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Feb. 13, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:50:29
Should I Move My Wife to Africa? Freedomain Call In
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Time Text
Hello, hello.
How are you doing?
Hello, hello.
I am well.
How are you?
I'm well.
I'm well, thanks.
I'm well.
Nice to chat with you.
Thanks for starting a little bit early.
So, yeah, I'm all ears.
Lay it on me.
Okay.
All right.
Great.
We'll hit the ground running, I suppose.
Yeah, so as I mentioned in my initial email and my question, I could give you a brief background of, you know, Who I am and how I got to where I am today?
Would that be perhaps and then lead on to the question itself?
Yeah, go for it.
So I was born and raised in a country in Africa, and I lived there up until I was 17 years old, at which point my family and I, family of origin, moved over to the UK. It was myself, my younger brother, and my younger sister.
I'm the oldest of three.
I'm sorry, I never assume, you know, people say I was born in South Africa.
I never assume ethnicity.
So what is your ethnicity?
That's a good question.
And, you know, and it's probably an important part of why I do not feel like I belong in any particular area, because even in the country I was born in, in Zambia, I'm not quite like black African, if you will.
It's still like mixed.
I'm sort of like mixed race.
But mixed what?
So if I start with my parents, my dad is mixed white and mixed Indian, I would say.
What do you mean he would say?
Do you not know?
I do know.
You're just like rule of thumb.
This is like me when I try to get paint done at the store.
I'm like brown-ish, green-ish, white-ish.
I don't know.
So what do you mean?
Yeah, kind of.
I mean, because his dad was from the UK, so I know he was white.
But his mom is, I think, also mixed.
His mom is mixed of black African and Indian.
So his mom is a mix of Indian and African.
So half black, quarter white, quarter Indian?
Is it something like that?
That's right.
So that's my dad.
So my dad has got a mixed light-skinned complexion type of thing.
He almost looks Arabic.
He looks like he's from Egypt or something.
Or Egyptian, right?
And my mother, again, is also mixed.
She's neither black nor white, but her parents are both mixed as well.
So it's, you know, they're...
And then, yeah, I can't...
I don't know exactly...
So my mom's mom was a mixture of, I think, black African and also a European from Belgium, so white and black African.
And then my grandmother's father...
On my mom's side was, I think, just Black African.
Holy crap.
I mean, you send in your request for a DNA analysis and the computers just explode, right?
That's just like...
And I did do that.
I've done the MyHeritage thing and it's just like, yeah, it overlaps so many different things.
Was it 19 pages back on your MyHeritage?
More or less.
But yeah, it turns out I'm more European than I am African.
A gypsy, some space alien.
Yeah, okay.
Got it.
Some Viking in there, you know, throw it all in there.
So it's...
Yeah, I'm like 50.2% European and then 49. whatever percent African.
And even within Africa, there's subdivisions of, you know, there's mixtures in there with different tribes and what have you like.
There's Nigerian, there's Kenyan and, you know.
That's the Baku and the Koi.
Oh yeah, no, it's a lot different.
That's right, exactly that.
And, you know, being from South Africa yourself, you know about all the tribes and the movements and all that.
So myself being, yeah, in my complexion, I'm sort of like fairly, you know, light-skinned.
I'm not black.
I'm not white.
I'm in between.
No, no.
The real complexion, as you know, is the hair.
Yeah, well, good observation.
I have none of it left anymore because, you know, it's kind of gone.
But my hair was, you know, kind of like Afro-ish.
You know, it definitely wasn't straight.
It was water-repellent.
I could grow it out of a curly course, I would say.
When I did have it, and I did grow it to an afro at one point during my university days.
But it's crazy because you look at me and then my brother, for instance, he looks like he's from Bangladesh.
So this goes back to the true mixture of our genes.
My brother.
I think there was some Indian guy who shaved his head down and pretended to be black and got away with a scholarship and stuff like that.
So yeah, it's a real nice roll these days.
But sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, so no problem with that.
And yeah, so he looks like he's from straight out of Bangladesh.
Like, it's crazy.
Like, a lot of people, when we were growing up, they were like, oh man, he's a brother Indian.
Is he your brother?
Yes, he is my brother.
And he looks like a spitting image of my dad when he was younger.
Just he's darker skin than me.
He's a bit darker.
And then my sister, she's now, she's fairer skinned.
She's got, like, not straight hair, not like European hair, but straighter than mine.
And it's a funny thing about the mixed race families, of course, that you get siblings who can be quite a scattershot, right, of the various ingredients.
And that's, you know, it's like one baker bakes 12 muffins and they all look different.
But it's the same recipe, kind of.
But, yeah, that's a challenge, right?
Absolutely.
And you hit the nail on the head there.
I couldn't put a better analogy myself.
It's exactly like that.
We used to call it a throwback gene or something.
I don't know.
For my brother.
I don't know if you've seen those.
I'm sure you have these sort of memes where some white guy has kids with an Asian woman and it's like bro's genes didn't even try because the kids are just 100% Asian and they just don't even try.
Whereas it could go the other way as well.
Yeah.
And it's funny because my wife is European.
And so our two children, they're more on the fair-skinned side.
You could almost say that they were pretty much white there.
I mean, they both have curly hair, but kind of like blondish, brown type thing.
Brown eyes, but yeah, very fair-skinned.
But I guess they would undoubtedly be classed as mixed as well.
I mean, to the untrained eye...
Towards the lighter skin, even two siblings could be considered high or low status based on.
I don't know if you've heard this.
It's a rather bitter joke about this kind of stuff where people get so tired of the bias against white skin that they're like, you know what?
Everyone's just going to be painted blue, right?
Everyone's going to be painted blue, but the lighter blues get to sit at the front of the bus.
And it's just like, it just goes right back to that.
So, yeah, it's sort of a bitter joke about this kind of prejudice.
Yeah, even within the simplest, if there's a difference in skin color, it can have an effect on perceived status.
Yes, so going back to when I was in Africa, it was funny.
I used to be called a muzungu, which in African means like a white man, right?
And I wasn't even white.
I'm sure that's just the title of love and affection, though.
Yeah, it was like a term of endearment, perhaps, right?
Yeah, so I used to be called...
White boy, basically, but I wasn't white.
And then I moved to the UK, and now I'm considered black, even though...
I mean, everything that's not white, I guess, is black, right?
In some forms.
If you're not white, you're black.
And so, yeah, I mean, you know, that wasn't really an issue or anything for me growing up.
Like, I just noticed it, you know, like, being a different skin color would mean that you were kind of, like, thought of to be...
You know, in Africa, Zambia, I'm just going to say is the country I'm from, is a poor country.
And I guess anybody who is like lighter skinned or thought to be from, you know, like a well-to-do family or something.
So there was a bit of prejudice thinking like against you that you were, you know, like considered to be from a higher status family or what have you.
Oh, yeah.
It's a funny thing, of course.
I mean, what age?
Roughly, are you?
You don't have to tell me your exact age, but like 30s, 40s, something else?
Yeah, around the 38 mark.
Yeah, so I mean, I'm old enough to remember when the dream was sort of like not to be obsessed about race.
And we were kind of getting close to that.
And then unfortunately, the Wall Street protests, like the Occupy Wall Street protests happened and everybody got programmed about race stuff.
But yeah, I mean, my best friend in boarding school was an Indian fella who was great.
And we were just aiming towards this.
Generally, not so race-obsessed society.
And it's funny, though, because, of course, as you know, much better than I do, but when you travel to places like Africa or India, like, the obsession with skin color is not small.
And everyone's like, oh, my gosh, you know, the West is so race-conscious.
It's like, well, that's kind of provoked in a way, but, man, other countries and cultures.
I mean, they are just...
All over that stuff and so incredibly race conscious that it would be almost incomprehensible to a lot of Westerners.
Yeah, absolutely.
It is quite palpable in those countries.
And yeah, even more so than I think in the West.
It's a bit more tangible.
It's noticeable in those countries.
And I guess it doesn't really get talked about as much as everything is like, oh, in the West, they're the ones that are more prejudiced and what have you.
But it does happen.
In Africa as well.
And so, yeah, and so I grew up over there.
I lived there till, you know, I was almost 18 and then moved over.
Obviously, my siblings were younger than me.
All right, you know we can't just go zero to 18, right?
You know that, right?
No.
It's a bit of a childhood show.
So, in general, I don't quite like that big squeal fast forward.
I feel like I never liked watching the movie halfway through, right?
What the hell happened?
Tell me a little bit about your upbringing and what it was like and how you were parented and all that kind of good stuff.
I have really fond memories of growing up.
It wasn't all sunshine and butterflies and rainbows and all of that, whatever the analogy is.
But I have fond memories because I I obviously had my parents and we lived in a small flat and eventually moved into a bigger house with a swimming pool.
And so my childhood was filled with making friends with my next-door neighbors and the self-governing type of childhood where you were free to make friends.
You could spend all day out with them riding bicycles and that whole kind of neighborhood.
Oh yeah, the kids these days have no concept of the glories of sublime parental indifference that characterized most of our childhoods, where my mom would literally lean out the window with a cowbell when it was time for dinner, and if we were even remotely within earshot, we might get some food.
But yeah, no, I mean, that's like, off you go.
Parenting is so kind of obsessively involved these days that no wonder people don't have many kids.
Yeah, I mean, and we can touch on that later on when it comes to like how I'm dealing, well, my wife and I deal with our two young ones because it's so intense, but we can, yeah, we'll circle back to that.
And so, yeah, my upbringing was very much about that, you know, self-governing, we're making friends with like the next door neighbors, we go on adventures and, you know, people didn't like conform to, you know, well, I wouldn't say conform, but if somebody was just being a dick for no reason, then there was that ostracism of, you know, Weeding out people that were the bad actors and all the rest of it.
And yeah, so that's pretty much how my childhood was oriented.
I wasn't very close to my two siblings though growing up, which is, I don't know, kind of weird when I think about it because I think, well, why wasn't I close to them as much?
And that kind of like bleeds onto our adult life.
We're not really close in our adult life.
Well, but when I was a kid, and of course, you know, we're different people, but maybe this has some relevance.
When I was a kid, so the less involved the parents are, the more there is sex segregation among childhood play.
I mean, when I was a kid, like, we played war and, like, sort of these really intense games.
I honestly have no idea what the girls were doing, but they weren't doing it with us.
and so the less that the parents are involved in other words the more sort of free flowing or free form the childhood is the more there tends to be sex segregation among the kids plays yeah and
And, yeah, I mean, so for my, you know, don't get me wrong, there's only a, like, under two-year gap between my brother and me, so we were fairly close in age, and then there's a six-year gap between me and my sister, so that gap is a little bigger.
So your brother did not really play with you and your friends?
We did, no.
So I was going to say, yeah.
Even though we weren't that close, we still did get involved together.
I would say more towards when we started getting into high school is where the real rift started coming in.
But before that, we were relatively...
Close, I suppose.
We played with the same friends.
We did kind of the same things.
We'd go swimming together.
We'd ride bikes and all that kind of thing.
So I think in the younger years, probably from ages, I don't know, from what I can remember, from maybe 3 to 10 or 12, the closeness was there.
And then once puberty hit and once I went to high school, because I... I volunteered to go to boarding school.
Oh, sorry, at what age?
Like around puberty?
At around, yeah, around age 13, 14, somewhere there.
Yeah.
Okay.
Because I started off, when I moved to high school, I started off being like a day scholar.
And then I was like, talking to all my friends and stuff like that, and just heard all the stories of the things that they used to get up to.
In the boarding hostels and all the different adventures they had on the weekends.
And I thought, man, home life is boring compared to this.
I want to get stuck into this.
And I just made that decision and I requested it from my parents.
I was like, look, I want to try boarding school.
And they were like, fine, yeah, you can go ahead and do that.
What else about my childhood?
So we had maids and stuff like that growing up in the house.
So parents didn't really have to do a lot when it came to...
Our upbringing, they were obviously there.
But one thing as well that I notice and I think about nowadays is there wasn't really a lot of affection that was PDA between my parents or anything like that.
There wasn't ever the I love you or how I try to tell my children I love you and stuff like that.
That word wasn't really said.
I don't know if it's something that's typical about African African parents and stuff like that.
That kind of showing of emotion just wasn't really there growing up.
So we didn't really say those type of things to each other.
And I guess that's why I don't really say it that often as an adult.
I find it kind of hard to say those words sometimes in just my relationships, my close relationships at the moment.
But yeah, so growing up...
We didn't have that.
I didn't say that to my siblings or anything like that.
We didn't say like, oh, goodnight, I love you and all that kind of stuff.
There was obviously the, as most African parents do, and I'm not going to say all, I'm not speaking for parents, but we did have the punishment through spanking type thing as well.
So, I mean, my experience wasn't terrible, like compared to some people's experiences.
Uh, you know, I didn't really get belts or anything like that.
You know, it was more just like spanking on, you know, on the backside, that kind of thing.
Um, it wasn't to the degree that some of the other poor kids used to get, they used to get, you know, tree branches, belts and they're, you know, all sorts of things that, Oh, the, uh, the pick your switch parents, right?
Yeah, that's right.
But, you know, it happened to me, and whatever effect that may have had.
Maybe we can uncover it.
And how often would that happen?
I generally was a good child, so not very often.
Probably, I don't know, maybe once or twice.
I generally wasn't a good child.
No, I generally was.
Sorry, my apologies.
Sorry if I got that wrong.
You were kind of obedient in that way, right?
I was, yes.
Yes, I was very obedient.
Yeah, probably once a year or once every six months or something like that.
I can't even remember how often it happened.
And what else would happen when your parents would disagree with what you did?
Sometimes they would be shouting.
It would be shouting and threats of being hit.
Or it would just be dismissing it and saying it's got to be this way because I said so, that type of thing.
There was negotiation at times, but I think it's where they just wanted something to be their way where there was no avenue to have a discussion about things.
It had to do it their way type of thing.
It wasn't the worst, but it could have.
There was room for improvement, I suppose.
Sorry, what about being close to your parents?
Yeah, good question.
I think I was...
But close in what way, though?
In the sense that you could tell them everything?
No, not telling them stuff, although I'm sure that's helpful.
By close, I mean...
Did they sort of work on teaching you how to live, give you good advice, feedback, wisdom, you know, so you don't have to invent everything yourself?
No, there wasn't really that.
The closeness, those type of feedback through wisdom was kind of just like the scare tactics.
Oh, don't do this because this would happen.
You'll get somebody pregnant or what have you.
I remember the first sort of like real sex talk that I got from, sex education talk that I got from my mother was, She noticed that I was getting really friendly with a female cousin of mine, and she just used that opportunity to say to me, make sure you don't do anything with her or something like that.
I can't really remember, but I just remember thinking it was really strange because one of my cousins had actually got impregnated by her stepbrother, so she was just trying to make an example and say, remember what happened to her?
Make sure you don't.
And that was kind of the only talk, if you will.
It never really happened anything other than that.
It was just that, don't do it with your cousin.
And that was it.
It was always kind of just scaring you to not do certain things.
So I can't recall there being a lot of that kind of closeness where it's like, oh, this is how things work and explaining why.
You know, how they could feedback some of their world experience.
To me, it was kind of just like I learned it through boarding school.
And I'm kind of glad that I took it upon myself to say I want to go and experience that because it did teach me a lot of independence and self-reliance.
And I can notice the difference that it made in me when I compare myself to my brother.
At the moment, he's just kind of like a nomad who just doesn't really do anything, and he has really struggled to integrate into this society.
He has Asperger's, so he's kind of on the spectrum.
But I noticed the stark...
Yeah, he's got high functioning autism.
I think that's what it is.
But I noticed the stark differences between me and him, and we're not all...
We're not all prepared to go into the world the same way, I suppose, is what I'm trying to say, is that some people find it way more difficult.
I can just see it's just very different.
It's socially awkward and all that kind of stuff.
And there was also an aspect of bullying as well that happened at school.
I'm not going to say it was like a perfect childhood.
There was some bullying at school, and also my brother was a victim of it.
And was that because of the Asperger's or something else?
I think it was probably, yeah.
And also, again, because of the complexion, you're kind of targeted because you're not really, you're different, right?
So it was definitely probably part of that.
Because nobody in Zambia really understands what that is.
And especially at that time, there wasn't any type of thought of Asperger's or anything like that.
There was just, if you're not doing something a certain way, then you're a bad child.
They didn't have the same open-mindedness that you have here in the West where it's like, oh, you've got to think about all these different personality traits and all the rest of it.
It's just one way you've got to conform and that's it.
If you're not doing it, it's because you're unruly or there's something wrong with you.
I'm sure you probably understand what I mean when I say that.
There wasn't the same type of...
I guess not as much research done over there as it is over here.
And how did it show up for him?
He was generally socially awkward.
How did it show up for him?
As a child?
Yes.
Growing up?
I assume he got diagnosed or something, so there must have been some behavior that he was manifesting that.
Yeah, that diagnosis only happened as an adult whilst we were here in the West.
But if I think back to when we were growing up, what he was like, I don't know.
He just had strengths in other areas.
He was creative.
He was good at art and drawing.
He was good at music.
He was quite bright, but...
He didn't do well academically because things needed to be explained to him a certain way, I believe.
And it could have all been fixed with private tuition, which I received, but I don't know quite why my siblings didn't receive it.
But I did for certain subjects.
So I believe if he had the one-to-one attention, he could have...
You know, being better academically.
How else did it show up?
I mean, generally with like his family members and stuff, he was very playful, open, you know, happy in general, inquisitive, curious.
I think where it started to sort of go downhill was, yeah, again, in the high school when there was the bullying and stuff like that, his clothes were kind of like hand-me-downs from me.
So he looked a bit awkward with like, you know.
These huge trousers that he had to wear almost up to his nipples.
And so he was just like a goofy-looking type of child.
He didn't really care too much about his appearance, being smart or anything like that.
But as a child, really, you don't really care too much about that.
So I'm not criticizing him there.
But that's generally how it would show up.
It would be things like he would be forgetful.
My dad, I can always remember my dad just admonishing him for being forgetful and leaving things at school or not remembering what he did with something.
So yeah, things like that is how it would show up.
And now that continues into his adult life where, I don't know, he's really hyper-analytical about a lot of stuff.
And I get it because, like myself, I'm very curious and I want to know how things work and I'll do research and I'll...
And I'll not just trust what's said in the mainstream.
I'm very much into looking at alternative sources of information.
And your show as well has just been a huge lightbulb moment of just like, wow, when you hear how you uncover and explain complex topics and, oh, taxation is theft and all these things.
I've been listening to you since, I think I first heard about you on the Joe Rogan podcast, and that's how I've been listening since then.
And when you just hear people talk like that and you think, oh man, this just makes so much sense.
So he is open-minded, but he tends to get over-analytical where it's always like ready, ready, aim, but never fire type of thing.
It's always just like...
Just always just bogged down in the details and to the point where, you know, he was really bright.
He started university.
He was doing really well at first and then just kind of just had like a mental breakdown and just ended up doing all sorts of wacky stuff.
There was, you know, substance abuse there involved as well.
And he just ended up falling out of university.
Couldn't really get any traction with any jobs and kind of just like he's just...
Fast forward to now, he's just kind of in and out of homelessness, right?
Homelessness.
Yeah.
He puts himself in these really tough situations.
He almost thinks that to be successful, you have to go through all these hardships.
I don't know where this mentality has come from because he's kind of got to the point where he's like, I have to...
Maybe it's partly because he doesn't want to be a disappointment to our parents.
Especially for me, I remember growing up and also when I went to university, you don't want to disappoint your parents.
You always wanted to come across as, oh yeah, I've actually done something.
I'm successful.
I've passed.
But there was never any congratulations or acknowledging.
I remember actually when growing up that.
Oh, you've done this really well.
Well done.
That's really good of you doing that.
That's amazing.
Or that's beautiful what you've drawn.
Or, you know, keep going.
There wasn't really that encouragement or boost.
And I used to notice other parents giving their children that type of encouragement.
But we didn't really receive that.
We kind of were just told, like, you know, you've got to do well and then that's it.
However you do it, but you just got to do well.
It wasn't really like, oh, you're on the right track.
This is really good what you're doing.
So stemming from that, in his adult life, he feels like because looking around at people and seeing how some people have come from adversity and then managed to go on to do really great things, he's kind of thinking like, oh, I need to...
I need to do that because clearly I've missed the trick here.
I've just had a privileged life where I haven't really been going through any hardships.
I have to create hardships.
And that's the only real way for me to progress or to become something.
And when I talk about hardships, it's like things that are pretty wild.
He'll do things like, I don't know, he'll hike 10 miles to go and collect.
Firewood and then hike it back and things like that that are just totally unnecessary and really put his body through really hard times.
He doesn't have to be homeless, but he would...
And another thing, part of his personality is that he has really hard time discerning people's personalities.
He will befriend all sorts of people and people who are...
You know, bad people he will befriend because in his mind, he thinks that if I can just be nice to this person, they won't take advantage of me.
And time and time again, he's just been taken advantage of.
So when I say homeless, yeah, he would stay with my parents, but then he would have enough of them trying to tell him what to do and it should be this way and not, you know, just trying to control him.
And then he will...
He will flee the household and he'll start off just like wild camping and just living rough because he hasn't got a job or when he does have a job, it's something that's not really a sustainable type of thing.
He'll just do odd jobs here and there and really tough jobs as well.
That further push him down that spiral where he's having to habituate with people that don't have the best intentions.
He'll always find himself in those scenarios where whether it's a poor paying job or just making friends with people that somehow just always take advantage of him and then just lead him to go in so far down that spiral where he's almost like He gets to a desperate point where he's just not quite on death's door, although that has happened before.
He will just get to a point where he's suffering so much that he eventually has to snap out of it and be like, oh my god, what's going on?
And then he'll return to my parents' house, go back and live there for a little while.
And you think that he's recovering.
You think that, okay, he's going to stop with the craziness now.
And then the cycle repeats itself.
And it's been like that for the past, geez, at least 10 to 15 years.
He's just been going through this cycle of just, yeah, just a downward cycle.
There was a time he ran away to Colombia and he told all of us that he was just in a neighboring country here in the UK. He said he was in Wales, but he was actually in Colombia living.
You know, just like in the wild kind of thing, like doing God knows what.
But he was out there for like nine months until he got to a point where, again, he was almost bone thin.
He had infections from drinking contaminated water and he had to come back because he was literally, if he didn't come back, he needed medical attention.
And then, you know, he got back and he nursed himself back to health and everything.
There's a period where you think, oh, actually, he's actually starting to listen.
He's actually taking people's advice on board and he's not going to do this anymore.
He's done that.
He's learned his lesson.
And then, yeah, the cycle, like I said, the cycle will repeat itself.
This is always a fascinating thing to me.
What does he live on?
How does he get money?
When I was a kid, money was the thing.
You couldn't do anything without money.
You could end up on the street.
Like, what is he living in?
Yeah, well, he doesn't have a lot of money, and there's the welfare system.
Oh, does he get money from the government, like disability?
Yes.
Well, unemployment, I think.
Oh, isn't that terrible?
Yes.
Yeah, that's right.
When he's capable of doing, you know, way more than, you know, than he gives himself credit for.
So, yeah, that's kind of, I mean, he doesn't have a lot of money, and what he does have, he...
He squanders.
He uses it on...
I think he spends most of his money on just, you know, like essentials, like just food and that's it.
Because he'll end up...
You know, he doesn't tell us what he's doing as well because he knows that my parents don't approve of what he's doing and they're kind of just like done with trying to tell him otherwise because no matter what they say to him.
He will do the complete opposite of what they tell him.
And it's almost like he...
I don't know if it's like an F you to them kind of thing as well.
Well, I guess he has some tendencies towards unreality.
And that has really gotten bad because he doesn't have to get grounded in reality by having a job and needing to earn an income and stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
But again, he does like to delve into the...
I wouldn't say conspiracy theories, but he does like to delve into, you know, the reason behind certain things, like, you know, the vaccinations, for instance.
He'll go into that and talk about, like, all the drawbacks and everything like that, which, you know, there are some...
Yeah, I don't know that that's hardly conspiracy theory territory anymore.
It's not, exactly.
So this is why I'm...
Yeah, so...
Exactly.
So he is bright in that sense, in that he can do all of this and he's aware of all of this, but yet chooses to go down this road of...
And I wouldn't say it's like MGTOW, because this is kind of like...
I don't think he's even had a relationship ever.
Or maybe it is MGTOW. Maybe it's his own different way of...
I mean, what choice does he have, right?
Yeah.
I mean, is he ever dated?
Not that I know of.
No, but he has, I don't know, maybe had short-term relationships, but no dating.
Nothing like bringing her home to meet my parents or anything like that.
And I think out of all my siblings, I'm the only one that's had that experience of dating and bringing them home to my family and introducing them.
My sister hasn't done that.
She's got this long-term relationship with somebody across the world, halfway across the world.
And we know who he is.
My parents know who he is.
But he's just never even had the decency to fly over here to come and see her or to come and meet my parents.
She's always going over there.
And this has been 10 years now that they've had this relationship.
This has had a long-distance relationship for 10 years?
For 10 years.
Yeah, about 10 years, I would say.
And so this is part of the closeness that you were referring to earlier.
There doesn't seem to be that closeness in our family where we can want to bring...
People back to be like girlfriends or boyfriends back to say, oh, look, yeah, this is my girlfriend.
This is my boyfriend.
I just, you know, for me, I did it anyway because I was just like, oh, you know, screw it.
I'm just going to do it.
And if they approve, then they approve.
And if they don't, then whatever.
But for them, there hasn't been that.
And, you know, I'm not going to say that my dating track record is spotless, because there were times when my parents did have some valid contradictions, like, I mean, valid criticisms, because there was a time that I was dating a single mother of three children by two different dads, and I was only 18 or 19 or something like that.
And my dad was like, what the hell are you doing?
Yeah, so when I was...
When I was around 18, actually, was I 18?
Yeah, or 19, around there, maybe 20. I went through a period of dating a single mom that had three kids.
She was a bit older than me, probably only a couple years, and by three different fathers.
And yeah, it was at a time, growing up, my self-esteem wasn't great.
I think that's also something that my siblings share.
Growing up, we didn't really have strong self-esteem.
We didn't think that we were worthy.
There was always this feeling of just being unworthy.
And I can relate to that because growing up, I dated this girl because I thought I wasn't worthy of anything better at the time.
I just thought, man, this is the best I can do.
And yet, I'm only 18. I don't know how I could have come to that decision when there was just so much more options out there that I could have...
I didn't even stop to think like, wow, what are you doing?
You're selling yourself short here.
You're selling yourself short by doing this.
And one thing that...
I'll say that my parents were actually...
Or my dad, rather, said to me, look, man, you're making...
What the hell are you doing?
You shouldn't be dating this girl.
And, yeah.
Her kids must have been very little.
Yeah, they were.
They were, at the time, yeah.
I mean, the eldest was probably about three or four, three years old.
So she had a kid a year for three years with two different dads?
Yes.
Yes.
Okay, how pretty was she?
Uh, three, maybe.
Bro!
Yeah, exactly.
So I'm not going to say that my dating history was the best.
But did your parents say, like, why don't you think you can do better?
Or what are you doing with this kind of woman?
Yeah, because it was kind of like, at first, it was a secretive thing.
It was something that I was doing kind of just like, wow.
Just offer a teenage boy sex?
Yes.
Okay, so you're like, okay, this.
This food has fell off the truck.
I don't have to go hunting.
Yeah, exactly.
And the way it happened was like stuff that you only see in movies.
I was like, oh man, this shit actually happens in real life.
Like you're at a nightclub and some girl just says, oh, you want to come back to my place?
And wow.
And then the next thing you know, yeah, it's happening.
And I just got the V-canon, right?
I don't think that those are movies that have an excessive amount of plot, but okay.
No, but it just felt like it was a movie to me.
Because it was unbelievable.
And so your parents hadn't prepared you at all for predatory females?
No.
Okay.
Do you think that's because they're naive?
Do you think that they don't know that there are predatory females?
Because this was some dangerous shit.
You could have been rolled, robbed, blackmailed, STDs.
She might have been wanting another pregnancy.
Like, could be any number of things, right?
Yes.
And I'm so fortunate that none of that stuff actually happened because, I mean, that's exactly what she had tried to do with the previous partners that she had, and they didn't get away unscathed.
But somehow, here I am, naive as anything, still kind of fresh from a new country, still getting settled into a Western way of living, and still trying to acclimatize and all of that kind of stuff.
And then I'm just hit by this, and I'm like, whoa, this is insane.
Like you can, you know, just meet somebody and then it's like a one-night stand and then all of a sudden you've just been hit with a V-Cannon all the time.
Yeah, so I was just caught up in it and I kept it a secret because I knew deep down like, oh man, you know, the place she took me to was kind of like in the projects you would say or the ghetto or what have you.
So, you know, because she was on welfare, so the government had given her all sorts of stuff.
And she would shower me with gifts because she had money.
She had loads of disposable cash.
She was almost like a sugar mommy type thing.
Sugar baby mommy.
And so my dad kind of just bumped...
My parents didn't know about this relationship for the longest time until my dad just kind of bumped into us one day in the middle of town.
And I was like, oh man.
And he kind of looked at me and looked at her and really didn't say anything and then just kind of just walked back home.
Sorry, just walked on his way.
And I knew to myself, I was like, oh, there's going to be repercussions for this.
I know when I go home, I was kind of almost even gearing myself up to have a fight with him because I thought it was going to get physical where he's going to be like, what are you actually doing?
I've told you because I think...
They had suspicions that I was doing this because I had told some of my relatives and they had probably told my aunties who had then conveyed this.
So they had kind of like word of mouth that something was going on but probably didn't want to believe that it was happening until they saw the actual physical evidence.
But yeah, eventually I managed to ditch that relationship.
I'm glad I did because it was getting to the point where things were starting to escalate in terms of I could see how predatory, basically.
I was being groomed in a way, and there was a time that I also found out that she was being unfaithful.
Not that it matters, really, because it wasn't going to be a long-term relationship anyway, but I found out that she was being unfaithful.
She tried to lie about it.
I found out all the details and everything like that by looking at her computer.
And all the messages that she was having with this certain person.
So, yeah, I mean, I could have been exposed to all sorts of, like you say, diseases or infections or what have you.
Oh, just the crazy axis, right?
The dads and kids.
Yeah, yeah.
Yes, yeah.
But yeah, so move on from that.
And this was around about the time.
So I moved to the UK in 2004. And when I moved here...
I couldn't really start school straight away because I just finished GCSEs, as you would call it, I suppose, over here.
I just finished that in Zambia.
When I moved over here, I was now due to start what's called A-levels, which is like a two-year course where it's kind of like, yeah, it's like at a college or something.
But I couldn't do that immediately because at the time that I moved...
The school term starts in September and we moved in January.
So when I first moved to the UK, I started working in a factory.
So I started working pretty early on and then did that for nine months until I could start college in the fall.
And yeah, did that, did my A-levels out of college, graduated.
Yeah, I say graduated and then took a year out, which is called like a gap year, I suppose, is it?
Yeah, a gap year.
And went traveling to Australia, did the whole backpack thing before coming back and then going to university.
And yeah, I studied at university for four years and then just started my work in life after that and met my wife.
Around 2012. Yeah, so...
Yeah, wow.
Coming on...
What is that, 13 years?
13 years ago.
Is that right?
Is my math off there?
Oh, I mean, it's right at the beginning of 2025, so, you know, anywhere from 13 to 15. Yeah.
Yes.
And...
Yeah, so we've been together since then.
We've been married for about five years and have two wonderful sons, aged three and one, so still very young.
I don't know if this brings me to the point where my question comes in.
I've just kind of started developing feelings or thoughts, shall I say, for wanting to move back to Africa.
And I'm just trying to uncover as to what could be the source of these feelings and whether or not it's...
Is it just purely just because it's coming from some kind of fantasy where I think the grass is kind of greener on the other side?
Or is it...
Is it maybe because I've grown to dislike some of the things that are happening in the West and that I see happening, you know, whether it's through, I don't know, increasing government power or, you know, the UK itself being sort of like a semi-socialist type of nation.
The weather comes into it as well, where it's just...
I remember that.
Yeah, I mean...
I mean, you probably get colder winters where you are there, but we're coming out of a really cold spell where it got to about minus 10, and that's probably the coldest it's been for a long time.
But I know Canada gets even way crazier colder than that.
No, no, it's not the cold, because the cold in England is in your bones.
It's just foggy, clammy, grey.
The cold in Canada, you're going down a ski slope or even just a bargaining in the blinding sunshine.
It's cool cold.
It's fun cold.
The British, it's just like being in a slow-motion, laundry, chilly, horrible little thing.
So I prefer the Canadian cold.
100%.
It's exactly like that.
It's the worst thing ever.
It's like it can't make its mind up.
It just has to be this perpetual grayness all the time.
Yeah, like you're living in a chilled-out ping-pong ball.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, you really have to cherish the days when there's blue sky and the sun shining.
And I document those days and say, wow, look, the sun's actually out.
Yeah, in England, summer comes on a Wednesday.
One day.
Why do you think we all left the country anyway?
Went to Africa, get some sun.
Yeah, exactly.
And when summer does come around you, you're always filled with the hope of like, okay, this is going to be a great summer.
Woohoo, here we go.
And it just disappoints you year after year.
I mean, you may get a week of where it's actually really decent, nice hot weather, not raining, anything like that.
And yeah, you get led into that false hope.
And then the following week is just back to rain and grey skies and wind.
And that's really been getting to me, especially because I have children now.
And I get so frustrated with being cooped up indoors.
And I think back to my childhood where we would always have these awesome adventures with friends and we could go out and just play for what seemed like an endless amount of hours and come up with so many games and we could go swimming.
And it was just the best thing.
You could go outside.
You could be outside most of the time.
And I have the two small boys and we cooped up in this house and there's only so much willpower that I find I have and my wife has to create stimulating creative games to keep them occupied.
I know they're still very young and so they kind of depend on that.
But I just wish that I could be able to...
It takes about five hours to get ready to go outside just to have a 10-minute walk because then we put in coats on, welly boots on, just to get ready to go outside.
And then when we are outside, what can we do?
Just splash in a few puddles and then we get soaked and cold and we have to go back in and warm up again.
It's frustrating for me because I feel like...
I want them to have that experience that I had, in a way.
You want them to have a free-roam childhood, right?
A free-roam childhood, exactly.
And I don't think that that's going to happen here.
I mean, they might be able to do that for a month, two months out of the year.
But yeah, I just feel like it's...
And I have relatives back home, and I went to visit with my family last year.
And they kind of were exposed to that a little bit and I'm planning hopefully to go maybe this year again just because the younger one is a bit older now and he can run around and stuff and just to get a feel for it again and just to see and try and maybe see if there is something that can be like if it is even feasible for a move like that to happen and I basically I'm at that point where Yeah,
my thoughts are just fixated on that, where I can't help but think, what am I doing here?
And I almost don't see myself being able to keep paying a mortgage for a place that I don't really want to be in and carry on living in this perpetual Viking weather of just being in one continuous episode of the Vikings or something.
And then come to the end of it, like, you know, 30 years from now and just be like, oh, I've paid off a mortgage for a place where I don't, you know, essentially, I don't really have many freedoms.
And I think it also comes down to freedom.
Oh, yeah.
Like if you're listening to a show like this, England is not necessarily the most hospitable place for, I mean, it used to be the world center of free speech and critical thinking and all of that.
And yeah, that's all gone by the wayside, of course, as these things.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And I feel like, I know Africa's not, you know, the great place to know everything, but, you know, the country I'm from is relatively peaceful and it's a...
No, but Africa has the great advantage of chaos, incompetence, and bribery.
It does have that.
Come on, I'm not right.
You are right.
You are right.
The problem with the West is, you know, there's all of these fairly efficient bureaucrats who want to stifle your freedoms, whereas in other countries and other cultures, They're just not that obsessed with trying to control you.
And it's just like, yeah, you know, these are kind of the rules.
Give me five bucks or a wink and a nod and all of that kind of stuff.
So in a lot of ways, there are a lot more freedoms outside the West because there isn't this relentless anal bureaucratic efficiency that disciples you.
Hyper-regulation.
Yeah, yeah.
Hyper-regulation.
And apparently people really care about it in the bureaucracy.
It's not just an excuse to, you know.
Either harass people to get money or whatever it is.
They really care about it.
Third world permits are usually just exercises in bribery, but in the West, it's like, no, no, it's really important that you get a permit if you want to build a deck behind your house.
It's super important.
We really care about it.
Can't you just be like every other bureaucrat in the world and just harass people for money and then you get a lot more freedom by default in that way?
I know.
And exactly.
Speaking to that, everything is so formal to go to a park.
And you're paying for parking and everything has to fit in this lane.
It costs so much just to do stuff that should be for free.
Just being able to enjoy the outdoors kind of thing.
It's just really formal, should I say.
And maybe there are good things about that because it's good to wait in line and don't push in and all the rest of it.
But I think, you know, as part of that, there still comes like a bit of an element of it just becomes so stifled.
You know, it just feels like there's just so many roadblocks that are preventing you from doing stuff that you want to do.
Oh, no, like I remember when I was traveling in, I went to Belize and Guatemala and Mexico and places like that.
And, you know, every checkpoint, you know, it was all just so lazy.
Like, nobody cared.
And it's like, oh, how lovely.
Yeah.
Good.
People who don't take their stifling job seriously.
Can we get a little bit more of that?
But no.
Everybody's got to be conscientious and so thoughtful.
It really matters.
It's so important.
Anyway.
Exactly.
And even that falls back.
That even goes into, like, even wanting to see friends and, like, family members.
Everything has to be so, like, scheduled.
There's no...
Oh, no drop-ins.
Yeah, drop-ins are not that.
Yeah, no drop-ins.
Yeah, that kind of thing.
You know, I remember growing up, drop-ins were a regular thing.
People just used to turn up and, you know, you'd hang out.
There wasn't all of this, like, formalizing it.
We've got to schedule this date.
And then, you know, the date eventually comes and then something happens and you don't end up meeting anyway because maybe they're ill or what have you.
Yeah, God help you.
I mean, there was no such thing when I was a kid as a play day.
Yeah.
Yes.
You just went over and, you know, knocked on people's houses.
You know, I love a high conscientious society.
Like Britain is very much that way.
A high conscientious society is really good in the private sector.
Yes.
Right?
In the public sector, the high conscientious society gets really stifling really quickly.
And that was one of the things that I didn't like.
Yeah.
And so this leads me to think, like, I think there are opportunities that I could take up some opportunity.
There are opportunities there for me to do something abroad.
Oh, you mean like in Zambia, right?
In Zambia, yes.
Because I still have a bunch of family members over there, a bunch of contacts, people that have been in the industry that I'm in at the moment.
I feel like I can bring some of the good aspects and the good practices that I've learned over here.
You're multilingual, you've got...
Western experience and Western education.
I mean, yeah, it's no question that you would be very valuable in Africa.
I mean, I think that's a given.
So you don't have to sell me on a warmer climate.
You know, that's, yeah, I'm with you there, brother.
I get all of that.
The problem, of course, is your wife.
Yes.
Because are you saying that the, I mean, okay, how European is she?
Because Europe is a big-ass place, right?
And you've got the swarthy Sicilians all the way up to the ice-blue Norwegians.
So where's she on that?
She's half Italian, half British.
Which half one?
I'd say probably the British slash Irish, because I think there is some Irish in there as well.
Right.
So, you're taking one of the most sun-allergic species.
I'm just kidding, right?
Yeah.
So, I mean, has she been with you, Susambia?
I mean, what does she think?
Yeah, she came with me for the first time last year.
And she was kind of like, I mean, we've been to, you know, other third-world countries.
Well, like, we've been to Cuba and stuff.
So, she's seen, she's seen, should I say, poverty in some, you know...
No, it's not the poverty, I don't think.
I'm not going to speak for her.
But I don't think it's the poverty that's the major issue, because you would just live in a fairly well-to-do neighborhood, right?
Yes, yes.
Yes, that's right.
So it's not the poverty.
I think I know what it might be, but go on.
Well, for the most part, I think she enjoyed it.
She really liked it.
She was pleasantly surprised by how well she could get.
I mean, her idea of it was just like, there's going to be cholera everywhere, you have to...
You have to be really careful where you eat.
And yes, you do, but it's not like...
Her thoughts were like, everything you touch, straight away you've got to have antibacterial cream or just be in this protective bubble at all times.
That's really quite the dark continent perspective she's got going on there, right?
Yes, exactly.
No, no, there are really civilized, lovely places in Africa, which is...
Anyway, but go on.
Yes, there are civilized places in Africa.
And I think she was pleasantly surprised by that because the picture that she had built up in her mind was like, oh, this is just all going to be a quagmire or I don't know what.
I mean, she knows that there are white neighborhoods you don't want to touch things in, right?
You go to some hoarder trailer park and it's like, yeah, I don't want to sit anywhere.
Yes, and there are places like that here.
Exactly.
So, yeah, I mean, I can't...
I don't really know what her criticisms really were of them, of Zambia.
I probably need to ask her the question, but the main thing was probably just because she would be far away from her family would be an issue.
That would be a big issue.
Yeah, I mean, what's the flight length?
Oh, 17 hours.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
So, yeah, that's a whole and a half, but okay, what else?
So it would be being far away from her family.
I think she would be, she didn't like the fact that there was like power cuts.
So, you know, you don't get regular consistent electricity, which, you know, that is problematic.
Oh, and that's like even in the, like, is that sort of countrywide or gridwide?
Like, it's not like one of these neighborhoods, but like, so you'd have to have a generator or something like that because the energy is inconsistent, right?
It's unreliable.
Yeah, exactly.
But you can work around that to some degree.
Yes, you can.
I have friends who live in the country and they just have a generator.
Exactly.
There are workarounds and there's ample sunlight there for solar.
Solar is a big thing over there as well.
Also, I've been to Africa, as you know, a couple of times, South Africa.
And unfortunately, there is that bacon sizzling sound of Irish fresh being fried by the African sun.
But, you know, I'm a little bit on the dark Irish side, so I tan pretty well, so I can end up in the tropics.
I can end up pretty much okay after a month or two.
Yes, and her Italian genes come through with that because she can tan really well and, you know, she loves the sun.
She loves it.
Yeah, for sure.
And so, weather's fine.
I think, yeah, so she doesn't like the fact that there's unreliable electricity.
She's petrified of malaria, of getting malaria.
So that's, you know...
Oh, malaria, as you know, can be a real bitch.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it can weaken you for the rest of your life sort of stuff, as far as what I've heard.
Yes, yes.
But there are ways around that as well, because, you know...
My mom, who lived in Zambia for pretty much all of her life, never, ever had malaria.
I think there's certain blood types as well that are a bit more predisposed to it.
But I think we have a bit of sickle cell anemia in my family.
So I think you're a little less prone to getting malaria if you have that trait.
But don't quote me on that.
But that doesn't stop people.
Europeans that live in Zambia and have moved to Zambia from Europe that are living there and I don't think they live on anti-malarial tablets because there's only so much you can take of that and then you have to eventually stop doing that and you become acclimatized.
And that's not to say that you don't take precautions because you still would.
There are certain parts of cities that are virtually malaria-free.
It's only when you start going to the bush and areas like that where you're a bit more susceptible or a bit more prone to getting infected.
I remember when I first went to Africa at the age of six and I just remember the giant black wasps.
They were just completely terrifying to me.
They would float around because we went deep into the bush and all that because my father was a geologist and I remember that.
And I also remember The tsetse flies, right?
Tsetse flies?
I'm not sure how they would be pronounced in other places.
Also quite alarming because, you know, something that small, a sleeping sickness or malaria or things like that, that was all pretty alarming.
But of course, she's been there before and she knows you grew up there, so you'd have a lot of expertise and familiarity with the whole environment, right?
Exactly.
I mean, a lot of my family over there rarely ever get malaria.
And again, it could just be down to spraying the house at nighttime before you go to bed, having mosquito nets, using repellent if you're going to bushy areas and stuff like that.
And there's pretty good treatment as well for malaria over there if you do get it.
I mean, especially these days, the testing is pretty good.
It's fast.
You can get tested and get a result the same day and you can start treatments.
I mean, it's come a long way.
I'm sure that the illness has something to do with it, but that's probably not the essence of it.
That probably has something to do with it, yes.
Healthcare as well.
But I think mainly she probably is worried about pension as well.
I think when it comes to if she was to move over there, what would Sustain her in her later years because that's one thing that she's vocalized to me is that because she's a stay-at-home mom, she hasn't been working for her.
Well, she is working now, even though she is a stay-at-home mom, she works from home anyway.
And the type of job that she does as well is not dependent on geography because we can be anywhere in the world that has an internet connection and she can do what she does.
My job isn't like that at the moment.
I mean, although I do work remotely, I still have to go in every so often to the office.
But for the most part, both of us are stay-at-home parents.
And that's been beautiful, being able to be close to them, my children, as they're seeing them grow up in these young years, in their early years.
I think that's one side of it as well.
I'm trying to come to what it is that you're thinking.
Is your family around Lusaka or Copperbelt or other places?
Yeah, a bit in Lusaka, mostly in the Copperbelt.
And where would you think you would settle?
I'm open to where I grew up, in the Copperbelt.
Or Lusaka as well, because that Lusaka really is almost, in terms of things that you can buy in the shops and everything, is pretty much the same as you would get here in England.
Other than a few bumpy roads here and there, you have access to pretty much everything.
You have high-speed internet, you have electronics, you have gadgets.
Food shops, you have all the restaurants.
You pretty much have everything that you would get or enjoy over here.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
And I think Lusaka is really developing at a rapid speed.
I think there's a lot more opportunities there.
So I would be open to being there.
But also, I have family members still in the Copper Belt.
So there would be more.
And that's where...
I have family members with children that are around the same age as my two boys.
So there'd be a lot more opportunity for them to grow up with their cousins and play together and share the same schools and things like that.
So financially, maybe she's concerned.
I think there could be some financial concerns about moving there.
Definitely being far away from her family is an issue.
The unreliable electricity, the diseases maybe as well are a factor.
What else?
Really?
What else?
Really?
I mean, is it like blindingly, glaringly obvious?
Percent of people in Zambia who are white.
Right, yes, that is also another one.
I somehow thought about that, but yeah, so she would be a huge minority.
Zero?
Are you ready?
Are you ready for some zeros?
Yep, hit me with it.
0.002.
So out of the 20 mil in Zambia, about 40,000 Europeans.
And mostly in Zaka and Copper Belt.
Zaka, yeah.
Yes.
So it would, yeah, I mean...
Now, honestly, of course, I mean, she's not racist, so I'm not trying to sort of say anything like that.
Yeah.
But it can be, I mean, I'm sure you've experienced this to some degree, but, you know, it can be a little bit odd for some people where it's like, nobody around me looks like me.
Yeah.
Well, I don't really feel that way about me being here, but I understand what you're saying.
Yeah, because when I was in boarding school, Nobody looked like me.
There was like one other guy, maybe a couple of other Asian people.
Oh, yeah.
I'm sorry, but I was in boarding schools and my best friend was an Indian guy.
It was like 500 white boys and one Indian guy.
And, you know, it was tough for him.
I guess nothing to do with racism.
It's just, you know, we're not really programmed to, you know, we all grew up in the same tribes and so on.
So there's just kind of like a sense of like, we evolved to have people around us who look like us, right?
And that's just maybe, I don't know, this may be something to do with, but that's quite a big change for her, right?
Oh, huge.
Huge change.
Yeah, absolutely.
The people that look like her will be few and far between.
Crime rates in Zambia.
What are they like?
I feel I get a sense that In the good neighborhoods, I don't think that crime is terrible or that high, but again, I haven't looked into it, so I could be wrong.
And again, I think you can take precautions against that by being in either a gated community or having security yourself.
But then she's not going to the country.
She's going to a gated community.
Right?
She can't go to Zambia.
And listen, as a man, you know, sort of man-to-man, we don't think that much about it.
Yeah.
But women do, right?
I mean, this is something a friend of mine said when I was a teenager.
Like, imagine that you are half your size and in possession of something that every man wants.
Once, yes.
Right?
I mean, how tall is your wife?
Probably about 5'7".
All right.
And is she slender?
Yes.
Yeah, fairly.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, I assume she's fairly attractive?
Yes.
Okay.
So, how comfortable do you think she would feel walking around a non-gated community, Doing her shopping, roaming around, and so on as an attractive white woman in Zambia.
And the white stuff is not particularly important other than it would cause her to draw attention.
It would draw attention to her and she would stand out.
Yeah, probably not very comfortable at all.
I think she probably wouldn't do it.
No, she wouldn't.
No, she wouldn't.
At least to begin with.
Because I was going to say, at least to begin with, but in the cities like Lusaka, for instance, I did notice that there were white women going about doing their shopping and stuff in the shopping malls and they didn't seem to be accompanied by anybody else.
But I don't know what their risk tolerance is or if they had lived there for a long time or all their life or what have you.
But yeah, that wouldn't apply to my wife because she would be very uncomfortable doing something like that.
Well, I mean, women have certainly different levels of situational awareness, different levels of comfort.
And as a whole, what is her level of caution in the world, even in the UK? Yeah, her level of caution is extremely high.
You know, she's like, whenever I'm driving, she's that passenger driver who's like, oh, watch out for that thing in the hedge 10 miles away.
And that was, you know, kind of always telling me.
To slow down and drive a certain way because everything I do is just too frightening for when I'm driving.
So yeah, hype.
Like really cautious about everything.
Right.
Okay.
Especially when it comes to the children as well.
Zambia has pretty high rates reporting of sexual abuse against women and children.
Right.
Okay.
Now would that be in sort of more the rural areas?
Well, I'll give you the, I'll put us in the Skype chat, but you need to research this stuff.
I mean, don't make the mistake of thinking that the world is the same for the ladies as it is for the men.
I mean, I know you know that, but I'm just being an annoying guy to remind you.
Yeah.
I'll put this in just so I make sure that I don't recall, I don't...
Forget.
But yeah, she is going to look up the crime statistics.
She's going to look up the victimization statistics.
She's going to look up, and of course, not just sexual crimes, but other forms of crimes.
If there's a perception that, I mean, again, I hate the sort of the term third world in a way because it is kind of derogatory, but in terms of are there, you know, I know that when executives go to work in the third world, especially with their families, They have to be particularly cautious with their kids in case they're kidnapping for money and so on.
And this may all be not true, but it is an entirely new environment which is going to raise questions in her.
And I think you need to do the research in all the things that she has objections to.
Yes.
Yes.
And I don't think she'd want to go.
I mean, do you want to go to a place where you're so unusual that everyone stares at you?
And so on.
I mean, that can be a little unsettling.
Again, for men, you know, we don't particularly care.
But for women, sort of the male gaze thing can be, and I'm not going to contradict women on their sort of experience of these things, because it's a very foreign world to me.
But that sort of male gaze stuff, people staring, that can make women feel a bit nervous or a bit uncomfortable.
To the degree that that happens, I need to find out.
Because I have a friend over there, a childhood friend, who got married to a Russian woman.
And she's pretty much a fair complexion.
She's like a European woman.
And I need to find out with him what her experience is like living in Zambia.
Because she's moved over from Russia.
And she's living there.
And she's living in Osaka.
And so they are people that I can speak to as well to see what experience their wives are having who are, you know, of European descent.
Yeah, I'm just reading here as well.
And one place has quoted 20 million.
Other places have quoted this year says 13 million.
This could be older.
It says Zambia has a high morbidity and mortality with human HIV prevalence rate at over 14%.
Yes.
Gender-based violence cases are consistently on the rise, the majority of which are physical and sexual violence against women and children.
Yeah.
So it's a different world for them.
Yes, it is.
It is.
And it is a daunting prospect, probably.
And this is the thing I... Oh, sorry.
This is from 2018. So obviously this is...
I think the population is more towards about 20. I know when I was leaving the country, it was around 13 million.
And yeah, I think now it's around probably around 20 million, somewhere there.
So this is a little bit older, but there's also sexual violence against girls in Zambian schools.
This report examines the problem of sexual violence against girls in Zambian schools.
In Zambia, many girls are raped, sexually abused, harassed, and assaulted by teachers and male classmates.
They are also subjected to sexual harassment and attack while traveling to and from school.
And, of course, you know, it's not like in England the girls are safe either, as we've sort of found out more.
I guess the world has found out.
Exactly.
So, let's see here.
54% of students interviewed, and this is older, but...
It may be better, it may be worse, but this is 54% of students interviewed said they had personally experienced some form of sexual violence or harassment by a teacher, student, or men they encountered while traveling to and from school.
And of the girls interviewed, more than half said they knew of teachers at their current or former school who had sex or entered into relationships with students and so on.
So, it's a different world in many ways.
And I would say that to try and figure this stuff out.
So tell me a little bit more about the neighborhood where you were growing up.
Was it more secure, more safe, more gated, or were you out there, I guess you could say, in the general population?
Yeah, I was in the general population.
It wasn't a gated community at all.
We kind of just lived on the main road, if you will.
It had a fence around it, these brick wall fences that are typical of most houses in Africa.
So we had a wall around it with a big gate.
Wait, a wall with a gate, but it wasn't a gate of community?
Do you just mean the house itself?
The house itself was surrounded by a wall that had a gate to get into the house.
It was just its own individual property.
You would leave that environment and just run the neighborhoods, right?
I would leave that environment and roam the neighbourhoods.
Not that often, because the walls around our house were pretty sizable, so we didn't really have to.
For the most part, you weren't just in a gated community.
You stayed in your gated, obviously, but very large yard.
Is that right?
Yes, that's right.
We used to make friends with the neighbours on either side of the house.
Even though we were separated by a wall, as children, we used to find ways of climbing that wall and going over to the neighbor's house who had an equally sizable garden.
We'd play around in each other's gardens and stuff like that.
We were cautioned not to always just walk out as children into the street.
We were told as children not.
So I didn't do that a whole lot growing up.
It was mostly being within the safety or the confines of our own yards.
When we did go out onto the roads, we had to be usually accompanied by the maid or somebody or an adult or something like that.
So you were aware of the dangers of the general society?
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
So, it was more than a gated community.
You basically stayed in the house property?
Yes, in the house property, yeah.
Okay, and if you had to leave, you needed to be accompanied, right?
Yes, for the most part, yeah.
I mean, until I got to a certain age where I was kind of a bit more independent.
Did your parents talk to you or inform you about the dangers that they were protecting you against?
Yes.
And what did they say?
Pretty much that there's people on the street that could snatch you up and take you away.
Oh, so the kidnapping was like a thing.
And maybe it would be for blackmail or maybe it would just be for other, perhaps even more nefarious reasons, right?
Yeah, it could be, yes.
But the kidnapping wasn't like, oh, this is like a big thing that happens all the time.
It was just kind of like, you know, just like don't talk to strangers type of thing, like those type of questions.
Well, no, I mean, and I'm sorry to interrupt.
Like, I understand that.
That's common, right?
I mean, child-proofing your kids is very important.
But the idea that if you leave the fairly giant walled enclave of the house, you have to be accompanied at all times by an adult.
I mean, that's certainly not how I grew up.
So...
That's a sort of more risky situation, I would assume.
Yes, you're right.
There were times when we did leave the confines of the house, but we still stayed in close proximity to where our house was.
We didn't go straying off really far from the house.
So there were times that we could do that, we could go out, but it was under somebody's watchful eye.
Somebody had to be watching us when we did that.
Right.
Yeah, so we were warned just because we were right next to a busy road as well.
There's traffic, you could get run over, things like that that they warned us against.
They didn't want us running out into the road.
I lived on a road as well, but you get taught pretty early, don't go near the road, and then you could just go wherever you want, right?
So it's not just the road thing, right?
There is this concern about crime or kidnapping or snatching, as you say, right?
Yeah.
Yes.
Right.
I mean, it would be real drag to relocate and then realize that you don't have a whole lot more freedoms for your kids to roam.
One is the weather, the other is the danger, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And yeah, I mean, we'd probably have to scope all these things out.
Like, you know, maybe...
Sorry to interrupt.
Does it allow for homeschooling?
We would like to do homeschooling.
I think that would be our preference.
No, I understand that, and I'm glad that you do, but I can have a quick look here.
Homeschooling in Zambia.
I wasn't sure I was going to...
Oh, does it allow for it?
I'm sure it probably does.
I think...
I think...
That's the thing.
I'm not sure.
I probably need to...
Yes, you can.
Homeschooling in Zambia is supported by several organizations and resources and so on, right?
Although the majority of expats, I'm sure, would send their kids to international schools.
Exactly, yes.
That's U.S., British curricula, and often in Lusaka, I'm sure, and other places as well.
Okay, so that's certainly a possibility.
Because, I mean, it would be...
Well, I guess your kids are very young, right?
But it might be a bit of a...
A shock for them, if they were older, of course, to suddenly be sort of airdropped into a local Zambian school.
Sorry, are we still around?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Testing, one, two, three.
Do I have you?
Oh, yes, yes.
I'm there?
You can, yes.
Yeah, no problem.
No problem.
Yes.
Okay, and...
Would you face an exit tax if you moved out of the UK? What is an exit tax?
Oh boy, if you've never had to ask this question, you are a happy guy.
Oh, it's only considering doing that.
Because I am still classed as a Zambian.
I have dual citizenship, so I'm still...
I can be classed as an expat or I can be classed as a citizen.
I mean, it never used to be the case before.
You weren't allowed to have two passports or two nationalities, but part of the new government, they've changed that.
So you can actually be due national.
So I would have the benefits of being...
Yeah, I mean, obviously, I'm no lawyer, no accountant, but I would talk to an accountant specializing in international affairs to figure out what the tax implications are.
I mean, wouldn't it be lovely if we could just live in the world like a dandelion blown from place to place?
But there tend to be quite a lot of shackles for people who want to change countries.
So just from a practical standpoint, I would certainly suggest that.
So, would you be able to live in the same neighborhood as your family?
Because I think that would be one of the main benefits, right?
Would it be to have your kids play with other family members' kids and so on?
Yes.
Yeah, we still have property over there that's literally in the same vicinity.
My family home, actually, is still under my parents' ownership.
So, if I was to move back, I think I could...
I'd need to ask them if they would be willing to put us up in that house.
Right.
But that's great.
Then have a place to land.
Does your wife work?
Yes, she does.
And so who's taking care of your kids, brother?
So she works when I'm not working.
So we kind of just like...
And plus, we also have help from her parents.
We live close to her parents.
So, who's taking care of them?
Yeah, we both are, but we kind of like...
She works the hours when I'm...
You're kind of playing hot potato with the kids, right?
Hot potato, that's exactly it.
Okay, that's good.
And so, what would she do in Zambia?
Would she stay home with the kids?
Which is, of course, fine.
Obviously, this is not a judgment.
I'm just curious what...
Is she very attached to her career?
Is she like, love what she do?
Or is she like, I'd much rather stay home with the kids?
No, she is a bit of both.
She'd like to have the freedom to be able to still also do a...
She's not super attached to her career.
She's more focused on just building her own business at the moment, which is fantastic.
Because she's in education, she can pretty much go anywhere in the world where there's a demand for the European syllabus or the European curriculum, which is what she teaches in.
She's in education, so she's focusing on growing her own tuition type of thing.
What about language issues?
It's predominantly English-speaking.
Ah, okay.
Because it was a British colony, so yeah, I mean, there wouldn't really be any language barriers because English is promoted in virtually all the schools.
Okay, got it.
Well, that's a plus for sure.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, she had no problem with speaking to anybody when she was over there.
Excellent, excellent.
Okay.
And do you anticipate spending the rest of your life in Zambia?
Yes, I do.
So then that would be her too.
So she would be leaving her cultural history and country behind, right?
Yeah.
Obviously back to visit and things like that, right?
Yes, exactly.
And if it doesn't work out, say, if we tried it for, I don't know, maybe a few years, there's always...
I guess the fallback of being able to come back if it didn't work.
Oh yeah, for sure.
I get that.
There's always that option.
It doesn't have to be...
You see, the thing is, I don't want to go to like...
I want to be able to try and attempt something like this rather than have a regret of saying, oh, I never...
Why didn't we even try doing it at the time when we could have?
And now we're looking at it 20 years from now when children are all grown up and...
I'll know that she definitely wouldn't want to move at that stage, probably.
And, yeah, I just don't want to have that regret of thinking we didn't even try doing something like that.
When I have such a...
It's like all I think about these days.
Right, right.
And, I mean, I'm sure, of course, you have talked with your wife about the issues that she might have.
And what has she expressed in terms of her major issues?
One of them would be she would feel like she's on her own now.
There's nobody for her to give her that support if she ever needed it.
Like her family, that she would get from her family.
Right.
I mean, so your life may not change that much, but in terms of how her life would change, it would be a much bigger change, right?
It would be, yes.
Which is not to say that's good or bad, it just is a bigger change, right?
And I think recognizing that is important.
Yeah, she still has friends from school and stuff like that, whereas I pretty much don't have any friends.
If I'm speaking honestly, there's not anybody that I can think of that, oh...
Well, you're into philosophy.
It's a challenge, man.
Yeah, it is a challenge.
Yeah, it is.
And yeah, so right.
I don't have somebody that I can say, oh, that, you know, other than work colleagues and stuff like that, but they're just like, you know, colleagues from work that you're around, you socialize with at work and stuff.
Yeah, and outside of that...
There's a funny tweet the other day.
I was just reading about it.
It's like, you know, work is crazy, man.
You know someone at work for like three years and then he just leaves the work and you just never see him again.
You never see...
It's exactly that way.
It's the strangest thing.
It's like they're ghosts.
They just disappeared and that's it.
Just like off the face of the planet.
Right, right.
And it's been like that even with my friends that I had at university who I thought I was really close to.
And out of all of them, I've only remained close with one other friend who also happens to have moved to Africa.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
But to a different country.
Right, right.
I'm still very close with him.
And he's virtually the only guy that I talk to out of.
All the friends that I had at university as well.
So my life, in terms of social life, I don't have a social life.
We live in an area where she's close to her family members, and my family members are in another part of the UK. So we live closer to her family members.
So my social life really wouldn't change at all.
Maybe for the better, yeah.
It certainly would change for the better.
It would maybe be for the better, but because I'd have, yeah, I'd have, again, all my cousins and aunties and uncles and stuff over there.
Yeah, it would definitely change for the better.
And, of course, your kids, when they got older, would have the chance to figure out where they wanted to go live, right?
Yes, exactly that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And as they're growing up, we could spend Christmases in the UK if they wanted to with their grandparents over here.
And my parents would probably still be in the UK. I don't think they have any intention of going back to Zambia as well.
So both sides of the family still, in terms of grandparents for them, would still be in the UK. Oh, sure.
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, there'd always be trips back here.
And then they have the option of deciding where they want to go.
I mean, they were born here.
They could probably go to university here.
Oh, yeah.
You know, and all of that.
So there would be those options.
Right, right.
Okay.
So, yeah, I mean, overall, I think just recognizing that it's a different set of criteria for your wife when it comes to moving to a place like that.
I would imagine that physical security, she wouldn't want to end up feeling like a prisoner in her own home because she was concerned about issues that might happen in Zambia, if she's concerned about, and it seems like the data is, that there are some issues with violence and so on.
So I think, again, as dudes, we don't really think about that stuff, but it is a sort of very big issue.
And, you know, what are we going to say?
No, you're wrong, right?
I mean, that's not particularly productive.
And, yeah, I mean, it is a huge change for her, and it is a bigger change for her than it is for you, because you've been there before, and, of course, you have been in the UK for a long time, so for you going back, given that you grew up there, it would be sort of like I was in the UK until I was about...
I'm almost similar to your age.
I was about 11 when I left to Canada, which, of course, wasn't a massive change, at least not as big as something like what you're considering.
But it would be like if I went back to the UK, it would still be fairly recognizable and fairly comfortable because, you know, those sort of initial impressions are hard to just, you know, you can't really eradicate them or anything like that.
It would be like, you know, if I didn't speak English for a long time and then I spoke English again, it would come pretty easily, right?
Yeah, and I think as well, I know you've mentioned once, when people, especially speaking back to the problem with mass migration to the West from African countries, how long would it take for, say, a Japanese person Who grew up in Japan and came over to, I don't know, like England or went somewhere else.
How long would it take for them to acclimatize to that new culture, having grown up in a Japanese culture?
I don't know.
Sorry, that's a challenge when you are of a different race and you move to a...
You know, if you're Irish and you move to America in the 19th century, eventually you just look like all the other potato-based Americans or whatever, right?
Yes.
But if you, your wife will never, like everybody will know that the odds of her being born in Zambia are virtually zero, right?
Zero, yeah.
Like she will never, she will never fit in in that sense.
It's, you know, like the guy's, what's the guy's name who grew up in Japan, right?
And, you know.
Would he ever be fully accepted by, and I'm not sure how Zambians, it's obviously no area of expertise for me, I don't know exactly how Zambians feel about foreigners.
They're very accommodating, they're very welcoming, and receptive to it.
They have no issues with foreigners coming over.
Okay, good.
She will always be recognized as somebody who's not from Zambia.
I suppose.
And that, you know, that certainly can be a challenge.
And I think part of me as well is like, even though I've acclimatized and assimilated to life in the UK, there's still that part of me that's, you know, that is, because I grew up over there, there's still that part of me that longs to go back to that.
Even though, like you speak about, like if an Irish person in the 90s, 20s America went to America and then they blend in just like as if they had lived there.
I know I'm not really blended in in the sense that I'm like the homogenous crowd over here, but I have blended in because I can really adapt to different places.
I almost feel like I'm a world citizen in some ways.
Right.
I mean, sorry, because you're a multi-race, you can blend in in a lot of places.
The price of that is that it's a little tough to feel like you just blend in anywhere in sort of some fundamental way.
But as your wife is a full-on tighty-whitey, she's going to have more of a challenge, especially because she would just be in such a minority.
It's hard to conceive of 40,000 in 20 million.
Yeah, yes.
That is a minority, man.
It is, in the truest sense.
Now, again, people tend to congregate, right?
So it's not like those 40,000 whites are just...
They're not scattered throughout the general population, right?
Like most expats, they tend to go and congregate, right?
Yes, that's true.
Yeah, so that could be the case.
But I don't know.
I mean, I certainly have had these experiences from time to time.
If she's the only white person in an extended black family gathering, she may be totally fine with that.
I mean, this is not to prejudge, right?
I mean, some people would be.
And some people, you know, there may be some sort of, I don't know, this ancient, I don't know, like, tribal thing that kicks in, and maybe it would happen, maybe it wouldn't, but I think that is something that is probably worth discussing just to see if it would be something that might show up for her.
Yeah.
Because, again, if you've been part of a majority culture as a white woman in the UK, she's been part of majority culture.
She just may not really know.
You've had more of that experience, of course, right?
But she just may not really know what it's like then to be a really, really rare minority, if that makes sense.
Yes.
Yeah, it does make sense.
So I think those kinds of discussions.
Yeah.
So I think the physical security, I mean, you've identified the other ones about health and things like that, but I think the physical security stuff and whether she's going to feel like she can't leave the, you know, the family compound, so to speak, or any of that, or if she's constantly worried about her kids out in the neighborhood and so on, then, you know, there are lots of different prisons in the world, right?
And the prison of anxiety is...
It's tough and probably is a little bit more common among women.
And if you say your wife is, which I'm sure you're right, right, that she's a pretty high-caution kind of individual, then, you know, I mean, that might be something that would be less comfortable for her in the long run.
Or maybe in the long run, she'd get more used to it.
Sorry, that's completely backwards.
Maybe in the long run, she'd get more used to it, but in the short run, it might be a real challenge.
Yeah, I think in the short run it will be quite like a steep learning curve or experience curve.
But long term, those types of issues might just go by the wayside.
But something I probably need to discuss a bit more in depth with her and try and bring it up in a light-hearted way, I suppose, as well.
It almost feels like I already know what the answer is going to be, and I'm a bit apprehensive to bringing it up in our discussions, and I end up just bottling it in and being grumpy.
She might feel that there's something politically incorrect about feeling a bit odd about being such a tiny obvious minority.
It's not like, you know, you're one brunette in a class of 10 blondes.
Like, it's a pretty blindingly obvious minority.
And being that much of a minority, she might, I mean, because, you know, there's all this politically correct stuff that makes this stuff tough to talk about for a lot of people.
So she may feel like, well, I shouldn't feel that way.
And it's like, well, but, you know, if you do, it's just something to talk about and discuss, right?
I mean, I don't think any particular feelings or instincts are bad.
They just need to be talked about and discussed.
Some of them may not be appropriate to the situation, but...
If she might be targeted for her skin color, which, again, could happen, then that would be a place where she probably would feel more anxiety and danger.
And for a woman to feel that level of danger is just not a fun life.
Absolutely.
And an important question would be, I think, as well, is it a good decision for the children?
Is that also a good standpoint to come from?
Well, you know, that's a tough call.
That's a tough call because I really don't know much about the culture of Zambia.
They would be growing up and their peers would be, I assume, Zambian kids.
And because I don't really know much about the culture of Zambia, I don't know whether it is a culture like what are the attitudes of Zambians towards women because that's probably going to be the attitudes that your kids are going to pick up from their peers.
Is that something that you want them to pick up?
I don't know much about what the culture of Zambia is like.
I mean, I know it's largely Christian, but, you know, Christianity has many different faces throughout the world.
So if the cultural values of Zambia or Zambian culture, and again, I know it's a bunch of different tribes, so it's not like there's just one big culture, but so they would obviously have to have friends in the neighborhood, and then they would have to but so they would obviously have to have friends in the neighborhood, and then they would They They'd have to date in among their friend and peer group.
If they're homeschooled, there might be homeschooling.
I know that there are homeschooling associations and so on.
So are the cultural values that they will pick up in Zambia something that you want?
Because, you know, you co-parent with the culture, right?
Yeah.
But if I think about my experience that I've had, my attitude towards women has always been, you know, one of respect and treating them well and everything like that.
And that stemmed from...
You know, what I was exposed to growing up, I... Yes, but you're also, sorry to be annoying, but you're also extraordinarily high IQ. Right.
Right, so that, I mean, as you know, I always put the listeners to this show in the top 1% of IQ. And I think that's probably quite conservative.
It probably is the top 0.1% of IQ. So you're just a blindingly smart fellow, right?
Right, okay.
So you're going to be in a minority wherever you go.
And I'm sure your wife is very smart as well.
She's a teacher and entrepreneur and married to you and all that kind of stuff, right?
So you would have, I think, come to the position of rational self-interest and respect for women just by being very smart.
And I'm not saying that the culture in your family had nothing to do with that.
Of course, they did.
But, you know, one of the challenges, if you and your wife are super smart, is your kids...
I mean, they could be completely brilliant, they could be smarter than you, but the likelihood is they probably won't be quite as smart as you and your wife, and then they may be slightly more susceptible to peer or cultural influences.
You know, like if you and your wife are like six foot eight, your kids are going to be way taller than average, but there's this regression to the mean thing, so that's just something to be aware of.
And again, this is not to prejudge anyone, I mean...
I think my daughter's smarter than me in a lot of ways, so it could really work out, but that's a tiny bit of an anomaly as a whole.
So you will be co-parenting with the culture and some of the stuff that you figured out, I mean, obviously treating women with respect is not just moral, but it's rational self-interest, right?
Because you want that mutual respect in a relationship and it's good for love and sustainability in the marriage and so on.
But you will be co-parenting with the culture and maybe, just maybe, Your kids might be more influenced by the culture than you were.
And again, not knowing much about the culture of Zambia, I can't sort of say how that will be.
And again, there's more than one, but kids tend to...
Yeah, there's a lot...
Now, peer pressure, of course, gets minimized when you are homeschooling, which is a big plus.
But yeah, I mean, so whatever the cultural values are in Zambia...
Now, so let's say that you teach your kids the, for whatever, let's say that in Zambia, there are a lot of people who don't hugely respect women, right?
Maybe, right?
Well, that's the culture that your kids are going to have to grow up in.
So if you, you know, teach your kids and model that with your wife to really respect women, then they're going to have to navigate through a culture where that may not be the norm.
And that is a challenge.
challenge.
Whereas, of course, if they're in the UK, then that culture is going to be more the norm.
So that's neither here nor there, but just to be aware of those kinds of differences.
Like I knew for a fact that, you know, raising my daughter in the peaceful parenting way was going to make her quite a bit different from a lot of the other kids, most of the other kids in a lot of ways.
But, you know, and we've obviously talked about that from time to time.
But I mean, what's the alternative, right?
You know, harm your kids to make them fit in?
Like, no, thank you.
So, yeah.
So, I mean, you are making a decision for the culture that they're going to have to swim in and navigate because the sort of the The cocoon of your family disintegrates over time, and then, you know, you're getting old, you're not as much part of their lives, certainly, as when they're very young, and then you're dead, and then they're in Zambia with all the values that you and your wife have inculcated.
How well is that going to mesh with the local community and environment that they're in?
And again, I don't have any particular answers for that, but those are certainly considerations that you might want to have.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
Very valid perspectives that I'll definitely dwell on or ponder and just try and...
Again, yeah, I think the key would be just an open communication to air out these issues and bring them to light and the concerns that she has.
And yeah, I need to have that discussion a bit more in-depth with her.
Maybe visit the country a few more times.
Yeah, and if you do settle in Zambia, man, let me know.
I love the heat.
We'll do the next call then in person on some great Zambian food and maybe a Zambian beer or two.
So just keep me posted.
I'm just trying to create places around the world that I can go to.
I don't have anything in the Zs at the moment.
Zealand, New didn't quite pan out.
Yeah, and then maybe Zimbabwe, who knows?
Maybe Zimbabwe, yeah, that's right.
Because it's annoying, a lot of people often get those two countries mixed up, and Zimbabwe was a bit more well-known to the people in the West than Zambia was, and they always think, yo, you're from Zimbabwe, and I have to correct them.
No, I'm not from Zimbabwe, how do you know?
You're not skinny, you know?
Isn't Zimbabwe the one where they kicked out all the white farmers and then had to beg them to come back, and I don't know what it was.
Exactly.
Yeah, I think so.
It is.
Yes, it is Zimbabwe.
Yeah, yeah.
You're right.
Okay, so is there anything else that I can help you with?
I mean, it sounds like you've got a fairly good list to chat about with your wife.
And I mean, obviously, it's a great pleasure to chat.
And I really do appreciate the call.
And I hope that it's been of some value to you.
It has been of immense value.
And it's great to just have a soundboard sometimes because I almost just feel like, well, it does get to a point where I have nobody really...
To air out these concerns of mine and just look at it from an objective, somewhat objective and somewhat anecdotal point of view as well.
So it's been really, really enjoyable on my part as well.
Beautiful.
Well, listen, keep me posted about how things are going.
And if you could just drop me a line and let me know what your movements are.
And if you don't move, or even if you do, I'd be curious to see what your wife had to say.
You can just drop it in Skype.
I'd love to hear what she has to say about things.
Yeah, no problem.
I will, yeah, take note of that, and I'll certainly keep you posted.
All right.
Well, thanks, Emil, man.
I appreciate that, and I'm sure I'll hear from you soon.
Yeah, thank you very much.
And I'm just about halfway through with Peaceful Parenting.
No, sorry, not halfway.
I've just started Peaceful Parenting, so I'm going to finish that hopefully quite soon, and hopefully I can adopt a lot of the things that are in that book as well.
Oh, I'm sure you're doing most of it already, but I'm sure it's good to get a refresher.
All right, man.
Have a great evening, and I look forward to hearing back.
All right.
Thanks, Steph.
Bye.
Thank you.
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