Today, Radical Personal Finance, live Q&A. (upbeat music) Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insights, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheath.

Today is Friday, April 19th, 2024. And on this Friday, as I do on any Friday, in which I can arrange the appropriate recording technology, we do live Q&A. (upbeat music) Live Q&A works just like call and talk radio works, or used to work, we just moved on to the internet.

I show up to a phone line, you show up to a phone line, we chat, you get to run the conversation, you ask about anything that you want, bring up any topics of discussion, bring up any questions that you have, you run the podcast on these Friday Q&A shows.

If you'd like to gain access to one of these shows, you can do that by becoming a patron of the show. Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, sign up to support the show there on Patreon, and that will gain access for you to one of these Friday Q&A shows. We begin with Mava in Texas.

Mava, welcome to the show, how can I serve you today? - Hi, Joshua, thank you for taking my call. I'm a long-time listener, just haven't called in before, but I'm glad you took my call. Just have a quick question about just thinking about the sliding scale benefit of a full-time parent.

So situation, husband and I have an infant, thinking about dual income going to single income, thinking about the point at which, with a general interest in home education or just kind of a high level of involvement in child life, when to kind of think about that transition, because obviously exiting the workforce kind of goes against everything from a quick trajectory towards financial independence and those more quantitative goals.

So kind of think sliding scale on the quantitative side, but just the qualitative aspects of engagement, you can probably see that as being really important at age five, age six, but thinking about infant to six, going from dual to single income, thinking about it strategically, appreciate your thoughts. - Sure, how much money do you earn currently?

- 120. - And your husband? - 200. - So you are in the situation that is probably the most difficult, which is probably why you're calling in to talk about it, because there is a financial answer and there's a non-financial answer, and it's difficult to know how to value the non-financial answer.

Let's begin with the financial answer. If there is a woman who is earning, let's say 30 or $40,000 per year, and she is considering leaving her paid income in order to become a full-time mother and homemaker, and if her husband earns enough money to support the family without her income, then the financial incentive for her to do so is pretty obvious.

After all, what does daycare cost in your area? Any idea? - Haven't yet explored, have good kind of community family support, so haven't had to price that out, but I anticipate probably at least 400 to 500 a week at a minimum for the standard care we would be interested in.

- Yeah, so that's what I would guess. So you have a couple thousand dollars per month right there, and if you go through all of the different financial aspects of it and you calculate, a mother who's at that modest income range would probably come out ahead with her being a full-time stay-at-home mother.

So we can start with taxes. We would remember that her income is the most highly taxed because it's the marginal additional income. So let's say that she leaves her $40,000 a year job. There's gonna be good tax savings because that's gonna be $40,000 less at the top end, at the highest marginal tax rate of that couple.

Then we could get into the specific clear obvious costs of daycare, which can be calculated, recognizing that generally speaking, the costs of daycare are gonna be a post-tax cost, notwithstanding the various, perhaps you maybe have eligibility for a tax credit of some kind, but we're gonna have direct costs of daycare.

Then we can look into all of the other costs of working that are associated. So this family, for example, would frequently have two cars. They might be able to go from two cars to one car, or to some, maybe instead of having a brand new car that's reliable and fancy and shiny, now we can swap out that more expensive car for a cheaper car, and that might drop the car insurance payments.

It might drop the overall gasoline consumption. Maybe now where the family was eating out two or three nights a week because everyone was tired and no one wanted to cook, well now maybe she has the energy that we can eat at home more, and there's a savings on the grocery budget.

Maybe she's able to shop more efficiently and get better deals for the family on the overall costs of living, and she can plan really amazing, inexpensive vacations. And then just simply, there's a huge quality of life increase. With the additional hours, she might be able to mow the lawn on Wednesday morning so that Saturday can be family day instead of her husband having to be out there mowing the lawn on Saturday morning.

Maybe just they have more fun together because she's more relaxed. She's not stressed. She's not depressed. She's not dealing with workplace drama. Instead of being stuck in trying to figure out how to vacation on two bosses' schedules, all they gotta deal with is one job and one boss's schedule.

So those are some of the various lifestyle benefits, but it's a pretty obvious financial choice for a mother who is earning a more modest income. However, that probably caps out somewhere around the 50 to $60,000 a year number. Even if I go really aggressive with all the savings that can be had, at the end of the day, if a mother is earning, again, I'm just guessing, maybe more than 50 or $60,000, I don't think you can make a financial argument that the family is gonna have more money for her to be a stay-at-home mom than for the family to have a daycare and put the children into daycare.

Financially, I don't see that argument. The numbers don't work. And the numbers don't work partly because her income now is more significant to exceed all of those costs that I've described, but also because the second financial consideration always has to be counted in, which is, is there a potential harm, either an actual harm or a potential harm, to her long-term career ambitions and her job prospects based upon her being out of the workforce?

In a highly corporatized society, there is often very little value that an employer is going to place upon her and her work experience if she takes time out from the workforce and then stays at home. And this is something that a lot of women find challenging. When they go back into the workforce, well, I've been kind of out of touch, my network has grown sour.

Before I was Miss Corporate Hotshot, I had all the connections, all of the network, I had all of the opportunities built up, but now all my friends are mothers with babies and all the people that I associate with, I don't even have my professional wardrobe anymore and these kinds of things.

And so she goes back to get into the workforce and get a job again. And she, instead of having five more years of experience and five more advancements in her career, well, now there's a slower pathway for her and it may take her quite some time to catch up from a career perspective.

So if your income exceeds that, I don't see how you can make a financial argument in favor of being a stay-at-home mother. And so quantitatively, again, with the exceptions that I've said, if your income is quite modest, then quantitatively, financially, you will be better off always working, working, working, working, earning money, earning money, earning money, and then paying other people to take care of your children.

Now, when I say it like that, it should grate on your nerves a little bit because wait a second, that's not what I'm trying to do, but in reality, that is what is happening. And so let's talk about why is it the case that this is what we're doing?

Well, first of all, let's say that you did become a stay-at-home mother. Well, your child would have a one-to-one daycare provider to student relationship. And that daycare provider herself would be a highly educated, highly motivated, very socially competent worker who has all kinds of experience and is filled with love and patience for her individual child.

If you go and take your child to a daycare, you're generally gonna have a relatively lowly paid worker who is working in a ratio of, I don't know, four to one, five to one, depending on the daycare, four or five students to one low-paid worker taking care of your child.

And so you can automatically see where the cost savings for daycare come from. The cost savings for daycare come from the fact that instead of you providing the kind of mothering experience that you could provide, you are hiring a low-paid worker to provide a basic custodial care experience. And you may have higher-end daycares, you may have environments with more child stimulation, and there may be benefits that children get to play with others and things like that.

But the point is you're substantially downgrading the quality of care that a child is available, that a child is able to experience in that kind of model. So what other, so there's no way that, I don't know how to measure that on a financial scale. How do I say, if we know, for example, that a huge amount of a child's social emotional control is built based upon his relationship with his mother, and we know that when he's taken out of that and he's subjected to being separated from his mother, what is the cost of that in the long-term in his life?

We don't know. We know that it's subpar. We know that it's absolutely inferior. We know that emotional regulation is enormously higher for children who are with their mother than for children who are in a daycare environment, and we know that that's measurable throughout a child's lifetime, but I don't know how to put a dollar figure on that.

I know it's absolutely there. I know it's absolutely measurable, and I don't know what price we would assign to that value. Similarly, if we look to educational outcomes or morals or vocabulary development, on every single metric, the child's performance on long-term social studies will always be highest if he is with his mother and with his family, with his siblings, and so we can track that.

Children who are entered into a daycare environment are noticeably behind the curve on all of these factors because of the inferior social environment, but I don't know how to put a number on that, so I know that it's real. I know that there is a value there, but I don't know how to put a number on it, so I think a lot of times what I see happening is that it's going to wind up being a qualitative decision that's just simply based upon vision, based upon what you want.

I think in your situation, what you've described is based upon the income that you earn and the income that your husband earns, you have two difficult decisions. Number one, if you're earning $120,000, you're earning that because your career is something that you've worked hard on, you've developed yourself, and you've built a strong career that provides you with a significant amount of income.

So that's great. The problem is then it's harder to leave. It's harder to take that time out, and so you're going to need more compelling reasons to do that than many people face. However, on the flip side, your husband also earns a great income, and so you guys could still have plenty of money based upon his income, and so you have an easier decision if that were a path that you would want to go down.

You have an easier decision than, say, someone whose husband is earning $50,000. It's not easy to make it on a $50,000 household income. So if you were earning $50,000 and he were earning $50,000, that would be a big hit to your lifestyle for you to stop earning an income.

In your case, however, if you're earning $120,000 and he's earning $200,000, the hit to your lifestyle would be less a matter of lifestyle and more a matter of less savings. You could live the same or similar lifestyle to what you're living now, but your savings plan would slow down.

Your financial independence plan would slow down. What's that worth to you? I don't know. What I would suggest to you is that you not try to make that decision today, but rather that you put a plan in place so that you could be a full-time mother if you wanted to.

And what I mean by that is anytime I'm counseling a couple who's having a baby, especially a baby for the first time, and if they have any inclination or draw at all to the mother being a full-time stay-at-home mom, then what I encourage them to do is to split their income and only live on the husband's income and save all of the wife's income and do whatever is necessary in order to make that happen.

So if you have to pay down debt or whatever you gotta do, if you just only resolve that going forward, we are only gonna live on his income and all of your income gets set aside into a separate account that way you would know what you're getting into if you chose to stop earning income for a time.

Number two is there's not really a need to decide this stuff much in advance when you're having a baby. So what I mean is let's say that you get pregnant and you're expecting a baby and the baby's expected in 40 weeks. Okay, well, fine. You don't need to march into your boss's office that day and say, "I'm having a baby, I'm done here." And you don't even need to do it at any time in the pregnancy.

You can take the pregnancy, take maternity leave, and then you can always decide to quit your job in the future if you want to. And in today's world, though, of course, all of us would like to provide our bosses with substantial upfront warning so they can hire someone else.

At the end of the day, if you want to provide your, at the end of the day, you're better off just keeping it to yourself. Take maternity leave and see what happens. My observation from talking with a lot of mothers is that prior to the baby being there, they often feel more strongly about continuing their income, and they don't worry too much about their baby.

But once the baby's there, they tend to fall in love with their baby. And after a few months with the baby, then when everything has changed in terms of their relationship with their baby, then they see, these mothers see things through a different lens. And I watch it happen with my wife, with every baby.

My wife is, okay, when the baby is in her tummy, okay, fine, it's a baby and we can talk about it. But then the baby comes out, and those first few days of a baby's life, I watch her fall in love with the baby. And it's just so obvious.

It's so crystal clear as I watch it happen. And I think that's generally a common experience. So I would say, don't try too hard to make the decision in advance. Position yourself so that if you wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, you could. And then just wait and see.

Wait and see what your experience is after the baby's there. Wait and see what happens with your family dynamic and consider it. The third and final thing I wanna, or the final option I wanna point out is there are third options. So I said option one is full-time stay-at-home mom.

Option two is putting your child into a low-cost daycare. There are many third options. So third options include family being involved. Third options include working from home, having an in-home nanny, someone who's there with you. Throughout history, we have worked, knowing these problems that I've described, throughout history, wealthy families have found solutions to this.

And aristocratic, wealthy families, it's generally normal that your children would have a governess, a full-time governess or nanny, someone who's fully responsible for childcare. And so there may be other options. And if your income is very important to you, but you're trying to kind of split the difference, then I think you should pursue these options.

I think you should say, how could I have family members, how could I work from home so that I'm more available? I'm not spending time commuting into the city. How could I have family members providing care during certain times? Could I find one individual that would be a really great asset to our family to care for this child so that I can continue to work?

And I think that people who are, women who are in a situation like you're in, where you're a somewhat high earner and you have this desire to provide all those positive things for your child, will often pursue something related to that third path. - Thanks, Joshua, appreciate your input.

- My pleasure, anything else? - That'll be it for today, thank you. - Call me back in the future and we'll talk more. Mike in Minnesota, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? - Hi, Josh, we spoke a few years ago and then again last year about my wife and I spending extended time in South Africa with her family.

And after we spoke, you said I should call you back and tell you how it went. - Yeah, tell me about it. - We're back and I figured I'd tell you how it went. Okay, so a couple of things that we spoke about, I guess the rewind is that we went from the day after Thanksgiving, late in November of 2023 through February of 2024 and spent 90 days.

I wasn't gonna be able to renew my visa to stay, so we just stayed for 90 days and then came back to Minnesota. And in our time there, we stayed with my wife's brother-in-law in the granny flat out back. So we had a lot of time with my wife's family visiting their nieces, the nephew and her brother and parents.

And so that was all great. You also, you mentioned we should maximize the time that we have and instead of kind of looking at things through the prism of geo-arbitrage and dollar save to rather utilize that time well. So we had some four-wheel drive trips to Lesotho. I actually had a brother of mine come over for the New Year's break and we went to Mozambique and went four-wheel driving there.

And yeah, I had a great time. And I guess I really appreciated your perspective that you've kind of offered through your international travels on the podcast and found a lot of inspiration in that. And so it's definitely something that we're planning on repeating again. And I don't know for how long we can be snowbirds and leave the North American winter and go to South Africa, but while we're able to, we're going to keep trying to do that.

- How old are your children? How old were they on this previous trip? - So we don't have children yet. We were just visiting my wife's family and seeing her nieces and nephews. - Perfect. - We actually are planning on starting our family, I guess, probably planning to have, if all goes to plan, we would try to have a child in 2025 when we return from our trip next year.

And that actually is one of the things that I wanted to ask you about, is have you found any challenges with traveling with your wife as your family has grown while she's pregnant? If I was to put my thumb in the wind and take a guess, I would guess we would probably try to have, you know, start our family maybe two or three months after returning from South Africa in 2025.

And so that would mean we would be traveling during her pregnancy. What are your thoughts on that? - Yeah, I'll comment on that just a moment before I do. - Sure. - You were working from, while you were abroad, you were working from abroad, is that correct? - Yeah, that's right.

So I'm a W-2, you know, employee, and so I had, I think we had discussed, I actually spent quite a while in a job search looking for an opportunity that would allow our family to do this. And so, yeah, I worked U.S. hours in South Africa. Mostly I would work two to 11 p.m.

And I found the adjustment was actually pretty well to my liking, except for times where there was something going on in the evening and friends wanted to meet up or something like that. That was, you know, a bit of a drag. The rest of it was really nice. We had our days free, you know, mornings were all to us and it was kind of easier to spend our time freely that way, except for when it came to meeting up with friends who were on, you know, a standard schedule there.

- How did you-- - But yeah, that worked out very well. - How did you arrange your affairs in Minnesota with your house and things like that so that you could be away for that long? - Yeah, so we got a sublet for our apartment that we rented. And that situation has just changed.

When we got back, we actually moved again. And so we'll probably have to climb that mountain again for this winter. We, you know, we'd be able to afford to go there and still pay our rent that we're paying here. But it was certainly convenient to have somebody else paying almost all the rent while we were gone.

So we'll try to crack that code again when we go, but it's not, it wouldn't prevent us. - Taking into account all of the, sorry, taking into account all of the extra money that you spent on activities, would you say you spent about the same in Minnesota as compared to South Africa?

Little less, little more, substantially less, substantially more, how would you compare your expenses during that time? - Oh, see, now you've-- - Just vaguely, just broadly. - I'm a numbers guy. - Okay, just broadly. - Yeah, broadly we saved. So I would say we probably, just our overall spend over three months was probably $2,000 less with far more dining out there than we would have done here, and then far more in the way of travel for vacation and leisure and stuff like that.

- That's great. Yeah, I just wanted to draw that out because here I got a live, real live testimonial that you called me in with. And I think when we have the opportunity, we wanna share these ideas one with another, because we live in a time in which this lifestyle that once would have been the domain of a wealthy, financially independent multi-millionaire to be able to go abroad for the winter is now something that is available to, don't be insulted, but a simple worker, right?

You have a job, and you can go abroad, and here you are, you can get out of Minnesota for three months, go to beautiful South Africa, enjoy your time there, and enjoy a totally different set of experiences that really bring a more, a stronger joie de vivre on a daily basis than you would sitting in Minnesota during the winter.

And yet, financially speaking, you may have even saved a little bit of money, be a little bit ahead of where you otherwise would have been. And that's what's so cool about geo-arbitrage. And the way that you've done it is, I think, ideal, where, and what I mean is, you didn't move abroad, you didn't sever all your relationships, you didn't get rid of all your stuff.

That's really disruptive. You just kept everything just how it is. You just went abroad or went elsewhere for a few months. And then during that few months, you experience a different lifestyle, and then when you returned back to Minnesota, or when you returned back to Minnesota, I would guess that you had a newfound appreciation for many aspects of your lifestyle there, is that right?

- Yes, certainly. And it also helped us consider what it is that we valued in the place that we're moving to. And so I think we've made better decisions on the return as well. - Good, I love that. All right, I cut you off. You were gonna say one more thing, and then I'll answer your baby question.

- Yeah, I was gonna say, I was just, I'm very proud of, my wife also was instrumental in making this opportunity a reality, because she took a leap in her business that she does full-time, and she actually hosted some photographers, two different flights of wedding photographers that came to a safari retreat that we reserved, and we captured wedding content for these photographers who want to appear adventurous and capture interesting wedding content.

And so that was a new leap in her business, and that's another enabling feature. So yeah, definitely planning to redo that. - That is super cool. I love it, I love it. All right, to answer the question, it's fairly simple. So there's the technical, or what I'll call just the legal side.

It's not dealing with the law. It's just more of a policy. And then there's the real side. So is it difficult for a pregnant woman to fly? The answer is basically no. Each airline will have its own individual policy related to how many weeks pregnant you can fly. In general, they will allow you to fly very pregnant, although some of them will ask, let's say you're at 38 weeks.

They'll say, we'd really like you to have a doctor's note saying that it's okay for you to fly. But in practice, very rarely is an airline employee, in many cases a rather low-level airline employee, going to ask a pregnant mother how pregnant she is. And different mothers carry their babies in very different ways.

There are some mothers who they're at 39 weeks, and you would think, ah, she's 15 weeks pregnant. And there's other mothers who are at 20 weeks, and you think she's at 39 weeks. So different mothers carry babies in different ways. And because we all, I mean, you and I, I would assume you feel like me, you don't even wanna ask a woman if she's pregnant, unless she's very, very clearly pregnant, and she has confirmed with verbal affirmation.

I'm not gonna ask a mother if she's pregnant. I'm not gonna say anything about it. And so airline employees are no different. And they just, the only reason for the policy is they would prefer for a woman not to go into labor during flight. That makes for an inconvenient situation for the air crew.

So technically speaking, each airline will have a policy. The policies vary, but practically speaking, no one's really ever gonna ask you about that. I think what's more important for you is that you will want to have a plan for your wife to have high-quality prenatal care. It's very, very important that a pregnant mother has high-quality prenatal care.

And it will be quite inconvenient for you to have that prenatal care in two locations or multiple locations and have the same high quality of care. And with a mother's first baby, there's a significant level of unknown. Because we tend to be somewhat isolated, it seems to me, I'm making this up, you verify with your wife, but I think the first birth that most women ever attend is the birth of their first child.

And so if it were different, if she had training as a midwife or if she had visited, she had attended her sister's births or her brother's birth going up or she'd been in that, then that would be something. But in general, the first birth that a first-time mother in our culture attends is the birth of her own child, which means that she has quite a lot of skills that she needs to learn.

And your best birthing outcome will come if your wife feels incredibly strong and confident and empowered and exactly, she has everything arranged exactly as she wants it to be. And so I think in general, because of that, you will want to have a situation in which she is fully in control and completely has everything lined up exactly as she wants it.

She has the exact prenatal care that she wants. She has the exact helpers, whether it's a midwife or her doctor or whoever it is that she's interacting with. She has a very warm and comfortable relationship. And you want her to feel the strong sense of stability in her life.

So unless there's a strong and clear need as to why you need to be traveling, then I would encourage you, skip the trip abroad during that time. Now, just for some others in my audience, this clearly violates my discussions on birth tourism. And this is, I think, the biggest downside of birth tourism is that if you go somewhere for the goal of having a baby, all of a sudden now you insert all kinds of uncertainty into the situation, which can have negative results.

So that's much easier, I think, for a mother who's had a baby before to do it. Or if you're gonna do birth tourism, then you wanna have a clear reason you're doing it. And if at all possible, you wanna be set up in advance. It's just much easier for a mother who has been through the process at least once, maybe twice.

Now, all of a sudden, her confidence level is very different. But if I were in your shoes and my wife were having her first baby, I'd just cancel the South Africa trip that year. Stay home, take a car trip. Go to Florida for the winter. Go somewhere where it's easy.

You can get back and forth for prenatal appointments if you need to. Take a shorter trip. All those things are fine, but I would not go to South Africa for three months for the reasons that I've just stated. - All right, Josh, thanks for the input. - And thanks for calling back with a story.

We move on to Matthew in Florida. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you, Matthew? Matthew in Florida, go ahead. - Yeah, sorry, just unmuting myself there. So my question pertains to tithing. And before I ask the question, I realized that tithing or tenting in the Christian tradition is a very prayerful thing that you should consider.

And I'm trying to put some quantitative reasoning behind a certain situation. So I had a real estate investment project that went South and long story short, the bank took over the property and I'm out six figures. And it kind of made me start thinking like, how do we tithe in respect to big gains and losses in investment versus our typical incomes that are coming in like W-2 or business income?

And so I wanted to throw that out there and see what your thoughts were. - I think the answer for someone who is convicted of his desire or responsibility to tithe from a biblical perspective, then I think the answer is relatively straightforward. My understanding of the tithe would be that you tithe on the increase of your wealth in whatever form it is.

And so in the agrarian society of the Old Testament, then the tithe was when you harvested your crops, you gave a 10th of your tithe to the local temple to support the priests who were laboring there. This was a pre-financial society. In the New Testament, we start to see a society functioning in more of what we would recognize as something related to a modern financial system.

And we don't see the tithe working in exactly the same way because the priestly system has changed. And that's one of the reasons there's so much controversy around this issue among Christians who have different convictions, churches that have different teachings. But at its core, the tithe is based upon the increase.

And so how I would approach that is as you have wages, then you tithe on your wages. As you have profits, then you tithe when you realize the profit. So if you sell a piece of property, and at that point in time, you realize the profit, you realize the gain, then take a 10th of the gain and give that away.

If you sell a business and you realize the gain, then go ahead and take a 10th and give that away. So it's fairly straightforward that it should be done when you realize a profit. I don't think you tithe on profits that are not realized. So if your portfolio has increased enormously, but it's just sitting there, then I would not tithe on that.

That doesn't make sense. You tithe on the increase or the gain, and when it's something that is like an investment, then you tithe when the gain is recognized. - That makes sense. I guess in the context of, I'm not necessarily counting on that income to survive. Obviously, I have other income, but as far as my investment portfolio, that's not in a "retirement" setting where I'm taking draws from it.

I guess would you view that as just like, hey, here's my bucket for later, and I'm gonna be harvesting later. I'm not taking that for my needs now. No, no, I'm just trying to wrap my head around it. - I would, and so that's why I used the word that I did.

I was very precise with my word. I said, when you realize the gain, and so realizing a gain has a specific accounting meaning. There's a difference between unrecognized gains, recognized gains, and realized gains. So putting it simply, an unrecognized gain is what you have right now in your 401(k), meaning that, okay, I've put money in there, and it's growing, but it's not what's called recognized for tax purposes.

A recognized gain is when you have a gain, but for some reason you have to recognize it or report it, usually for tax purposes. And so an example of this would be, let's say that you are going to convert from your traditional IRA to a Roth IRA. Well, you would recognize those gains in the traditional IRA as you convert them to a Roth IRA for tax purposes.

I'm just saying a realized gain is just simply money that you're receiving. And so you can have realized gains that are recognized and recognized gains that are unrealized. I'm using realized here just to mean when you actually get the money. And I think this is in line with the basic spirit, which is when you receive the money and you have control of it, that would be the time at which I think it would be wise to pay a tithe.

So would I tithe on the increase of a 401(k) account? No, but when I take money out of the 401(k) account, that's when I would pay it. - Yeah, that makes sense, you applied it. I was over-complicating. I always appreciate how you're able to take something and simplify it.

So thank you, Joshua. - My pleasure, anything else? - No, that's it for this week. - Great, thank you very much. We move on to the great state of New Jersey. Welcome to the show, how can I serve you today? - Hey, Joshua, can you hear me? - Yes, sounds good.

- Okay, perfect. Well, I'm glad the last caller introduced the topic of apologetics. I have a question for you, but really actually a couple of questions, really coming from the other side. So I'm not a Christian, but I have lots of family who are in different denominations and even some non-denominational.

And one of the big challenges that we run into is around the issue of abortion. And I understand that there's a general distaste for it in that community, but what I don't understand is, one, is there an explicit scriptural basis for rejecting abortion at any point? Second question is, if not, how do most Christians arrive at their conclusion about abortion?

And third, does any of that change as we learn more about gestational development? So I'll leave that, I'll tee that up for you to answer. And again, I really appreciate the way you think about these things, so I'll just, I'll leave it there. - Absolutely, just if you're able to stay on the line, though, so we can go back and forth.

So the first question you asked was, is there a specific scriptural kind of definition as to a specific point during pregnancy at which abortion would be disallowed, is that correct? - Well, I guess more generally, any specific scriptural prohibition. - Right, so I think there would be, the reason I'm trying to discern is to answer the question, there would be two basic questions.

The first question would be, from a Christian perspective, is there a scriptural prohibition of abortion? And then the second question would be, is there a specific scriptural prohibition against abortion at a certain time? And this, I think, is the more applicable debate that happens in our society right now.

So do you have a question on both of them, or one or the other? - I guess both of them, I'd be curious to know the answer on. But yeah, separating it that way makes sense. - Okay, so the first thing, let's deal with the first, actually, let's deal with the second, which makes more sense.

I guess we'll just deal with the first one, first and foremost. I think, in fairness, while I do think this Bible teaches clearly about abortion, this is one of those topics that requires application. And what I mean by that is, where I usually hear this would be Christians prohibition, when Christians prohibit homosexuality.

And people say, well, Jesus never talked about homosexuality. And that's fair, that's true. But to say that Christians should not be concerned about homosexuality, because Jesus did not talk about homosexuality, is to demonstrate ignorance of how Christians derive their theology, and the applications of theology. So there are lots and lots of things that are not written in red letters in the New Testament that Jesus specifically talked about.

Everything from slavery, to abortion, to sex trafficking, to rape, to all kinds of things. I mean, we could go down the list of all kinds of sins, things that you being a non-Christian, and I being a Christian, would wholeheartedly agree with one another. This is absolutely wrong. This is absolutely prohibited.

And yet, we would have to acknowledge that Jesus specifically did not speak about them. So that's one thing that is important. And this does come up sometimes in abortion, because people say, well, Jesus didn't talk about abortion. And you have to quick to say, that is correct. Jesus did not talk about abortion.

Now, to understand this, Christians generally derive their theology from the fullness, the full breadth of Scripture. Across Christendom, there are differences in what Christians consider to be the canon of Scripture. Protestants generally recognize the 66 books of the Old and New Testament that are most well-known. Roman Catholics have a few additional that we'd label the Apocrypha.

Orthodox Christians have a few additional. And so there's some variation, but generally speaking, Christians affirm that all of these writings are inspired. That's why they have been collected to be the canon of Scripture. There were other writings that are ancient that were rejected by early councils of the Church, but the books that we bring together, we consider these all to be authoritative.

And so you'll find, and then the Scriptures themselves are self-referential. And so, for example, there's a verse in Timothy in the New Testament, a letter that the Apostle Paul is writing to his disciple Timothy, a young man that he is training. And he says, "All Scripture is God-breathed "and useful for correction and for teaching "and for all the rest of it." And what he's referring to there is, of course, the Hebrew Bible, that's what he's referring to.

And he's specifically saying that it will be the Hebrew Bible, that this is inspired. And then based upon that, other Christians in the early Church have gone on and gathered together the writings that are in the New Testament and affirmed, these are the reliable and inspired Scriptures. Now, in addition to that, you should also understand that some Christians believe that not all Christian doctrine has to be drawn exclusively from the Bible itself, from the writings, from the written Scriptures itself.

This, most famously, was one of the major divisions in the Protestant Reformation. So 500 years ago, in the Protestant Reformation, the early Reformers created the five solas. And one of the five solas that they kind of staked their claim on created Protestant Christianity, which is probably what mostly surrounds you.

But Protestant Christianity was built upon, one of the basic ideas is that of sola scriptura, so that the Scripture alone is the ultimate source of authority. But the reason that there was a schism there between Protestants, as they're known now, and Roman Catholics is because in the Roman Catholic tradition, Scripture is not the sole source of authority.

And so Roman Catholics would acknowledge Church tradition and Church authority as being also authoritative over the doctrine of the Church and the doctrine that Christians live by. So for example, a Roman Catholic in the papal encyclical, I forget what it was called, I read it, but an example would be birth control, right?

Roman Catholic theology and dogma teaches that married couples should not use physical or chemical means of avoiding, physical barrier or chemical means of avoiding children. That is the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. That is not a teaching that is based, that is not a teaching that you can find in black and white letter in the Bible.

You can find hints of it, you can find traces of it, and for that reason, the Roman Catholic Pope wrote that encyclical and why that became Church doctrine. But that is not a black and white thing. There is no verse that says thou shalt not use birth control. So tradition and Church authority are also valid, also in the Orthodox Church.

In Protestantism itself, this will be a big dividing point. So Jesus himself said, he said, "It's good for you "that I go away, because if I don't go, "then the Comforter will not come. "But when he comes, he shall take all of the things of mine "and teach them to you." And so in Protestant Christianity, many Protestants don't affirm the sole and exclusive teaching of Scripture as being everything.

Many Protestants would believe that the Holy Spirit is teaching us, because that is what Jesus said. And so I myself would affirm this, that I would say that the Holy Spirit will teach you or will teach me something that I need to know. And I will never contradict Scripture.

I will never go to Scripture and say, "Hey, look, in black and white it says this is wrong, "but the Holy Spirit is telling me "with my personalized revelation that I should do it." I think that is wrong, but you can in many ways have expanded application of a principle that you see in Scripture in your own life.

And I'll give you one specific example, okay? I'm a rather, this is silly, and I'm trying to use examples that would make this simple, that would make this clear. I'm a somewhat large guy, and throughout my life, I've generally been in the habit of keeping my shirt buttons open because of the largeness of my frame.

When I was in high school and had a uniform, it just wasn't comfortable to button it all the way up. And one time I was in my early 20s, and I was looking at myself in the mirror, and the top button of my shirt was unbuttoned, and I was showing all this chest hair, and I looked at myself and I said, "Joshua," and I just sensed, in my heart, I just sensed a conviction that that's not the image that you should be portraying.

That's not modest, button your shirt. Now, that kind of conviction would be something that many Christians experience and say, I claim that I've experienced this. I sensed what I would label as the voice of the Holy Spirit saying, "Joshua, this is an immodest behavior." But I would never go out and put that in black and white and say to someone else, "Well, you can't unbutton your shirt." I wouldn't create an encyclical that says, "You can't do this." It's just a, there's a biblical doctrine of modesty, and I wanna apply it, and in that moment, I was applying it with my physical experience.

And then there would be similar expressions of, you would have a biblical doctrine of modesty. So, for example, in the New Testament, Paul writes to women, and he says, "I want women to be adorned with the beauty "that comes from the inside, "not with costly gold and expensive apparel "and braided hair and all of these things." So, different Christians take that in different ways, and they make different applications of it.

And so, you may have a very conservative Mennonite group that where the Christians in that group never ever wear earrings, they never wear any kind of jewelry, they never wear makeup, they never do anything, because they are very fundamentalist in following the specific dictates of that passage of Scripture.

Then you'll have other groups that are less focused on the specific application of don't wear costly jewels, and instead focused on applying the spirit of it, the spirit of the idea. And so, this would be kind of where I would be. So, I gave my wife a pair of earrings for, I don't know, some present in the past, but I don't wanna go around and see how much wealth can I display on her.

And in my own expression, I want, even though that was written to women, specifically by the Apostle Paul, I take that as applying to me as well, as a Christian virtue of modesty. And so, I want to be modest. I wanna be modest in my speech, I wanna be modest in my appearance, I wanna be modest in my expression, I don't wanna go around and just talk about myself all the time, I don't wanna wear things that are constantly gonna bring attention to myself, I wanna express this virtue of modesty, but I wanna do it in a thoughtful way.

So, that's a preamble to say that as we go to Scripture, you need to understand where doctrine comes from, and that I could wholeheartedly, you can make the argument against a certain thing, such as abortion, without specifically going to chapter and verse, and specifically identifying this one thing, and still be perfectly correct within Christian doctrine.

And each tradition or stream of Christianity would have a slightly different way of looking at it. And so, if you don't understand that, you just look ignorant when you say, well, show me chapter and verse on that, show me chapter and verse, Joshua, as to why you think you should button the top button of your shirt.

It just makes you look ignorant that you don't understand how we derive doctrine in what we do. Now, there's one more thing that you need to understand, is that if you go to Scripture itself, I think it's fairly common, I'm not saying anything controversial here, most Christians would agree that what you see in...

So, in our modern world, in the United States and in England and various other places, we have a tradition of what is called common law. Common law is different than a civil law tradition. So, the difference between England and France is you have a distinction between common law and civil law, difference between the United States and...

Anyway, you have a difference between common law and civil law countries. I don't remember which country has every single one. But in the English-speaking world, common law is the basic application. What that means is there's not so much a focus on a specific set of laws that are written down by a government, and that these are all of the laws, but rather we draw our legal system from the laws that have gone on before.

And when something has gone on before, then you see an application of it. And so, in the U.S. tradition, we have a written constitution. That would be different than in England. But we have a written constitution, and then you have application of that. You have case law. And that case law is an expansion of the law that has come before.

Now, I'm not a legal scholar. I would say, though, that certainly, this is the same basic system that you see in the Bible itself. And then I think you could say, I would guess that probably the common law tradition comes out of Christianity, that we draw it from that.

And so, if you go back and you study the most detailed civil laws that we have in the Bible, coming from the Mosaic Civil Code, I'm persuaded that this is a system of case law. You have a basic law. For example, you could bring it together with just the Ten Commandments.

Here's the basic Ten Commandments. But then you have many, many applications of that case law, of expressions of it, of bringing it into more focus, and what about this situation? What about that situation? And it expands throughout history. So, the simplest reason that Christians would be opposed to abortion is because of the biblical prohibition of murder.

Thou shalt not murder is one of the most fundamental aspects of biblical law. Thou shalt not murder is clearly stated in the Ten Commandments. But prior to that, in the Noahic Covenant, you have God clearly saying, don't murder. And if a man takes another man's life, then his life is to be forfeit.

He should be executed if he takes another man's life. Murder is one of the first sins that's recorded in the Bible between Cain and Abel. And from the beginning to the end of scripture, we have a prohibition against murder. Now, there are applications of that. What is murder? The reason we have the different distinction between murder and manslaughter is because of the biblical distinction between murder and killing, where we clearly see application of this.

But no other verse is necessary for being opposed to abortion other than thou shalt not murder, the fundamental, foundational, basic ethic of any ethical system. So we'll go to a couple more examples in a moment, but I'm answering question one to say, why would a Christian oppose abortion? Well, because Christians believe that abortion is murder, and the Bible says thou shalt not murder.

So then we get to the second question. We would say, all right, well, is there a point in time at which it would be murder and a point in time at which it would not be murder? So let's say that I have a baby, and here's where I just ask you if you're willing to share your perspective.

Let's say I have a week-old baby, and I intentionally end the life of that baby a week after he has been from his mother's womb. Would you call that murder if I did that to a week-old baby yourself at where you are right now? - Yes. - Okay. And if it were a week prior to the birth of the child, would you call it murder if I ended the life of the baby?

- I think I would, yeah. - Okay, so good. So not all people would agree with you, because many people have tried to come up with different theories. So I think, I don't know if he's still, he doesn't seem as popular as he once was, but I once read some of Peter Singer's writing on this where he talked about basically we should not, that, what was his argument?

You're getting me on the spot. So you get what I can do just extemporaneously, but Peter Singer talked about basically that in order for a baby to, in order for murder to be, in order for the ending of life of a young human being to be murder, the human being would have to have personhood.

And he did not believe that personhood was an attribute that a baby could express prior to, I forget his number, but maybe two or three years old. And so we get into the question of personhood, which is the fundamental debate philosophically as the difference between ending life of a human as compared to murdering a person.

It's based upon personhood. So he said that because he didn't see much of a distinction between a baby at 39 weeks of gestation as compared to a baby at 41 weeks of gestation. And it's interesting that when you have a baby, the first, in some literature related to childbirthing, you have the concept of the first trimester, the second trimester, the third trimester, and the fourth trimester.

And so the fourth trimester is the first few months, first three months of a baby's life in which the baby has been delivered from his mother's womb, but in many ways, he still has a very similar experience outside of the womb as he had inside the womb. There's a lot more similarity between a baby that's two-month-old with a 32-week baby as compared to a two-month-old with a six-month-old baby.

They're just wildly different in terms of their development. And so you could say, well, maybe the, and many people say abortion is the ending of human life prior to the physical delivering of the baby. Well, if you apply your reasonable thinking to that, it's hard to draw that line.

It's hard to say that there's a big difference between a baby at 39 weeks of gestation versus a baby who was delivered at 40 weeks and is one week old. Both of them will die if left alone. So we can't say that personhood comes when you can take care of yourself.

A six-year-old child will die if left alone in most cases. So we can't use a criteria of saying that the child has to be able to take care of himself. And physically speaking, then we say, well, maybe it's 'cause the baby can survive outside of his mother's womb. Well, at 39 weeks, then the baby can survive outside of his mother's womb, no big deal, fully formed, everything's good to go, just like at 41 weeks.

There's no material difference there. So then we say, well, then the difference of personhood or whether abortion is wrong or not is just based upon the location of the baby. The baby is located inside the baby's, the mother's body or outside of the mother's body. And some people believe that, but I think that if you examine that really carefully, it starts to break down.

And so then we have to move earlier in the pregnancy and we have to find some other basis of it. So this is where there's been such a big difference with two things, number one, ultrasound technology, where we can see the development of the baby. We can see the point at which a zygote and an embryo and a fetus start to resemble what we would recognize as a baby versus before that.

And we're pretty astonished to see how early that happens. It's really remarkable when you start getting ultrasounds at 20 weeks and you see your baby there formed, it's just, it's astonishing to see it. And then the second thing is our ability to provide pre, forgetting the name of it, but the NICU, for a very premature baby, provide life-giving care for a preemie baby.

And if you have a very premature baby, I mean, certainly the statistics change a lot, but you move all the way back to, you move all the way back to 25 weeks and you might get decent survival rates for a baby with medical care. And so those arguments just don't seem like they're philosophically consistent.

What's the difference between 25 weeks and 27 weeks? And you go back to Roe v. Wade and kind of this creation of this trimester system, and it just seems philosophically inconsistent. So the two, so I think what often Christians look at is they go back and they say, at what point in time is the baby a separate entity?

And it took quite a while for there to be the broad agreement that there is now among many Christians, but basically the point in time at which the baby is a separate entity is at fertilization. The time at which there is a unique DNA that is different from the DNA of the mother and of the father basically is fertilization.

That's the point in time. And then there is scriptural evidence that could be pointed to to indicate this from a theological basis. So probably some of the famous verses in Psalms, the writer of Psalms says that you knitted me together in my mother's womb, and I'm fearfully and wonderfully made.

There's a verse in Jeremiah that says, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. So let me repeat that. Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you. And then you can go through and, I mean, there are other applications of that that you can find.

And there's, I can't cite chapter and verse at the moment extemporaneously, but we can go back and there were laws in the Mosaic law about striking a woman who is pregnant and what happens there. And so there's clearly an acknowledgement that there is a, that God is involved in the forming together of life in the womb.

So the primary doctrine is thou shalt not murder. And then secondarily, in addition to those verses that talk about God's knowledge of the baby, there is a clear, consistent theme in scripture that God himself is the author of life. And it's not necessary to deny that a male and a female through sexual copulation are involved in that process in order to affirm that.

The scripture clearly teaches that God is the author of life, not independent of a man and woman's activities, but together with them. And so we see throughout the Bible, there's basically an uninterrupted theme from the beginning to the end that God opens the womb and God closes the womb.

And so if you bring these various strains together, you arrive at the modern Christian conviction. You arrive at the modern Christian conviction that life begins at conception, that God is involved in the actual giving of life, and life begins at conception primarily because where else can it be placed?

And as we have increasing levels of scientific evidence, then that argument has been easier for Christians to make because now we have scientific evidence that supports what, in many cases, is a theological conviction. Let me add two more things, and then I'll just stop for your comments. There's two more things that are associated with this, though.

The other theme that is really important doctrinally is that Christians value persons, they value people. And one of the most consistent expressions of the Christian religion has been to care for those who are unwanted. Christians are clearly commanded multiple times to care for widows and especially orphans, that providing care for orphans is a fundamental basis of Christian religion.

If you went back to the early Christians in the Roman Empire at that time, abortion, safe methods of abortion, were not common. And so it's my understanding of history that in the Romans, it would be very frequent that they would go ahead, the baby would be birthed, but then the baby would just be set aside on the trash heap.

And it's my understanding that Christians would go out and regularly work through the trash heap finding abandoned babies, and they would take those babies, they would adopt them, and they would raise them. And this has been the same thing that Christians have done all around the world in many places, is that anytime a baby is unwanted or abandoned, then Christians go and adopt the baby because we have to, it's a fundamental commandment of our Maker that we are to care for orphans.

And then you say, well, all right, that's fine, but why would there be a society, why would somebody not want a baby? And this is where you get to other aspects of sin that often what Christians deal with. If you look at the reasons that people abort their babies, generally speaking, can I speak generally?

This is non-inclusively, but many of the reasons that a mother would abort her baby would be related to some expression of sin. Sometimes it would be sexual sin. In some cases, a young mother was engaging in sexual relations with a man, and they weren't married, and they were fornicating, and now there's a baby, and I don't want the baby, and the baby's inconvenient.

In many cases, it would be due to sins of greed and sins of, I mean, I just label it as greed. If you look at the pro-abortion folks today and you listen to their arguments, their basic argument in many cases, when you go back to a couple years ago, there was the shout your abortion, and I listened to all these testimonies of women who were talking about their abortions.

The basic theme as to why these women would kill their babies was that the baby was an inconvenience to my career. The baby was gonna keep me from making more money. The baby was gonna keep me from doing better financially, and this is repulsive. This kind of thinking is repulsive to the Christian mind.

To put money in front of a person who needs you is repulsive, and then you look at the societal expressions, and there's all kinds of just practical expressions of it. So it's the totality of all of those things that is based upon it, and I should also note that if you look at the arguments of pro-abortion activists or proponents, basically, then you have to deal with the philosophical arguments for autonomy.

That's one of the basic philosophical arguments in favor of a woman being able to abort her baby at any time for any reason whatsoever. It's autonomy. I can do what I want, and autonomy, this kind of extreme form of autonomy is not a Christian virtue or a Christian philosophy, and I'll skip that discussion for the moment, but those are kind of some of the many reasons as to why you have such a strong Christian support for abolishing abortion in all of its forms.

- Okay, I'm gonna need to go back to listen to digest all of that. - You'll be both. - Yeah, well, first, I wanna say thank you for going to such lengths. This is a topic that, as I said in the beginning, it's difficult to speak with Christians about because I often run into the scenario where it's kind of like a moral dumbfounding.

Like, what do you mean? What do you mean, why is it wrong? It's wrong because it's wrong. Okay, well, let's go a little deeper than that and try to understand what the motives are here. So I appreciate you taking the topic on and sharing your beliefs. It's really helpful for me to understand.

We could probably fill out the rest of your show talking about this, so I wanna respect the rest of your listeners. And I guess my, in conclusion, my concern is that things like complete prohibitions on mostly anything tend to ignore the consequences of those prohibitions. So abortions that are performed illegally with less than sterile techniques for, let's say, medically necessary reasons, those stories get pushed down and not paid attention to in favor of the, oh, well, she sinned, and so, therefore, she was wrong, so she deserves whatever she gets.

That's my concern, is really about the total prohibition on anything. And I think that if we, I guess, in conclusion, I would have one final question. Is there a point of compromise that you think Christians and non-Christians could make on abortion at any point in the future, or will abortion at any point, let's say, beginning at conception, always and forever be considered a sin and, therefore, rallied against politically?

- Fair questions. - Can there be any compromise? - And, well, we're not gonna do two hours on this. Any listener who wants to skip this has a skip button and a fast-forward button. So I'm more interested in two thoughtful men who care about these issues and wanna deal with them in a straightforward way.

I'm more interested in our having a productive conversation, and I pay for the hosting. Anyone who wants to skip can skip. I feel that one of the great problems that we face in our society is that when these important and heavy and difficult moral issues are dealt with, people try to deal with them too quickly, and these are difficult things.

So in terms of, first, I think that it's important for anybody who is, I guess one thing that I found really helpful is the time at which I was fully able to empathize with a mother who aborts her baby. And I'll tell you specifically where that happened. My wife used to watch this show called "Call the Midwife." She got interested in it.

And there was a scene in "Call the Midwife," or various scenes, in which it was dealing with this direct topic. And it was clearly, the writer of the show was clearly doing it to get at the coat hanger issue that you're specifically dealing with. But the writer of the show, at the time, abortion was prohibited in England.

The show was set in England. And there was this very poor mother with many children, and this very poor mother with many, many children became pregnant again, and she couldn't care for the children that she had. And the show writers wrote her in a situation where she felt like she had no other option.

And so she went, and she obtained a back alley abortion. And I don't remember if she, I think she lived, but it was very severe, and she was going to die, and who knows. But it was that time in which I was filled with empathy. And I'm really glad that I saw that, because it seems like I have to go through experiences for me to have empathy with people.

And when I have empathy, I'm able to be more, I'm able to face things more straightforwardly. At its core, though, empathy, or kind of a toxic form of empathy, can't be our beginning place in anything, because we can empathize all the way to the greatest moral evil you would ever imagine, purely from empathy perspectives.

So we need to begin by using our rational brains and thinking about things logically, and then make sure that we have dealt with the emotions appropriately, and that we're genuinely actually providing care for the people involved. And what I find is that in the difficult cases, usually, so the difficult cases are actually much simpler if we begin with a logical argument, and then we move then to how do we do this in an appropriate way?

So you mentioned difficult situations, and then you talked about people dying with illegal abortion procedures and things like that. So first, let's deal with, or straightforwardly, let's deal with the most common objections, which are rape, incest, and abortion necessary because of the life of the mother, where there's a danger to the life of the mother.

If we look at these logically, I'll just give you my case, is that if we assign personhood to a baby, and personhood is a philosophical term, basically, we mean that I have rights, you have rights, the father has rights, the mother has rights, and the baby has rights, these are persons, and we're going to treat the baby as a human being with human rights.

If we do that, and then just follow that train of logic forward, then we have everything that we need to resolve those three most commonly cited situations and arrangements. There are two separate trains. So if a baby is conceived in rape, or a baby is conceived as a product of incest, then in that situation, we need to understand that the only morally righteous person involved is the baby.

The baby is the only innocent party. Excuse me, in the case of rape, I'm not trying to say that the mother is not innocent. What I'm saying is that the baby is the most obviously truly innocent person. So what we have in the case of rape or incest, and a baby conceived in rape or incest, is we have multiple moral agents.

In the case of rape, the guilty party is the father. The mother may or may not bear some responsibility, but let's assume that she's totally innocent. The baby is also totally innocent. And we don't right moral wrongs with more moral wrongs. So if I come and I murder your brother, we don't right the wrong of my murdering your brother by you going and murdering my mother.

We know that. We know that while it might feel good to kill someone else, and it might give some kind of vengeance, it doesn't solve the moral wrong. And so the same thing that happens in rape, the morally guilty party is the rapist. That's whose life should be forfeit.

The baby is the truly innocent party. And then you get to, well, what I commonly hear if I talk to someone, well, you don't want a mother to see the face of her rapist for the rest of her life. If you read the stories of mothers who have faced that, in some cases, the baby himself or herself winds up being an important part of her healing from the trauma of this great evil that was committed against her.

In some cases, the baby can be adopted. But in no case is the moral evil of rape made right by murdering the innocent baby. Similar with incest, same basic thought process applies, is that the baby is the innocent party. And we should not go out and murder innocent people just because other people commit great wrongs and great evils.

With regard to life of the mother, if we ascribe personhood to the baby and to the mother, then we have a proper moral framework in which to deal with difficult situations. We know how to triage situations. What happens in abortion is that if a mother's life is in danger, then we automatically assume that the right answer to that is the death of the baby.

That's not always a right assumption. It's my understanding, I'm not a medical doctor, and this could be wrong, but I think it's right. I am not aware of any medical procedure that would require us to intentionally end the life of a developing fetus in order to save the life of a mother.

There may be many circumstances in which the baby must be delivered. The mother is experiencing preeclampsia or some potentially life-ending disease. We may need to deliver the baby. And clearly, we may deliver the baby knowing that the baby will die. If the baby is very young, we know that the baby will die.

But we don't need to take active steps to kill the baby before delivering the baby. And that's the difference between abortion versus a medical triage situation in which we're weighing the balance of two important lives, the mother and the baby, and we're doing our best that both of them would be alive.

But in many cases, we know that the baby may die because the baby is not fully developed and we have to protect the life of the mother. So if we just describe personhood, then we know how to deal with this. We know morally that when there's a great accident, an airplane accident or a great war, we know morally when we go out on the battlefield that you might be a one and you might be a three, and we're gonna first take all the ones and the twos, and if you're still alive when we get to the threes, you might make it.

But when the guy going around triaging all of the casualties is riding on your face with a Sharpie and he rides a three, he knows that you're probably gonna be dead. So we can deal with those things morally speaking. Now, in terms of what about if, is a woman just going to abort her baby and be, let's say that abortion were made illegal.

Let's say that guys in my camp who want to abolish human abortion win, and it becomes the law of the land at which abortion by any means or mechanism, be it physical, chemical, at any stage of pregnancy is made illegal. Are people still going to abort their babies? They might.

Human history would indicate that at the end of the day, if anybody wants a baby to die, then we can do that. The basic reason we kill babies is they can't defend themselves. And so our, just like Bill Maher last week, Bill Maher's comments that made the news. It's like, okay, I can see that it's murder and I'm kind of okay with that.

The reason we murder babies is they have no means of self-defense. And if they did, then we wouldn't murder them. So it calls on those of us who do have a means of imposing our will on other people for morally righteous reasons to do so. And we have to be those who defend the babies.

But at the end of the day, we're not going to end murder just by making murder illegal. As far as I know, murder is illegal everywhere in the world. And as far as I know, people still murder one another. But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done.

If an action is immoral, and that's a big if, but if I'm right and abortion is an immoral act always, then it would not be a problem for there to be a law that prohibits an immoral act. And law has multiple functions. One function of law is a practical outworking of law.

But another function of law is to simply send a signal, send a moral signal. So for example, I think, although I would have to go and check state by state, and I don't know, but why is suicide a crime? Well, it seems like the dumbest crime in the world.

After all, the dude's dead. You're gonna make it illegal for him to commit suicide? It's the dumbest thing in the world. But the signaling importance of law is that law sets the standard that we should look to. And so suicide should be illegal. It should be an illegal act so that people have one more reason out of many to not try to commit suicide, because that destroys a society.

And I'm not a legal theorist, but that's where I would like to discuss with regard to saying, well, aren't women going to harm themselves with a back alley abortion? I don't know. I would guess so. After all, people do horrific things all the time, no matter what the law is.

And if somebody wants to kill another person, they're gonna find someone to kill someone else. What I don't think we have an obligation to do is to facilitate murder in a safe, comfortable environment. After all, it's never safe or comfortable for the baby. The baby is the one who always winds up dead.

And since babies can't defend themselves, you and I, who can defend morally innocent persons, you and I have to be the ones that stand up and defend the baby. Now, there are many practical outworkings that we simply don't know. We don't know all of the impact of things. We don't know how to do things.

And the other question you said was, is there a point of compromise, or will we always be arguing about it? I don't know. What I do know is that the current system we have is immoral. What I do know is that, just as a simple example, if there were anybody in my life who came to me and said, "I'm going to abort my baby, "but if I don't, would you do something else?" I would adopt any baby from, I can't say anyone in the world 'cause I'd be careful, 'cause I would adopt any baby that I had contact with in order to save his life from being aborted.

And so right now, there are so many societal problems that we have with the adoption system, with all kinds of issues that are not being, they're not being attended to because we have a completely dysfunctional system. And there are many solutions that we haven't created even yet that we could create.

And just putting it simply, right? So I've said this to multiple people. I've said this to people that I have known. I've said, "Listen, if you ever found yourself pregnant "and you weren't going to keep the baby, "I just want you to know that I'll adopt the baby "because I feel like it's my moral duty to do that.

"If I'm gonna be against abortion "and I'm not gonna be willing to adopt children, "then I have a problem. "I need to be super careful about that." That doesn't mean that it's always, that I always have to do it. It doesn't mean, you know, we need to be careful with what we create.

But in general, there are all kinds of other systems that are not created, that are not done. My wife and I, we went a number of years ago and explored adoption. And I still am interested in adopting children. And we went and we visited. I walked away from that experience, visiting with the government agencies.

I walked away from that experience saying basically, "There's no possible way "that I'll ever be able to adopt a baby." And the hardship of that, there aren't enough babies that are even available. And then the cost and the hardship and everything of that, it's just that it's a really difficult scenario.

And so I can't go into it. But my point is that we need to start from first principles and ask ourselves these deep philosophical questions that you and I began with. Then continue that on and then try to find solutions that don't involve moral wrong. And that's not always gonna be easy.

We shouldn't pretend it is. We're adults. We have to deal with things that are hard. But we need to be careful that we keep what is right and what is wrong in clear focus. Or there's no limit to where we can go. And this would be my kind of comment of this monologue.

And then I wanna hear your response. But I had an experience in 2005 that shook me to my core. I was in Guatemala in 2005, and I was up on top of a pyramid, a temple that was there. And this is one of the temples with the local, I don't know if they were Mayans.

I forget the tribe now. But it was a temple that was used for human sacrifice. And I sat there on that temple, and I pictured the thousands and thousands and thousands of babies that were sacrificed right there on that pyramid. And I don't know if I wept or not, but I wanna weep when I think about it, just because it really opened my eyes.

And if you look throughout history, you and I in the modern world, in our modern civilization, we are living in a world that is formed by men with moral courage who spread a message of moral virtue. That has never been easy. And it is not the common experience of mankind.

The argument that we're having, or the discussion, I use argument in a philosophical sense. The argument that we're having at this time is something that we could only have in today's world, where you and I are trying to think through these issues as seriously as we can and reason with one another and reason with our neighbors in public and make arguments.

You and I are not resorting to force. You and I are not picking up guns and shooting each other. And that is vanishingly rare throughout human history. Normally in human history, you just might makes right. And it's the same with every expression of warfare. It's the same with anything.

And you and I are not fundamentally different than those Mayans who sacrificed their babies to their god in cold blood. There's no real difference between you and I, except that we have been raised in a society that cares about moral virtue. So we need to be super careful that we don't ever stray away from that, but rather that we continue to proceed on this societal direction.

And we'll have to develop new systems, new institutions that cause, but I don't want to get away from the fact that most of the time the root cause of abortion is sin. It's people knowing they're doing wrong and wanting to do it anyway. I've spoken with a lot of women who do, excuse me, I've listened to a lot of women who do abortion ministry, and I've spoken to a handful of them.

And if you will go and talk to anti-abortion activist women who reach out to young women who are aborting their babies, you will find that the things that you and I are talking about now, the discussions of rape, incest in life of the mother, the discussion of, well, how will a woman, will a woman be damaged if she does a back alley abortion and she harmed, et cetera?

This is not the vast majority of cases. The vast majority of mothers who are murdering their babies are doing it because the baby is an inconvenience to their life and the baby can't defend himself. And they know what they're doing is wrong and they're taking joy in it. And I know that it sounds harsh for me to say that, but I've listened to enough of them who are actively talking to women in that situation, and I've seen enough of it come out in the public that I think that my statement is not incorrect.

So I didn't answer the, you know, is there gonna always be, let me, is there gonna be a point of compromise? I don't think there's gonna be a point of compromise ever. Well, I think what you're going to see ultimately is I think that in the fullness of time, abortion will be illegal in many places, not all places, but probably many places.

And if nothing else, the reason for that is that people who are pro-abortion kill their babies. And one of the reasons that, one of the challenges that men like you face, who are not particularly religious, is that religious people don't tend to, don't tend to be around, sorry, non-religious people don't tend to be around for very long.

And so I think the future of the world is almost certainly more religious than it is today. If we go back and we look at the, if we look at the statistics related to atheism from say the 1980s as compared to today, we see that non-belief in God, non-religious belief has dramatically declined.

And we see that the future is basically being built by people who are religious. And if you look at the religious fault lines, even in our, if you look at the lines in our world today, if you look at our society, the people who are productive and who have babies are generally religious.

And the people who don't have babies are generally not. And the people who kill their babies, there's lots of people who with crosses on their back of their car that kill their babies, unfortunately. But in general, the people who kill their babies are generally non-religious. The people who welcome their babies are generally religious.

If you look at the sexual practices of the religious versus the non-religious, non-religious sexual practices generally don't result in babies. Or if they do result in babies, they generally cost 30 or $40,000 to pay someone to birth a baby for them, which has its own slave market that we have to deal with.

People who are religious generally have babies pretty easily and naturally. And so if for no other reason, birth rates are on the side of the religious people. And generally speaking, many of the major religions of the world are pretty united in their prohibition of abortion. And so if for no other reason, I don't think there's gonna be a compromise.

I think there's gonna be a very difficult time right now in the United States as we see of political effects and legal cases and things like that. But in the fullness of time, generally speaking, it seems obvious to me that babies are worthy of our defense. It's also obvious that we're going to be pretty desperate for babies in the future as we continue to live through population collapse.

And generally, religious people tend to outproduce and out procreate non-religious people. And so it may just be a function of demographics and not a function of moral argumentation. I'm hoping it comes faster. But for that reason, I don't expect a compromise. In the fullness of time, I expect that eventually abortion will be hopefully abolished throughout the world, but it'll probably be a while before that happens.

I spoke for a while. So please share anything that you wanna say. I didn't mean to go quite that long. - That's fine. I don't know that I could speak for as long. You got a lot more experience on the mic than I do. I think I agreed with almost everything you said with a couple of caveats.

So yes, I also don't wanna live under some law of Hammurabi where you murder my brother and therefore I murder your mother and we're square. That's obviously wrong. I don't wanna live in a society where murder is just openly accepted and it's okay to do and everyone turns a blind eye.

That's also obviously wrong. I think from a values perspective, just strict values, you and I are probably pretty closely aligned. I too am a father, I love my babies and I certainly appreciate everything that they offer to me. And if someone told me that at 39 weeks, they were going to try to abort them, yeah, I would fight them tooth and nail.

My issue comes up in where we start defining personhood. I know you had said that personhood begins at conception and I've had trouble with that. So a little more background. I was formerly a Christian for a long time, but I started having, I guess, holes kind of poked in that around questions where it was just kind of a doctrinal faith answer.

And I guess my general synopsis is that it's hard for me to accept answers like that when it seems that time and time again, the modern apologetics from Christians tend to try to assimilate scientific findings instead of just looking back at the way the doctrine has been ascribed for decades and saying, okay, well, this was clearly wrong and we're going to update.

No, it's okay, we'll find a new scriptural verse that is permissive of these things that we now know to be scientifically true without a question of a doubt. So all of that to say, I guess the main difference comes up when we start talking about personhood. I can't say I think personhood begins at conception.

In fact, I don't think I would. I also don't think it begins at birth. That seems to me to be kind of equally flawed in thinking and whatever side of the argument you're on, I think, at least from my worldview, both of those have some flaws to them. What I think is that we're running into, or we will at some point run into a scenario where we know a lot more about what makes a human brain conscious.

And at the end of the day, I think we care most about the humanity of an embryo or humanity of a fetus. I scientifically don't think there's much difference between a zygote or a blastocyst from a goat or a newt or a human or any other animal. If we look at it under a microscope, they're all gonna look very, very much the same.

There's certainly a point when from an embryo perspective, there starts to be morphological changes. And again, I'll offer the same credentials you did. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a gestational scientist, just I know enough from reading to be a little dangerous. We're gonna run into a point where we know a lot more about when the consciousness enters or develops in the brain from electrical signals and impulses and neurons firing than we know right now.

And I guess my concern is that that will kind of slide through the news cycle as unimportant because everyone has already decided when human consciousness begins for them. And to me, human consciousness is really the thing that we care about here that separates us. I don't see any evidence for a soul being breathed into a zygote.

It's very difficult for me just to accept that as a matter of faith because it's not something that I possess. So I guess the reason I asked about the, are we ever going to reach a period where we can come to some agreement, it's under the hope that at some point, we'll know more than we do right now to be able to say, okay, definitively, 12 weeks, 20 weeks, whatever it is, this is when this thing can feel pain, experience human consciousness.

And that's really what we care about. So it's difficult for me to accept just the basis that personhood, to use the term you used, begins at conception. And I think the challenge we run into in our society is that a lot of the most vocal proponents on the anti-abortion side tend to use the notion that there can be no exceptions to this.

You frequently hear it from, I guess, my side of the argument. Well, if you don't want to have an abortion, then don't have an abortion. I get that. And I would support that. And mind you, I'm not pro-abortion. I think I feel similarly to you that if someone I knew were preparing to have an abortion, I would really strongly consider having them deliver the baby if they were later term and raising the baby myself.

'Cause I think that's a strong value to have if you can do it. I guess I'm, as usual with these conversations, it comes down to a matter of, do you believe that souls exist or that souls don't exist? And if a soul is breathed into a human at conception, then your side of the argument makes perfect rational sense.

From my side of the argument, without that belief, the rationality is kind of lost to just not knowing exactly where that point lands. It's not, to me, it's not at the beginning. It's not at the end. We just don't know enough yet. So I guess that'll be my response.

- I think your critique of Christians or various religious people wanting to update their theories as scientific evidence emerges and say, look, we got it right, is a very valid one. And so I wanna affirm you in that critique. I don't know that it's always, I don't know that the critique is always applicable, but it certainly can be something that people do.

And the world is flat. Well, look, the Bible says the world is fat. Well, the world is round. Look, the Bible says the world is round. And you see various people do that from various religions. And so I think that that's a fair critique. And it can be something that people would do.

And it may also be true that we don't have answers. I would, you and I would be fully shared in that we don't necessarily have answers. So at the end of the day, we're gonna be saying, this seems best to me. I don't see another place to put this.

And so I would say, as an example, can I acknowledge that it's difficult to accept an 82-celled organism that I can't see as a person? Certainly, I would acknowledge that. It's much easier for me to see a 41-week baby as a person than a 41-hour fertilized, whatever it's called at that stage of gestation, as a person.

Certainly, I would acknowledge that openly, that in terms of human intuition, one is much easier to relate to than the other. I just, I don't see where else you would put it. And I think you see that working out in our debate on this subject, in our discussion on this subject, that if you went back 20 years, and what was Bill Clinton's quote, President Clinton?

Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. And you look at the argument today. I mean, that was something that I think really a lot of people were united on at that time, that you would have had guys like you and me that would have said, well, we have different, I don't think so, but okay, I understand.

And that legal thing is-- - Close enough. - Close enough, maybe we could share this to some degree. But what we see, for whatever reason, is that that is not where we are right now. You see the strong form of, so the pro-life camp is not a united camp, it's pretty squishy.

And so right now, you see a strong moral movement in the anti-abortion crowd, coming from the abolitionists, those who wanna abolish human abortion. That abolitionist movement is gaining ground on the pro-life camp. And then you see, in the pro-abortion camp, you see a widespread saying of, listen, we will not tolerate any restrictions whatsoever.

I often wonder if this is just an expression of the US-American political system that creates this environment for us. Because if you go around the world, it seems to me that most, other than perhaps Canada, I don't know of a country in the world that has more rights to abortion than the United States.

I would say Canada certainly has more, but there's probably one or two others. But abortion is very highly restricted in much of the world, especially in the European world, where we have a common heritage as compared to the US system. And I don't know, I guess is my point.

I don't know. I do have one question, though. Is there a reason, since we've discovered DNA, and since we can measure DNA, would you be willing to accept the baby's separate DNA as a sufficient evidence of personhood, of a unique identity? - I'm not sure. My initial kind of gut-check response is yes.

But I haven't considered that. I'll have to take that back with me and mull over it a little bit. - I think if there is a scientific solution, I think it would be that one, at least in terms of our current scientific knowledge. That one and then just the general intuition of rights.

As I see it, maybe it's Peter Singer. And I would say that one of the things that's interesting is I think there are a variety of things that are related. If you go and read Singer's writings, one of his most important contributions in his sphere was his writings on speciesism and the preferential treatment that humans receive as compared to animals.

And so you interact in today's world with many ethical vegans, ethical vegetarians, as they style themselves, that basically don't distinguish between human persons and animals in terms of rights. And so you see people trying to defend animals and get animals into courts and give animals the same rights that human beings have.

And I think that's kind of the logical outflow as well. I see these three issues as related. Number one, abortion is related to, number two, euthanasia, is kind of the second expression of it because many of the arguments around abortion have a natural fellow argument in the face of euthanasia.

And as you see euthanasia spreading around the world, then I think those are naturally related in terms of the same arguments that I would use to defend the rights of a baby are the same arguments I would use to oppose euthanasia. And then the same arguments of autonomy that someone would use to promote the right of a woman to abort her baby would be the same arguments that would be commonly used to defend access to euthanasia.

And then the third would be simply arguments related to animals and our rights over animals or our defense of animals and everything associated with speciesism, the most obvious expression of that being in the ethical, vegetarian, vegan world. And so I think they're related. And I think that maybe there will be, I don't think that science is ever gonna create some system of rights.

So far, if it is so far, it seems like an abject failure to me. So I think we're always gonna be left with a fundamentally religious understanding of the world in some form that will be informed by science. And I don't have a problem with those two things functioning side by side.

I think that, I'm of course partial to toot our own horns as Christians, but I think Christians were hugely responsible, maybe not entirely, but hugely responsible for the scientific revolution. I think it's a net gain. But it seems to me that scientists desperately need some really strong moral supervision on behalf of religious leaders, 'cause without that, we wind up in a hellish landscape.

So I wanna thank you for the conversation because I'm gonna go back through and think these things over myself. I've given you my best defense. And I think that on the whole, what is, we should be involved in our, we should be involved philosophically kind of debating this. If we have to vote, then that's where this comes in and defending different things.

But on the whole, I can walk side by side with you and say that if we see babies that are unwanted, let's bring those babies in and care for them. And let's provide care for mothers who can't care for their babies. Let's support them. And I think that most people are not even gonna be able to follow the discussion that we've had.

But they certainly will see the effect of our actions. And so I wanna have this discussion. That's why we had it. But we should also just continue to focus on the actions. And then regardless of differing beliefs, there's a broad array of actions that we can be united on.

And we can defend our neighbor and love our neighbor as much as possible. - Well said, I'll be calling back in to muse on the subject more with you. Really appreciate the time. - I hope that you will and I look forward to it. - And with that, we go to Kyle.

Kyle, thank you for your patience. Welcome, Kyle from Washington. How can I serve you today? - Hi, thank you. I have a question earlier in the year. You mentioned something about seeing accounting and bookkeeping going away or changing meaningfully in the next few years as a result of AI's influence on the profession.

And I'm curious if you could please elaborate on what you see, why you see it changing, and do you think it's gonna entirely replace the human element of the profession? What do you see going on? - Fair question, and the caveat I would always say is I'm not an accountant, I'm not a bookkeeper.

If I have an accountant or bookkeeper in the audience who knows accounting more intimately than I do and has opinions, I would welcome that person to reach out to me and us to have an in-depth discussion on it. But since this is my Q&A show and I don't have that person waiting on the other line, I will tell you why I said that.

First, it's been my observation that the general trend in accounting has been, for a long time, an offshoring trend. And when I first started working with an accountant, I had an actual accountant who actually worked with me and he was an experienced guy and he would do my stuff for me.

Then I switched to a different accountant and this accountant had a team of accountants in another country who would do all of the entry work and the basic stuff, and then he would just look at the returns and sign off on them. And then I changed and I've used software programs and I find that I think the software programs can do a great job for most people.

And so if you look at the basic functions of bookkeeping and accounting, a lot of them are functions that, today, can be done by software and many of them are functions that can be done anywhere in the world. And those kinds of features are the features that I'm looking for to see an industry that's gonna be disrupted by increasingly powerful artificial intelligence.

So if we follow a transaction through, let's say that I have a transaction where I purchase something for my business. Let's assume that I use a business credit card that only has business expenses. First, there's a significant amount of information that's related to that transaction that'll be on my transaction report from the bank.

And even if my statement doesn't currently reflect it, there's even more information that could be gathered there from the merchant as the merchant ID and the category and all that directly from the merchant. Then I have an invoice or a receipt. Well, today, I can take that invoice or receipt, I can take a picture of it, run it through a scanner, a computer can run an optical character recognition program on it, and it can gather all of the information from that receipt.

If I now upload that receipt just to chat GPT, which is not in any way designed for accounting, but if I upload the picture of the receipt, chat GPT will pull out a huge amount of relevant information from the transaction of all of the details from it. And I can tell, I can take, I've been testing this, I can take a receipt.

Generally, it doesn't work so well with a super minimized receipt, but let's say I had an itemized receipt. I can take this as a picture, I can upload it to chat GPT, and I can tell chat GPT, which I repeat, is not designed for this, it's just a general GPT model.

And I can say, give me all of the categories, pull out for me all of the meat from this receipt and tell me how much money I spent on meat. Or I can say, give me all the categories, categorize all my information on this thing, and tell me what I spent in each category.

So you can already today use chat GPT to make your bookkeeping easier if you're trying to figure out how much you spend on meat versus vegetables. It's pretty simple and straightforward. Now, take the next thing. What's all the income data? Well, all the income data is easily done. I can take a W-2, I can take a 1099, and all of the data and the information that I need is right there, the computer can model it.

And so, and plus I have bank statements, so I don't see any technological barrier as to why all of this information cannot be applied by an artificial intelligence program to integrate this information. Now, the next thing is I've been playing a lot with chat GPT with regard to financial planning.

And I find that it's pretty good with financial planning. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. So it's got access to huge amounts of data, it can contextualize, it can do really good stuff with financial data. Tax stuff is generally much simpler than financial planning because tax stuff is all backwards looking.

Financial planning involves significant amounts of projection and assumptions. Tax stuff doesn't involve much of that at all. So this is the low-hanging fruit for some kind of AI model to work with because you have solid numbers, you've got transactions, and you've got just basically synthesizing that information and putting it into a tax form.

And then, and I see no reason why, and I shouldn't expect that to be the standard going forward for tax data. So what it actually looks like, where the data comes from, I don't know, but anything that can be done by a computer program and anything that can be done with offshoring, with sending data around virtually, that seems like the first kinds of jobs that will succumb to artificial intelligence.

Anything that can't be done by a computer program, so some kind of soft skill, some kind of interpersonal relational skill, or something that can't be outsourced or can't be sent around the world, I think we still have good moats against that. But that's my argument in favor of the statement that I said.

- Gotcha. And then this might be a let me Google that for you type of question, but what type of learning resources do you recommend for somebody that's interested in digging into learning about how to utilize AI? - I think the best one to start with is just starting.

What I mean is there's stuff out there, I'm sure, probably 80% of it written by AI. I would say the first thing you should do is if you don't have one, establish a subscription with ChatGPT so you have access to Chat 4.0, and just start playing with it, start using it.

And make it kind of a hobby of yours to put stuff into it. And there are many other models. I am in no way an expert on AI. There are many other things available, but I think that there are so many things that you'll see in your own life that it's a really valuable, it's a really valuable personal assistant for most people.

And you can use it in many areas of your life. We don't have any clue even what the starting point of all the areas that you can use it is. But it's there. So take, if you are involved in accounting or bookkeeping in some way, take some of your receipts or take some of your invoices and load them up into it.

From a personal finance perspective, take your monthly budget, upload your monthly budget into it and say, "Hey, chat, I'm trying to figure out "where I can cut some costs." Go back and forth with it, talk to it back and forth. And I don't, there's huge amounts of it that are not useful, but the difference between 1.0 and two and three and four now and then five, I don't know when five's coming, but the difference is enormous.

And so there's plenty of utility that you can get an idea of where we're going. And it's a powerful, powerful tool, but I wouldn't suggest anything except just starting to play with it. - Okay. - Okay. Yeah, there's probably people, the most valuable training tools would be if someone would show you their prompts.

There are, I see people advertising, prompting classes and things. There probably will be more and more of that, but getting good output from an AI model is very much a function of your skill with creating the prompts that are useful to you. And so that's where the skill development is.

And, but you can learn a lot of that organically. There's a learning curve where you learn it yourself, then you start to hear what other people's prompts are. Sometimes I'll show people my prompts and they're like, "Wow, I never knew you could do that." And so you'll have a similar experience as you play with it and talk to your friends who are also playing with it.

- Would Gabriel tell me that I need a whole nother computer? Or is it... - I haven't asked him about his opinions on AI. I think that I would say the good thing about it is that, so you should expect that there is going to be a privacy leak there, because any information you put out is there.

I would say that you can probably have a decent level of interaction with it if you use a clean computer. And then the good thing is that signing up for it, signing up for chat, all you need is a pretty basic email address and a way to pay digitally.

So whether that's a privacy.com debit card or whether it's prepaid, other debit card, they don't accept Bitcoin or Monero, anything that I know of. So you just need some kind of digital card and that'll be good. Just be cautious of what you're putting out into it, because every piece of information is always going to be stored in some way.

- All right. - All right, Kyle, thank you for the question. Really appreciate it. And I want to thank you to all of those who have listened to the show. I know I certainly did take quite a long time there with that discussion on abortion, but it is important.

And as always, you have a fast forward button, you have a skip button, use those things whenever you want. But it is important that we have those discussions and we need to have them even various formats. So thank you for calling in and making me think. And I welcome if you'd like to call in and talk about another hard question, we should do this regularly.

I want to live in a society in which mature men and women can sit down and can discuss difficult topics together. We can come as friends and we can leave as friends. And I don't see any reason that should not be our standard. And of course, we live in a society filled with acrimony and argumentation.

And there's probably a place for that. There's a place for polemics. There's a place for all that stuff. But I want to live in a society in which serious minded men and women can sit down and talk about important, difficult decisions, factor in new information, and then share those things with other people.

Because I believe in the value of that interaction producing synergistic results. One plus one is more than two when people are interacting appropriately. Thank you for listening. Remember, if you'd like to join me next week, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. And we'll be with you very soon. (upbeat music) ♪ Oh, oh, oh, O'Reilly ♪ - You've got questions?

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