy about it, but we need to find ways to incentivize, right?
	And morality is all well and good, but what people really respond to, sadly, is incentives, and I'm not sure that will change hugely in the future.
	So who is it who can profit?
	Who profits from healthy children in a free society?
	I'll put that question to you because you always hammer me with hard questions.
	So let me throw one. So who profits from healthy, well-raised children in a free society?
	Well, several people.
	I would say the parents because they have somebody who can take care of them in the long run.
	Well, sorry. It has to be something specific to a free society because that's the case now, but there, of course, still a lot of...
	Well, I guess insurance companies would profit because they...
	Yeah, people who protect you from criminals would profit because there'd be far fewer criminals, right?
	Right, right. Who else?
	Other people around me.
	Okay, it has to be specific to a free society.
	Yes. DROs.
	That's sort of an insurance company though, right?
	Right, right. Well, where do children spend a good deal of their time?
	School. Right.
	Is it easier to teach children who are untraumatized?
	Is it easier to get better test scores and higher marks and all of that from children who are not traumatized?
	I would say so. Yeah, absolutely.
	It is going to be much easier not only to have children learn but to teach a group of children, right?
	I mean I don't know about your experience in school but in my experience in school, 90% of the problems came from like 10% of the kids.
	And so having traumatized kids in the class who are acting out is hugely negative for the reputation of a school.
	So the school is going to want to make sure that it has as few traumatized kids as possible.
	Now, I hope that's not going to mean just kicking them out, although that's what happens in a state of society, largely, or they get drugged.
	But you have...
	The parents are going to pay far lower insurance premiums if they parent well.
	Right? Because they're going to have to be insured for the actions of their children.
	Parents are going to have to pay far less in school fees If their children are attentive and reason to be well behaved and so on, right?
	If they're not throwing things at the teacher and threatening students and taking their lunch money and stuff, right?
	Because either then they'll be kicked out of school or they will – and the DRO may not let – Parents off the hook as far as not having their children educated at all.
	And so my guess is that from some of the teachers I've talked to, it's about four times harder to teach a kid who's disruptive and acting out.
	So it would be four times the educational cost.
	So it would probably go from something like $4,000 to $16,000.
	And that's pretty expensive.
	And DROs, of course, would offer free parenting courses and a reduction in your insurance policies and follow-ups in order to make sure that you followed best parenting practices to produce, right?
	So you would get your insurance premiums, like the number of well-raised children who just randomly become criminals and abusers and all that, I don't know.
	I mean, it may be zero, it may be tiny, but it's not more than tiny.
	Based on sort of the research that I've done.
	And so what will be the cost of insuring your child's behavior if your child is better?
	Well, it's going to be 1 20th the price.
	Right? So, you know, if it's $100 a year to insure your kid...
	Versus $2,000 or $3,000 a year to insure your kid.
	If it's $4,000 to educate your kid rather than $16,000 to educate your kid.
	And if the difference between these two things is a bunch of free parenting courses, I can't imagine – I mean only the most insane people would reject that.
	And maybe go live off the grid, live in the woods and so on.
	That's a tiny percentage. I mean, that's going to be such a tiny percentage.
	You'd count that on the camel toes of one camel.
	And you say, well, what about those people?
	Well, of course, the reality is that the existing society can't do anything about those people either.
	I mean, if two people go off and live in the woods and have their kid out in the woods and nobody knows where they are and nobody knows the kid exists, then the kid's not going to get any social help anyway.
	So, um, there, there may be a few people who, you know, but I would, I would imagine that, um, uh, you know, if people want to get pregnant, they would probably want to tell their DRO, um, you know, just so that they can get, again, you don't have to tell your DRO anything and you can raise your kids however you want.
	It's just that the negative costs are going to accrue to you.
	And also not just the negative costs, but the risks, right?
	So we're just talking about maybe it's 20 times more expensive to insure a traumatized kid, so four times more expensive to educate him.
	But the kid, of course, if the kid does something that's really bad, like tortures somebody else's house, then the parents would be on the hook.
	I mean, no, the insurance wouldn't cover that.
	There would be a very – I mean, they're very strict spending cap on what you would be insured for if your kid was some true nut job.
	And so the risks would all accrue to – Now, and we know that most abusive parents respond to incentives because they don't hit their children in front of police officers.
	So we know that most abusive parents can restrain their behavior if there's enough incentive.
	And so what we want to do, of course, is build as free a society as we can with as many people with a strong incentive for healthy and well-raised children.
	And that will create a massive set of...
	Motivating factors for parents to become better and better.
	And we do know that parents, even abusive and destructive parents, do respond to incentives.
	And so we really just want their strict financial incentives for parents and for others to have well-behaved and well-raised children.
	And very dangerous negative consequences if they don't.
	And as much social pressure as possible, of course, there.
	And as much of a positive environment for children to tell the truth.
	About what's going on in the family.
	And again, I can't answer all of the questions because there'll be 10,000 entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to do it best.
	But those would be my sort of seat-of-the-pants answers if that helps.
	Great. Thank you so much, Steve.
	You're very welcome, man. Anytime, man.
	I love those questions.
	All right, next up we have Sleepy Salsa.
	Hello. Hey, it's definitely good to be back on with you, Stefan.
	It's been entirely way too long.
	I have missed it. I have been pining.
	I have been stroking my salsa.
	But go on. Well, I mean, I literally have this pool of questions, which is actually, last time I checked, it was over 20.
	And I think maybe if I plug away maybe once a week, which is like the weekly question, I think I might get through it.
	But today, I'll just ask you one question.
	What's the trick you like? Oh, sorry about that.
	We have about three other people online, so we can get like two questions in.
	Yeah, so throw a question in, and you can always circle back if the well runs dry.
	Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, well, at the very least, I'll do one question, and then I'd like to make a statement and whatnot.
	My question is...
	Oh, sorry, there's somebody named Teodar in the chat room who's got a good question, if you can just grab that.
	I don't think he's on. He's just typed it in, but sorry, SS, go ahead.
	Of course. I wanted to know, what were your thoughts about the American readout?
	The American what? The American readout.
	It was this concept that James Wesley Rawls came up with that sounds like a, how shall I say, a more updated version of the Free State Project, if you were familiar with it.
	No, the only Rawls I know is that creepy Harvard guy who came up with the theory of justice, John Rawls.
	But no, so tell me all about it.
	I'm all ears.
	Basically the short version, and for anybody who's curious about this, you just would go to his website, survivalblog.com, and it's somewhere on the left-hand side called the American Readout.
	But it kind of reminded me of the Free State Project in a lot of ways.
	His idea was basically to have a lot of liberty-minded people of various political orientations basically go move and live in, let's see, I think it's Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and then the eastern halves of Washington State, and I believe that is Oregon.
	Not Manhattan?
	No. Just checking.
	Yeah, not exactly. So no good theater, that's what you're saying.
	Anyway, go on. Right, right, right.
	And not exactly, you know, that High Life City stuff.
	I don't know if I can give up Broadway for freedom.
	Anyway, sorry, go on. Well, yeah, exactly.
	And part of the reason, too, was for other reasons as well, including agricultural productivity, the ability to grow food and stuff like that, as well as natural defenses and everything that kind of stems from that.
	So there was a lot of reasons for picking that area.
	And I just wanted to know if, like, here's the thing, too, Stefan.
	He actually specifically mentioned Galt's Gulch from Atlas Shrug and kind of said this is – my intention with this is to basically have a real-life version of at least one Gulch if not several.
	So I just wanted your take on that.
	I think it's great.
	I think it's great. I mean I think that – I wouldn't move there because I thought it would sort of change the state or anything like that.
	But it would be great to be among liberty-minded people.
	I mean – I should say, there's a lot that I would like, I'd find value in being around philosophically minded people, I think I would say.
	You know, there are some people, as there are in almost every community, I mean, there are some people in the libertarian community who are nuts.
	And I say this with the full understanding that there may be people in the libertarian community who think I'm nuts.
	So I'm not pointing any fingers.
	I'm just saying that the sort of liberty alone thing doesn't really have much to do with always being compatible in every way, shape, and form.
	Although, of course, I have found that it's pretty important.
	But it's necessary but not sufficient.
	Yeah. Yeah, I think it's great.
	You know, at the higher end of the scale, there's Doug Casey's Argentinian, I think it's called, and he's got some beautiful stuff out there.
	It takes a little bit more scratch to get your way into that community, but it certainly looks beautiful on the website.
	I think those things are great.
	And it's nice not to have to bite your tongue around people.
	It's nice not to, I don't know, hope they don't ask you awkward questions about foreign policy or your opinion of the drug war.
	When they introduce you to, here's my wonderful brother, the DEA agent, that you just go.
	So, yeah, I think it's great.
	And if people have the flexibility, I think it's a great thing to pursue.
	Well, I mean, when I was looking at it originally, and then I started looking into it a bit more, it kind of reminded me of the Seasteading Institute, except this would be more of a land, actually like the original homesteading type stuff.
	We have like your house and your land to actually be at least a subsistence farmer, if not more than that.
	So I just thought that would be an opportunity that people might want to look into a little bit more.
	And, Safan, I did want to just kind of...
	I'm sorry to interrupt. Somebody has just read about Cafayette last night.
	It makes me wish I had a few million to get in.
	It's not that much. I just want to be clear about that.
	It does not take a few million dollars to get into Casey's horseback riding, golf toting, cigar chomping, Rancho Freedom.
	It's much less than that.
	So we should be really clear.
	But I think the houses you can get for about half a million.
	I'm not saying that's cheap, but it's not a few million.
	And of course, you can...
	Oh yeah, so cheaper lots are about $180k cheaper lots, so talk to them if you're at all interested.
	And of course you can go down and visit and check it out.
	They have regular meetups that you can sign up for where people go down and get tours and stuff like that.
	So if it's of interest to you, then I would strongly recommend it.
	I'm sorry. Go ahead. Oh, yes, sure.
	And I would also like to extend you an offer if you'd like to think about it for a bit.
	There's actually a kind of a startup of sorts that I'm actually a part of.
	That's going to try and host their live stream and podcast over at blogtalkradio.com.
	And I would love to actually interview you for my show that's kind of geared towards more, you know, constitutional patriot, minarchist types.
	But I think a lot of what you talk about would appeal to them.
	And I think we can start off with stuff like the non-aggression principle and then kind of proceed from there.
	But I would absolutely love to have you on.
	Oh, I would be honored and just send me an invitation.
	I would be more than pleased and very happy to help.
	No, I'm going to say help. It's not like charity or anything.
	But yeah, I would be very pleased to just shoot me an email.
	Okay, great. I will do that.
	And thank you, Stefan, for having me on.
	You're very welcome. All right, so a question that was raised in the chat.
	Next Saturday, I will, with most certainty, bump into a girl I've really been interested in.
	I was just wondering if you have some good general advice to make the best out of the night.
	I'm interested in philosophy and economics, so I've never had a girlfriend.
	That's why this is important to me.
	Right. Well, I mean, the first thing, of course, is you don't just bump into a girl you're interested.
	You bump and grind into a girl that you're interested in, and that way you signal your intentions and get yourself a tasty restraining order at the same time.
	But, um... Yeah, I mean it's an interesting question and I've run the gamut of how to approach romantic or potential romantic partners.
	It's interesting. I can sort of give you some of the things that have worked for me or not.
	The friend zone is a challenge.
	The friend zone where you're sort of, hey, that's great.
	Maybe we can go out for friends and coffee and all that sort of stuff.
	That can be a real challenge because you can get stuck in the friend zone.
	But here's my suggestion.
	Look. Let's be shallow for a moment.
	Let's climb our way up from the Mariana Trench bath escape depths that we normally inhabit and talk about some of the shallower aspects that are important, that are valuable.
	Get a haircut if you don't have one.
	You know, shave or trim.
	Obviously, a shower excessively.
	Get some light cologne.
	And, you know, put yourself on as a tasty Christmas-wrapped present so that that's – you know, that says a lot about sort of self-confidence.
	It's sexual presentation.
	You know, the peacock fans out his – His tail and we open up the forehead vents and show the breadth of our frontal lobes or whatever it is that we do.
	I don't know. The mating display of a philosopher is something to do with the dance of the 12 library cards, which is much more salacious than you might think.
	So you want to present a good package, so to speak.
	I think that's very important.
	In conversation...
	I think there's a little bit of mystery is not bad.
	I've tried the approach of, you know, hey, I find you attractive.
	Would you like to go on a date?
	I think that – but remember, the sort of blink thing is that attractiveness or potential attractiveness is usually determined relatively quickly.
	So, you know, recognize that up front.
	Yeah. If she's in conversation with someone, I know it can feel kind of weird.
	There's nothing like the self-consciousness of a philosopher because we're about self-awareness, we're about self-knowledge and monitoring our internal states.
	So the good side of that is freedom from the determinism of defensiveness.
	The bad side of that is a hyper-awareness of self-awareness.
	Potential social discomfort.
	So that's something to be aware of.
	But if she's in conversation with someone else, you can go up and, you know, just say hi and listen for a bit and so on.
	And there may be information there, right?
	So if she's talking about how she's just about to get married to the entire Illinois Nazi Party or some local motorcycle gang, then there may be some evidence of what way to go or another.
	But listening in, I think, can be a really important thing.
	But... Yeah, just ask questions a lot.
	I mean, I find that's very helpful and very important to just ask questions a lot.
	Don't be afraid to be goofy.
	Don't be afraid to be funny, if you like.
	I mean, certainly a sense of humor is a very strong positive sexual signal because it indicates intelligence and it also indicates good humor, which is fairly important for, you know, the original – the sort of basic biological intent of all of that.
	So, yeah. So yeah, I think the presentation is, you know, your presentation is really important.
	And I would go in with a goal, right?
	I mean, the goal is everything.
	If you go in and just try and hope for the best, right, then it probably will get kind of confusing because being attracted to someone is a real distraction.
	I mean, there are a bunch of distractions in conversations with people, right?
	So if the person is intimidating to you, that's a distraction.
	If they're famous, then that's a distraction for you if you care about that.
	And if they're really attractive to you, then that's a distraction.
	So, you know, have a goal. And the goal may be as simple as, you know, I'm going to get a coffee.
	Would you like one as well? And if she says, yes, bring me back one, then she may not be the person for you.
	But if she's like, yeah, that'd be great or whatever, right?
	Then You know, just have a chat.
	But have an intention. And the intention would be get her phone number, get her email address or, you know, a lock of her hair or something like that.
	So you can, you know, build a zombie girlfriend if the real one doesn't work out.
	So those would be my suggestions.
	But remember, I mean, first and fundamentally is that in every romantic transaction, and this is true not just of romantic transactions, you're not just selling, you're also buying.
	You're not just selling, you're also buying.
	So obviously you want her to be attracted to you if you remain attracted to her after getting to know her a little bit better.
	But remember, just like in job interviews, you're not just trying to sell your services, you want the other person to sell the company.
	That indicates confidence.
	And so it's okay to let her work a little bit for...
	You know, to impress you as well.
	Otherwise, you're just a sort of cringing, begging dog who may get some scraps, but usually a little more than that.
	Anyway, I hope that helps. I'm sorry that it's not particularly specific, but those would be my suggestions.
	All right, next up, we have Alec, if you're ready.
	Hi, Alec. You looking for the S? Hello, Alec.
	Can you hear me? Yes, go ahead.
	Hey, hey, how are you doing? Greetings from Germany.
	A couple of months ago I have called in the show and I had a talk with you about property rights.
	And I had an issue about the property rights concerning claiming self-ownership.
	I totally understand. And then I had an issue with a missing link, how I can claim ownership about something in the exterior.
	And your answer was not so satisfying because it was something that I already know.
	And I was thinking and thinking and then I came to...
	A conclusion or a result.
	And that result was that property rights, how we see them, and self-claiming self-ownership over my body and then out of that resulting into creating stuff in the exterior, only makes sense on the pre-assumption when we have As humans, when we give us an exclusive right...
	Well, sorry, sorry, I'm sorry to interrupt you just when you're starting and I want you to hold your thought, but haven't we already established that I'm responsible for the effects of my actions?
	Because you said, Steph, your arguments, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Sorry, but just for those who are listening, the challenge is, can you have a discussion about property rights without recognizing that each person in the debate is claiming ownership?
	For the effects of his or her actions and also accepting ownership of the actions of other people, right?
	So if you're having a debate with someone, then you're saying, well, there are your arguments and there are my arguments.
	There are your words and there are my words.
	And the words, of course, have escaped the person's body, floated into the ear and now have become part of the other person's brain.
	It's an infection of language.
	And so, I don't want to knock you off course, and let's get back to your point, but I think that if you stop and look at, and I'm sure you have, or stop and look at how we are debating, we have already established self-ownership and ownership of the effects of actions.
	You can't have a debate without assuming those things.
	But go ahead. Yeah, no, of course.
	I mean, I totally agree, and it totally makes sense in the realm of you and me and other human beings.
	But I was thinking that this whole Property rights thing would fall apart or doesn't make so much sense or doesn't work really properly when we consider other non-human beings like animals or even material objects like plants or whatever, that they would have the same rights.
	And of course there's a problem of, yeah, well, we can't communicate with them, but then...
	No, it's not just that. Sorry, it's not just that we can't communicate with them.
	It's not just that we can't communicate with them, because let's say there's somebody who's Japanese, and I don't speak Japanese, I can't communicate with him, that doesn't mean that he has no property rights, right?
	Yeah, exactly. Somebody in a coma may have property rights if they've sold a will.
	We have to respect their wishes.
	Somebody who has a do not resuscitate in a hospital is exercising self-ownership even when they're incapacitated.
	So again, I'm sort of using extreme examples.
	But to me, the reason that animals do not have rights is because they cannot think in abstract terms.
	They cannot morally evaluate the results of their actions.
	And they also do not have functional real alternatives to their actions, right?
	So somebody who kills someone for money has alternatives to getting money, right?
	They can get a job, they can beg, they can whatever, right?
	But a lion who's in the Serengeti hunting a gazelle Well, they don't have the capacity to go to work, save up some money, and get a gazelle shank from Loblaws, right?
	And so the fact that they cannot compare their actions to a moral ideal, and they also cannot really – they do not have functional alternatives.
	In the absence of alternatives, there's no such thing as morality.
	So those would be my, you know, very, very brief – I know it's a big topic, but those would be sort of brief ideas about that, but go ahead.
	Yeah. Yeah, but it's based on a whole bunch of pre-assumptions.
	And what are those? Well, I mean, first of all, we cannot get out of our subjective viewpoint.
	I mean, how we see that line in the Serengeti might be very, very false and very wrong, how that actually is.
	I mean, and also we can never...
	I'm sorry, how would we know that?
	Get rid of...
	What? Well, so you're saying that it would be wrong, but how?
	I mean, I'm just pointing out that we cannot talk for the lion.
	No, no, no, but you can't fear uncertainty and doubt without a follow-through or a standard, right?
	So if there's something that I'm missing in my evaluation of the lion, do you believe that lions have the capacity for abstract language?
	Well, that's the thing.
	I don't know and I can't prove it, but only because I don't know and I can't prove it doesn't mean that they don't have that capacity.
	You know what I mean? I mean, I sort of understand.
	I could not prove that you are a subjective being.
	And only because, I mean, I can assume it that you are.
	I hope you are. Sorry, let's go back to the lions.
	So, okay, so obviously you and I can establish that we have the capacity for abstract language because that's what we're using at the moment, right?
	So there's empirical evidence, there's subjective evidence for our capacity.
	It doesn't mean we're correct, but it means that we have the capacity for abstract language, right?
	Yes. For philosophy.
	And so that we can establish because we use it.
	And we can establish that algae doesn't.
	Algae, I think, let's start with algae, right?
	Algae does not have the capacity for abstract language.
	We will accept that, right?
	Who's LG? Oh, sorry.
	Moss or plankton.
	Let's say plankton. Trill, right?
	An amoeba does not have the capacity for abstract language, right?
	Well, yeah, but we can't say that, right?
	Yes, we can. We can only presume that it's like that, but we can't definitely say it.
	How can we say that? We can, because the capacity for abstract language requires a brain, and a single-celled organism does not have I mean, it's like saying, does an amoeba have legs?
	Well, no. And does an amoeba have a brain that can support?
	I don't even know if an amoeba has a brain.
	I don't think it does. But, you know, can an amoeba, does it have a brain that can even potentially support abstract language?
	Well, no. So there's a physical characteristic that is necessary.
	See, that's what I mean. You're already assuming that in order to think, you need a brain.
	But what we can't say for sure, there might be beings there which they don't need a brain to think.
	I mean, it's very far-fetched.
	No, come on. Tell me, why are you reaching so far with this?
	You understand that this kind of discredits philosophy if you leave yourself open to these possibilities?
	So you're saying that there's...
	It's like saying that there could be a being that has legs that has no legs.
	No! There can't be a being that has legs that has no legs.
	Abstract thought is the result of a highly evolved brain.
	And if a being...
	Okay, can we at least accept that a stone does not have the capacity for language?
	Come on. I know you're German.
	I know you come from radical skepticism.
	You can't have a conversation with a rock.
	At least let's set the bar that low.
	No, I mean, I would say yes, and of course, I would say, but I was...
	I would say, do you say, don't give me these weasel words, do you say yes to the fact that you cannot have a conversation with the pebble?
	Inside, I mean, inside of this discussion of maybe considering that human beings are not the only sentient communicating beings on the planet...
	No, I never said that. I never said that human beings were the only sentient communicating beings.
	I have no doubt...
	That in the hundred billion stars in the hundred billion galaxies scattered around the universe, that there are other beings with the capacity for abstract language.
	I have no doubt about that whatsoever.
	Statistically, the odds that we're the only one is so close to zero that it might as well be zero.
	Yeah. But can we at least accept that you cannot have a philosophical conversation with a stone, that when Hamlet is speaking to the skull of Jurek, that it would be really funny if Jurek answered back, right?
	Well, it would. And because it would be absurd.
	Because a skull has no brain in it.
	And therefore, bone, you cannot have a conversation with a skull, right?
	Yeah. I mean, yeah, well, I mean, we would project our thoughts there, right?
	No, no, no, no, no!
	Can you have a conversation with a stone, yes or no?
	I'll have to try it. I don't know.
	I never tried it. Did you?
	Okay, I think we're going to have to move on then because if we can't get to that level of certainty, then there's nothing.
	If we can't build something on rock, then we're just launching out of abstractions and then you can change the base at any time.
	So if we can't get to empiricism to the point where, like you'll accept the empirical reality of all the technology that allows us to talk, but the biological reality of the fact that a stone is not alive and a stone does not have a brain Or a circulatory system or a larynx to speak with or anything like that.
	If you're fundamentally not willing to grant that there's a distinction between animate and inanimate, then I don't see how we can go further in the discussion.
	I can't jump over that, right?
	Because then wherever we go, anything could change going behind, right?
	Yeah, okay. Yeah, cool.
	Yeah, it's true. Yeah, okay.
	I totally agree on that one, yeah.
	My question is, why is that hard?
	No, look, why is it hard to agree on that basic biological distinction, right?
	I mean emotion – because intellectually it's not, right?
	Intellectually it's not – I mean to say it may be possible to have a philosophical conversation with a rock is – I mean even if we say that's Dwayne whatever his name is, that's not hard to say from a scientific factual standpoint or from a philosophical standpoint.
	So it must be that it's emotionally difficult for you, right?
	Right. Yeah, yeah, I mean, exactly.
	I mean, I wanted to just point out actually the extreme subjectivity and especially...
	I mean, it might well happen.
	I mean, okay, I've got a friend, for example, right?
	And he landed in the loony bin.
	And he landed in the loony bin because suddenly the entire world, plants, rocks, and everything which we can't have, like, communications or, like, conversations with, started to talk with him.
	Obviously, he was also misusing some psychiatric drugs very hardly.
	But... But still, I mean, just that the brain, our brain has this capacity to interpretate the information which is around in such a completely different way.
	I dream every night that I can fly.
	That doesn't mean that it's possible for me to fly when I'm not dreaming.
	I mean, the subjective creativity of the brain is legendary and stunning.
	And this is why I kind of, I mean, you get to take an LSD trip every time you fall asleep.
	So I don't know why people need drugs.
	So we know that the brain has the capacity to animate an entire world with alternate physics down to the last detail.
	I mean if you ever do lucid dreaming or conscious dreaming and you try and take control of your dreams, you can actually turn around and look and see every detail of a world, of an entire city, of a jungle, every leaf, every drip of the branches, the stick insects climbing up the wet tree trunks, the coconuts trembling from the top of the palm trees.
	The clouds of the sky, every pixel, so to speak, is generated dynamically by the mind while your eyes are closed.
	And you not only, I mean, there's tactile, there's smell, there's taste.
	People can have orgasms having sex with fantasy.
	I mean, it's incredible what the mind can do in terms of its fertility and creativity.
	I mean, that I am entirely in agreement with you there.
	But, of course, if people damage the barrier between fantasy and reality, then these capacities of the mind spill over into waking life.
	I'm talking about this at the moment.
	I'm really fascinated watching my daughter go through the process of differentiating fantasy from reality.
	It's a lot of work, and it takes a lot of combing over, but she's really good at it.
	She knows the difference between It's not real, but it's a fun story versus, you know, it's possible versus it's real.
	And so she knows that a man who doesn't talk can talk.
	Just because he hasn't talked yet doesn't mean that he can't talk.
	But she knows that if we went to go and see the movie Chipwrecked, With the chipmunks, these talking rats with bouffants on the tail.
	And she knows that they don't really talk in real life, that it's a fun story.
	And she knows about Santa Claus, but she knows that Santa doesn't fly through the skies with reindeer at Mach 12.
	It's a fun story. And so she is very clear on the differentiation between that.
	And I've been asking her for over a year now about her dreams and what she dreams about, and she understands the difference between dreams and waking reality.
	So she's got all this down at two and a half to three years old pretty well.
	She doesn't make mistakes in this area.
	And even tougher things like unicorns, right?
	Well, she's never seen a horse with a horn on its head, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be there, right?
	Because it's not self-contradictory property.
	But she's still sort of pretty clear that if she's only ever seen it on TV and if they can do magical things on TV, they're probably not real.
	So that kind of stuff.
	So yeah, I mean I have no doubt that people who damage the barrier between fantasy and reality can get some pretty powerful delusions.
	But of course they do remain delusions.
	Obviously the plants and the rocks are not talking to the fellow because they can't do that.
	But he is suffering from waking dreams.
	Again, I'm just talking about this from a purely amateur standpoint.
	But given that we have that capacity in the mind already, the fact that it happens when people are awake is not revolutionary because it happens every day when they're sleeping anyway.
	Yeah.
	Let's go in a slightly other direction, but still with self-ownership.
	What do you think about possessions?
	I mean, in the animal world, I just recently read some stuff about rabies and other parasites.
	Rabies, everyone is familiar, but there's like this other parasite which goes into the brain of an ant and It's some parasite which wants to get into the stomach of a cow or another animal.
	So it starts with an ant.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Yeah, so it starts with this ant and it makes this ant to walk every night onto the end of a grasshound.
	And during the day, the ant would just go...
	Oh, to get eaten by the cow, right.
	Exactly. And then it gets eaten by the cow, then it develops like babies in the cow's stomach, then it gets shitten out, and then there's like this cycle of going back to the ant.
	Right. So...
	I can't imagine that the ant colony's discussions about free will versus determinism must just be scintillating.
	But anyway, go on. Yeah.
	So, how about with human beings, right?
	I mean, there are like cases of where you could say that there is a person possessed, you know, possessed by the devil or whatever, or possessed by, I don't know what, by money.
	No, no, I'm sorry. I'm not sure how you, you just kind of seem to slip that in there, right?
	No, no, no. I would not say that there are times when people are possessed by the devil.
	Of course, but that was obviously when someone was infected by some parasite which takes over the control by the brain and then it's difficult to say, right?
	No, it could be epilepsy. It could also be people faking it, right?
	Yeah, of course. But what do you do with a person who is, let's say, in epilepsy or is splattering spit everywhere and obviously totally out of mind, eyes looking right and left?
	I'm not sure what you mean by when you say what do you do with them.
	Tell me what you mean by that.
	Yeah, I mean, do you still respect their...
	I mean, can you still acknowledge them as their...
	that they have their property rights, their self-ownership?
	No, I would say not.
	I mean, we recognize...
	So if I have an epileptic attack and I've never had one before...
	And I reach out with my – I have a spasm and my hand goes out and hits you in the face.
	You can obviously be upset, but you can't sue me for assault, right?
	Because I just – I had a – I have a – there was a brain problem, right?
	I mean I was misfiring all cylinders.
	So we recognize that involuntary movements are not – Not subject to conscious control.
	Conscious control may be bypassed at that time.
	Sleepwalkers, right? Somebody who's sleepwalking is diminished capacity for sure.
	Yeah, there are certainly circumstances under which there is diminished capacity.
	I have no problem with that.
	Just this whole thing makes me think a lot.
	My suggestion would be that...
	I think you're missing the point of philosophy and I apologize for putting it that way and maybe you'll think I'm full of shit when I'm done, but I'll tell you why.
	Look, there are certain people who, when presented with a solution, will immediately try to find the exception.
	I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but there is a point where it becomes absurd and also self-paralyzing and paralyzing to others.
	So it's like, I don't know, you say something about the tensions between blacks and whites in America, and then somebody says, well, don't forget, there are people who are half black and half white.
	Yeah, okay, that's true, so there are people who are half black and half white.
	Well, remember, there are people who are five-eighths black and only three-eighths white.
	Yeah, okay, that's... And then there are people who are 71, 72nds black, and, you know, like, they just keep slicing and dicing to the point where it's like, what was I talking about again, you know?
	Yeah. And while it's – everything that they're saying is true, you actually can't make any progress because you end up splitting the atom and splitting the atom until you simply can't – you can't do anything, right? You can't actually – every term has to be defined.
	Everything has to be a possibility and you can't actually make any forward progress.
	Right? And I think that's a step up from where you are, though, because you're hesitant to say you can't talk with a rock as an objective fact.
	And so I think your interest in philosophy and consistency is admirable and fantastic, but you've got to screw your courage to the sticking point and jump over the chasm of radical skepticism.
	Because otherwise, you're actually never going to end up solving problems.
	All you're going to do is confuse yourself and confuse other people.
	And that's bad for philosophy as a whole.
	Because philosophy is about solving problems.
	And look, if biologists can classify animals despite each animal's distinctive – each individual animal's distinctive difference, then we can do some categorizations too with stuff that's far more clear than – I mean if you took a rock to a biology conference and said, I don't know, is this a mammal or a reptile or a fish or – they'd all be like, what the hell is wrong with this guy?
	It's a fucking rock.
	You would be viewed as like, they'd call security.
	Right? So if biologists can manage it, and if my local grocery store can manage to categorize things, Well, this is a different shaped cereal.
	It still goes in the cereal aisle.
	Well, this cereal has sugar.
	It still goes in the cereal aisle.
	Well, this cereal you put hot water in, not cold milk, still goes in the cereal aisle.
	If a grocery store manager can categorize his stuff Then we've got to be able to at least rise to the level of a grocery store manager or somebody who's, you know, studied six or seven minutes of biology.
	And so just do the classifications.
	I know that in certain circles, if ever you express certainty, you're considered to be naive, right?
	Naive realism. Or, you know, you just don't understand the complexities of the...
	Of the environment and therefore you can't – like I get this all the time.
	I talk about logic and people say, well, there are these different systems of logic and these different systems of logic can all propose contradictory things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And you ask them to process a sort of simple statement like two and two make four and tell me, okay, under what system of logic is that not true?
	And they can't answer it. I mean, so there's this feeling that if you have some certainty about something, then you're missing something very important, that you are clinging on to certainty as a result of some psychological problem rather than You know, if biologists can do it and grocery store clerks can do it, and if I ask my daughter, who's three, to organize the snowballs by size or to tell me the difference between dirt and ice, she can do that, no problem.
	Lickety split, straight off, like a cannon, right out of the gate.
	And so, you know, we're just asking, can we rise to the epistemological level of a three-year-old as philosophers?
	That, to me, would be very important.
	And that's not a matter of immaturity.
	I think that's just a matter of rational acceptance.
	Yep. I would just add that philosophy is not only there to solve problems, but also to raise questions and to ask questions, right?
	Yeah, I think you just did it again.
	I mean, that's kind of an insulting thing to say, right?
	Of course it's there to ask questions, but the purpose of asking questions is to have an answer.
	Yeah. Not necessarily.
	Just quickly, it's also there to point out other ways of seeing things, right?
	And that's the only reason why I went down that road of entire skepticism, because I wanted to see it in a different light.
	Even so, I know that it is mere impossible to get...
	Okay, so if I say a one-blooded animal is a mammal, what is the different light that we can see that definition in?
	Sorry again, what was that? A warm-blooded animal is a mammal.
	What is the different light that a biologist would see that in?
	With recognizing that that is maybe also a feeling, sentient, emotional, communicating being who deserves the same property rights than humans.
	No, that would not be a biologist, that would be a philosopher, right?
	Because the rights question is not dealt with in biology.
	Yes. Two plus two is four.
	What's another way of seeing that?
	What's another light you can see that in?
	Well, yeah, I don't know.
	Well, no, but that's important, right?
	So you want to... I mean, I agree with seeing stuff in other lights and creativity and new ways of looking at things.
	I mean, okay, I can actually answer that.
	I mean, I can say that is like...
	I mean, two plus two is four, right?
	Okay, I can see that. But like when I see now it's me and my girlfriend and then...
	I'm making two babies and then they make...
	I don't know. I mean, if I give those numbers something very specifically, it changes right away, right?
	I mean, two plus two is just an abstraction.
	Well, sure. I mean, the philosophy deals with abstractions, right?
	So the moment you take an abstraction and turn it personal, you can say, well, me and my girlfriend and two children make a family, not the number four.
	We make the number four and we make a family.
	Is that sort of what you mean?
	Yeah. Yeah, kind of, kind of.
	Yeah, so I can understand that, but these are still true-false statements.
	You know, my girlfriend and I and two babies do not make a flock of seagulls, right, as human beings, right?
	So they're still very sort of strict things.
	Anyway, I sort of am going to move on if we don't mind, because I'm sure we're going to board the hell out of everyone else, but thanks for the call.
	It was certainly interesting. Yeah, thanks also to listening me out.
	All right. All right, Chris, you're up next.
	Thank you, James. Good morning, Stefan.
	How are you? Thanks again for taking my call.
	It's my pleasure. That's what I'm here for.
	Hey, to follow up, I called last weekend and spoke to you about an issue with my sister and my niece.
	Oh, yeah, yeah. Right, and I've done a lot of thinking and reading and research since last weekend regarding that, and I did a little introspection as well and discovered that part of, at least for me, what I believe, part of what helped me get beyond some of the damage done by the destruction of our family When we were young,
	because my sister and I both did grow up in the same house and have very similar upbringings, was the decision I made on my own to basically forgive.
	And I didn't really tell anybody in my nuclear family about that decision, but I determined that if I held on to the anger, the frustration, the hurt, the pain, that it would likely stunt my ability to go beyond it as an adult,
	and I didn't want that to happen. So, I did some looking around with the podcast on the site, and forgiveness, I didn't see anything, and perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see anything that was a little more concrete or substantial about forgiveness,
	and I wanted to get your take on the importance, or lack thereof, of forgiveness in healing emotionally and growing beyond, growing as an adult and moving on to potentially healthier relationships.
	Right, right. It's a great question.
	I do have actually a podcast called The Philosophy of Forgiveness.
	So I'll just touch on this briefly here if people want to...
	If anybody knows the...
	If you go to the podcast page, there's a little search thing there.
	Just type in forgiveness or whatever.
	I'm sure you'll be able to find it. It's pretty early on.
	Well, to me, there are emotional states that arise from within us.
	I mean, I'm hungry, right?
	This is not somebody's forced on me, but it's not something that's forced on me by someone else, pretty much, right?
	I mean, there's something that arises from my own...
	Or if I forget something and I'm like, oh man, I forgot something, I'm so frustrated, that's something that arises from within me.
	But there are other emotional states that are relational.
	I'm not saying it's sort of a black and white thing, but there are other emotional states that are relational.
	So I can't will myself...
	To find a food tasty that I find repulsive.
	And I cannot will myself to love someone whose values are ghastly, horrible, immoral, destructive, abusive, or whatever.
	And so the emotional states which are elicited by the actions of other people Are the ones I think that I focus on when I talk about relationships.
	Because I think we're given a lot of magical thinking in society, which is around you can will these states.
	You can make yourself fall in love with someone.
	You can make yourself forgive someone.
	And my argument is that it's not the case.
	I think that forgiveness is something that is elicited in us by the actions of other people.
	Now, I mean, I understand.
	So people misuse this, right?
	And they say, well, you made me angry.
	And they take no responsibility for their own processing of reality, and they blame everyone else for their emotional states.
	And so, again, I'm not saying it's a black and white issue and it's complex, but...
	So something like love, sustainable love, is something where it's my admiration for the virtuous actions of another person.
	Now, how do I prepare myself to fall in love in a healthy way?
	Well, I develop virtuous actions on my own, right?
	So that I end up not being attracted to nasty people, but being attracted to healthy and good and virtuous people.
	So the things that I can do to sort of ready myself for that.
	But to me, if somebody wrongs me...
	It's my responsibility to say, I'm hurt.
	I'm upset. I'm not sure exactly why, but this happened and this happened and then I felt this way and let's talk about it.
	And if in the conversation they accept that they wronged me in some manner, then it's not my job to forgive them.
	It is their job to earn my forgiveness.
	Forgiveness is a kind of currency.
	Love is a kind of currency.
	And you can give it away if you want, but it just lowers the value of your currency.
	And so it's up to other people to earn my respect.
	Just as it's up to me to earn other people's respect.
	I mean, nobody has to respect anything that I'm saying or believe anything that I'm saying.
	I have to earn that through, you know, hopefully consistently rational behavior.
	And so when it comes to things like love and forgiveness, I am responsible for Preparing myself for these states, right?
	So to be open to somebody's restitution if they've wronged me rather than just hold a grudge and use it to have power over them.
	So it's up to me to be open to that, but forgiveness is not to me something that you just will onto other people.
	Now, I think what you're talking about is more along the lines of you have to forgive people in order to move on.
	You have to forgive people in order to let go.
	You have to forgive people so that you don't stew in anger and hatred for the rest of your life.
	I would agree with you.
	I would just use a different word than forgiveness.
	The word that I would use is closure.
	I think in order to have peace about your relationships, you need to have closure about those relationships.
	Closure to me is certainty.
	Is certainty. And so if you've been – if a friend wrongs me or I feel upset and we talk about it and he accepts that he sort of wronged me but then he never makes any restitution or he repeats the behavior, then I can do it again a number of times.
	But if that behavior doesn't change, then I'm going to lose my desire to have that person as a friend.
	I obviously don't want to sit there and stew in anger and hatred and so on, but when I've experienced, I don't have any proof for this, but I've experienced that when I achieve certainty or when I reach certainty about a relationship, I simply don't have those feelings nearly as much anymore.
	So I have certainty about my family of origin, and I don't sit there every day stewing in hatred or revenge or bitterness or whatever frustration about all of that because I've just accepted it.
	I have just accepted that these people are the way that they are.
	I am the way that I am.
	And there's not compatibility there that's going to be productive pretty much for either party.
	And so for me, it's around coming to a rational and empirical certainty about the nature of the relationship.
	That is what allows me to be free of past relationships.
	I don't believe that forgiveness is necessary because for me...
	If I forgive people who've made no restitution and then I use the same word for people who've made restitution, then I'm using the same words to describe bad behavior.
	In other words, people who don't make restitution for the wrongs they've done me.
	I'm using the same word to describe bad behavior that I'm using to describe good behavior, which is people who've done wrong and made restitution.
	And I can't...
	You know, as a hopefully clear-headed thinker, I cannot use the same word to describe bad behavior as I used to describe good behavior.
	But the word closure, I think, or certainty or knowledge, as certain as you can get about things, to me, gives me a lot of freedom and does not require me to use the same word to describe both good and bad behavior.
	Okay, I can understand that.
	A difference of word, because I agree, you know...
	Though in the past I have personally used the same word to describe when someone said, hey, you know what, I did this to you and I was pretty screwed up and I apologize.
	At least they did make a cursory effort to acknowledge the wrong and to make it right in some small way, versus others who have not.
	So yeah, I can understand that.
	And the reason I ask, because I saw a lot of follow-up questions in the chat, which I thought were really cool, Was that I'm trying to, again, with my sister in particular, help her move to a similar state where, you know, it doesn't matter.
	I had absolutely no control as a child over what my father did, what my mother did, or whatever.
	But I don't have to allow myself to remain victimized by it.
	And I'm trying to help her move to that same state of plane.
	So I was just looking for, you know, tidbits in your explanation or discussion there that I could use.
	Do you mean sort of how to avoid victimization?
	Um... Well, I suppose, but let me lay it out.
	Like, I made a choice to not be victimized by what happened.
	And without making that choice, I think I would be in a much, much worse place mentally.
	Sorry, and I don't mean to interrupt you.
	I just want to make sure that I'm clear about what you're saying.
	Do you mean that you were victimized?
	Because if you were victimized in the past, you can't make the choice to not be victimized because it's already happened, right?
	Well, no, you're right.
	What I mean is to allow that to continue.
	The ill effects of that, I'm talking about making a conscious choice to not allow that to still affect me negatively as an adult so that I can move on and have productive and healthy and loving relationships.
	And how did you do that?
	You know what?
	Sadly, I don't really have an answer other than I just determined that if I allowed—I took responsibility and ownership of my future, and I knew that in order to do that, I had to let go of this stuff in the past that would otherwise hold me back.
	And I determined that my dad was an asshole.
	My dad took off. He didn't want anything to do with me.
	That was his choice, but I don't have to be the same way as a father, and so I'm not.
	I didn't develop trust issues because I knew that if I wanted people to trust me, I had to be A, trustworthy, and be willing to trust people in return.
	And people who screw my trust, well, sorry, they're not trustworthy, so I don't trust them.
	And it was just a growing process that I made, but ultimately it came down to a personal choice to say, hey, you know, I can remain a victim of this or I can develop myself into, you know, not allow the ill effects of that to continue to shape how my relationships develop as an adult.
	Right. Right. So if I can paraphrase, it's sort of like, if you keep building a sandcastle at low tide, and then the tide comes in and washes it away, and you want to keep that sandcastle, then you're like, okay, you accept.
	You understand they're getting your sandcastle knocked over every day.
	You say, okay, well, the tide's going to come in and knock over my sandcastle, so I'm going to move where I built it, because I accept that as a reality.
	I'm just going to have to move it, right? Right.
	That's pretty spot on.
	I wish I had that recorded so I could play that for my sister.
	Don't worry. It'll come out as a show.
	But that to me is – but that's closure, right?
	Which is to say, well, this person is simply not capable.
	Or they've proven that whether it's, you know, conscious or not, who knows, right?
	But, you know, there's a functional incapacity for that person to behave in a decent way, in a way that is safe for me, that it is productive and positive and makes me feel good.
	And so, yeah, and I think also for me, closure has something to do with recognizing when restitution becomes impossible, right?
	Because I think it's really bad to stay in relationships where there's been significant wrong but restitution is impossible.
	This is a guarantee for frustration.
	Because, like, so, you know, one of the questions I asked about my own history was I said, okay, well, is there anything, say, that my parents could do that would make me accept what happened to me as a child?
	Right? Because, I mean, that's what restitution is.
	It's making whole. It's making things okay, right?
	And, you know, so if somebody puts a dent in my car, then they have to fix the dent in my car, you know, give me maybe a couple of hundred bucks for my trouble, and then I'm okay.
	Like, I'm not, restitution, it's too much restitution if you would then want them to knock your car again because they gave you a million dollars.
	That's too much restitution, right?
	Restitution is that balancing point where it's like, okay, I accept what happened.
	I don't really want it to happen again because it wasn't great, but I'm okay with the fact that it happened because restitution has been made.
	It's sort of a, just the right amount.
	It's a delicate sort of balance.
	But for me, when restitution became impossible, then certainty about the relationship became clear for me.
	And not only was restitution impossible even if people had wanted to give it to me, but there was no indication that people wanted to give it to me, right?
	And so that gave me some sort of very clear certainty about the relationship and where it was heading.
	And once you have that certainty, then you can make, I think, a more clear and rational decision about whether it's worth it for you.
	Indeed. Hey, thanks again for taking my call.
	I really appreciate the input.
	You're very welcome. And I had another thought that I was...
	It was popping around in my head.
	I thought it was really good, but I'm not sure.
	Maybe it'll come back before the end of the show.
	But yes, it's a great question.
	It's a great question. I think passivity is an important thing in relationships.
	You know, I think particularly people who've been victimized, we feel that we have to work really hard on our relationships.
	And I find that it's really important to not do that at times.
	Certainly not to do that with regards to other people's actions.
	You know, you can just sit back, wait and see.
	I think it's really important. Oh yeah, I remember what I was going to say.
	So people in relationships will often view hurt or upset as a negative.
	And I have actually found that to be not true in my good relationships.
	In my good relationships, the fact that I will hurt other people or that they will hurt me from time to time...
	It's not a negative. It, in fact, can be a positive because it gives great opportunity for growth and self-knowledge.
	And it also gives great opportunity for an increase in trust.
	So if somebody's never hurt you, then I guess you trust them, but that trust has never been tested.
	But if somebody's hurt you and then has apologized and made restitution, then your trust is actually, rather than sort of zero or one, it's plus ten.
	Right now, if they hurt you and they don't make, then it goes into the negatives.
	But your relationship can get stronger through conflict.
	It can get stronger through bringing hurt if the other person does the right thing or if you do the right thing when you hurt someone.
	So rather than seeing relationship problems or conflicts or hurt as an automatic negative, which is sort of how I was raised, I actually now view conflict as an interesting potential, a positive potential for further intimacy, self-knowledge, and trust in the other person.
	Thanks again, Steph. That's it for me, and I look forward to the rest of the show.
	Thank you again. Alright, thanks, man.
	Alright, Wayne, you're up.
	Thanks for waiting. You are waning?
	I'm waxing. Go on. Okay, first thing I was wondering was, in most of your podcasts, you seem to be kind of fixated on the state of the United States, and fixated on their Political situation.
	You're living in Ontario, right?
	Yes. Hold Canadian citizenship, right?
	Yeah. You're not worried about things at home?
	Am I not worried about things at home?
	Yeah. Well, no, I don't think that's the case.
	Sorry, I've just started up doing a show with the head of Mises Canada where we're going to be discussing more Canadian issues.
	But yeah, no, I mean, there's certainly things to be concerned about here in Canada, for sure.
	Of course, if you're in Canada, perhaps you are, you know that...
	Right, right. Yeah, I mean we have a – we are sort of like a heron on the back of the hippo called the United States.
	So what happens to the US has a significant impact on Canada, although Canada is certainly moving away from dependence on trade with the US for obvious reasons.
	Like Robin Williams put it, we're the loft party – or we're the loft apartment above a really cool party.
	Right. But of course, it's demographics and it's generosity.
	So if most of my listeners are in the U.S. and most of my donations come from the U.S., well, it's a case of follow the money.
	So I certainly – yeah, I think Canada is very interesting.
	I think there's a lot to learn about.
	You know, in Canada, you know, there's this myth that Canada is socialist and America is more free market.
	And in many ways, that's just not true.
	It's just not true at all.
	Even if you discount the whole military-industrial complex, which runs so much of American politics and economics, Canadian taxes can be as low, if not lower, than the U.S. taxes.
	And there's a lot more freedoms.
	There's lower interprovincial trade barriers in many ways than there are interstate trade barriers.
	So Canada has a bit more of a Focus on free trade.
	Environmentalism is not quite as strong a movement here as it is in the U.S. and has a little less political clout and is able to block less stuff.
	So, yeah, I mean, I think Canada is fascinating and I've sort of been meaning for a while to make the case for Canada because people say, why do you live in Canada?
	Well, there's a lot of good reasons to live in Canada relative to other tax forms.
	So, yeah, I think it's a point well taken and I will certainly try to focus more on Canadian content.
	Okay, well, the The primary motive I had for asking you that was we do have a growing situation here in Ontario that has lately been affecting me a whole lot personally, and I just wanted to get your opinion on this.
	There's a fellow by the name of Ian Thompson from Port Colborne, which is actually just a little bit, I guess, southwest of me, That is actually still being tried in our courts because he defended himself and his homestead against a group of teenagers that were firebombing him.
	He actually has video cameras, you know, like security cameras that have actual footage of these kids firebombing his house.
	He's a local firearms instructor.
	He went and got a revolver and fired a couple of shots in the air and the kids ran off.
	The day was saved.
	But now he's up on charges for not properly storing firearms.
	Did the kids get charged?
	No. And it's going, what?
	We had a Vietnamese fellow in Toronto get charged with kidnapping After he apprehended, a repeat shoplifter held him in his store until the police could arrive.
	Right. I remember seeing that one in the news.
	And myself, I, as I said, live in St.
	Catharines, moved down here in 93, and between 1994 and Saturday, just past Saturday, I have been assaulted, like physically attacked by 12 times.
	By who? By aggressive panhandlers and robbed on December 5th when I was in Niagara Falls, New York at gunpoint.
	Holy... And I'm thinking, you know, what the hell are we allowed to do to defend ourselves anymore?
	I'm beginning to get a little fed up with this.
	Right, right.
	Well, I mean...
	I think that, you know, firing shots in the air is tricky, right?
	Because you don't know where the hell they're going to land.
	And so that's, you know, that's a challenge.
	Again, I don't know the situation.
	It was published as firing warning shots.
	He actually fired them into the ground.
	Oh, he fired them into the ground.
	Okay, okay. Right, right.
	Well, my guess would be, look, we all know that there's a whole bunch of different legal systems in the world.
	I mean, this is certainly the case in Canada, and I'm sorry to be annoying, but I'm going to quote a U.S. example simply because it was mentioned by Harry Brown.
	There was some congressman who was really big on the war on drugs, right?
	Fight the war on drugs and so on, and death penalty for drug dealers and all this sort of stuff.
	And then his own son was apprehended selling cocaine to a friend of his, and what did the Congressman do?
	Well, he immediately used all of his political clout to keep his son out of jail to attempt to get him into rehab.
	And he strenuously argued for the fact that his son was helpless in the face of his addiction and needed help and that jailing him would be the worst thing to do.
	I mean, this is natural. It's inevitable.
	It's inevitable. You know, why are people so...
	Everyone's created equal, except some are more equal than others.
	Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, why is it that people find it so easy to get all fired up about immigration?
	Because they are illegal immigrants, right?
	I mean, because they don't know these people, really.
	I mean, that's sort of natural.
	And if you look at the disparities in black-white sentencing in the U.S. and other places, I mean, it's just hideous.
	The question to me would always be, okay, well, who are these teenagers?
	And do these teenagers have parents who have political clout?
	Or are they part of a sort of sympathetic group that the media could spin, right?
	Because these kinds of things very often, I think, are politically motivated.
	And people sort of say, okay, well, if I don't prosecute this, what's going to happen?
	Or if I do prosecute this, what's going to happen?
	Certainly launching firebombs at someone's house is a criminal offense.
	And so if people weren't prosecuted, It's because there's political connections that are going on.
	I believe they were charged with public mischief and given the usual slap on the wrist that young offenders get.
	Right, right.
	I think it was literally an instance of teenagers with too much time on their hands getting bored and just trying to look for something to give their life a thrill.
	Or at least that's what it appears like.
	I don't know everything because it's still in the courts and they can't publish it all.
	Right. Now, of course, I mean, the government doesn't particularly want citizens to get self-sufficient in this area?
	Oh, of course not. Right, I mean, they want you to phone 911 and wait for the 20 minutes for nothing to happen rather than deal with it yourself because there's a lot of paperwork then.
	Yeah, like according to what they've actually published, one of the lawyers has stated that it should have taken this fellow a full 60 seconds to get Both retrieve the firearm and then go to the separate location where the ammunition should have been stored.
	And when your house is on fire, a full 60 seconds will kill you.
	Right, and so there's this old idea, right?
	You can't take the law into your own hands, right?
	That's the big statement.
	You can't take the law. You have to rely on the professionals.
	Self-defense has become something that you need to outsource to other people.
	I mean, police take the law into their own hands all the time.
	This is one of the reasons I want to move to the U.S. Southwest, particularly Arizona and or New Mexico.
	You'll certainly get some more latitude there from what I understand about that sort of stuff.
	There is only one state in the Union now that you still are required to have a concealed carry permit.
	Everywhere else you can carry concealed, no problem.
	In Illinois, forget it.
	That is the home of Al Capone.
	Yeah, I guess so. Maybe that's got something to do with it, but...
	Yeah, so, I mean, I sympathize.
	Yeah, no, I sympathize.
	You know, people have this belief, you know, that...
	And I credit a libertarian legal theorist with giving me this insight.
	But people have this belief that there's these magic words that are written down.
	And the judges, they must follow that.
	If you can make the case, if you can show the law, then the judges are sort of like robots.
	Or it's like a magic spell that controls people.
	But the case is not the case.
	And people who've had legal dealings with it tell me consistently.
	It doesn't matter what you say.
	It's random in there.
	It's a government of laws and not of men.
	Well, the laws don't enforce themselves.
	It's only and forever a government of men.
	And so the fact that there's seemingly random stuff coming out that's contrary to the law, to me, is kind of entirely to be expected.
	I mean, how could it be different?
	When I was operating my own business, I used to run a paintball store here in St.
	Catharines. And there was a Jamaican gang that moved into the business next door.
	And the night that there was a murder committed in there and a running gunfight up Wallen Avenue, I'm the guy that called the cops.
	And suddenly I got death threats.
	Well, my customers got death threats.
	I went three months with no customers.
	And well, you know, a small business in Canada, three months with no customers.
	You haven't got any business.
	Oh, yeah. And I lost everything.
	And according to our wonderful political system, there is sweet FA I can do about it.
	Right. Yeah.
	And I mean, I won't bore you with my own experiences in this area, but I mean, the only people who seem to have faith in the law are those people who've never tried to use it.
	Yeah. I mean, of course, half the world is lawless anyway.
	I mean, the black and gray market economy where people have no access to contract law is half the world's workers are stuck in this extrajudicial – what's that word you really can't say when you're drunk?
	Not that I'm drunk. But yeah, I think it's by 2020, two-thirds of the world's workers are going to be in the gray market or the black market.
	And, of course, according to all status theories, there should be nothing but violence and bloodshed in half the world's worker population because there's no access to the law.
	And this is, of course, not the case.
	The gray market is the freest market on the planet.
	Yeah, I mean, we have half the world's workers are running on no state contracts.
	And it's not the chaos that everyone expects.
	eBay is so popular. Right, right.
	eBay basically is a large grey market.
	Yeah. Alright, we've got only a few more minutes left, so I want to make sure we get to the last callers, but thank you very much.
	Not a problem. I really want to extend my sympathies and hope that you enjoy the new CanCon coming up.
	Oh, and you and I have got to have a private conversation someday about the Canadian military.
	There's some things you should know.
	I always like to. But I have been party to.
	Alright, give me a shout. Have fun.
	Well, we don't have any other callers in line at the moment, but we do have somebody asking, and maybe you want to have a few comments about this or thoughts about this, but someone asked if you had seen that Ireland is banning the spanking of children.
	I have not seen that. And I was asking for a link.
	He's looking for it now. I have not seen that.
	Because that would be interesting. Serbia too, someone else says.
	Yeah, I mean, I try not to be, you know, obviously a law is a law, right?
	I try not to be too cynical about this sort of stuff.
	But I wonder if the reason that some of this stuff is occurring is because children are being sort of collectivized, so to speak.
	So many children are being dumped in daycare that it has become almost impossible for the daycare workers to manage traumatized kids.
	So I wonder if there's not a move.
	You know, I'm not saying that people are indifferent to kids and all that.
	Maybe there's more of an altruistic measure towards...
	I think that's something to that.
	But I also wonder the degree to which it may not just be that people are finding it impossible to run daycares with too many traumatized kids.
	That's a guess. I don't know.
	So, more of a, um, more of the calving strategy of the state, so to speak.
	Yeah, like now we have, now that you have one caregiver, like, let's see, we had about 25 think kids, uh, in, when I worked in a daycare and there was one other teacher and myself, not that I was a teacher, I was just a kid, but, um, you know, so that's, you know, 12 or 13 students.
	Per caregiver. And so maybe there's a sense that, you know, that can't work with traumatized kids.
	And, you know, having one kid, I mean one kid who's an exciting handful, I think is...
	If I had 12 or 13, it would be much more chaotic.
	So there could be that aspect, that the sustainability of the outsourcing of child-raising model is threatened by it, and that's why.
	Again, I don't want to be overly cynical, but maybe it is because they all just really love the kids now and are waking up to that.
	I have some significant suspicions about that, just based on personal and empirical evidence, but I could be wrong.
	I could be wrong. Yeah, I think, I don't know if you'd get any like actual hard data on that, but maybe if you found the relative degree of how many kids are in daycare versus whether that law exists.
	Oh yeah, but I mean that's been shooting up like crazy.
	I mean we know that for a fact.
	I mean I can, without even looking it up, I can tell you that it's way higher simply because the number of single parent families is so high.
	And I mean how many single parent families is it where the mom doesn't have to work?
	Right. Well, I'm also thinking because Serbia, for example, has this, and I don't know.
	So we're going back to, because I have very little actual update information, but they used to be part of Yugoslavia, is that right?
	Yes. So I don't know if there would have been a lot of fracturing of the family unit in that, or if that's happened over the past couple of decades, or what.
	Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the daycare enrollment in Serbia is not at the tip of my tongue for obvious reasons, but if anyone knows and would like to sort of look at it, I think that would be interesting.
	And then how... Sorry, go ahead.
	How would you be able to...
	So those two things would be correlated.
	How would you be able to sort of...
	What would be the prediction of that as a theory if that was a reason why?
	Or does it matter? Well, I mean, I guess it matters, and this is really, really off the top of my head, so please take this with all the skepticism in the world.
	But if you're still going to control kids, and that obviously is the case, right?
	So if the state keeps getting bigger and more brutal, then you have to replace corporal punishment with something, right?
	Look, the more sophisticated an economy gets, the less valuable, highly traumatized children are.
	And so if you want to compete in the modern economy, not hitting kids is a pretty good thing.
	Now, that doesn't mean that you want to set children free.
	If you really want to set children free, you'd privatize education and eliminate the national debt.
	And that, of course, is not going to happen at all.
	So state power is increasing over children, but children are less valuable in a modern economy if they're physically traumatized.
	Because they're too volatile, can't think, IQ points drop, and so on.
	And so, I mean, to me, it's just a farming technique.
	It's like, okay, well, if we don't hit them, then there'll be more productive tax cattle for us, and that's good.
	But, of course, we have no interest in setting them free.
	There's no principled objection to violence or anything like that.
	It's just less productive.
	We can't compete with traumatized kids, and we really need to keep them in daycare, and maybe we're having trouble finding daycare workers because the children are too hard to manage.
	And of course, if they were really interested in the welfare of kids, they would ban these psychotropic drugs.
	But that's just another part of the management strategy.
	So again, I don't want to be overly cynical.
	I think that parenting is getting better over time.
	But as far as these laws go… The one positive sign is that the electorate is willing to vote for it, or at least not willing to vote politicians out who approve it.
	So I think that's a good thing, but I certainly don't see it as any commitment to freeing kids from state power.
	It just means that you have to have more indoctrination and less brutality.
	Which one is going to be more clear to kids in the long run?
	You could argue that if kids are hit, they learn the true nature of the state faster than if they're propagandized.
	Yeah, and just as an example, now this is in the United States and there's no ban on spanking the US. There's been a ban of corporal punishment in schools, which is limited, not directly to parents.
	It doesn't apply directly to parents, but Obama passed or commented or signed a law or whatever it was—this is how closely I follow this—recently about—you did a video on it about keeping the children in school until they're 18.
	Yeah, no, that's right.
	So I'm wondering if there are also—those laws already exist in those other countries or if they will come to pass soon because of that.
	Now, that's granted. That's at the other end of the scale of the children, but that's in line with keeping them propagandized.
	Well, I mean, I think also if you look at the correlation, I think this is sort of related as well.
	So where does most of the school spanking go on in the U.S.? Well, it's in the South, right?
	And the South has traditionally been the source of the warrior class in the U.S. And so countries that are warlike simply cannot afford to ban corporal punishment.
	So they just can't, right?
	I mean, the two that seem to be the most aggressive towards kids are the UK and the US, and they both have heavy military commitments overseas and have at least for most of the last decade.
	And so you can't get soldiers if children...
	I mean, soldiers are harder to come by.
	At least good soldiers, so to speak.
	Effective soldiers are harder to come by if children are not brutalized.
	And so I did this regression...
	I did this statistical analysis a while back.
	It's on the message board somewhere where you look at military enrollment relative to spanking states.
	And it tracks fairly closely.
	So as long as America is still an imperialistic power...
	It's going to have a tough time banning spanking because everybody gets deep down that you need that physical aggression against your kids in order to get soldiers who are willing to shoot people.
	Was there somebody on an interview you did where they were talking about what the actual biblical interpretation of spare the rod, spoil the child is supposed to mean?
	Or was that similar?
	I saw that on YouTube somewhere. It's been floating around, right?
	I mean, it's the idea that the rod is correction.
	The rod is not a physical thing you hit a child with.
	Yeah, like it's supposed to be the shepherd sort of comparison, and of course it's not what people use it to mean anyway, so it's kind of a moot point.
	Well, I mean, it doesn't argue for the divinity of the Bible if a key passage is misunderstood to mean that you're supposed to hit your children.
	Okay, that didn't come to my mind.
	Yeah, I mean, if there's one thing that a loving God would be clear on, it's don't hit your kid's shoulder, right?
	And if God supervised the writing and the translation of the books and that got messed up, that's not a very good argument as to the fact that there's a loving God-king who oversaw the entire linguistic exercise.
	Yeah, it's kind of why those jokes about...
	There's various jokes about, you know, people die, go to heaven, and there's some, you know, like, I think Robin Williams did one.
	I'm, of course, murdering the joke now.
	Instead of virgins, it was Virginians, because, you know, someone's getting kicked in the ass by Washington and Jefferson and a whole bunch of people, so.
	That's funny. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, or if people did misunderstand it, at least send them a vision, you know, saying, no.
	Right, right. Don't be doing that, right?
	Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you doing?
	What are you doing? Right, right.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Spare the Rod? No.
	That means that if they don't watch enough episodes of The Twilight Zone, then they're going to grow up culturally undisciplined.
	Oh, there's an obscure joke for you.
	I'll wait for three people to get that.
	Rod Sterling? Anyway.
	I know what The Twilight Zone is, but I don't have anything beyond that.
	Alright, I'll see if anyone is going to come online.
	Alright, well I'll finish up with an Izzy story then.
	Okay. First of all, I thought it was a pretty funny story.
	We took her to see a play, and a woman was out, and she was singing, and then she started tap dancing, you know, clip-clop, clip-clop, with her feet on the stage.
	Isabella brought down the house by turning to me and saying loudly, is she a horsey?
	I saw that clip-clop and it was just great.
	It's not a good sign for a kid's play when the funniest line comes from a three-year-old.
	Anyway, so there was that and then we were at some people's houses and – We have this thing, of course, where we say, as I've talked about with some of the other parents here, the clock.
	It's the clock that says you have to go to bed.
	It's the clock that says it's time for this.
	It's the clock that says it's time for lunchtime.
	So we offload all the indignation to the clock.
	The poor clocks in this house have an entirely unjustifiably bad reputation.
	Anyway, so she wanted me to – I was chatting with the people and she wanted me to come and play with her.
	And I said, just a few minutes, just a few minutes.
	Anyway, so she had – she was playing with a little clock.
	And she moved the clock to 8 o'clock.
	And she said, Dada, it's 8 o'clock.
	You must come and play.
	It's playtime now. The clock says so.
	I'm like, you win that round, honey.
	You know, that's just, that's fantastic.
	She is, you know, she's quite the negotiator.
	And if she's, you know, if she's going to use those rules, then I'm going to obey them.
	Because that's only fair.
	So yeah, I dropped what I was doing.
	And I went to play with her.
	And... That's the next Disney story.
	It's just brilliant. Oh, yeah.
	So you're saying your daughter did that too?
	Yeah. You've got to be really careful with the rule.
	The moment you have a rule in the house, it's about eight minutes until the kids use it against you.
	That's why you have to be a UPB slave.
	All right. Well, we have no more questions.
	I guess I'll finish my meal without chewing in everybody's brain.
	Oh, Pinker. Yeah, sorry.
	I've made lots of questions about this new Pinker book, but obviously it's 800 pages with a lot of numbers.
	So not only is my daughter frightened of the numbers of the clock, I'm frightened of numbers in books.
	And so his thesis, as far as I understand it, is that violence has gone down as a sort of modernity moves forward and so on.
	And... I would imagine people will doubtless correct me if I'm wrong, as they want to do and as it's good for them to do.
	But he probably doesn't include national debts in that.
	And I think that's pretty important because that is a form of theft against the young.
	And it's easy to reduce violence through bribery.
	I mean, that's the whole point of the mafia, right?
	If you pay them off, then the recorded incidence of arson and kneecapping goes down, right?
	So if you only look at these statistics of people who pay off the mafia, you'd say, well, you know, more people pay off the mafia, then violence has gone down.
	Well, it kind of hasn't though, right?
	It's just that people are being paid off.
	So if you spend, if the government spends more than it earns, then it's going to bribe people into not being aggressive.
	And so therefore the violence is going to go down, but all you're doing is making the situation worse in the long run, right?
	So when the government runs out of money, as it's inevitably going to do, barring some amazing Atlas Shrugged-style 20th century motor company invention that triples everybody's income, which will only postpone it, of course, and make it even worse.
	But if the government – when the government runs out of money, what is going to happen to the people?
	Well, they're going to get very violent.
	They're going to get very aggressive.
	And there is going to be a significant spike in social aggression.
	And so if he's not taking into account national debts as a way of drugging people into compliance and reducing the amount of violence through rampant bribery, then I think he's sort of missing the point.
	And if he's not talking about government monopolies, then that also is a problem, right?
	So if he's not talking about, well, the fact that the postal office and the The law system and the education system are almost all state monopolies.
	Then that's violent, right?
	So if you mistake compliance for the law for a reduction in violence, then I think that he could make that case.
	But again, this is just off the top of my head, things that I would be concerned about in looking at the book.
	What I recall from what other people have reported about this book is that he attributes the reduction in violence to – unless this is a new book – he attributes the reduction in violence to state, to the existence of the state, that the state itself has reduced violence.
	Right. Right. And I mean if you sort of look at – the state has grown bigger throughout the 20th century and – World wars have diminished, at least since the 1940s, of course.
	And so, again, I'm obviously simplifying what is probably a brilliant book by a certainly brilliant guy.
	So I hesitate to say it, but I can certainly see how you could make that statistical correlation.
	I just think that you need to ignore a bunch of things which libertarians and anarchists understand are violent, but which, of course, is largely invisible to the mainstream, right?
	Right. Not to do any poisoning of the well or anything like that, but I believe he's also an academic, which makes it a little more difficult for him to see that.
	Right. So he obviously would not see that his paycheck is to some degree funded through the coercive monopolies and rent-seeking of academics and so on.
	So, again, there's no reason why he would see these things.
	I mean, they're blinkered out through propaganda and self-interest.
	How many people know that?
	I mean, how many people in academics know a libertarian or an anarchist who can make this case for them?
	It's functionally invisible to people, and so I can completely understand where he would be coming from.
	But of course to those who are working from first principles, it's just a little bit more obvious.
	Just as a reminder, people, we don't have a show next week.
	Steph is going to be traveling.
	That is true. That is true.
	I will be in Odessa, Texas.
	And it's libertyfestwest.com, I think, is where you can go.
	I think they still have some tickets.
	I hope that you will come.
	I really, really want to encourage people to come.
	Obviously, conferences are hard to do.
	They're hard to do. And it's nail-biting to do.
	And so if you can come, it really does help people who are doing these conferences.
	I mean, I'm not saying it's, you know, do it just because it helps people, but it really is helpful.
	And yeah, libertyfestwest.com.
	It's going to be February the 11th from 5.30pm to midnight, and there's going to be a bunch of other things.
	I'll be in there earlier, so anybody who wants to get together, just give me a shout.
	But yeah. You know, it's a great thing.
	It's a great thing. It's a memorable thing.
	You know, as I get older...
	Let me be annoyed.
	I could just use that phrase. As I get older...
	And this is not just me. This is the science talking as well.
	But as I get older, what I remember in my life are the things that were different.
	So if you don't come to Liberty Fest West, then you'll just have a weekend.
	And, you know, in a month or two, you won't even remember what you did.
	If you come to Liberty Fest West, you will remember that until...
	Your dying day. And I think it's important to mix things up, to have memories that are different from the average, different.
	And if it costs you some money, obviously it's going to cost you some money, but buying memories is one of the best trades in the world.
	Buying things that are different, buying things that are memorable is one of the best deals, it's one of the best ways that you can spend your money, all other things being equal.
	So I would really want to make the pitch for that.
	You wouldn't happen to be flying through Denver on a connection, would you?
	No, I don't think I am, in fact.
	Because I'm moving then, and then I'm going to actually be in Denver on the 12th, or arriving on the late 11th.
	Oh, cool. Well, if I am, I don't have my ticket here, but I will sign the check and let you know if I am.
	Yeah, that would be awesome. That would be great.
	I'll find a way to make it up to the airport if I'm there in time.
	Absolutely. Alright, well, I don't think we have anyone else, and I think it's the time to go, so...
	Alright, well, thank you everybody so much.
	Just my usual goodbye.
	Look forward to your donations at freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
	A massive shout-out of thanks to everybody who's helping out with the documentary.
	If I can bring the level of the script up to the level of expertise that people are bringing to the table, I think that we'll have a truly wonderful, wonderful...
	It's a means of communicating.
	And of course donations that are coming in are going to go and help fund the rather exciting bill that will be coming to you as a result of this.
	So if you would like to help out, I would obviously really, really appreciate it.
	And I think it's going to be a great way to get...
	Some very powerful messages out to people in a way that, you know, I mean, what is it?
	I think the story of your enslavement has just passed 800,000 views.
	It's going to go up to a million relatively soon.
	And so if I can make one that's just as good as that one, that's pretty powerful.
	If I can make one that's even better, which is, of course, the goal, or we can all make one that's better, then it's going to be a pretty powerful vehicle for getting the message across.
	And so that's going to be a different experience.
	And let's pay for that if we can.
	So, thanks everybody so much.
	You know, this conversation, the honesty, the openness, the curiosity of people, the disagreements, the conflicts, it's all part of the same delicious mix.
	And everybody who adds salt to the soup is as worthwhile to cook as everybody who adds sugar as well.
	So, thank you everybody so much.
	Have yourselves a wonderful week. Remember, no show next week.
	But we will, of course, be picking it up the week after.

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