2024-04-19_Friday

00:00:00.720 | Today, Radical Personal Finance, live Q&A.

00:00:02.800 | (upbeat music)

00:00:05.380 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance,

00:00:20.240 | a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:21.840 | skills, insights, and encouragement you need

00:00:24.120 | to live a rich and meaningful life now,

00:00:26.280 | while building a plan for financial freedom

00:00:27.640 | in 10 years or less.

00:00:28.560 | My name is Joshua Sheath.

00:00:29.600 | Today is Friday, April 19th, 2024.

00:00:34.600 | And on this Friday, as I do on any Friday,

00:00:37.800 | in which I can arrange the appropriate recording technology,

00:00:40.640 | we do live Q&A.

00:00:43.340 | (upbeat music)

00:00:45.920 | Live Q&A works just like call and talk radio works,

00:00:53.600 | or used to work, we just moved on to the internet.

00:00:56.000 | I show up to a phone line, you show up to a phone line,

00:00:58.160 | we chat, you get to run the conversation,

00:01:00.800 | you ask about anything that you want,

00:01:02.280 | bring up any topics of discussion,

00:01:03.760 | bring up any questions that you have,

00:01:05.520 | you run the podcast on these Friday Q&A shows.

00:01:08.320 | If you'd like to gain access to one of these shows,

00:01:10.440 | you can do that by becoming a patron of the show.

00:01:12.280 | Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance,

00:01:14.920 | patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance,

00:01:18.040 | sign up to support the show there on Patreon,

00:01:20.240 | and that will gain access for you

00:01:22.020 | to one of these Friday Q&A shows.

00:01:24.480 | We begin with Mava in Texas.

00:01:26.440 | Mava, welcome to the show, how can I serve you today?

00:01:28.940 | - Hi, Joshua, thank you for taking my call.

00:01:32.160 | I'm a long-time listener, just haven't called in before,

00:01:36.080 | but I'm glad you took my call.

00:01:38.440 | Just have a quick question about just thinking

00:01:42.400 | about the sliding scale benefit of a full-time parent.

00:01:45.280 | So situation, husband and I have an infant,

00:01:48.780 | thinking about dual income going to single income,

00:01:53.520 | thinking about the point at which,

00:01:56.840 | with a general interest in home education

00:01:58.960 | or just kind of a high level of involvement in child life,

00:02:02.840 | when to kind of think about that transition,

00:02:04.560 | because obviously exiting the workforce

00:02:07.160 | kind of goes against everything from a quick trajectory

00:02:11.760 | towards financial independence

00:02:13.380 | and those more quantitative goals.

00:02:15.440 | So kind of think sliding scale on the quantitative side,

00:02:18.520 | but just the qualitative aspects of engagement,

00:02:21.640 | you can probably see that as being really important

00:02:23.520 | at age five, age six, but thinking about infant to six,

00:02:28.520 | going from dual to single income,

00:02:31.040 | thinking about it strategically, appreciate your thoughts.

00:02:33.160 | - Sure, how much money do you earn currently?

00:02:35.820 | - 120.

00:02:37.880 | - And your husband?

00:02:39.800 | - 200.

00:02:41.840 | - So you are in the situation

00:02:45.800 | that is probably the most difficult,

00:02:47.560 | which is probably why you're calling in to talk about it,

00:02:51.000 | because there is a financial answer

00:02:53.840 | and there's a non-financial answer,

00:02:55.560 | and it's difficult to know

00:02:57.080 | how to value the non-financial answer.

00:02:59.000 | Let's begin with the financial answer.

00:03:01.240 | If there is a woman who is earning,

00:03:03.600 | let's say 30 or $40,000 per year,

00:03:07.120 | and she is considering leaving her paid income

00:03:10.420 | in order to become a full-time mother and homemaker,

00:03:14.720 | and if her husband earns enough money

00:03:16.760 | to support the family without her income,

00:03:19.480 | then the financial incentive for her to do so

00:03:22.920 | is pretty obvious.

00:03:24.000 | After all, what does daycare cost in your area?

00:03:26.640 | Any idea?

00:03:27.480 | - Haven't yet explored,

00:03:31.080 | have good kind of community family support,

00:03:35.000 | so haven't had to price that out,

00:03:36.560 | but I anticipate probably at least 400 to 500 a week

00:03:40.480 | at a minimum for the standard care we would be interested in.

00:03:43.440 | - Yeah, so that's what I would guess.

00:03:44.560 | So you have a couple thousand dollars per month right there,

00:03:48.860 | and if you go through

00:03:50.360 | all of the different financial aspects of it

00:03:53.200 | and you calculate,

00:03:54.640 | a mother who's at that modest income range

00:03:57.560 | would probably come out ahead

00:04:00.200 | with her being a full-time stay-at-home mother.

00:04:02.820 | So we can start with taxes.

00:04:04.600 | We would remember that her income is the most highly taxed

00:04:08.200 | because it's the marginal additional income.

00:04:11.240 | So let's say that she leaves her $40,000 a year job.

00:04:15.320 | There's gonna be good tax savings

00:04:17.240 | because that's gonna be $40,000 less at the top end,

00:04:19.800 | at the highest marginal tax rate of that couple.

00:04:24.800 | Then we could get into

00:04:27.280 | the specific clear obvious costs of daycare,

00:04:31.200 | which can be calculated,

00:04:32.880 | recognizing that generally speaking,

00:04:34.880 | the costs of daycare are gonna be a post-tax cost,

00:04:37.940 | notwithstanding the various,

00:04:40.200 | perhaps you maybe have eligibility

00:04:42.320 | for a tax credit of some kind,

00:04:44.960 | but we're gonna have direct costs of daycare.

00:04:47.020 | Then we can look into all of the other costs of working

00:04:50.420 | that are associated.

00:04:51.400 | So this family, for example,

00:04:53.240 | would frequently have two cars.

00:04:55.160 | They might be able to go from two cars to one car,

00:04:58.080 | or to some, maybe instead of having a brand new car

00:05:01.160 | that's reliable and fancy and shiny,

00:05:03.640 | now we can swap out that more expensive car

00:05:05.840 | for a cheaper car,

00:05:07.040 | and that might drop the car insurance payments.

00:05:09.520 | It might drop the overall gasoline consumption.

00:05:12.120 | Maybe now where the family was eating out

00:05:15.200 | two or three nights a week

00:05:16.200 | because everyone was tired and no one wanted to cook,

00:05:18.540 | well now maybe she has the energy

00:05:20.420 | that we can eat at home more,

00:05:21.780 | and there's a savings on the grocery budget.

00:05:23.940 | Maybe she's able to shop more efficiently

00:05:26.380 | and get better deals for the family

00:05:28.740 | on the overall costs of living,

00:05:32.260 | and she can plan really amazing, inexpensive vacations.

00:05:36.100 | And then just simply,

00:05:36.940 | there's a huge quality of life increase.

00:05:39.020 | With the additional hours,

00:05:40.500 | she might be able to mow the lawn on Wednesday morning

00:05:43.220 | so that Saturday can be family day

00:05:44.820 | instead of her husband having to be out there

00:05:46.880 | mowing the lawn on Saturday morning.

00:05:48.320 | Maybe just they have more fun together

00:05:49.980 | because she's more relaxed.

00:05:51.240 | She's not stressed.

00:05:52.240 | She's not depressed.

00:05:53.160 | She's not dealing with workplace drama.

00:05:55.720 | Instead of being stuck in trying to figure out

00:05:58.120 | how to vacation on two bosses' schedules,

00:06:00.840 | all they gotta deal with is one job and one boss's schedule.

00:06:03.760 | So those are some of the various lifestyle benefits,

00:06:06.280 | but it's a pretty obvious financial choice

00:06:09.300 | for a mother who is earning a more modest income.

00:06:12.620 | However, that probably caps out

00:06:15.680 | somewhere around the 50 to $60,000 a year number.

00:06:20.200 | Even if I go really aggressive

00:06:22.120 | with all the savings that can be had,

00:06:24.440 | at the end of the day, if a mother is earning,

00:06:27.760 | again, I'm just guessing, maybe more than 50 or $60,000,

00:06:31.440 | I don't think you can make a financial argument

00:06:34.220 | that the family is gonna have more money

00:06:36.440 | for her to be a stay-at-home mom

00:06:38.360 | than for the family to have a daycare

00:06:41.520 | and put the children into daycare.

00:06:43.360 | Financially, I don't see that argument.

00:06:45.360 | The numbers don't work.

00:06:46.520 | And the numbers don't work partly

00:06:48.040 | because her income now is more significant

00:06:52.280 | to exceed all of those costs that I've described,

00:06:55.560 | but also because the second financial consideration

00:06:58.600 | always has to be counted in,

00:07:00.960 | which is, is there a potential harm,

00:07:04.180 | either an actual harm or a potential harm,

00:07:06.060 | to her long-term career ambitions and her job prospects

00:07:09.500 | based upon her being out of the workforce?

00:07:12.020 | In a highly corporatized society,

00:07:14.720 | there is often very little value

00:07:16.760 | that an employer is going to place

00:07:18.560 | upon her and her work experience

00:07:21.120 | if she takes time out from the workforce

00:07:23.460 | and then stays at home.

00:07:24.560 | And this is something that a lot of women find challenging.

00:07:27.780 | When they go back into the workforce,

00:07:30.080 | well, I've been kind of out of touch,

00:07:31.480 | my network has grown sour.

00:07:32.720 | Before I was Miss Corporate Hotshot,

00:07:35.840 | I had all the connections, all of the network,

00:07:37.760 | I had all of the opportunities built up,

00:07:40.160 | but now all my friends are mothers with babies

00:07:43.720 | and all the people that I associate with,

00:07:45.280 | I don't even have my professional wardrobe anymore

00:07:47.880 | and these kinds of things.

00:07:48.720 | And so she goes back to get into the workforce

00:07:51.680 | and get a job again.

00:07:53.980 | And she, instead of having five more years of experience

00:07:57.120 | and five more advancements in her career,

00:07:59.180 | well, now there's a slower pathway for her

00:08:03.340 | and it may take her quite some time

00:08:04.800 | to catch up from a career perspective.

00:08:07.120 | So if your income exceeds that,

00:08:09.860 | I don't see how you can make a financial argument

00:08:13.580 | in favor of being a stay-at-home mother.

00:08:16.080 | And so quantitatively, again,

00:08:18.960 | with the exceptions that I've said,

00:08:20.280 | if your income is quite modest,

00:08:22.720 | then quantitatively, financially,

00:08:25.620 | you will be better off always working,

00:08:27.880 | working, working, working,

00:08:29.200 | earning money, earning money, earning money,

00:08:31.240 | and then paying other people to take care of your children.

00:08:34.120 | Now, when I say it like that,

00:08:35.480 | it should grate on your nerves a little bit

00:08:39.360 | because wait a second, that's not what I'm trying to do,

00:08:42.160 | but in reality, that is what is happening.

00:08:44.320 | And so let's talk about why is it the case

00:08:47.440 | that this is what we're doing?

00:08:50.560 | Well, first of all,

00:08:51.800 | let's say that you did become a stay-at-home mother.

00:08:54.500 | Well, your child would have a one-to-one daycare provider

00:08:59.500 | to student relationship.

00:09:02.760 | And that daycare provider herself

00:09:06.320 | would be a highly educated, highly motivated,

00:09:11.120 | very socially competent worker

00:09:13.760 | who has all kinds of experience

00:09:16.680 | and is filled with love and patience

00:09:18.720 | for her individual child.

00:09:20.740 | If you go and take your child to a daycare,

00:09:22.880 | you're generally gonna have a relatively lowly paid worker

00:09:26.400 | who is working in a ratio of, I don't know,

00:09:29.320 | four to one, five to one, depending on the daycare,

00:09:32.080 | four or five students to one low-paid worker

00:09:35.040 | taking care of your child.

00:09:36.440 | And so you can automatically see

00:09:38.400 | where the cost savings for daycare come from.

00:09:40.520 | The cost savings for daycare come from the fact

00:09:43.120 | that instead of you providing

00:09:44.960 | the kind of mothering experience that you could provide,

00:09:49.520 | you are hiring a low-paid worker

00:09:51.680 | to provide a basic custodial care experience.

00:09:55.240 | And you may have higher-end daycares,

00:09:57.320 | you may have environments with more child stimulation,

00:10:02.080 | and there may be benefits that children get to play

00:10:04.440 | with others and things like that.

00:10:06.160 | But the point is you're substantially downgrading

00:10:09.000 | the quality of care that a child is available,

00:10:11.920 | that a child is able to experience in that kind of model.

00:10:16.000 | So what other, so there's no way that,

00:10:20.200 | I don't know how to measure that on a financial scale.

00:10:22.640 | How do I say, if we know, for example,

00:10:25.960 | that a huge amount of a child's social emotional control

00:10:30.960 | is built based upon his relationship with his mother,

00:10:36.560 | and we know that when he's taken out of that

00:10:38.880 | and he's subjected to being separated from his mother,

00:10:41.960 | what is the cost of that in the long-term in his life?

00:10:45.680 | We don't know.

00:10:46.520 | We know that it's subpar.

00:10:48.120 | We know that it's absolutely inferior.

00:10:49.880 | We know that emotional regulation is enormously higher

00:10:54.040 | for children who are with their mother

00:10:56.360 | than for children who are in a daycare environment,

00:10:59.280 | and we know that that's measurable

00:11:02.040 | throughout a child's lifetime,

00:11:03.320 | but I don't know how to put a dollar figure on that.

00:11:06.160 | I know it's absolutely there.

00:11:07.440 | I know it's absolutely measurable,

00:11:08.880 | and I don't know what price we would assign to that value.

00:11:12.500 | Similarly, if we look to educational outcomes

00:11:15.000 | or morals or vocabulary development,

00:11:18.720 | on every single metric, the child's performance

00:11:23.480 | on long-term social studies will always be highest

00:11:26.920 | if he is with his mother and with his family,

00:11:29.720 | with his siblings, and so we can track that.

00:11:32.680 | Children who are entered into a daycare environment

00:11:36.340 | are noticeably behind the curve on all of these factors

00:11:40.740 | because of the inferior social environment,

00:11:43.840 | but I don't know how to put a number on that,

00:11:46.000 | so I know that it's real.

00:11:47.760 | I know that there is a value there,

00:11:49.640 | but I don't know how to put a number on it,

00:11:51.760 | so I think a lot of times what I see happening

00:11:54.200 | is that it's going to wind up being a qualitative decision

00:11:58.640 | that's just simply based upon vision,

00:12:00.440 | based upon what you want.

00:12:02.920 | I think in your situation, what you've described

00:12:05.120 | is based upon the income that you earn

00:12:08.200 | and the income that your husband earns,

00:12:09.780 | you have two difficult decisions.

00:12:11.140 | Number one, if you're earning $120,000,

00:12:13.400 | you're earning that because your career

00:12:15.600 | is something that you've worked hard on,

00:12:17.040 | you've developed yourself, and you've built a strong career

00:12:19.840 | that provides you with a significant amount of income.

00:12:24.700 | So that's great.

00:12:25.720 | The problem is then it's harder to leave.

00:12:27.600 | It's harder to take that time out,

00:12:29.480 | and so you're going to need more compelling reasons

00:12:32.020 | to do that than many people face.

00:12:34.380 | However, on the flip side,

00:12:35.620 | your husband also earns a great income,

00:12:38.240 | and so you guys could still have plenty of money

00:12:40.840 | based upon his income, and so you have an easier decision

00:12:43.960 | if that were a path that you would want to go down.

00:12:45.920 | You have an easier decision than, say,

00:12:48.400 | someone whose husband is earning $50,000.

00:12:50.920 | It's not easy to make it on a $50,000 household income.

00:12:53.840 | So if you were earning $50,000

00:12:55.440 | and he were earning $50,000,

00:12:57.360 | that would be a big hit to your lifestyle

00:12:59.440 | for you to stop earning an income.

00:13:02.240 | In your case, however, if you're earning $120,000

00:13:05.840 | and he's earning $200,000, the hit to your lifestyle

00:13:09.560 | would be less a matter of lifestyle

00:13:11.420 | and more a matter of less savings.

00:13:14.840 | You could live the same or similar lifestyle

00:13:17.040 | to what you're living now,

00:13:18.300 | but your savings plan would slow down.

00:13:19.960 | Your financial independence plan would slow down.

00:13:22.360 | What's that worth to you?

00:13:23.920 | I don't know.

00:13:24.760 | What I would suggest to you

00:13:27.160 | is that you not try to make that decision today,

00:13:30.400 | but rather that you put a plan in place

00:13:33.160 | so that you could be a full-time mother if you wanted to.

00:13:37.680 | And what I mean by that is anytime I'm counseling a couple

00:13:41.320 | who's having a baby, especially a baby for the first time,

00:13:44.000 | and if they have any inclination or draw at all

00:13:47.620 | to the mother being a full-time stay-at-home mom,

00:13:50.520 | then what I encourage them to do is to split their income

00:13:54.440 | and only live on the husband's income

00:13:56.800 | and save all of the wife's income

00:13:59.480 | and do whatever is necessary in order to make that happen.

00:14:03.780 | So if you have to pay down debt or whatever you gotta do,

00:14:06.040 | if you just only resolve that going forward,

00:14:09.680 | we are only gonna live on his income

00:14:11.720 | and all of your income gets set aside into a separate account

00:14:14.960 | that way you would know what you're getting into

00:14:17.660 | if you chose to stop earning income for a time.

00:14:21.380 | Number two is there's not really a need

00:14:24.220 | to decide this stuff much in advance

00:14:26.620 | when you're having a baby.

00:14:28.020 | So what I mean is let's say that you get pregnant

00:14:31.680 | and you're expecting a baby

00:14:33.780 | and the baby's expected in 40 weeks.

00:14:35.500 | Okay, well, fine.

00:14:36.640 | You don't need to march into your boss's office that day

00:14:39.100 | and say, "I'm having a baby, I'm done here."

00:14:41.660 | And you don't even need to do it

00:14:42.540 | at any time in the pregnancy.

00:14:43.980 | You can take the pregnancy, take maternity leave,

00:14:46.740 | and then you can always decide to quit your job

00:14:48.540 | in the future if you want to.

00:14:50.260 | And in today's world, though, of course,

00:14:52.900 | all of us would like to provide our bosses

00:14:55.340 | with substantial upfront warning

00:14:57.980 | so they can hire someone else.

00:14:59.280 | At the end of the day, if you want to provide your,

00:15:03.020 | at the end of the day,

00:15:04.740 | you're better off just keeping it to yourself.

00:15:07.080 | Take maternity leave and see what happens.

00:15:09.780 | My observation from talking with a lot of mothers

00:15:12.660 | is that prior to the baby being there,

00:15:16.100 | they often feel more strongly

00:15:20.660 | about continuing their income,

00:15:24.100 | and they don't worry too much about their baby.

00:15:26.540 | But once the baby's there,

00:15:27.700 | they tend to fall in love with their baby.

00:15:29.720 | And after a few months with the baby,

00:15:32.420 | then when everything has changed

00:15:34.580 | in terms of their relationship with their baby,

00:15:37.100 | then they see, these mothers see things

00:15:40.140 | through a different lens.

00:15:41.340 | And I watch it happen with my wife, with every baby.

00:15:44.820 | My wife is, okay, when the baby is in her tummy,

00:15:47.300 | okay, fine, it's a baby and we can talk about it.

00:15:50.100 | But then the baby comes out,

00:15:51.660 | and those first few days of a baby's life,

00:15:53.820 | I watch her fall in love with the baby.

00:15:55.700 | And it's just so obvious.

00:15:57.060 | It's so crystal clear as I watch it happen.

00:15:59.700 | And I think that's generally a common experience.

00:16:02.000 | So I would say, don't try too hard

00:16:03.960 | to make the decision in advance.

00:16:05.660 | Position yourself so that if you wanted

00:16:07.580 | to be a stay-at-home mom, you could.

00:16:09.580 | And then just wait and see.

00:16:11.080 | Wait and see what your experience is

00:16:13.140 | after the baby's there.

00:16:14.200 | Wait and see what happens with your family dynamic

00:16:17.660 | and consider it.

00:16:18.940 | The third and final thing I wanna,

00:16:20.180 | or the final option I wanna point out

00:16:22.780 | is there are third options.

00:16:25.780 | So I said option one is full-time stay-at-home mom.

00:16:30.140 | Option two is putting your child into a low-cost daycare.

00:16:33.140 | There are many third options.

00:16:35.060 | So third options include family being involved.

00:16:38.220 | Third options include working from home,

00:16:40.180 | having an in-home nanny, someone who's there with you.

00:16:43.280 | Throughout history, we have worked,

00:16:45.700 | knowing these problems that I've described,

00:16:47.580 | throughout history, wealthy families

00:16:49.780 | have found solutions to this.

00:16:51.220 | And aristocratic, wealthy families,

00:16:53.620 | it's generally normal that your children

00:16:55.580 | would have a governess, a full-time governess or nanny,

00:16:58.500 | someone who's fully responsible for childcare.

00:17:01.300 | And so there may be other options.

00:17:03.840 | And if your income is very important to you,

00:17:07.080 | but you're trying to kind of split the difference,

00:17:08.760 | then I think you should pursue these options.

00:17:10.580 | I think you should say, how could I have family members,

00:17:14.740 | how could I work from home so that I'm more available?

00:17:17.300 | I'm not spending time commuting into the city.

00:17:19.420 | How could I have family members providing care

00:17:21.260 | during certain times?

00:17:22.580 | Could I find one individual that would be

00:17:25.260 | a really great asset to our family to care for this child

00:17:28.260 | so that I can continue to work?

00:17:30.660 | And I think that people who are,

00:17:32.700 | women who are in a situation like you're in,

00:17:34.700 | where you're a somewhat high earner

00:17:36.740 | and you have this desire to provide

00:17:39.500 | all those positive things for your child,

00:17:42.580 | will often pursue something related to that third path.

00:17:45.380 | - Thanks, Joshua, appreciate your input.

00:17:52.520 | - My pleasure, anything else?

00:17:53.980 | - That'll be it for today, thank you.

00:17:57.180 | - Call me back in the future and we'll talk more.

00:17:59.660 | Mike in Minnesota, welcome to the show.

00:18:01.080 | How can I serve you today?

00:18:04.580 | - Hi, Josh, we spoke a few years ago

00:18:08.620 | and then again last year about my wife and I

00:18:11.780 | spending extended time in South Africa with her family.

00:18:16.380 | And after we spoke, you said I should call you back

00:18:18.620 | and tell you how it went.

00:18:19.540 | - Yeah, tell me about it.

00:18:20.740 | - We're back and I figured I'd tell you how it went.

00:18:23.700 | Okay, so a couple of things that we spoke about,

00:18:27.420 | I guess the rewind is that we went from

00:18:32.700 | the day after Thanksgiving, late in November of 2023

00:18:37.380 | through February of 2024 and spent 90 days.

00:18:41.920 | I wasn't gonna be able to renew my visa to stay,

00:18:46.420 | so we just stayed for 90 days

00:18:48.140 | and then came back to Minnesota.

00:18:51.020 | And in our time there, we stayed with my wife's brother-in-law

00:18:56.020 | in the granny flat out back.

00:19:00.340 | So we had a lot of time with my wife's family

00:19:05.020 | visiting their nieces, the nephew

00:19:09.900 | and her brother and parents.

00:19:12.260 | And so that was all great.

00:19:14.580 | You also, you mentioned we should maximize the time

00:19:19.340 | that we have and instead of kind of looking at things

00:19:23.200 | through the prism of geo-arbitrage and dollar save

00:19:28.060 | to rather utilize that time well.

00:19:31.020 | So we had some four-wheel drive trips to Lesotho.

00:19:36.020 | I actually had a brother of mine come over

00:19:38.740 | for the New Year's break and we went to Mozambique

00:19:42.780 | and went four-wheel driving there.

00:19:45.700 | And yeah, I had a great time.

00:19:47.820 | And I guess I really appreciated your perspective

00:19:52.500 | that you've kind of offered

00:19:54.380 | through your international travels on the podcast

00:19:57.980 | and found a lot of inspiration in that.

00:20:00.740 | And so it's definitely something

00:20:02.500 | that we're planning on repeating again.

00:20:05.540 | And I don't know for how long we can be snowbirds

00:20:08.540 | and leave the North American winter and go to South Africa,

00:20:12.140 | but while we're able to,

00:20:13.420 | we're going to keep trying to do that.

00:20:15.460 | - How old are your children?

00:20:16.940 | How old were they on this previous trip?

00:20:18.940 | - So we don't have children yet.

00:20:21.900 | We were just visiting my wife's family

00:20:25.180 | and seeing her nieces and nephews.

00:20:29.020 | - Perfect.

00:20:30.060 | - We actually are planning on starting our family,

00:20:33.660 | I guess, probably planning to have,

00:20:37.980 | if all goes to plan,

00:20:40.500 | we would try to have a child in 2025

00:20:45.460 | when we return from our trip next year.

00:20:48.420 | And that actually is one of the things

00:20:49.820 | that I wanted to ask you about,

00:20:52.820 | is have you found any challenges

00:20:57.780 | with traveling with your wife

00:21:01.620 | as your family has grown while she's pregnant?

00:21:04.940 | If I was to put my thumb in the wind and take a guess,

00:21:09.820 | I would guess we would probably try to have,

00:21:14.380 | you know, start our family maybe two or three months

00:21:17.380 | after returning from South Africa in 2025.

00:21:22.620 | And so that would mean we would be traveling

00:21:25.340 | during her pregnancy.

00:21:27.300 | What are your thoughts on that?

00:21:28.140 | - Yeah, I'll comment on that just a moment before I do.

00:21:30.620 | - Sure.

00:21:31.460 | - You were working from, while you were abroad,

00:21:33.820 | you were working from abroad, is that correct?

00:21:36.620 | - Yeah, that's right.

00:21:37.460 | So I'm a W-2, you know, employee,

00:21:42.460 | and so I had, I think we had discussed,

00:21:47.220 | I actually spent quite a while in a job search

00:21:49.980 | looking for an opportunity

00:21:51.700 | that would allow our family to do this.

00:21:53.980 | And so, yeah, I worked U.S. hours in South Africa.

00:21:58.980 | Mostly I would work two to 11 p.m.

00:22:02.020 | And I found the adjustment was actually pretty well

00:22:06.100 | to my liking, except for times

00:22:08.940 | where there was something going on in the evening

00:22:10.980 | and friends wanted to meet up or something like that.

00:22:13.980 | That was, you know, a bit of a drag.

00:22:16.100 | The rest of it was really nice.

00:22:17.380 | We had our days free, you know,

00:22:20.260 | mornings were all to us and it was kind of easier

00:22:23.340 | to spend our time freely that way,

00:22:26.820 | except for when it came to meeting up with friends

00:22:30.300 | who were on, you know, a standard schedule there.

00:22:33.060 | - How did you--

00:22:33.900 | - But yeah, that worked out very well.

00:22:35.580 | - How did you arrange your affairs in Minnesota

00:22:37.420 | with your house and things like that

00:22:38.900 | so that you could be away for that long?

00:22:40.900 | - Yeah, so we got a sublet for our apartment

00:22:46.700 | that we rented.

00:22:47.860 | And that situation has just changed.

00:22:49.980 | When we got back, we actually moved again.

00:22:53.260 | And so we'll probably have to climb that mountain again

00:22:56.740 | for this winter.

00:22:57.780 | We, you know, we'd be able to afford to go there

00:23:03.860 | and still pay our rent that we're paying here.

00:23:09.020 | But it was certainly convenient to have somebody else

00:23:12.500 | paying almost all the rent while we were gone.

00:23:15.260 | So we'll try to crack that code again when we go,

00:23:19.700 | but it's not, it wouldn't prevent us.

00:23:22.260 | - Taking into account all of the, sorry,

00:23:24.820 | taking into account all of the extra money

00:23:26.580 | that you spent on activities,

00:23:28.540 | would you say you spent about the same in Minnesota

00:23:31.500 | as compared to South Africa?

00:23:33.220 | Little less, little more, substantially less,

00:23:35.260 | substantially more, how would you compare

00:23:36.820 | your expenses during that time?

00:23:38.380 | - Oh, see, now you've--

00:23:40.740 | - Just vaguely, just broadly.

00:23:42.140 | - I'm a numbers guy.

00:23:43.060 | - Okay, just broadly.

00:23:44.180 | - Yeah, broadly we saved.

00:23:46.220 | So I would say we probably,

00:23:49.260 | just our overall spend over three months

00:23:51.100 | was probably $2,000 less with far more dining out there

00:23:56.020 | than we would have done here,

00:23:57.700 | and then far more in the way of travel for vacation

00:24:01.420 | and leisure and stuff like that.

00:24:02.940 | - That's great.

00:24:03.980 | Yeah, I just wanted to draw that out

00:24:05.420 | because here I got a live, real live testimonial

00:24:08.220 | that you called me in with.

00:24:09.660 | And I think when we have the opportunity,

00:24:11.700 | we wanna share these ideas one with another,

00:24:13.660 | because we live in a time in which this lifestyle

00:24:17.100 | that once would have been the domain

00:24:18.580 | of a wealthy, financially independent multi-millionaire

00:24:22.140 | to be able to go abroad for the winter

00:24:25.100 | is now something that is available to,

00:24:28.340 | don't be insulted, but a simple worker, right?

00:24:32.460 | You have a job, and you can go abroad,

00:24:34.780 | and here you are, you can get out of Minnesota

00:24:36.420 | for three months, go to beautiful South Africa,

00:24:38.420 | enjoy your time there,

00:24:39.780 | and enjoy a totally different set of experiences

00:24:43.340 | that really bring a more,

00:24:45.380 | a stronger joie de vivre on a daily basis

00:24:50.860 | than you would sitting in Minnesota during the winter.

00:24:53.900 | And yet, financially speaking,

00:24:56.020 | you may have even saved a little bit of money,

00:24:57.700 | be a little bit ahead of where you

00:24:58.980 | otherwise would have been.

00:25:00.380 | And that's what's so cool about geo-arbitrage.

00:25:02.260 | And the way that you've done it is, I think, ideal,

00:25:05.860 | where, and what I mean is, you didn't move abroad,

00:25:08.780 | you didn't sever all your relationships,

00:25:10.300 | you didn't get rid of all your stuff.

00:25:11.900 | That's really disruptive.

00:25:13.340 | You just kept everything just how it is.

00:25:14.860 | You just went abroad or went elsewhere for a few months.

00:25:18.660 | And then during that few months,

00:25:20.100 | you experience a different lifestyle,

00:25:21.940 | and then when you returned back to Minnesota,

00:25:24.420 | or when you returned back to Minnesota,

00:25:26.980 | I would guess that you had a newfound appreciation

00:25:29.100 | for many aspects of your lifestyle there, is that right?

00:25:31.900 | - Yes, certainly.

00:25:33.820 | And it also helped us consider what it is that we valued

00:25:37.420 | in the place that we're moving to.

00:25:39.180 | And so I think we've made better decisions

00:25:41.740 | on the return as well.

00:25:43.380 | - Good, I love that.

00:25:44.780 | All right, I cut you off.

00:25:45.900 | You were gonna say one more thing,

00:25:46.740 | and then I'll answer your baby question.

00:25:48.660 | - Yeah, I was gonna say, I was just,

00:25:51.860 | I'm very proud of, my wife also was instrumental

00:25:56.700 | in making this opportunity a reality,

00:25:59.140 | because she took a leap in her business

00:26:03.140 | that she does full-time,

00:26:04.420 | and she actually hosted some photographers,

00:26:08.380 | two different flights of wedding photographers

00:26:10.740 | that came to a safari retreat that we reserved,

00:26:15.740 | and we captured wedding content for these photographers

00:26:20.820 | who want to appear adventurous

00:26:24.540 | and capture interesting wedding content.

00:26:29.020 | And so that was a new leap in her business,

00:26:32.020 | and that's another enabling feature.

00:26:36.140 | So yeah, definitely planning to redo that.

00:26:40.260 | - That is super cool.

00:26:41.180 | I love it, I love it.

00:26:42.540 | All right, to answer the question, it's fairly simple.

00:26:45.780 | So there's the technical,

00:26:47.380 | or what I'll call just the legal side.

00:26:49.300 | It's not dealing with the law.

00:26:50.620 | It's just more of a policy.

00:26:52.220 | And then there's the real side.

00:26:53.740 | So is it difficult for a pregnant woman to fly?

00:26:58.620 | The answer is basically no.

00:27:00.220 | Each airline will have its own individual policy

00:27:03.620 | related to how many weeks pregnant you can fly.

00:27:07.700 | In general, they will allow you to fly very pregnant,

00:27:10.940 | although some of them will ask,

00:27:12.860 | let's say you're at 38 weeks.

00:27:14.420 | They'll say, we'd really like you to have a doctor's note

00:27:17.020 | saying that it's okay for you to fly.

00:27:19.180 | But in practice, very rarely is an airline employee,

00:27:24.180 | in many cases a rather low-level airline employee,

00:27:30.860 | going to ask a pregnant mother how pregnant she is.

00:27:35.380 | And different mothers carry their babies

00:27:37.980 | in very different ways.

00:27:40.220 | There are some mothers who they're at 39 weeks,

00:27:43.580 | and you would think, ah, she's 15 weeks pregnant.

00:27:45.660 | And there's other mothers who are at 20 weeks,

00:27:47.300 | and you think she's at 39 weeks.

00:27:49.260 | So different mothers carry babies in different ways.

00:27:51.860 | And because we all, I mean, you and I,

00:27:53.940 | I would assume you feel like me,

00:27:56.100 | you don't even wanna ask a woman if she's pregnant,

00:27:57.900 | unless she's very, very clearly pregnant,

00:28:00.300 | and she has confirmed with verbal affirmation.

00:28:03.900 | I'm not gonna ask a mother if she's pregnant.

00:28:06.340 | I'm not gonna say anything about it.

00:28:07.860 | And so airline employees are no different.

00:28:10.300 | And they just, the only reason for the policy

00:28:12.820 | is they would prefer for a woman

00:28:14.300 | not to go into labor during flight.

00:28:15.700 | That makes for an inconvenient situation for the air crew.

00:28:20.140 | So technically speaking, each airline will have a policy.

00:28:23.460 | The policies vary, but practically speaking,

00:28:25.660 | no one's really ever gonna ask you about that.

00:28:27.940 | I think what's more important for you

00:28:29.520 | is that you will want to have a plan

00:28:31.140 | for your wife to have high-quality prenatal care.

00:28:34.180 | It's very, very important that a pregnant mother

00:28:36.420 | has high-quality prenatal care.

00:28:39.060 | And it will be quite inconvenient for you

00:28:43.020 | to have that prenatal care in two locations

00:28:46.740 | or multiple locations and have the same high quality of care.

00:28:50.460 | And with a mother's first baby,

00:28:52.500 | there's a significant level of unknown.

00:28:55.500 | Because we tend to be somewhat isolated,

00:28:58.300 | it seems to me, I'm making this up,

00:29:00.100 | you verify with your wife,

00:29:01.660 | but I think the first birth that most women ever attend

00:29:05.280 | is the birth of their first child.

00:29:07.460 | And so if it were different,

00:29:08.800 | if she had training as a midwife or if she had visited,

00:29:11.300 | she had attended her sister's births

00:29:12.900 | or her brother's birth going up or she'd been in that,

00:29:16.540 | then that would be something.

00:29:17.660 | But in general, the first birth

00:29:19.020 | that a first-time mother in our culture attends

00:29:21.460 | is the birth of her own child,

00:29:23.380 | which means that she has quite a lot of skills

00:29:25.780 | that she needs to learn.

00:29:27.220 | And your best birthing outcome will come

00:29:31.020 | if your wife feels incredibly strong

00:29:34.220 | and confident and empowered and exactly,

00:29:38.500 | she has everything arranged exactly as she wants it to be.

00:29:42.420 | And so I think in general, because of that,

00:29:47.060 | you will want to have a situation

00:29:49.380 | in which she is fully in control

00:29:51.700 | and completely has everything lined up

00:29:54.780 | exactly as she wants it.

00:29:56.220 | She has the exact prenatal care that she wants.

00:29:59.700 | She has the exact helpers,

00:30:02.940 | whether it's a midwife or her doctor

00:30:06.460 | or whoever it is that she's interacting with.

00:30:08.540 | She has a very warm and comfortable relationship.

00:30:11.180 | And you want her to feel the strong sense

00:30:13.700 | of stability in her life.

00:30:15.700 | So unless there's a strong and clear need

00:30:20.580 | as to why you need to be traveling,

00:30:23.480 | then I would encourage you,

00:30:24.620 | skip the trip abroad during that time.

00:30:27.500 | Now, just for some others in my audience,

00:30:29.860 | this clearly violates my discussions on birth tourism.

00:30:34.860 | And this is, I think, the biggest downside of birth tourism

00:30:38.740 | is that if you go somewhere for the goal of having a baby,

00:30:42.660 | all of a sudden now you insert all kinds of uncertainty

00:30:47.380 | into the situation, which can have negative results.

00:30:50.260 | So that's much easier, I think,

00:30:52.500 | for a mother who's had a baby before to do it.

00:30:54.940 | Or if you're gonna do birth tourism,

00:30:56.660 | then you wanna have a clear reason you're doing it.

00:30:58.660 | And if at all possible, you wanna be set up in advance.

00:31:02.580 | It's just much easier for a mother

00:31:04.000 | who has been through the process at least once, maybe twice.

00:31:07.080 | Now, all of a sudden,

00:31:07.920 | her confidence level is very different.

00:31:09.540 | But if I were in your shoes

00:31:10.780 | and my wife were having her first baby,

00:31:12.180 | I'd just cancel the South Africa trip that year.

00:31:14.100 | Stay home, take a car trip.

00:31:16.180 | Go to Florida for the winter.

00:31:18.900 | Go somewhere where it's easy.

00:31:19.860 | You can get back and forth for prenatal appointments

00:31:21.740 | if you need to.

00:31:22.640 | Take a shorter trip.

00:31:23.940 | All those things are fine,

00:31:24.900 | but I would not go to South Africa for three months

00:31:27.520 | for the reasons that I've just stated.

00:31:29.420 | - All right, Josh, thanks for the input.

00:31:33.260 | - And thanks for calling back with a story.

00:31:34.860 | We move on to Matthew in Florida.

00:31:37.060 | Welcome to the show.

00:31:37.900 | How can I serve you, Matthew?

00:31:39.340 | Matthew in Florida, go ahead.

00:31:45.300 | - Yeah, sorry, just unmuting myself there.

00:31:48.740 | So my question pertains to tithing.

00:31:52.440 | And before I ask the question,

00:31:55.340 | I realized that tithing or tenting in the Christian tradition

00:31:59.680 | is a very prayerful thing that you should consider.

00:32:04.220 | And I'm trying to put some quantitative reasoning

00:32:08.780 | behind a certain situation.

00:32:11.940 | So I had a real estate investment project

00:32:16.740 | that went South and long story short,

00:32:20.640 | the bank took over the property and I'm out six figures.

00:32:26.780 | And it kind of made me start thinking like,

00:32:31.620 | how do we tithe in respect to big gains and losses

00:32:36.620 | in investment versus our typical incomes

00:32:41.980 | that are coming in like W-2 or business income?

00:32:45.420 | And so I wanted to throw that out there

00:32:48.500 | and see what your thoughts were.

00:32:50.380 | - I think the answer for someone who is convicted

00:32:53.500 | of his desire or responsibility to tithe

00:32:57.940 | from a biblical perspective,

00:32:59.620 | then I think the answer is relatively straightforward.

00:33:02.780 | My understanding of the tithe would be that you tithe

00:33:07.300 | on the increase of your wealth in whatever form it is.

00:33:14.100 | And so in the agrarian society of the Old Testament,

00:33:17.940 | then the tithe was when you harvested your crops,

00:33:21.580 | you gave a 10th of your tithe to the local temple

00:33:24.060 | to support the priests who were laboring there.

00:33:26.460 | This was a pre-financial society.

00:33:29.540 | In the New Testament, we start to see a society functioning

00:33:33.820 | in more of what we would recognize as something related

00:33:36.620 | to a modern financial system.

00:33:38.900 | And we don't see the tithe working in exactly the same way

00:33:42.740 | because the priestly system has changed.

00:33:45.020 | And that's one of the reasons there's so much controversy

00:33:47.340 | around this issue among Christians

00:33:49.380 | who have different convictions,

00:33:50.580 | churches that have different teachings.

00:33:52.500 | But at its core, the tithe is based upon the increase.

00:33:56.180 | And so how I would approach that is as you have wages,

00:34:00.940 | then you tithe on your wages.

00:34:02.940 | As you have profits,

00:34:04.520 | then you tithe when you realize the profit.

00:34:07.180 | So if you sell a piece of property,

00:34:09.460 | and at that point in time, you realize the profit,

00:34:12.380 | you realize the gain,

00:34:13.620 | then take a 10th of the gain and give that away.

00:34:16.780 | If you sell a business and you realize the gain,

00:34:19.500 | then go ahead and take a 10th and give that away.

00:34:22.620 | So it's fairly straightforward that it should be done

00:34:26.780 | when you realize a profit.

00:34:29.020 | I don't think you tithe on profits that are not realized.

00:34:32.580 | So if your portfolio has increased enormously,

00:34:35.460 | but it's just sitting there,

00:34:36.540 | then I would not tithe on that.

00:34:38.380 | That doesn't make sense.

00:34:39.900 | You tithe on the increase or the gain,

00:34:42.340 | and when it's something that is like an investment,

00:34:47.340 | then you tithe when the gain is recognized.

00:34:49.580 | - That makes sense.

00:34:56.900 | I guess in the context of,

00:34:59.360 | I'm not necessarily counting on that income to survive.

00:35:04.860 | Obviously, I have other income,

00:35:06.860 | but as far as my investment portfolio,

00:35:09.060 | that's not in a "retirement" setting

00:35:12.620 | where I'm taking draws from it.

00:35:14.860 | I guess would you view that as just like,

00:35:18.500 | hey, here's my bucket for later,

00:35:21.180 | and I'm gonna be harvesting later.

00:35:24.140 | I'm not taking that for my needs now.

00:35:27.620 | No, no, I'm just trying to wrap my head around it.

00:35:32.340 | - I would, and so that's why I used the word that I did.

00:35:34.940 | I was very precise with my word.

00:35:36.300 | I said, when you realize the gain,

00:35:39.140 | and so realizing a gain has a specific accounting meaning.

00:35:44.140 | There's a difference between unrecognized gains,

00:35:47.460 | recognized gains, and realized gains.

00:35:50.340 | So putting it simply, an unrecognized gain

00:35:53.360 | is what you have right now in your 401(k),

00:35:56.780 | meaning that, okay, I've put money in there,

00:35:58.820 | and it's growing, but it's not what's called recognized

00:36:03.820 | for tax purposes.

00:36:06.120 | A recognized gain is when you have a gain,

00:36:09.700 | but for some reason you have to recognize it or report it,

00:36:13.260 | usually for tax purposes.

00:36:14.860 | And so an example of this would be,

00:36:16.900 | let's say that you are going to convert

00:36:19.100 | from your traditional IRA to a Roth IRA.

00:36:22.700 | Well, you would recognize those gains in the traditional IRA

00:36:27.380 | as you convert them to a Roth IRA for tax purposes.

00:36:31.220 | I'm just saying a realized gain

00:36:33.140 | is just simply money that you're receiving.

00:36:35.380 | And so you can have realized gains that are recognized

00:36:38.820 | and recognized gains that are unrealized.

00:36:41.180 | I'm using realized here just to mean

00:36:43.380 | when you actually get the money.

00:36:44.740 | And I think this is in line with the basic spirit,

00:36:47.220 | which is when you receive the money

00:36:49.220 | and you have control of it,

00:36:50.500 | that would be the time at which

00:36:52.260 | I think it would be wise to pay a tithe.

00:36:54.060 | So would I tithe on the increase of a 401(k) account?

00:36:57.320 | No, but when I take money out of the 401(k) account,

00:37:00.260 | that's when I would pay it.

00:37:01.620 | - Yeah, that makes sense, you applied it.

00:37:06.620 | I was over-complicating.

00:37:09.380 | I always appreciate how you're able to take something

00:37:12.940 | and simplify it.

00:37:13.980 | So thank you, Joshua.

00:37:14.820 | - My pleasure, anything else?

00:37:16.220 | - No, that's it for this week.

00:37:19.060 | - Great, thank you very much.

00:37:20.300 | We move on to the great state of New Jersey.

00:37:22.500 | Welcome to the show, how can I serve you today?

00:37:25.420 | - Hey, Joshua, can you hear me?

00:37:26.820 | - Yes, sounds good.

00:37:27.780 | - Okay, perfect.

00:37:29.900 | Well, I'm glad the last caller introduced

00:37:31.740 | the topic of apologetics.

00:37:34.140 | I have a question for you,

00:37:35.380 | but really actually a couple of questions,

00:37:37.860 | really coming from the other side.

00:37:39.660 | So I'm not a Christian,

00:37:41.460 | but I have lots of family who are in different denominations

00:37:44.100 | and even some non-denominational.

00:37:45.820 | And one of the big challenges that we run into

00:37:48.260 | is around the issue of abortion.

00:37:49.780 | And I understand that there's a general distaste for it

00:37:54.220 | in that community, but what I don't understand is,

00:37:56.880 | one, is there an explicit scriptural basis

00:38:00.040 | for rejecting abortion at any point?

00:38:01.960 | Second question is, if not,

00:38:04.520 | how do most Christians arrive

00:38:06.820 | at their conclusion about abortion?

00:38:08.800 | And third, does any of that change

00:38:11.060 | as we learn more about gestational development?

00:38:13.680 | So I'll leave that, I'll tee that up for you to answer.

00:38:16.160 | And again, I really appreciate the way you think

00:38:18.640 | about these things, so I'll just, I'll leave it there.

00:38:20.720 | - Absolutely, just if you're able to stay on the line,

00:38:23.040 | though, so we can go back and forth.

00:38:24.800 | So the first question you asked was,

00:38:26.480 | is there a specific scriptural kind of definition

00:38:31.480 | as to a specific point during pregnancy

00:38:35.440 | at which abortion would be disallowed, is that correct?

00:38:39.000 | - Well, I guess more generally,

00:38:42.280 | any specific scriptural prohibition.

00:38:45.160 | - Right, so I think there would be,

00:38:47.680 | the reason I'm trying to discern is to answer the question,

00:38:51.840 | there would be two basic questions.

00:38:53.840 | The first question would be, from a Christian perspective,

00:38:57.460 | is there a scriptural prohibition of abortion?

00:39:02.240 | And then the second question would be,

00:39:05.560 | is there a specific scriptural prohibition

00:39:08.440 | against abortion at a certain time?

00:39:10.880 | And this, I think, is the more applicable debate

00:39:15.220 | that happens in our society right now.

00:39:17.800 | So do you have a question on both of them,

00:39:20.360 | or one or the other?

00:39:23.520 | - I guess both of them,

00:39:25.480 | I'd be curious to know the answer on.

00:39:28.200 | But yeah, separating it that way makes sense.

00:39:30.680 | - Okay, so the first thing, let's deal with the first,

00:39:34.680 | actually, let's deal with the second,

00:39:36.840 | which makes more sense.

00:39:38.400 | I guess we'll just deal with the first one,

00:39:41.880 | first and foremost.

00:39:43.460 | I think, in fairness, while I do think

00:39:49.280 | this Bible teaches clearly about abortion,

00:39:53.080 | this is one of those topics that requires application.

00:39:58.080 | And what I mean by that is,

00:40:00.360 | where I usually hear this would be Christians prohibition,

00:40:03.320 | when Christians prohibit homosexuality.

00:40:06.560 | And people say, well,

00:40:07.400 | Jesus never talked about homosexuality.

00:40:09.640 | And that's fair, that's true.

00:40:12.120 | But to say that Christians should not be concerned

00:40:16.760 | about homosexuality,

00:40:17.960 | because Jesus did not talk about homosexuality,

00:40:21.720 | is to demonstrate ignorance

00:40:24.200 | of how Christians derive their theology,

00:40:26.760 | and the applications of theology.

00:40:29.520 | So there are lots and lots of things

00:40:31.160 | that are not written in red letters in the New Testament

00:40:34.400 | that Jesus specifically talked about.

00:40:36.920 | Everything from slavery, to abortion, to sex trafficking,

00:40:41.840 | to rape, to all kinds of things.

00:40:43.880 | I mean, we could go down the list of all kinds of sins,

00:40:45.920 | things that you being a non-Christian,

00:40:48.180 | and I being a Christian,

00:40:49.160 | would wholeheartedly agree with one another.

00:40:51.520 | This is absolutely wrong.

00:40:53.200 | This is absolutely prohibited.

00:40:55.240 | And yet, we would have to acknowledge

00:40:58.120 | that Jesus specifically did not speak about them.

00:41:02.080 | So that's one thing that is important.

00:41:04.540 | And this does come up sometimes in abortion,

00:41:07.120 | because people say, well, Jesus didn't talk about abortion.

00:41:09.160 | And you have to quick to say, that is correct.

00:41:11.360 | Jesus did not talk about abortion.

00:41:13.760 | Now, to understand this,

00:41:16.400 | Christians generally derive their theology

00:41:20.180 | from the fullness, the full breadth of Scripture.

00:41:23.800 | Across Christendom, there are differences

00:41:27.680 | in what Christians consider to be the canon of Scripture.

00:41:30.920 | Protestants generally recognize the 66 books

00:41:33.640 | of the Old and New Testament that are most well-known.

00:41:36.260 | Roman Catholics have a few additional

00:41:38.360 | that we'd label the Apocrypha.

00:41:40.940 | Orthodox Christians have a few additional.

00:41:43.040 | And so there's some variation, but generally speaking,

00:41:47.140 | Christians affirm that all of these writings are inspired.

00:41:51.260 | That's why they have been collected

00:41:52.680 | to be the canon of Scripture.

00:41:55.000 | There were other writings that are ancient

00:41:56.760 | that were rejected by early councils of the Church,

00:42:00.080 | but the books that we bring together,

00:42:03.140 | we consider these all to be authoritative.

00:42:05.840 | And so you'll find, and then the Scriptures themselves

00:42:10.560 | are self-referential.

00:42:12.240 | And so, for example, there's a verse in Timothy

00:42:15.640 | in the New Testament, a letter that the Apostle Paul

00:42:18.520 | is writing to his disciple Timothy,

00:42:20.800 | a young man that he is training.

00:42:22.040 | And he says, "All Scripture is God-breathed

00:42:25.060 | "and useful for correction and for teaching

00:42:27.060 | "and for all the rest of it."

00:42:28.720 | And what he's referring to there is, of course,

00:42:31.640 | the Hebrew Bible, that's what he's referring to.

00:42:34.240 | And he's specifically saying that it will be

00:42:38.800 | the Hebrew Bible, that this is inspired.

00:42:42.240 | And then based upon that, other Christians

00:42:45.160 | in the early Church have gone on and gathered together

00:42:47.520 | the writings that are in the New Testament

00:42:49.280 | and affirmed, these are the reliable

00:42:52.080 | and inspired Scriptures.

00:42:53.920 | Now, in addition to that, you should also understand

00:42:56.920 | that some Christians believe that not all Christian doctrine

00:43:01.920 | has to be drawn exclusively from the Bible itself,

00:43:08.840 | from the writings, from the written Scriptures itself.

00:43:12.300 | This, most famously, was one of the major divisions

00:43:16.040 | in the Protestant Reformation.

00:43:18.060 | So 500 years ago, in the Protestant Reformation,

00:43:21.140 | the early Reformers created the five solas.

00:43:25.920 | And one of the five solas that they kind of staked

00:43:28.620 | their claim on created Protestant Christianity,

00:43:30.880 | which is probably what mostly surrounds you.

00:43:34.000 | But Protestant Christianity was built upon,

00:43:37.320 | one of the basic ideas is that of sola scriptura,

00:43:41.060 | so that the Scripture alone is the ultimate

00:43:44.200 | source of authority.

00:43:46.200 | But the reason that there was a schism there

00:43:48.840 | between Protestants, as they're known now,

00:43:51.680 | and Roman Catholics is because in the Roman Catholic

00:43:54.660 | tradition, Scripture is not the sole source of authority.

00:43:59.660 | And so Roman Catholics would acknowledge Church tradition

00:44:03.400 | and Church authority as being also authoritative

00:44:07.800 | over the doctrine of the Church and the doctrine

00:44:12.800 | that Christians live by.

00:44:16.780 | So for example, a Roman Catholic in the papal encyclical,

00:44:21.700 | I forget what it was called, I read it,

00:44:23.500 | but an example would be birth control, right?

00:44:27.240 | Roman Catholic theology and dogma teaches

00:44:30.540 | that married couples should not use physical

00:44:34.540 | or chemical means of avoiding, physical barrier

00:44:38.220 | or chemical means of avoiding children.

00:44:40.720 | That is the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.

00:44:44.680 | That is not a teaching that is based,

00:44:47.100 | that is not a teaching that you can find

00:44:49.820 | in black and white letter in the Bible.

00:44:52.080 | You can find hints of it, you can find traces of it,

00:44:56.580 | and for that reason, the Roman Catholic Pope

00:45:00.460 | wrote that encyclical and why that became Church doctrine.

00:45:03.460 | But that is not a black and white thing.

00:45:06.340 | There is no verse that says thou shalt not

00:45:08.740 | use birth control.

00:45:11.580 | So tradition and Church authority are also valid,

00:45:15.240 | also in the Orthodox Church.

00:45:17.160 | In Protestantism itself, this will be a big dividing point.

00:45:20.940 | So Jesus himself said, he said, "It's good for you

00:45:24.220 | "that I go away, because if I don't go,

00:45:27.920 | "then the Comforter will not come.

00:45:29.620 | "But when he comes, he shall take all of the things of mine

00:45:32.920 | "and teach them to you."

00:45:34.420 | And so in Protestant Christianity,

00:45:36.760 | many Protestants don't affirm the sole and exclusive

00:45:41.760 | teaching of Scripture as being everything.

00:45:44.620 | Many Protestants would believe that the Holy Spirit

00:45:47.260 | is teaching us, because that is what Jesus said.

00:45:49.780 | And so I myself would affirm this,

00:45:51.780 | that I would say that the Holy Spirit will teach you

00:45:54.160 | or will teach me something that I need to know.

00:45:57.300 | And I will never contradict Scripture.

00:46:00.100 | I will never go to Scripture and say,

00:46:04.360 | "Hey, look, in black and white it says this is wrong,

00:46:08.080 | "but the Holy Spirit is telling me

00:46:09.460 | "with my personalized revelation that I should do it."

00:46:12.480 | I think that is wrong, but you can in many ways

00:46:15.800 | have expanded application of a principle

00:46:20.680 | that you see in Scripture in your own life.

00:46:22.760 | And I'll give you one specific example, okay?

00:46:25.240 | I'm a rather, this is silly,

00:46:26.800 | and I'm trying to use examples that would make this simple,

00:46:29.560 | that would make this clear.

00:46:30.740 | I'm a somewhat large guy, and throughout my life,

00:46:35.740 | I've generally been in the habit

00:46:37.460 | of keeping my shirt buttons open

00:46:40.040 | because of the largeness of my frame.

00:46:43.520 | When I was in high school and had a uniform,

00:46:45.480 | it just wasn't comfortable to button it all the way up.

00:46:48.020 | And one time I was in my early 20s,

00:46:50.800 | and I was looking at myself in the mirror,

00:46:52.480 | and the top button of my shirt was unbuttoned,

00:46:54.680 | and I was showing all this chest hair,

00:46:56.120 | and I looked at myself and I said, "Joshua,"

00:46:58.720 | and I just sensed, in my heart,

00:47:00.600 | I just sensed a conviction that that's not the image

00:47:03.840 | that you should be portraying.

00:47:05.480 | That's not modest, button your shirt.

00:47:07.720 | Now, that kind of conviction would be something

00:47:12.720 | that many Christians experience and say,

00:47:16.160 | I claim that I've experienced this.

00:47:18.180 | I sensed what I would label

00:47:20.800 | as the voice of the Holy Spirit saying,

00:47:22.260 | "Joshua, this is an immodest behavior."

00:47:24.720 | But I would never go out and put that in black and white

00:47:27.720 | and say to someone else,

00:47:28.620 | "Well, you can't unbutton your shirt."

00:47:30.560 | I wouldn't create an encyclical that says,

00:47:32.360 | "You can't do this."

00:47:33.560 | It's just a, there's a biblical doctrine of modesty,

00:47:38.560 | and I wanna apply it, and in that moment,

00:47:41.320 | I was applying it with my physical experience.

00:47:44.280 | And then there would be similar expressions of,

00:47:46.280 | you would have a biblical doctrine of modesty.

00:47:48.320 | So, for example, in the New Testament,

00:47:50.640 | Paul writes to women, and he says,

00:47:52.240 | "I want women to be adorned with the beauty

00:47:54.980 | "that comes from the inside,

00:47:56.180 | "not with costly gold and expensive apparel

00:47:59.180 | "and braided hair and all of these things."

00:48:01.400 | So, different Christians take that in different ways,

00:48:04.620 | and they make different applications of it.

00:48:06.800 | And so, you may have a very conservative Mennonite group

00:48:11.800 | that where the Christians in that group

00:48:17.860 | never ever wear earrings,

00:48:20.000 | they never wear any kind of jewelry,

00:48:21.580 | they never wear makeup, they never do anything,

00:48:23.860 | because they are very fundamentalist

00:48:25.800 | in following the specific dictates

00:48:27.840 | of that passage of Scripture.

00:48:30.100 | Then you'll have other groups that are less focused

00:48:33.940 | on the specific application of don't wear costly jewels,

00:48:38.780 | and instead focused on applying the spirit of it,

00:48:41.980 | the spirit of the idea.

00:48:43.780 | And so, this would be kind of where I would be.

00:48:48.780 | So, I gave my wife a pair of earrings for,

00:48:52.040 | I don't know, some present in the past,

00:48:53.460 | but I don't wanna go around

00:48:55.020 | and see how much wealth can I display on her.

00:48:56.960 | And in my own expression,

00:48:58.500 | I want, even though that was written to women,

00:49:01.500 | specifically by the Apostle Paul,

00:49:03.620 | I take that as applying to me as well,

00:49:05.620 | as a Christian virtue of modesty.

00:49:07.620 | And so, I want to be modest.

00:49:09.180 | I wanna be modest in my speech,

00:49:10.540 | I wanna be modest in my appearance,

00:49:12.220 | I wanna be modest in my expression,

00:49:14.620 | I don't wanna go around

00:49:15.840 | and just talk about myself all the time,

00:49:17.420 | I don't wanna wear things

00:49:18.380 | that are constantly gonna bring attention to myself,

00:49:20.620 | I wanna express this virtue of modesty,

00:49:23.900 | but I wanna do it in a thoughtful way.

00:49:26.420 | So, that's a preamble to say that as we go to Scripture,

00:49:31.420 | you need to understand where doctrine comes from,

00:49:34.660 | and that I could wholeheartedly,

00:49:37.360 | you can make the argument against a certain thing,

00:49:43.580 | such as abortion,

00:49:44.940 | without specifically going to chapter and verse,

00:49:48.580 | and specifically identifying this one thing,

00:49:51.820 | and still be perfectly correct within Christian doctrine.

00:49:55.300 | And each tradition or stream of Christianity

00:49:57.660 | would have a slightly different way of looking at it.

00:50:00.020 | And so, if you don't understand that,

00:50:03.100 | you just look ignorant when you say,

00:50:04.580 | well, show me chapter and verse on that,

00:50:05.900 | show me chapter and verse, Joshua,

00:50:07.060 | as to why you think you should

00:50:08.300 | button the top button of your shirt.

00:50:10.000 | It just makes you look ignorant

00:50:11.100 | that you don't understand how we derive doctrine

00:50:14.260 | in what we do.

00:50:16.300 | Now, there's one more thing that you need to understand,

00:50:18.260 | is that if you go to Scripture itself,

00:50:20.340 | I think it's fairly common,

00:50:22.660 | I'm not saying anything controversial here,

00:50:24.620 | most Christians would agree that what you see in...

00:50:28.220 | So, in our modern world,

00:50:29.860 | in the United States and in England and various other places,

00:50:32.660 | we have a tradition of what is called common law.

00:50:35.020 | Common law is different than a civil law tradition.

00:50:37.820 | So, the difference between England and France

00:50:39.500 | is you have a distinction between common law and civil law,

00:50:41.540 | difference between the United States and...

00:50:44.140 | Anyway, you have a difference between

00:50:46.500 | common law and civil law countries.

00:50:47.740 | I don't remember which country has every single one.

00:50:50.140 | But in the English-speaking world,

00:50:51.540 | common law is the basic application.

00:50:54.200 | What that means is there's not so much a focus

00:50:57.340 | on a specific set of laws

00:51:00.780 | that are written down by a government,

00:51:05.140 | and that these are all of the laws,

00:51:07.500 | but rather we draw our legal system

00:51:09.960 | from the laws that have gone on before.

00:51:12.180 | And when something has gone on before,

00:51:14.820 | then you see an application of it.

00:51:19.380 | And so, in the U.S. tradition,

00:51:21.700 | we have a written constitution.

00:51:23.100 | That would be different than in England.

00:51:25.260 | But we have a written constitution,

00:51:26.700 | and then you have application of that.

00:51:28.140 | You have case law.

00:51:29.380 | And that case law is an expansion

00:51:31.700 | of the law that has come before.

00:51:34.100 | Now, I'm not a legal scholar.

00:51:35.540 | I would say, though, that certainly,

00:51:37.660 | this is the same basic system

00:51:39.260 | that you see in the Bible itself.

00:51:41.740 | And then I think you could say,

00:51:43.380 | I would guess that probably the common law tradition

00:51:47.020 | comes out of Christianity, that we draw it from that.

00:51:50.780 | And so, if you go back and you study

00:51:52.460 | the most detailed civil laws that we have in the Bible,

00:51:56.040 | coming from the Mosaic Civil Code,

00:51:57.780 | I'm persuaded that this is a system of case law.

00:52:00.720 | You have a basic law.

00:52:02.420 | For example, you could bring it together

00:52:04.640 | with just the Ten Commandments.

00:52:05.820 | Here's the basic Ten Commandments.

00:52:07.420 | But then you have many, many applications of that case law,

00:52:10.780 | of expressions of it, of bringing it into more focus,

00:52:13.900 | and what about this situation?

00:52:15.060 | What about that situation?

00:52:16.300 | And it expands throughout history.

00:52:18.400 | So, the simplest reason that Christians

00:52:21.300 | would be opposed to abortion

00:52:26.300 | is because of the biblical prohibition of murder.

00:52:31.700 | Thou shalt not murder is one of the most

00:52:34.380 | fundamental aspects of biblical law.

00:52:37.780 | Thou shalt not murder is clearly stated

00:52:40.020 | in the Ten Commandments.

00:52:41.620 | But prior to that, in the Noahic Covenant,

00:52:43.900 | you have God clearly saying, don't murder.

00:52:46.180 | And if a man takes another man's life,

00:52:47.740 | then his life is to be forfeit.

00:52:49.540 | He should be executed if he takes another man's life.

00:52:52.060 | Murder is one of the first sins that's recorded in the Bible

00:52:55.180 | between Cain and Abel.

00:52:56.740 | And from the beginning to the end of scripture,

00:52:58.940 | we have a prohibition against murder.

00:53:01.460 | Now, there are applications of that.

00:53:02.980 | What is murder?

00:53:03.940 | The reason we have the different distinction

00:53:06.940 | between murder and manslaughter

00:53:08.780 | is because of the biblical distinction

00:53:10.900 | between murder and killing,

00:53:13.160 | where we clearly see application of this.

00:53:15.300 | But no other verse is necessary

00:53:19.140 | for being opposed to abortion

00:53:24.980 | other than thou shalt not murder,

00:53:26.780 | the fundamental, foundational, basic ethic

00:53:31.540 | of any ethical system.

00:53:34.940 | So we'll go to a couple more examples in a moment,

00:53:39.820 | but I'm answering question one to say,

00:53:41.340 | why would a Christian oppose abortion?

00:53:43.820 | Well, because Christians believe that abortion is murder,

00:53:47.260 | and the Bible says thou shalt not murder.

00:53:49.620 | So then we get to the second question.

00:53:51.060 | We would say, all right, well, is there a point in time

00:53:54.060 | at which it would be murder

00:53:56.100 | and a point in time at which it would not be murder?

00:53:58.860 | So let's say that I have a baby,

00:54:01.220 | and here's where I just ask you

00:54:02.660 | if you're willing to share your perspective.

00:54:04.740 | Let's say I have a week-old baby,

00:54:06.980 | and I intentionally end the life of that baby

00:54:10.540 | a week after he has been from his mother's womb.

00:54:13.380 | Would you call that murder

00:54:15.100 | if I did that to a week-old baby yourself

00:54:17.100 | at where you are right now?

00:54:17.940 | - Yes. - Okay.

00:54:19.060 | And if it were a week prior to the birth of the child,

00:54:22.860 | would you call it murder if I ended the life of the baby?

00:54:25.700 | - I think I would, yeah.

00:54:29.300 | - Okay, so good.

00:54:30.980 | So not all people would agree with you,

00:54:33.060 | because many people have tried

00:54:35.140 | to come up with different theories.

00:54:36.820 | So I think, I don't know if he's still,

00:54:39.300 | he doesn't seem as popular as he once was,

00:54:41.020 | but I once read some of Peter Singer's writing on this

00:54:44.540 | where he talked about basically we should not,

00:54:48.020 | that, what was his argument?

00:54:50.180 | You're getting me on the spot.

00:54:51.100 | So you get what I can do just extemporaneously,

00:54:54.900 | but Peter Singer talked about basically

00:54:56.980 | that in order for a baby to,

00:55:00.580 | in order for murder to be,

00:55:03.060 | in order for the ending of life

00:55:04.860 | of a young human being to be murder,

00:55:08.260 | the human being would have to have personhood.

00:55:11.180 | And he did not believe that personhood was an attribute

00:55:14.740 | that a baby could express prior to, I forget his number,

00:55:17.940 | but maybe two or three years old.

00:55:19.780 | And so we get into the question of personhood,

00:55:21.660 | which is the fundamental debate philosophically

00:55:24.700 | as the difference between ending life of a human

00:55:27.460 | as compared to murdering a person.

00:55:29.980 | It's based upon personhood.

00:55:31.900 | So he said that because he didn't see much of a distinction

00:55:35.100 | between a baby at 39 weeks of gestation

00:55:37.820 | as compared to a baby at 41 weeks of gestation.

00:55:41.060 | And it's interesting that when you have a baby,

00:55:44.220 | the first, in some literature related to childbirthing,

00:55:49.220 | you have the concept of the first trimester,

00:55:52.100 | the second trimester, the third trimester,

00:55:53.980 | and the fourth trimester.

00:55:55.420 | And so the fourth trimester is the first few months,

00:55:58.900 | first three months of a baby's life

00:56:00.900 | in which the baby has been delivered from his mother's womb,

00:56:05.060 | but in many ways, he still has a very similar experience

00:56:08.620 | outside of the womb as he had inside the womb.

00:56:11.380 | There's a lot more similarity between a baby

00:56:14.740 | that's two-month-old with a 32-week baby

00:56:18.060 | as compared to a two-month-old with a six-month-old baby.

00:56:22.380 | They're just wildly different in terms of their development.

00:56:24.900 | And so you could say, well, maybe the,

00:56:27.980 | and many people say abortion is the ending of human life

00:56:32.980 | prior to the physical delivering of the baby.

00:56:38.380 | Well, if you apply your reasonable thinking to that,

00:56:41.140 | it's hard to draw that line.

00:56:44.080 | It's hard to say that there's a big difference

00:56:46.940 | between a baby at 39 weeks of gestation

00:56:48.980 | versus a baby who was delivered at 40 weeks

00:56:51.860 | and is one week old.

00:56:53.220 | Both of them will die if left alone.

00:56:56.500 | So we can't say that personhood comes

00:56:59.740 | when you can take care of yourself.

00:57:01.180 | A six-year-old child will die if left alone in most cases.

00:57:04.980 | So we can't use a criteria of saying

00:57:07.820 | that the child has to be able to take care of himself.

00:57:10.860 | And physically speaking, then we say,

00:57:13.020 | well, maybe it's 'cause the baby can survive

00:57:14.860 | outside of his mother's womb.

00:57:15.900 | Well, at 39 weeks, then the baby can survive

00:57:18.100 | outside of his mother's womb, no big deal, fully formed,

00:57:20.420 | everything's good to go, just like at 41 weeks.

00:57:22.820 | There's no material difference there.

00:57:24.340 | So then we say, well, then the difference of personhood

00:57:27.060 | or whether abortion is wrong or not

00:57:28.980 | is just based upon the location of the baby.

00:57:31.140 | The baby is located inside the baby's,

00:57:33.860 | the mother's body or outside of the mother's body.

00:57:36.540 | And some people believe that,

00:57:37.980 | but I think that if you examine that really carefully,

00:57:40.380 | it starts to break down.

00:57:41.740 | And so then we have to move earlier in the pregnancy

00:57:45.140 | and we have to find some other basis of it.

00:57:48.980 | So this is where there's been such a big difference

00:57:51.580 | with two things, number one, ultrasound technology,

00:57:54.460 | where we can see the development of the baby.

00:57:56.820 | We can see the point at which a zygote and an embryo

00:58:00.620 | and a fetus start to resemble what we would recognize

00:58:03.740 | as a baby versus before that.

00:58:05.420 | And we're pretty astonished to see how early that happens.

00:58:08.020 | It's really remarkable when you start getting ultrasounds

00:58:10.900 | at 20 weeks and you see your baby there formed,

00:58:13.220 | it's just, it's astonishing to see it.

00:58:15.340 | And then the second thing is our ability to provide

00:58:18.860 | pre, forgetting the name of it, but the NICU,

00:58:23.580 | for a very premature baby,

00:58:25.980 | provide life-giving care for a preemie baby.

00:58:28.900 | And if you have a very premature baby,

00:58:31.020 | I mean, certainly the statistics change a lot,

00:58:33.820 | but you move all the way back to,

00:58:35.700 | you move all the way back to 25 weeks

00:58:39.740 | and you might get decent survival rates for a baby

00:58:42.460 | with medical care.

00:58:43.540 | And so those arguments just don't seem

00:58:45.580 | like they're philosophically consistent.

00:58:48.260 | What's the difference between 25 weeks and 27 weeks?

00:58:50.980 | And you go back to Roe v. Wade

00:58:52.620 | and kind of this creation of this trimester system,

00:58:55.740 | and it just seems philosophically inconsistent.

00:58:58.820 | So the two, so I think what often Christians look at

00:59:02.620 | is they go back and they say,

00:59:05.220 | at what point in time is the baby a separate entity?

00:59:09.160 | And it took quite a while for there to be

00:59:12.580 | the broad agreement that there is now among many Christians,

00:59:16.460 | but basically the point in time

00:59:18.020 | at which the baby is a separate entity is at fertilization.

00:59:21.180 | The time at which there is a unique DNA

00:59:23.780 | that is different from the DNA of the mother

00:59:25.420 | and of the father basically is fertilization.

00:59:28.680 | That's the point in time.

00:59:30.220 | And then there is scriptural evidence

00:59:33.140 | that could be pointed to to indicate this

00:59:36.200 | from a theological basis.

00:59:38.080 | So probably some of the famous verses in Psalms,

00:59:42.460 | the writer of Psalms says that you knitted me together

00:59:46.320 | in my mother's womb,

00:59:48.020 | and I'm fearfully and wonderfully made.

00:59:49.900 | There's a verse in Jeremiah that says,

00:59:51.820 | before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.

00:59:54.780 | So let me repeat that.

00:59:55.820 | Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,

00:59:59.820 | and before you were born, I consecrated you.

01:00:03.140 | And then you can go through and,

01:00:06.660 | I mean, there are other applications of that

01:00:10.340 | that you can find.

01:00:11.540 | And there's, I can't cite chapter and verse at the moment

01:00:14.580 | extemporaneously, but we can go back

01:00:16.300 | and there were laws in the Mosaic law

01:00:19.300 | about striking a woman who is pregnant

01:00:21.860 | and what happens there.

01:00:23.140 | And so there's clearly an acknowledgement

01:00:25.100 | that there is a, that God is involved

01:00:28.900 | in the forming together of life in the womb.

01:00:33.460 | So the primary doctrine is thou shalt not murder.

01:00:38.300 | And then secondarily, in addition to those verses

01:00:41.180 | that talk about God's knowledge of the baby,

01:00:43.180 | there is a clear, consistent theme in scripture

01:00:47.540 | that God himself is the author of life.

01:00:50.860 | And it's not necessary to deny that a male and a female

01:00:55.860 | through sexual copulation are involved in that process

01:01:00.880 | in order to affirm that.

01:01:02.540 | The scripture clearly teaches that God

01:01:04.580 | is the author of life, not independent

01:01:07.540 | of a man and woman's activities, but together with them.

01:01:11.780 | And so we see throughout the Bible,

01:01:14.980 | there's basically an uninterrupted theme

01:01:17.020 | from the beginning to the end that God opens the womb

01:01:19.300 | and God closes the womb.

01:01:21.060 | And so if you bring these various strains together,

01:01:23.900 | you arrive at the modern Christian conviction.

01:01:26.800 | You arrive at the modern Christian conviction

01:01:28.620 | that life begins at conception,

01:01:33.420 | that God is involved in the actual giving of life,

01:01:37.500 | and life begins at conception primarily

01:01:39.480 | because where else can it be placed?

01:01:41.620 | And as we have increasing levels of scientific evidence,

01:01:45.900 | then that argument has been easier for Christians to make

01:01:49.480 | because now we have scientific evidence

01:01:51.980 | that supports what, in many cases,

01:01:54.300 | is a theological conviction.

01:01:55.820 | Let me add two more things,

01:01:56.940 | and then I'll just stop for your comments.

01:01:59.220 | There's two more things

01:02:00.220 | that are associated with this, though.

01:02:02.820 | The other theme that is really important doctrinally

01:02:07.260 | is that Christians value persons, they value people.

01:02:12.260 | And one of the most consistent expressions

01:02:15.940 | of the Christian religion

01:02:17.540 | has been to care for those who are unwanted.

01:02:20.700 | Christians are clearly commanded multiple times

01:02:23.460 | to care for widows and especially orphans,

01:02:26.360 | that providing care for orphans

01:02:28.660 | is a fundamental basis of Christian religion.

01:02:32.400 | If you went back to the early Christians

01:02:34.340 | in the Roman Empire at that time,

01:02:36.700 | abortion, safe methods of abortion, were not common.

01:02:39.340 | And so it's my understanding of history

01:02:40.820 | that in the Romans, it would be very frequent

01:02:44.140 | that they would go ahead, the baby would be birthed,

01:02:46.920 | but then the baby would just be set aside on the trash heap.

01:02:49.620 | And it's my understanding that Christians would go out

01:02:51.980 | and regularly work through the trash heap

01:02:55.640 | finding abandoned babies, and they would take those babies,

01:02:58.820 | they would adopt them, and they would raise them.

01:03:00.820 | And this has been the same thing

01:03:02.620 | that Christians have done all around the world

01:03:04.140 | in many places, is that anytime a baby is unwanted

01:03:07.800 | or abandoned, then Christians go and adopt the baby

01:03:11.060 | because we have to, it's a fundamental commandment

01:03:14.500 | of our Maker that we are to care for orphans.

01:03:17.460 | And then you say, well, all right, that's fine,

01:03:19.660 | but why would there be a society,

01:03:21.220 | why would somebody not want a baby?

01:03:23.540 | And this is where you get to other aspects of sin

01:03:25.860 | that often what Christians deal with.

01:03:28.740 | If you look at the reasons that people abort their babies,

01:03:31.760 | generally speaking, can I speak generally?

01:03:36.240 | This is non-inclusively, but many of the reasons

01:03:39.540 | that a mother would abort her baby

01:03:43.240 | would be related to some expression of sin.

01:03:46.600 | Sometimes it would be sexual sin.

01:03:49.720 | In some cases, a young mother was engaging

01:03:54.720 | in sexual relations with a man, and they weren't married,

01:03:57.920 | and they were fornicating, and now there's a baby,

01:04:00.120 | and I don't want the baby, and the baby's inconvenient.

01:04:02.720 | In many cases, it would be due to sins of greed

01:04:06.920 | and sins of, I mean, I just label it as greed.

01:04:11.340 | If you look at the pro-abortion folks today

01:04:13.920 | and you listen to their arguments,

01:04:15.240 | their basic argument in many cases,

01:04:18.560 | when you go back to a couple years ago,

01:04:20.200 | there was the shout your abortion,

01:04:21.440 | and I listened to all these testimonies of women

01:04:23.520 | who were talking about their abortions.

01:04:25.760 | The basic theme as to why these women

01:04:27.760 | would kill their babies was that the baby

01:04:30.080 | was an inconvenience to my career.

01:04:32.060 | The baby was gonna keep me from making more money.

01:04:33.920 | The baby was gonna keep me from doing better financially,

01:04:37.040 | and this is repulsive.

01:04:39.840 | This kind of thinking is repulsive to the Christian mind.

01:04:42.760 | To put money in front of a person who needs you

01:04:47.760 | is repulsive, and then you look at the societal expressions,

01:04:53.520 | and there's all kinds of just practical expressions of it.

01:04:56.280 | So it's the totality of all of those things

01:05:00.000 | that is based upon it, and I should also note

01:05:02.360 | that if you look at the arguments

01:05:04.920 | of pro-abortion activists or proponents,

01:05:09.460 | basically, then you have to deal

01:05:10.960 | with the philosophical arguments for autonomy.

01:05:13.480 | That's one of the basic philosophical arguments

01:05:17.880 | in favor of a woman being able to abort her baby

01:05:21.080 | at any time for any reason whatsoever.

01:05:24.400 | It's autonomy.

01:05:25.240 | I can do what I want, and autonomy,

01:05:27.400 | this kind of extreme form of autonomy

01:05:30.000 | is not a Christian virtue or a Christian philosophy,

01:05:33.920 | and I'll skip that discussion for the moment,

01:05:36.520 | but those are kind of some of the many reasons

01:05:41.280 | as to why you have such a strong Christian support

01:05:44.580 | for abolishing abortion in all of its forms.

01:05:52.720 | - Okay, I'm gonna need to go back

01:05:54.000 | to listen to digest all of that.

01:05:55.940 | - You'll be both.

01:05:56.780 | - Yeah, well, first, I wanna say thank you

01:06:00.240 | for going to such lengths.

01:06:02.680 | This is a topic that, as I said in the beginning,

01:06:05.060 | it's difficult to speak with Christians about

01:06:07.340 | because I often run into the scenario

01:06:09.040 | where it's kind of like a moral dumbfounding.

01:06:11.800 | Like, what do you mean?

01:06:12.680 | What do you mean, why is it wrong?

01:06:13.760 | It's wrong because it's wrong.

01:06:15.200 | Okay, well, let's go a little deeper than that

01:06:17.600 | and try to understand what the motives are here.

01:06:20.400 | So I appreciate you taking the topic on

01:06:22.480 | and sharing your beliefs.

01:06:23.760 | It's really helpful for me to understand.

01:06:25.800 | We could probably fill out the rest of your show

01:06:30.200 | talking about this, so I wanna respect

01:06:32.000 | the rest of your listeners.

01:06:33.680 | And I guess my, in conclusion,

01:06:38.560 | my concern is that things like complete prohibitions

01:06:43.560 | on mostly anything tend to ignore

01:06:46.720 | the consequences of those prohibitions.

01:06:49.280 | So abortions that are performed illegally

01:06:52.680 | with less than sterile techniques

01:06:54.400 | for, let's say, medically necessary reasons,

01:06:56.800 | those stories get pushed down and not paid attention to

01:07:01.800 | in favor of the, oh, well, she sinned,

01:07:04.600 | and so, therefore, she was wrong,

01:07:06.040 | so she deserves whatever she gets.

01:07:09.280 | That's my concern, is really about

01:07:11.040 | the total prohibition on anything.

01:07:12.520 | And I think that if we,

01:07:14.540 | I guess, in conclusion,

01:07:18.200 | I would have one final question.

01:07:20.080 | Is there a point of compromise

01:07:22.140 | that you think Christians and non-Christians

01:07:24.800 | could make on abortion at any point in the future,

01:07:28.440 | or will abortion at any point,

01:07:31.280 | let's say, beginning at conception,

01:07:33.040 | always and forever be considered a sin

01:07:36.500 | and, therefore, rallied against politically?

01:07:38.780 | - Fair questions.

01:07:40.660 | - Can there be any compromise?

01:07:42.120 | - And, well, we're not gonna do two hours on this.

01:07:44.360 | Any listener who wants to skip this

01:07:45.960 | has a skip button and a fast-forward button.

01:07:48.000 | So I'm more interested in two thoughtful men

01:07:51.560 | who care about these issues

01:07:52.840 | and wanna deal with them in a straightforward way.

01:07:56.800 | I'm more interested in our having

01:07:58.260 | a productive conversation, and I pay for the hosting.

01:08:02.600 | Anyone who wants to skip can skip.

01:08:04.740 | I feel that one of the great problems

01:08:07.520 | that we face in our society is that

01:08:10.000 | when these important and heavy and difficult

01:08:15.000 | moral issues are dealt with,

01:08:17.520 | people try to deal with them too quickly,

01:08:19.120 | and these are difficult things.

01:08:22.240 | So in terms of, first, I think that it's important

01:08:26.320 | for anybody who is, I guess one thing

01:08:28.560 | that I found really helpful is the time

01:08:31.440 | at which I was fully able to empathize

01:08:36.440 | with a mother who aborts her baby.

01:08:40.740 | And I'll tell you specifically where that happened.

01:08:42.720 | My wife used to watch this show called "Call the Midwife."

01:08:46.440 | She got interested in it.

01:08:47.920 | And there was a scene in "Call the Midwife,"

01:08:50.480 | or various scenes, in which it was dealing

01:08:52.880 | with this direct topic.

01:08:54.560 | And it was clearly, the writer of the show

01:08:57.340 | was clearly doing it to get at the coat hanger issue

01:09:00.760 | that you're specifically dealing with.

01:09:02.760 | But the writer of the show, at the time,

01:09:04.560 | abortion was prohibited in England.

01:09:06.640 | The show was set in England.

01:09:08.120 | And there was this very poor mother with many children,

01:09:14.120 | and this very poor mother with many, many children

01:09:16.720 | became pregnant again, and she couldn't care

01:09:21.320 | for the children that she had.

01:09:22.820 | And the show writers wrote her in a situation

01:09:25.800 | where she felt like she had no other option.

01:09:28.400 | And so she went, and she obtained a back alley abortion.

01:09:32.720 | And I don't remember if she, I think she lived,

01:09:36.120 | but it was very severe, and she was going to die,

01:09:38.400 | and who knows.

01:09:40.000 | But it was that time in which I was filled with empathy.

01:09:43.560 | And I'm really glad that I saw that,

01:09:46.040 | because it seems like I have to go through experiences

01:09:49.200 | for me to have empathy with people.

01:09:51.240 | And when I have empathy, I'm able to be more,

01:09:54.760 | I'm able to face things more straightforwardly.

01:09:58.440 | At its core, though, empathy, or kind of a toxic form

01:10:02.260 | of empathy, can't be our beginning place in anything,

01:10:06.020 | because we can empathize all the way

01:10:09.160 | to the greatest moral evil you would ever imagine,

01:10:13.680 | purely from empathy perspectives.

01:10:16.000 | So we need to begin by using our rational brains

01:10:18.840 | and thinking about things logically,

01:10:21.680 | and then make sure that we have dealt

01:10:24.140 | with the emotions appropriately,

01:10:26.280 | and that we're genuinely actually providing care

01:10:29.000 | for the people involved.

01:10:30.560 | And what I find is that in the difficult cases,

01:10:34.640 | usually, so the difficult cases are actually much simpler

01:10:39.640 | if we begin with a logical argument,

01:10:43.040 | and then we move then to how do we do this

01:10:47.560 | in an appropriate way?

01:10:48.920 | So you mentioned difficult situations,

01:10:52.180 | and then you talked about people dying

01:10:54.600 | with illegal abortion procedures and things like that.

01:10:59.200 | So first, let's deal with, or straightforwardly,

01:11:02.400 | let's deal with the most common objections,

01:11:05.280 | which are rape, incest, and abortion necessary

01:11:10.280 | because of the life of the mother,

01:11:11.480 | where there's a danger to the life of the mother.

01:11:13.720 | If we look at these logically, I'll just give you my case,

01:11:16.160 | is that if we assign personhood to a baby,

01:11:21.160 | and personhood is a philosophical term,

01:11:23.560 | basically, we mean that I have rights, you have rights,

01:11:27.600 | the father has rights, the mother has rights,

01:11:30.080 | and the baby has rights, these are persons,

01:11:32.640 | and we're going to treat the baby

01:11:34.320 | as a human being with human rights.

01:11:37.220 | If we do that, and then just follow

01:11:39.460 | that train of logic forward,

01:11:41.720 | then we have everything that we need

01:11:44.520 | to resolve those three most commonly cited

01:11:47.680 | situations and arrangements.

01:11:52.640 | There are two separate trains.

01:11:54.360 | So if a baby is conceived in rape,

01:11:57.240 | or a baby is conceived as a product of incest,

01:12:00.760 | then in that situation, we need to understand

01:12:04.360 | that the only morally righteous person involved is the baby.

01:12:09.360 | The baby is the only innocent party.

01:12:14.620 | Excuse me, in the case of rape,

01:12:16.160 | I'm not trying to say that the mother is not innocent.

01:12:18.960 | What I'm saying is that the baby

01:12:21.060 | is the most obviously truly innocent person.

01:12:25.640 | So what we have in the case of rape or incest,

01:12:30.600 | and a baby conceived in rape or incest,

01:12:32.400 | is we have multiple moral agents.

01:12:36.560 | In the case of rape, the guilty party is the father.

01:12:40.500 | The mother may or may not bear some responsibility,

01:12:45.520 | but let's assume that she's totally innocent.

01:12:48.840 | The baby is also totally innocent.

01:12:51.160 | And we don't right moral wrongs with more moral wrongs.

01:12:56.160 | So if I come and I murder your brother,

01:13:01.600 | we don't right the wrong of my murdering your brother

01:13:08.600 | by you going and murdering my mother.

01:13:11.360 | We know that.

01:13:12.300 | We know that while it might feel good to kill someone else,

01:13:15.920 | and it might give some kind of vengeance,

01:13:17.280 | it doesn't solve the moral wrong.

01:13:19.760 | And so the same thing that happens in rape,

01:13:21.640 | the morally guilty party is the rapist.

01:13:26.160 | That's whose life should be forfeit.

01:13:28.960 | The baby is the truly innocent party.

01:13:32.720 | And then you get to, well, what I commonly hear

01:13:35.400 | if I talk to someone, well, you don't want a mother

01:13:37.320 | to see the face of her rapist for the rest of her life.

01:13:41.920 | If you read the stories of mothers who have faced that,

01:13:45.360 | in some cases, the baby himself or herself winds up

01:13:50.360 | being an important part of her healing from the trauma

01:13:53.520 | of this great evil that was committed against her.

01:13:56.280 | In some cases, the baby can be adopted.

01:13:59.320 | But in no case is the moral evil of rape made right

01:14:04.080 | by murdering the innocent baby.

01:14:06.280 | Similar with incest, same basic thought process applies,

01:14:09.960 | is that the baby is the innocent party.

01:14:12.680 | And we should not go out and murder innocent people

01:14:16.920 | just because other people commit great wrongs

01:14:19.840 | and great evils.

01:14:21.260 | With regard to life of the mother,

01:14:23.160 | if we ascribe personhood to the baby and to the mother,

01:14:27.340 | then we have a proper moral framework

01:14:29.320 | in which to deal with difficult situations.

01:14:32.120 | We know how to triage situations.

01:14:35.240 | What happens in abortion is that if a mother's life

01:14:38.520 | is in danger, then we automatically assume

01:14:42.120 | that the right answer to that is the death of the baby.

01:14:45.760 | That's not always a right assumption.

01:14:47.920 | It's my understanding, I'm not a medical doctor,

01:14:50.800 | and this could be wrong, but I think it's right.

01:14:53.400 | I am not aware of any medical procedure

01:14:55.800 | that would require us to intentionally end the life

01:15:00.800 | of a developing fetus in order to save the life of a mother.

01:15:06.060 | There may be many circumstances

01:15:07.720 | in which the baby must be delivered.

01:15:10.240 | The mother is experiencing preeclampsia

01:15:12.280 | or some potentially life-ending disease.

01:15:15.960 | We may need to deliver the baby.

01:15:17.920 | And clearly, we may deliver the baby

01:15:20.480 | knowing that the baby will die.

01:15:22.680 | If the baby is very young, we know that the baby will die.

01:15:25.600 | But we don't need to take active steps to kill the baby

01:15:29.760 | before delivering the baby.

01:15:31.640 | And that's the difference between abortion

01:15:33.240 | versus a medical triage situation

01:15:35.660 | in which we're weighing the balance of two important lives,

01:15:39.380 | the mother and the baby, and we're doing our best

01:15:41.960 | that both of them would be alive.

01:15:43.920 | But in many cases, we know that the baby may die

01:15:46.960 | because the baby is not fully developed

01:15:48.880 | and we have to protect the life of the mother.

01:15:50.940 | So if we just describe personhood,

01:15:52.440 | then we know how to deal with this.

01:15:54.040 | We know morally that when there's a great accident,

01:15:56.840 | an airplane accident or a great war,

01:15:59.340 | we know morally when we go out on the battlefield

01:16:01.540 | that you might be a one and you might be a three,

01:16:05.000 | and we're gonna first take all the ones and the twos,

01:16:07.320 | and if you're still alive when we get to the threes,

01:16:09.160 | you might make it.

01:16:10.240 | But when the guy going around triaging all of the casualties

01:16:14.160 | is riding on your face with a Sharpie and he rides a three,

01:16:17.120 | he knows that you're probably gonna be dead.

01:16:19.200 | So we can deal with those things morally speaking.

01:16:22.160 | Now, in terms of what about if,

01:16:25.800 | is a woman just going to abort her baby and be,

01:16:28.640 | let's say that abortion were made illegal.

01:16:31.560 | Let's say that guys in my camp

01:16:33.720 | who want to abolish human abortion win,

01:16:37.360 | and it becomes the law of the land

01:16:40.400 | at which abortion by any means or mechanism,

01:16:45.060 | be it physical, chemical,

01:16:47.160 | at any stage of pregnancy is made illegal.

01:16:50.360 | Are people still going to abort their babies?

01:16:53.040 | They might.

01:16:53.880 | Human history would indicate that at the end of the day,

01:16:57.100 | if anybody wants a baby to die, then we can do that.

01:17:01.400 | The basic reason we kill babies

01:17:03.140 | is they can't defend themselves.

01:17:04.840 | And so our, just like Bill Maher last week,

01:17:08.440 | Bill Maher's comments that made the news.

01:17:10.240 | It's like, okay, I can see that it's murder

01:17:12.360 | and I'm kind of okay with that.

01:17:13.800 | The reason we murder babies

01:17:15.160 | is they have no means of self-defense.

01:17:17.520 | And if they did, then we wouldn't murder them.

01:17:20.320 | So it calls on those of us who do have a means

01:17:24.080 | of imposing our will on other people

01:17:27.400 | for morally righteous reasons to do so.

01:17:30.520 | And we have to be those who defend the babies.

01:17:32.920 | But at the end of the day, we're not going to end murder

01:17:36.040 | just by making murder illegal.

01:17:37.600 | As far as I know, murder is illegal everywhere in the world.

01:17:40.000 | And as far as I know, people still murder one another.

01:17:44.320 | But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done.

01:17:46.520 | That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done.

01:17:47.960 | If an action is immoral, and that's a big if,

01:17:52.000 | but if I'm right and abortion is an immoral act always,

01:17:57.000 | then it would not be a problem for there to be a law

01:18:01.440 | that prohibits an immoral act.

01:18:03.320 | And law has multiple functions.

01:18:06.760 | One function of law is a practical outworking of law.

01:18:12.720 | But another function of law is to simply send a signal,

01:18:16.680 | send a moral signal.

01:18:18.480 | So for example, I think,

01:18:20.360 | although I would have to go and check state by state,

01:18:22.480 | and I don't know, but why is suicide a crime?

01:18:25.960 | Well, it seems like the dumbest crime in the world.

01:18:28.320 | After all, the dude's dead.

01:18:29.400 | You're gonna make it illegal for him to commit suicide?

01:18:32.600 | It's the dumbest thing in the world.

01:18:34.360 | But the signaling importance of law

01:18:37.120 | is that law sets the standard that we should look to.

01:18:41.000 | And so suicide should be illegal.

01:18:44.720 | It should be an illegal act

01:18:46.520 | so that people have one more reason out of many

01:18:49.640 | to not try to commit suicide,

01:18:52.200 | because that destroys a society.

01:18:54.480 | And I'm not a legal theorist,

01:18:56.040 | but that's where I would like to discuss

01:18:57.680 | with regard to saying,

01:19:00.920 | well, aren't women going to harm themselves

01:19:03.520 | with a back alley abortion?

01:19:05.480 | I don't know.

01:19:06.640 | I would guess so.

01:19:08.200 | After all, people do horrific things all the time,

01:19:12.040 | no matter what the law is.

01:19:13.720 | And if somebody wants to kill another person,

01:19:16.280 | they're gonna find someone to kill someone else.

01:19:19.440 | What I don't think we have an obligation to do

01:19:22.320 | is to facilitate murder in a safe,

01:19:27.160 | comfortable environment.

01:19:28.480 | After all, it's never safe or comfortable for the baby.

01:19:31.640 | The baby is the one who always winds up dead.

01:19:34.400 | And since babies can't defend themselves,

01:19:36.440 | you and I, who can defend morally innocent persons,

01:19:40.480 | you and I have to be the ones

01:19:41.760 | that stand up and defend the baby.

01:19:43.600 | Now, there are many practical outworkings

01:19:45.960 | that we simply don't know.

01:19:48.000 | We don't know all of the impact of things.

01:19:52.040 | We don't know how to do things.

01:19:53.360 | And the other question you said was,

01:19:55.160 | is there a point of compromise,

01:19:56.480 | or will we always be arguing about it?

01:19:59.880 | I don't know.

01:20:01.240 | What I do know is that the current system we have is immoral.

01:20:05.600 | What I do know is that, just as a simple example,

01:20:08.840 | if there were anybody in my life who came to me

01:20:14.040 | and said, "I'm going to abort my baby,

01:20:17.320 | "but if I don't, would you do something else?"

01:20:23.800 | I would adopt any baby from,

01:20:27.560 | I can't say anyone in the world 'cause I'd be careful,

01:20:29.480 | 'cause I would adopt any baby that I had contact with

01:20:33.080 | in order to save his life from being aborted.

01:20:35.880 | And so right now, there are so many societal problems

01:20:39.880 | that we have with the adoption system,

01:20:42.240 | with all kinds of issues that are not being,

01:20:46.760 | they're not being attended to

01:20:48.360 | because we have a completely dysfunctional system.

01:20:51.000 | And there are many solutions

01:20:52.600 | that we haven't created even yet that we could create.

01:20:57.600 | And just putting it simply, right?

01:20:59.560 | So I've said this to multiple people.

01:21:01.200 | I've said this to people that I have known.

01:21:02.760 | I've said, "Listen, if you ever found yourself pregnant

01:21:05.920 | "and you weren't going to keep the baby,

01:21:08.440 | "I just want you to know that I'll adopt the baby

01:21:10.560 | "because I feel like it's my moral duty to do that.

01:21:13.320 | "If I'm gonna be against abortion

01:21:15.480 | "and I'm not gonna be willing to adopt children,

01:21:18.200 | "then I have a problem.

01:21:20.160 | "I need to be super careful about that."

01:21:22.880 | That doesn't mean that it's always,

01:21:24.680 | that I always have to do it.

01:21:25.920 | It doesn't mean, you know,

01:21:27.120 | we need to be careful with what we create.

01:21:29.520 | But in general, there are all kinds of other systems

01:21:32.200 | that are not created, that are not done.

01:21:35.040 | My wife and I, we went a number of years ago

01:21:37.160 | and explored adoption.

01:21:39.080 | And I still am interested in adopting children.

01:21:42.920 | And we went and we visited.

01:21:44.000 | I walked away from that experience,

01:21:45.600 | visiting with the government agencies.

01:21:47.160 | I walked away from that experience saying basically,

01:21:50.040 | "There's no possible way

01:21:51.160 | "that I'll ever be able to adopt a baby."

01:21:53.120 | And the hardship of that,

01:21:54.960 | there aren't enough babies that are even available.

01:21:58.280 | And then the cost and the hardship and everything of that,

01:22:02.280 | it's just that it's a really difficult scenario.

01:22:04.680 | And so I can't go into it.

01:22:06.240 | But my point is that we need to start from first principles

01:22:10.960 | and ask ourselves these deep philosophical questions

01:22:13.160 | that you and I began with.

01:22:14.640 | Then continue that on and then try to find solutions

01:22:19.120 | that don't involve moral wrong.

01:22:21.280 | And that's not always gonna be easy.

01:22:23.080 | We shouldn't pretend it is.

01:22:24.400 | We're adults.

01:22:25.240 | We have to deal with things that are hard.

01:22:27.080 | But we need to be careful that we keep what is right

01:22:30.200 | and what is wrong in clear focus.

01:22:32.800 | Or there's no limit to where we can go.

01:22:38.680 | And this would be my kind of comment of this monologue.

01:22:42.080 | And then I wanna hear your response.

01:22:43.720 | But I had an experience in 2005 that shook me to my core.

01:22:48.920 | I was in Guatemala in 2005,

01:22:51.560 | and I was up on top of a pyramid,

01:22:54.040 | a temple that was there.

01:23:00.560 | And this is one of the temples with the local,

01:23:03.640 | I don't know if they were Mayans.

01:23:04.480 | I forget the tribe now.

01:23:05.720 | But it was a temple that was used for human sacrifice.

01:23:09.160 | And I sat there on that temple,

01:23:12.480 | and I pictured the thousands and thousands

01:23:15.880 | and thousands of babies that were sacrificed

01:23:18.080 | right there on that pyramid.

01:23:22.760 | And I don't know if I wept or not,

01:23:26.000 | but I wanna weep when I think about it,

01:23:28.520 | just because it really opened my eyes.

01:23:32.240 | And if you look throughout history,

01:23:34.040 | you and I in the modern world, in our modern civilization,

01:23:37.720 | we are living in a world that is formed

01:23:41.120 | by men with moral courage who spread a message

01:23:47.520 | of moral virtue.

01:23:49.880 | That has never been easy.

01:23:53.040 | And it is not the common experience of mankind.

01:23:56.880 | The argument that we're having, or the discussion,

01:24:00.120 | I use argument in a philosophical sense.

01:24:01.700 | The argument that we're having at this time

01:24:05.800 | is something that we could only have in today's world,

01:24:10.400 | where you and I are trying to think through these issues

01:24:12.760 | as seriously as we can and reason with one another

01:24:15.640 | and reason with our neighbors in public and make arguments.

01:24:19.600 | You and I are not resorting to force.

01:24:21.600 | You and I are not picking up guns and shooting each other.

01:24:24.760 | And that is vanishingly rare throughout human history.

01:24:28.080 | Normally in human history, you just might makes right.

01:24:32.080 | And it's the same with every expression of warfare.

01:24:35.360 | It's the same with anything.

01:24:37.440 | And you and I are not fundamentally different

01:24:39.680 | than those Mayans who sacrificed their babies

01:24:43.320 | to their god in cold blood.

01:24:46.040 | There's no real difference between you and I,

01:24:48.240 | except that we have been raised in a society

01:24:50.880 | that cares about moral virtue.

01:24:53.160 | So we need to be super careful

01:24:54.520 | that we don't ever stray away from that,

01:24:56.840 | but rather that we continue to proceed

01:24:59.400 | on this societal direction.

01:25:01.560 | And we'll have to develop new systems,

01:25:03.860 | new institutions that cause,

01:25:06.440 | but I don't want to get away from the fact

01:25:08.080 | that most of the time the root cause of abortion

01:25:14.000 | is sin.

01:25:15.120 | It's people knowing they're doing wrong

01:25:17.400 | and wanting to do it anyway.

01:25:18.400 | I've spoken with a lot of women who do, excuse me,

01:25:21.440 | I've listened to a lot of women who do abortion ministry,

01:25:26.240 | and I've spoken to a handful of them.

01:25:29.080 | And if you will go and talk to anti-abortion activist women

01:25:33.480 | who reach out to young women who are aborting their babies,

01:25:37.000 | you will find that the things

01:25:38.200 | that you and I are talking about now,

01:25:40.960 | the discussions of rape, incest in life of the mother,

01:25:43.400 | the discussion of, well, how will a woman,

01:25:44.960 | will a woman be damaged if she does a back alley abortion

01:25:47.920 | and she harmed, et cetera?

01:25:49.560 | This is not the vast majority of cases.

01:25:52.800 | The vast majority of mothers who are murdering their babies

01:25:55.840 | are doing it because the baby is an inconvenience

01:25:58.160 | to their life and the baby can't defend himself.

01:26:01.320 | And they know what they're doing is wrong

01:26:02.960 | and they're taking joy in it.

01:26:04.160 | And I know that it sounds harsh for me to say that,

01:26:07.060 | but I've listened to enough of them

01:26:08.300 | who are actively talking to women in that situation,

01:26:11.280 | and I've seen enough of it come out in the public

01:26:12.840 | that I think that my statement is not incorrect.

01:26:17.480 | So I didn't answer the, you know,

01:26:18.760 | is there gonna always be, let me,

01:26:21.600 | is there gonna be a point of compromise?

01:26:23.080 | I don't think there's gonna be a point of compromise ever.

01:26:25.500 | Well, I think what you're going to see ultimately

01:26:27.360 | is I think that in the fullness of time,

01:26:29.920 | abortion will be illegal in many places,

01:26:34.280 | not all places, but probably many places.

01:26:36.200 | And if nothing else, the reason for that

01:26:38.620 | is that people who are pro-abortion kill their babies.

01:26:41.660 | And one of the reasons that,

01:26:43.700 | one of the challenges that men like you face,

01:26:46.260 | who are not particularly religious,

01:26:47.980 | is that religious people don't tend to,

01:26:51.020 | don't tend to be around, sorry,

01:26:52.460 | non-religious people don't tend to be around for very long.

01:26:56.340 | And so I think the future of the world

01:26:58.140 | is almost certainly more religious than it is today.

01:27:01.540 | If we go back and we look at the,

01:27:03.580 | if we look at the statistics related to atheism

01:27:06.180 | from say the 1980s as compared to today,

01:27:09.220 | we see that non-belief in God,

01:27:11.860 | non-religious belief has dramatically declined.

01:27:15.460 | And we see that the future is basically being built

01:27:18.320 | by people who are religious.

01:27:20.020 | And if you look at the religious fault lines,

01:27:21.980 | even in our, if you look at the lines in our world today,

01:27:25.320 | if you look at our society,

01:27:26.900 | the people who are productive and who have babies

01:27:30.060 | are generally religious.

01:27:32.340 | And the people who don't have babies are generally not.

01:27:35.980 | And the people who kill their babies,

01:27:38.060 | there's lots of people who with crosses

01:27:40.340 | on their back of their car

01:27:41.420 | that kill their babies, unfortunately.

01:27:42.940 | But in general, the people who kill their babies

01:27:45.860 | are generally non-religious.

01:27:47.100 | The people who welcome their babies are generally religious.

01:27:49.860 | If you look at the sexual practices

01:27:51.460 | of the religious versus the non-religious,

01:27:53.780 | non-religious sexual practices

01:27:55.580 | generally don't result in babies.

01:27:57.540 | Or if they do result in babies,

01:27:59.500 | they generally cost 30 or $40,000

01:28:01.980 | to pay someone to birth a baby for them,

01:28:03.720 | which has its own slave market that we have to deal with.

01:28:06.980 | People who are religious generally have babies

01:28:09.660 | pretty easily and naturally.

01:28:11.260 | And so if for no other reason,

01:28:13.100 | birth rates are on the side of the religious people.

01:28:16.300 | And generally speaking,

01:28:17.740 | many of the major religions of the world

01:28:19.580 | are pretty united in their prohibition of abortion.

01:28:22.060 | And so if for no other reason,

01:28:23.920 | I don't think there's gonna be a compromise.

01:28:25.620 | I think there's gonna be a very difficult time right now

01:28:28.820 | in the United States as we see of political effects

01:28:32.220 | and legal cases and things like that.

01:28:34.480 | But in the fullness of time, generally speaking,

01:28:37.880 | it seems obvious to me that babies

01:28:41.340 | are worthy of our defense.

01:28:45.820 | It's also obvious that we're going to be pretty desperate

01:28:48.700 | for babies in the future

01:28:50.020 | as we continue to live through population collapse.

01:28:53.520 | And generally, religious people tend to outproduce

01:28:57.680 | and out procreate non-religious people.

01:29:00.020 | And so it may just be a function of demographics

01:29:03.540 | and not a function of moral argumentation.

01:29:05.860 | I'm hoping it comes faster.

01:29:07.220 | But for that reason, I don't expect a compromise.

01:29:09.700 | In the fullness of time,

01:29:10.620 | I expect that eventually abortion

01:29:13.420 | will be hopefully abolished throughout the world,

01:29:15.620 | but it'll probably be a while before that happens.

01:29:17.820 | I spoke for a while.

01:29:18.640 | So please share anything that you wanna say.

01:29:20.060 | I didn't mean to go quite that long.

01:29:22.480 | - That's fine.

01:29:24.500 | I don't know that I could speak for as long.

01:29:25.820 | You got a lot more experience on the mic than I do.

01:29:28.420 | I think I agreed with almost everything you said

01:29:33.060 | with a couple of caveats.

01:29:34.340 | So yes, I also don't wanna live under some law of Hammurabi

01:29:37.820 | where you murder my brother

01:29:39.020 | and therefore I murder your mother and we're square.

01:29:40.920 | That's obviously wrong.

01:29:42.860 | I don't wanna live in a society where murder

01:29:44.740 | is just openly accepted and it's okay to do

01:29:47.080 | and everyone turns a blind eye.

01:29:48.500 | That's also obviously wrong.

01:29:50.440 | I think from a values perspective, just strict values,

01:29:54.580 | you and I are probably pretty closely aligned.

01:29:57.140 | I too am a father, I love my babies

01:29:59.220 | and I certainly appreciate everything that they offer to me.

01:30:04.220 | And if someone told me that at 39 weeks,

01:30:06.940 | they were going to try to abort them,

01:30:09.420 | yeah, I would fight them tooth and nail.

01:30:11.780 | My issue comes up in where we start defining personhood.

01:30:16.780 | I know you had said that personhood begins at conception

01:30:19.620 | and I've had trouble with that.

01:30:21.980 | So a little more background.

01:30:23.540 | I was formerly a Christian for a long time,

01:30:25.300 | but I started having, I guess, holes kind of poked in that

01:30:29.660 | around questions where it was just

01:30:31.980 | kind of a doctrinal faith answer.

01:30:34.380 | And I guess my general synopsis is that

01:30:38.020 | it's hard for me to accept answers like that

01:30:40.860 | when it seems that time and time again,

01:30:43.820 | the modern apologetics from Christians

01:30:46.900 | tend to try to assimilate scientific findings

01:30:51.860 | instead of just looking back

01:30:54.980 | at the way the doctrine has been ascribed for decades

01:30:59.340 | and saying, okay, well, this was clearly wrong

01:31:01.660 | and we're going to update.

01:31:02.620 | No, it's okay, we'll find a new scriptural verse

01:31:05.380 | that is permissive of these things

01:31:07.420 | that we now know to be scientifically true

01:31:09.260 | without a question of a doubt.

01:31:10.940 | So all of that to say,

01:31:13.380 | I guess the main difference comes up

01:31:15.260 | when we start talking about personhood.

01:31:17.220 | I can't say I think personhood begins at conception.

01:31:20.860 | In fact, I don't think I would.

01:31:23.140 | I also don't think it begins at birth.

01:31:27.020 | That seems to me to be kind of equally flawed in thinking

01:31:31.300 | and whatever side of the argument you're on,

01:31:34.140 | I think, at least from my worldview,

01:31:36.820 | both of those have some flaws to them.

01:31:39.540 | What I think is that we're running into,

01:31:42.020 | or we will at some point run into a scenario

01:31:44.620 | where we know a lot more about

01:31:46.420 | what makes a human brain conscious.

01:31:49.780 | And at the end of the day,

01:31:51.220 | I think we care most about the humanity of an embryo

01:31:56.220 | or humanity of a fetus.

01:31:58.700 | I scientifically don't think there's much difference

01:32:01.660 | between a zygote or a blastocyst from a goat or a newt

01:32:06.220 | or a human or any other animal.

01:32:08.020 | If we look at it under a microscope,

01:32:09.340 | they're all gonna look very, very much the same.

01:32:11.860 | There's certainly a point when from an embryo perspective,

01:32:16.740 | there starts to be morphological changes.

01:32:18.540 | And again, I'll offer the same credentials you did.

01:32:21.300 | I'm not a doctor, I'm not a gestational scientist,

01:32:25.380 | just I know enough from reading to be a little dangerous.

01:32:28.300 | We're gonna run into a point where we know a lot more

01:32:31.780 | about when the consciousness enters

01:32:36.420 | or develops in the brain from electrical signals

01:32:38.860 | and impulses and neurons firing than we know right now.

01:32:41.620 | And I guess my concern is that

01:32:45.380 | that will kind of slide through the news cycle

01:32:47.860 | as unimportant because everyone has already decided

01:32:50.660 | when human consciousness begins for them.

01:32:54.340 | And to me, human consciousness is really the thing

01:32:57.580 | that we care about here that separates us.

01:33:00.380 | I don't see any evidence for a soul being breathed

01:33:04.580 | into a zygote.

01:33:06.900 | It's very difficult for me just to accept that

01:33:09.900 | as a matter of faith

01:33:10.740 | because it's not something that I possess.

01:33:12.900 | So I guess the reason I asked about the,

01:33:16.140 | are we ever going to reach a period

01:33:18.140 | where we can come to some agreement,

01:33:20.980 | it's under the hope that at some point,

01:33:23.380 | we'll know more than we do right now to be able to say,

01:33:25.620 | okay, definitively, 12 weeks, 20 weeks, whatever it is,

01:33:29.420 | this is when this thing can feel pain,

01:33:33.220 | experience human consciousness.

01:33:34.740 | And that's really what we care about.

01:33:38.260 | So it's difficult for me to accept just the basis

01:33:43.500 | that personhood, to use the term you used,

01:33:48.460 | begins at conception.

01:33:49.780 | And I think the challenge we run into in our society

01:33:54.700 | is that a lot of the most vocal proponents

01:33:59.700 | on the anti-abortion side tend to use the notion

01:34:04.780 | that there can be no exceptions to this.

01:34:08.060 | You frequently hear it from, I guess,

01:34:11.380 | my side of the argument.

01:34:12.660 | Well, if you don't want to have an abortion,

01:34:15.500 | then don't have an abortion.

01:34:17.380 | I get that.

01:34:18.220 | And I would support that.

01:34:20.420 | And mind you, I'm not pro-abortion.

01:34:23.340 | I think I feel similarly to you

01:34:26.500 | that if someone I knew were preparing to have an abortion,

01:34:29.660 | I would really strongly consider having them deliver the baby

01:34:33.180 | if they were later term and raising the baby myself.

01:34:36.380 | 'Cause I think that's a strong value to have

01:34:38.460 | if you can do it.

01:34:42.460 | I guess I'm, as usual with these conversations,

01:34:46.180 | it comes down to a matter of,

01:34:47.620 | do you believe that souls exist or that souls don't exist?

01:34:50.220 | And if a soul is breathed into a human at conception,

01:34:54.380 | then your side of the argument makes perfect rational sense.

01:34:57.660 | From my side of the argument, without that belief,

01:35:01.780 | the rationality is kind of lost

01:35:04.460 | to just not knowing exactly where that point lands.

01:35:09.460 | It's not, to me, it's not at the beginning.

01:35:12.420 | It's not at the end.

01:35:13.260 | We just don't know enough yet.

01:35:15.140 | So I guess that'll be my response.

01:35:18.700 | - I think your critique of Christians

01:35:22.060 | or various religious people wanting to update

01:35:25.420 | their theories as scientific evidence emerges

01:35:30.020 | and say, look, we got it right, is a very valid one.

01:35:33.940 | And so I wanna affirm you in that critique.

01:35:37.100 | I don't know that it's always,

01:35:40.740 | I don't know that the critique is always applicable,

01:35:43.580 | but it certainly can be something that people do.

01:35:47.140 | And the world is flat.

01:35:48.620 | Well, look, the Bible says the world is fat.

01:35:50.060 | Well, the world is round.

01:35:50.900 | Look, the Bible says the world is round.

01:35:52.540 | And you see various people do that from various religions.

01:35:56.540 | And so I think that that's a fair critique.

01:35:59.500 | And it can be something that people would do.

01:36:02.700 | And it may also be true that we don't have answers.

01:36:05.900 | I would, you and I would be fully shared

01:36:09.020 | in that we don't necessarily have answers.

01:36:10.980 | So at the end of the day, we're gonna be saying,

01:36:13.420 | this seems best to me.

01:36:15.300 | I don't see another place to put this.

01:36:18.140 | And so I would say, as an example,

01:36:20.400 | can I acknowledge that it's difficult

01:36:25.580 | to accept an 82-celled organism

01:36:28.980 | that I can't see as a person?

01:36:32.700 | Certainly, I would acknowledge that.

01:36:34.780 | It's much easier for me to see a 41-week baby as a person

01:36:38.940 | than a 41-hour fertilized, whatever it's called

01:36:43.940 | at that stage of gestation, as a person.

01:36:46.940 | Certainly, I would acknowledge that openly,

01:36:51.940 | that in terms of human intuition,

01:36:55.620 | one is much easier to relate to than the other.

01:36:59.140 | I just, I don't see where else you would put it.

01:37:01.740 | And I think you see that working out

01:37:03.300 | in our debate on this subject,

01:37:04.980 | in our discussion on this subject,

01:37:06.820 | that if you went back 20 years,

01:37:09.380 | and what was Bill Clinton's quote, President Clinton?

01:37:12.740 | Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.

01:37:14.940 | And you look at the argument today.

01:37:16.580 | I mean, that was something that I think

01:37:18.340 | really a lot of people were united on at that time,

01:37:23.180 | that you would have had guys like you and me

01:37:25.420 | that would have said, well, we have different,

01:37:27.180 | I don't think so, but okay, I understand.

01:37:29.060 | And that legal thing is-- - Close enough.

01:37:31.220 | - Close enough, maybe we could share this to some degree.

01:37:35.180 | But what we see, for whatever reason,

01:37:37.060 | is that that is not where we are right now.

01:37:40.700 | You see the strong form of,

01:37:44.740 | so the pro-life camp is not a united camp,

01:37:48.460 | it's pretty squishy.

01:37:49.700 | And so right now, you see a strong moral movement

01:37:53.780 | in the anti-abortion crowd,

01:37:55.780 | coming from the abolitionists,

01:37:58.380 | those who wanna abolish human abortion.

01:38:00.460 | That abolitionist movement is gaining ground

01:38:05.060 | on the pro-life camp.

01:38:06.620 | And then you see, in the pro-abortion camp,

01:38:08.580 | you see a widespread saying of,

01:38:13.580 | listen, we will not tolerate any restrictions whatsoever.

01:38:20.460 | I often wonder if this is just an expression

01:38:23.180 | of the US-American political system

01:38:27.220 | that creates this environment for us.

01:38:28.980 | Because if you go around the world,

01:38:30.420 | it seems to me that most, other than perhaps Canada,

01:38:34.740 | I don't know of a country in the world

01:38:36.780 | that has more rights to abortion than the United States.

01:38:41.780 | I would say Canada certainly has more,

01:38:44.900 | but there's probably one or two others.

01:38:46.420 | But abortion is very highly restricted

01:38:49.300 | in much of the world, especially in the European world,

01:38:52.500 | where we have a common heritage

01:38:53.700 | as compared to the US system.

01:38:55.580 | And I don't know, I guess is my point.

01:38:58.380 | I don't know.

01:38:59.220 | I do have one question, though.

01:39:00.540 | Is there a reason, since we've discovered DNA,

01:39:03.260 | and since we can measure DNA,

01:39:05.980 | would you be willing to accept the baby's separate DNA

01:39:09.780 | as a sufficient evidence of personhood,

01:39:12.300 | of a unique identity?

01:39:13.780 | - I'm not sure.

01:39:18.460 | My initial kind of gut-check response is yes.

01:39:24.980 | But I haven't considered that.

01:39:26.400 | I'll have to take that back with me

01:39:27.940 | and mull over it a little bit.

01:39:29.720 | - I think if there is a scientific solution,

01:39:34.620 | I think it would be that one,

01:39:36.780 | at least in terms of our current scientific knowledge.

01:39:39.560 | That one and then just the general intuition of rights.

01:39:44.460 | As I see it, maybe it's Peter Singer.

01:39:49.460 | And I would say that one of the things that's interesting

01:39:51.820 | is I think there are a variety of things that are related.

01:39:54.420 | If you go and read Singer's writings,

01:39:56.020 | one of his most important contributions in his sphere

01:40:01.020 | was his writings on speciesism

01:40:04.060 | and the preferential treatment that humans receive

01:40:06.680 | as compared to animals.

01:40:08.220 | And so you interact in today's world

01:40:11.080 | with many ethical vegans, ethical vegetarians,

01:40:14.020 | as they style themselves,

01:40:15.100 | that basically don't distinguish between human persons

01:40:18.860 | and animals in terms of rights.

01:40:22.540 | And so you see people trying to defend animals

01:40:25.320 | and get animals into courts

01:40:26.540 | and give animals the same rights that human beings have.

01:40:30.260 | And I think that's kind of the logical outflow as well.

01:40:32.620 | I see these three issues as related.

01:40:34.900 | Number one, abortion is related to,

01:40:39.260 | number two, euthanasia,

01:40:40.900 | is kind of the second expression of it

01:40:43.100 | because many of the arguments around abortion

01:40:46.000 | have a natural fellow argument in the face of euthanasia.

01:40:50.380 | And as you see euthanasia spreading around the world,

01:40:53.940 | then I think those are naturally related

01:40:56.240 | in terms of the same arguments that I would use

01:40:59.060 | to defend the rights of a baby

01:41:01.780 | are the same arguments I would use to oppose euthanasia.

01:41:05.220 | And then the same arguments of autonomy

01:41:08.180 | that someone would use to promote the right of a woman

01:41:11.900 | to abort her baby would be the same arguments

01:41:14.040 | that would be commonly used to defend access to euthanasia.

01:41:20.040 | And then the third would be simply arguments

01:41:24.180 | related to animals and our rights over animals

01:41:28.400 | or our defense of animals

01:41:30.480 | and everything associated with speciesism,

01:41:32.560 | the most obvious expression of that being

01:41:35.400 | in the ethical, vegetarian, vegan world.

01:41:38.720 | And so I think they're related.

01:41:40.240 | And I think that maybe there will be,

01:41:44.040 | I don't think that science is ever gonna create

01:41:46.760 | some system of rights.

01:41:48.740 | So far, if it is so far,

01:41:50.760 | it seems like an abject failure to me.

01:41:52.760 | So I think we're always gonna be left

01:41:54.200 | with a fundamentally religious understanding of the world

01:41:59.200 | in some form that will be informed by science.

01:42:04.400 | And I don't have a problem

01:42:07.480 | with those two things functioning side by side.

01:42:10.040 | I think that, I'm of course partial

01:42:13.360 | to toot our own horns as Christians,

01:42:15.160 | but I think Christians were hugely responsible,

01:42:19.500 | maybe not entirely,

01:42:20.380 | but hugely responsible for the scientific revolution.

01:42:23.420 | I think it's a net gain.

01:42:25.180 | But it seems to me that scientists desperately need

01:42:28.540 | some really strong moral supervision

01:42:31.220 | on behalf of religious leaders,

01:42:32.680 | 'cause without that, we wind up in a hellish landscape.

01:42:36.340 | So I wanna thank you for the conversation

01:42:37.900 | because I'm gonna go back through

01:42:39.260 | and think these things over myself.

01:42:40.980 | I've given you my best defense.

01:42:42.680 | And I think that on the whole,

01:42:44.980 | what is, we should be involved in our,

01:42:49.980 | we should be involved philosophically kind of debating this.

01:42:53.100 | If we have to vote, then that's where this comes in

01:42:55.740 | and defending different things.

01:42:57.220 | But on the whole, I can walk side by side with you

01:42:59.940 | and say that if we see babies that are unwanted,

01:43:03.180 | let's bring those babies in and care for them.

01:43:05.460 | And let's provide care for mothers

01:43:06.980 | who can't care for their babies.

01:43:08.580 | Let's support them.

01:43:09.680 | And I think that most people

01:43:11.900 | are not even gonna be able to follow the discussion

01:43:13.780 | that we've had.

01:43:14.780 | But they certainly will see the effect of our actions.

01:43:17.660 | And so I wanna have this discussion.

01:43:20.060 | That's why we had it.

01:43:21.140 | But we should also just continue to focus on the actions.

01:43:23.660 | And then regardless of differing beliefs,

01:43:25.620 | there's a broad array of actions that we can be united on.

01:43:28.140 | And we can defend our neighbor

01:43:29.340 | and love our neighbor as much as possible.

01:43:31.700 | - Well said, I'll be calling back in

01:43:35.780 | to muse on the subject more with you.

01:43:37.860 | Really appreciate the time.

01:43:39.100 | - I hope that you will and I look forward to it.

01:43:41.340 | - And with that, we go to Kyle.

01:43:42.620 | Kyle, thank you for your patience.

01:43:45.180 | Welcome, Kyle from Washington.

01:43:46.580 | How can I serve you today?

01:43:47.880 | - Hi, thank you.

01:43:50.580 | I have a question earlier in the year.

01:43:54.380 | You mentioned something about seeing accounting

01:43:57.460 | and bookkeeping going away or changing meaningfully

01:44:00.500 | in the next few years as a result of AI's influence

01:44:05.260 | on the profession.

01:44:06.180 | And I'm curious if you could please elaborate

01:44:09.620 | on what you see, why you see it changing,

01:44:13.580 | and do you think it's gonna entirely replace

01:44:17.860 | the human element of the profession?

01:44:19.340 | What do you see going on?

01:44:20.720 | - Fair question, and the caveat I would always say

01:44:25.540 | is I'm not an accountant, I'm not a bookkeeper.

01:44:27.060 | If I have an accountant or bookkeeper in the audience

01:44:29.020 | who knows accounting more intimately than I do

01:44:32.020 | and has opinions, I would welcome that person

01:44:35.180 | to reach out to me and us to have

01:44:37.020 | an in-depth discussion on it.

01:44:38.780 | But since this is my Q&A show and I don't have

01:44:40.460 | that person waiting on the other line,

01:44:41.760 | I will tell you why I said that.

01:44:44.260 | First, it's been my observation that the general trend

01:44:48.580 | in accounting has been, for a long time,

01:44:53.380 | an offshoring trend.

01:44:55.460 | And when I first started working with an accountant,

01:44:58.540 | I had an actual accountant who actually worked with me

01:45:02.260 | and he was an experienced guy

01:45:04.460 | and he would do my stuff for me.

01:45:06.740 | Then I switched to a different accountant

01:45:09.460 | and this accountant had a team of accountants

01:45:11.220 | in another country who would do all of the entry work

01:45:15.220 | and the basic stuff, and then he would just look

01:45:18.920 | at the returns and sign off on them.

01:45:20.980 | And then I changed and I've used software programs

01:45:25.140 | and I find that I think the software programs

01:45:27.300 | can do a great job for most people.

01:45:29.660 | And so if you look at the basic functions

01:45:31.940 | of bookkeeping and accounting,

01:45:36.100 | a lot of them are functions that, today,

01:45:39.500 | can be done by software and many of them are functions

01:45:42.380 | that can be done anywhere in the world.

01:45:44.700 | And those kinds of features are the features

01:45:49.300 | that I'm looking for to see an industry

01:45:51.780 | that's gonna be disrupted

01:45:53.500 | by increasingly powerful artificial intelligence.

01:45:57.240 | So if we follow a transaction through,

01:45:59.700 | let's say that I have a transaction

01:46:01.580 | where I purchase something for my business.

01:46:03.300 | Let's assume that I use a business credit card

01:46:05.220 | that only has business expenses.

01:46:07.300 | First, there's a significant amount of information

01:46:09.460 | that's related to that transaction

01:46:11.180 | that'll be on my transaction report from the bank.

01:46:14.180 | And even if my statement doesn't currently reflect it,

01:46:16.580 | there's even more information that could be gathered there

01:46:19.060 | from the merchant as the merchant ID and the category

01:46:23.140 | and all that directly from the merchant.

01:46:24.900 | Then I have an invoice or a receipt.

01:46:28.500 | Well, today, I can take that invoice or receipt,

01:46:30.780 | I can take a picture of it, run it through a scanner,

01:46:33.000 | a computer can run an optical character recognition program

01:46:36.080 | on it, and it can gather all of the information

01:46:38.580 | from that receipt.

01:46:40.000 | If I now upload that receipt just to chat GPT,

01:46:44.120 | which is not in any way designed for accounting,

01:46:46.560 | but if I upload the picture of the receipt,

01:46:49.000 | chat GPT will pull out a huge amount of relevant information

01:46:54.000 | from the transaction of all of the details from it.

01:46:57.440 | And I can tell, I can take, I've been testing this,

01:47:00.400 | I can take a receipt.

01:47:01.640 | Generally, it doesn't work so well

01:47:03.840 | with a super minimized receipt,

01:47:05.800 | but let's say I had an itemized receipt.

01:47:07.640 | I can take this as a picture, I can upload it to chat GPT,

01:47:11.080 | and I can tell chat GPT, which I repeat,

01:47:13.880 | is not designed for this, it's just a general GPT model.

01:47:17.960 | And I can say, give me all of the categories,

01:47:21.680 | pull out for me all of the meat from this receipt

01:47:24.760 | and tell me how much money I spent on meat.

01:47:27.480 | Or I can say, give me all the categories,

01:47:29.240 | categorize all my information on this thing,

01:47:31.480 | and tell me what I spent in each category.

01:47:35.080 | So you can already today use chat GPT

01:47:37.760 | to make your bookkeeping easier

01:47:39.080 | if you're trying to figure out

01:47:39.920 | how much you spend on meat versus vegetables.

01:47:42.040 | It's pretty simple and straightforward.

01:47:44.440 | Now, take the next thing.

01:47:46.600 | What's all the income data?

01:47:48.040 | Well, all the income data is easily done.

01:47:49.960 | I can take a W-2, I can take a 1099,

01:47:53.360 | and all of the data and the information that I need

01:47:55.440 | is right there, the computer can model it.

01:47:57.680 | And so, and plus I have bank statements,

01:47:59.680 | so I don't see any technological barrier

01:48:02.680 | as to why all of this information cannot be applied

01:48:06.120 | by an artificial intelligence program

01:48:12.280 | to integrate this information.

01:48:14.080 | Now, the next thing is I've been playing a lot

01:48:16.200 | with chat GPT with regard to financial planning.

01:48:19.200 | And I find that it's pretty good with financial planning.

01:48:22.680 | It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

01:48:24.280 | So it's got access to huge amounts of data,

01:48:26.840 | it can contextualize, it can do really good stuff

01:48:29.520 | with financial data.

01:48:31.120 | Tax stuff is generally much simpler than financial planning

01:48:34.800 | because tax stuff is all backwards looking.

01:48:37.760 | Financial planning involves significant amounts

01:48:39.720 | of projection and assumptions.

01:48:41.600 | Tax stuff doesn't involve much of that at all.

01:48:44.360 | So this is the low-hanging fruit

01:48:46.240 | for some kind of AI model to work with

01:48:49.080 | because you have solid numbers, you've got transactions,

01:48:52.520 | and you've got just basically synthesizing that information

01:48:56.000 | and putting it into a tax form.

01:48:58.000 | And then, and I see no reason why,

01:49:03.000 | and I shouldn't expect that to be the standard

01:49:06.520 | going forward for tax data.

01:49:08.640 | So what it actually looks like, where the data comes from,

01:49:10.760 | I don't know, but anything that can be done

01:49:13.160 | by a computer program and anything that can be done

01:49:15.800 | with offshoring, with sending data around virtually,

01:49:19.520 | that seems like the first kinds of jobs

01:49:22.360 | that will succumb to artificial intelligence.

01:49:25.640 | Anything that can't be done by a computer program,

01:49:28.160 | so some kind of soft skill,

01:49:29.760 | some kind of interpersonal relational skill,

01:49:32.680 | or something that can't be outsourced

01:49:34.680 | or can't be sent around the world,

01:49:36.440 | I think we still have good moats against that.

01:49:38.640 | But that's my argument in favor of the statement that I said.

01:49:41.960 | - Gotcha.

01:49:44.720 | And then this might be a let me Google that

01:49:48.400 | for you type of question,

01:49:49.440 | but what type of learning resources do you recommend

01:49:54.440 | for somebody that's interested in digging into

01:49:58.840 | learning about how to utilize AI?

01:50:01.960 | - I think the best one to start with is just starting.

01:50:05.360 | What I mean is there's stuff out there, I'm sure,

01:50:08.880 | probably 80% of it written by AI.

01:50:12.280 | I would say the first thing you should do

01:50:13.960 | is if you don't have one,

01:50:15.640 | establish a subscription with ChatGPT

01:50:18.360 | so you have access to Chat 4.0,

01:50:21.400 | and just start playing with it, start using it.

01:50:24.280 | And make it kind of a hobby of yours to put stuff into it.

01:50:29.080 | And there are many other models.

01:50:30.680 | I am in no way an expert on AI.

01:50:33.440 | There are many other things available,

01:50:34.960 | but I think that there are so many things

01:50:37.200 | that you'll see in your own life

01:50:38.640 | that it's a really valuable,

01:50:40.980 | it's a really valuable personal assistant for most people.

01:50:44.000 | And you can use it in many areas of your life.

01:50:46.960 | We don't have any clue even what the starting point

01:50:49.600 | of all the areas that you can use it is.

01:50:53.200 | But it's there.

01:50:54.520 | So take, if you are involved in accounting

01:50:57.640 | or bookkeeping in some way,

01:50:59.360 | take some of your receipts or take some of your invoices

01:51:02.000 | and load them up into it.

01:51:03.480 | From a personal finance perspective,

01:51:05.140 | take your monthly budget,

01:51:06.560 | upload your monthly budget into it and say,

01:51:08.400 | "Hey, chat, I'm trying to figure out

01:51:10.160 | "where I can cut some costs."

01:51:12.200 | Go back and forth with it, talk to it back and forth.

01:51:15.060 | And I don't, there's huge amounts of it that are not useful,

01:51:19.080 | but the difference between 1.0 and two and three and four now

01:51:23.800 | and then five, I don't know when five's coming,

01:51:25.480 | but the difference is enormous.

01:51:27.280 | And so there's plenty of utility

01:51:28.880 | that you can get an idea of where we're going.

01:51:31.000 | And it's a powerful, powerful tool,

01:51:32.920 | but I wouldn't suggest anything

01:51:34.320 | except just starting to play with it.

01:51:36.160 | - Okay.

01:51:39.080 | - Okay.

01:51:40.320 | Yeah, there's probably people,

01:51:41.360 | the most valuable training tools would be

01:51:43.360 | if someone would show you their prompts.

01:51:45.360 | There are, I see people advertising,

01:51:47.800 | prompting classes and things.

01:51:50.040 | There probably will be more and more of that,

01:51:52.080 | but getting good output from an AI model

01:51:57.080 | is very much a function of your skill

01:51:59.920 | with creating the prompts that are useful to you.

01:52:04.000 | And so that's where the skill development is.

01:52:07.000 | And, but you can learn a lot of that organically.

01:52:09.280 | There's a learning curve where you learn it yourself,

01:52:11.500 | then you start to hear what other people's prompts are.

01:52:13.720 | Sometimes I'll show people my prompts and they're like,

01:52:16.020 | "Wow, I never knew you could do that."

01:52:17.560 | And so you'll have a similar experience

01:52:19.000 | as you play with it and talk to your friends

01:52:20.640 | who are also playing with it.

01:52:22.680 | - Would Gabriel tell me that I need a whole nother computer?

01:52:26.200 | Or is it...

01:52:27.040 | - I haven't asked him about his opinions on AI.

01:52:32.720 | I think that I would say the good thing about it is that,

01:52:37.720 | so you should expect that there is going to be

01:52:39.800 | a privacy leak there,

01:52:41.000 | because any information you put out is there.

01:52:43.440 | I would say that you can probably have a decent level

01:52:47.000 | of interaction with it if you use a clean computer.

01:52:51.280 | And then the good thing is that signing up for it,

01:52:53.860 | signing up for chat,

01:52:54.700 | all you need is a pretty basic email address

01:52:59.040 | and a way to pay digitally.

01:53:00.520 | So whether that's a privacy.com debit card

01:53:02.300 | or whether it's prepaid, other debit card,

01:53:04.640 | they don't accept Bitcoin or Monero,

01:53:07.640 | anything that I know of.

01:53:08.760 | So you just need some kind of digital card

01:53:10.520 | and that'll be good.

01:53:11.400 | Just be cautious of what you're putting out into it,

01:53:14.260 | because every piece of information

01:53:16.160 | is always going to be stored in some way.

01:53:18.200 | - All right.

01:53:21.640 | - All right, Kyle, thank you for the question.

01:53:23.040 | Really appreciate it.

01:53:24.120 | And I want to thank you to all of those

01:53:26.120 | who have listened to the show.

01:53:27.240 | I know I certainly did take quite a long time there

01:53:30.280 | with that discussion on abortion, but it is important.

01:53:34.880 | And as always, you have a fast forward button,

01:53:38.000 | you have a skip button,

01:53:39.040 | use those things whenever you want.

01:53:41.280 | But it is important that we have those discussions

01:53:43.360 | and we need to have them even various formats.

01:53:45.680 | So thank you for calling in and making me think.

01:53:49.160 | And I welcome if you'd like to call in

01:53:51.440 | and talk about another hard question,

01:53:53.620 | we should do this regularly.

01:53:55.680 | I want to live in a society in which mature men and women

01:53:59.900 | can sit down and can discuss difficult topics together.

01:54:03.640 | We can come as friends and we can leave as friends.

01:54:06.800 | And I don't see any reason that should not be our standard.

01:54:09.620 | And of course, we live in a society

01:54:11.120 | filled with acrimony and argumentation.

01:54:13.800 | And there's probably a place for that.

01:54:15.480 | There's a place for polemics.

01:54:16.520 | There's a place for all that stuff.

01:54:17.960 | But I want to live in a society

01:54:19.680 | in which serious minded men and women can sit down

01:54:22.520 | and talk about important, difficult decisions,

01:54:25.960 | factor in new information,

01:54:27.600 | and then share those things with other people.

01:54:29.560 | Because I believe in the value of that interaction

01:54:32.880 | producing synergistic results.

01:54:35.080 | One plus one is more than two

01:54:36.880 | when people are interacting appropriately.

01:54:39.540 | Thank you for listening.

01:54:40.380 | Remember, if you'd like to join me next week,

01:54:41.400 | go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance,

01:54:43.160 | patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance.

01:54:45.240 | And we'll be with you very soon.

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