Mary Rhyw Blychryd, ddod am ymwneud. Ac rwy'n gweithio i'r ddweud yma, ddod yn ddod i'n ddweud yma? Rwy'n ddweud? Rwy'n ddweud? Rwy'n ddweud? Rwy'n ddweud yma, ddod i'n ddweud eich cyflwyno? Rwy'n ddweud eich cyflwyno. Rwy'n ddweud eich cyflwyno? Rwy'n ddweud eich cyflwyno. Yn ddweud i'n ddweud eich cilydd hyd yn siarad rwy SOLU mynd? Rwy'n ddweud eich cilydd yma? Ok, batt. Rwy'n ddweud eich cyflwyno fel y hamentreadoreth ddir leisio eich cyflwyno? Felly mae'n cyflwyno i'r unrhyw i rhyw anghyb利ll. Saib dyma, oherwydd arall felly rom解'ch'. anggwyd eich syniad a fan gameswch. Y ddweud yma eich ddymau o'r wnghreifftol dw i chi, y pethau fan hyn hyn yn dweud o'r awr. Fydd sy'n cynnwys yw'r fath ar gyfer y peth. Ond teimlo, mae angin hynny y byddwch ar gyfer y llydd, yn ddifteig o'r nu'r wneud. Fy samu rhoi'ch defnyddio'r awr, I Prague is PCN OG. I want to share with you the exercise that I learned from my Uncle Bernard Mueller, who is a trainer at University of Oxford Told in Germany. This is a group mirroring exercise. Let me dedicate this exercise to the person I learned from, who's name is Bernard Mueller. I hope you can see me wherever you are. effaill y small mae yn f�ad mae eitwch oiable mae eitwch o buds mae eitwch oibolaeth mae ynghyd am yr i, mae eitwch allan mae eitwch o unint ul injnod tyn na Rwy'n credu o'i cyngorl sydd yn chael gwybodol yn ffeydd i'r bobl sydd yn ddweud fel yng ngyfaint. Fy enwedd ymddiannod. Mae'r olyg i'r gweld. Rydyn ni'n ddweud â'r thymau, a'r ddweud â'r ddweud â'r ddweud. Rydyn ni'n ddweud â'r ddweud. Ben Mawr yn ffantastig. Mae'r bwysig yn bwysig i'r rhywbeth, ac oedd Oksfyddiad ynglynig yn 1994 ac yma'r mynd i ddim yn ymddangos. Mae'n gwneud yn y ddarparu i un o ddweud. Mae'r ardal yn bwysig yn y bwysig yn gweithio'r llyfr oedd, ac mae'r bwysig yn y bwysig. Mae'r cyfrifol ddim yn gweithio'r llyfr. Mae'r llyfr yn y bwysig yn gwneud yn y bwysig o'r llyfr. Mae'n gwneud o'r ffordd o'r pwysig o'r pwysig yn gweithio'r llyfr. Rwy'n gweithio cael y sph�u'r cyffordd ystod yn rhywbeth ar gweithio iawn, a'r cyffordd o'r lle ac hi'n gweld y cyffordd o'r lle a rhai dim yn mynd yn ymgyrch. Rydyn ni'n debyg, os ydych chi'n gwybod, mor cyffordd mwy oedd oedd yng nghylch yn ddechrau sydd yn rhan o'r cwmwy, i'n byw oedd yn ei gwyedd, i'n feddygu'r cyllydd, i'n gweithio eich cyffordd o'r lle, a wedi'u gofyn i'n gwybod ar gyfer dechrau, Mae gennym o unrhyw ffaith. Mae gennym o unrhyw ffaith, mae gennym o unrhyw ffaith. One of the first things we do is to delete. We rubster out. If I was to talk to you for a moment about my journey from Cambridge to this building, there would be a lot of detail about how I got lost between, maybe you won't believe me, between Kings Cross and here. Mae'r number of people whom I asked, and the number of people didn't want to tell me, and the number of people didn't know. In all that plethora of detail you would have got the general message that Mario's pretty unhappy and pretty bad at job with it. You would certainly almost certainly delete many of the little bits of what I've told you. You'd just get the overall picture of this poor guy getting lost. You also have the phenomenon of distortion. When we listen, we distort. Or we pull around and change. Our own schemata changed what's coming in. Let me give you an example. I just wanted to go back for a moment in my own life to when I was 11, 12, 13. My father, who was Italian, was beginning to be preoccupied by the fact that his son Mario, his Italian, wasn't developing very well. And that I was still talking fairly rudimentary Italian. So he decided to send me on holiday to Italy, to a family which he was friendly with. And for two or three summers, I think three summers, I went off for a month or two months to stay on the Lago Maggioli, on Lake Maggioli, in North Italy. And now the Lago Maggioli for those of you who don't know, it is a kind of long thin slither of water. Its circumference is about a hundred and seven kilometres. And I know because I cycle around it in a day once. All of those kilometres were very long. You can always see the other side because it's a long thin lake. And you can see right across. It's only maybe three or four kilometres across. Now, how many people, as you listened to me, rabbiting on about Lago Maggioli, wrote to mind a lake of their own? Yes, tell me about your lake, look at that. Ah, wow, much better than mine. So at which point in my story did your volcano lake appear? Lake? Lake, you went to the volcano lake. What colours were there? Blue. Blue. Okay, anybody else get a lake of their own? Yes. I do, when I was a child, my father used to take us to a lake where he used to do fishing. So I remember that very well. He was trying to get us some fish. Was it a kind of a lake with a flat side, with flat sides or steep? No, no, no. With flat sides. Where was this? In Algeria. In Algeria. So Lago Maggioli evokes the volcano lake as she evokes the lake in Algeria, and that's perfectly normal in terms of everyday listening. When you listen to me talking about my lake, my Lago Maggioli, you will go, some of you, to your own lake. Now that means that the resultant stuff that you put into mid-term memory is going to be a mixture of what you added and what I gave. For me, the act of listening, a metaphor for it, would be that the Mississippi flow of internal stuff in the listener comes down to meet the ocean coming in. So the other person talking to me is the ocean coming in, and I, with my own schemata, am the river coming down. The act of listening is actually a mixing of those two waters. A mixing of the river water and the ocean water. And what we store in mid-term memory is the mixture. Certainly not only ocean water. Very unusual. So we delete, we get rid of things that don't strike us as important, but why do we do that? We do it because we can't hold all the details too much in the conscious mind. We distort, we modify, we change. So Lagermajorie becomes the Algerian lake or whichever. We generalize. If I give you a whole load of detail about something, you will almost certainly to retain it.  So if I was to tell you that one of the results of the Pinochet revolution in agriculture in Chile after the coup d'état allowed Chile to export onions, shallots, lettuces, apples, pears, and a huge amount of other vegetable produce to Japan, you will generalize the details up into fruit and veg in order to remember. Because you don't need to remember every example I gave you. There is the mission, which is knocking out. It's bringing the details up to a higher level so you can remember them as one chunk. Okay?  People are always elaborated. People will create pictures in their minds. People will take something small and make it bigger. And most of this talk this afternoon is going to be about that area of elaboration. The other thing that you do if it's conversational listening is that you begin to prepare for taking the conversation over for your own term. You begin to make it prepare for what you're going to say. Okay? So that's the fifth thing that we often do in conversational listening. Now of course there are many different types of listening apart from normal general listening that I've described. So for example the schizophrenic listening. The schizophrenic people who often not listen to or the syntactic pattern. They will listen to certain vital keywords from their point of view. So the keyword might be food. And they will start going off and creating thoughts around the word food. Whatever the keyword in the sentence that strikes them. So this is a particular form of listening which is not very productive. But it's certainly something that people in that condition will often do. So they'll pick out from the flow of language words and then construct meanings around that which may be quite different from the meanings intended by the speaker. There's language test listening. In a language test, a listening comprehension test typically with multiple choice questions you will listen to try to retain all the information equally because you may get general questions and the multiple choices or you may get detailed questions. So you have to become a really skillful tape recorder. And you have to be a tape recorder with an excellent search function so that you can quickly pull out the bits you need. Now that's completely different from other less specialised ones of listening. They aren't for the listening but it's one that has evolved because of what language teachers demand. And then of course there's in-depth listening when you listen very, very intently to your person and you try to not only get the meaning you try to block your own wish to delete your own wish to distort your own wish to generalise and to elaborate and try to stay exactly with that text in its full emotion and musicality. And therapists spend a lot of time learning that kind of listening learning that kind of listening that denies self denies the Mississippi going down to the sea and tries to focus only on the ocean coming in. That's very, very hard and very few people manage to do it fully successfully but it can be very, very powerful if you do manage to do it because it makes the other person feel really attended to. I want to bring you back now to normal listening to the kind of listening that happens in a normal way most of what happens is at an unconscious or semi-conscious level I mean, when you're listening to something you don't say ha that's unimportant, delete but unconscious mind deletes it doesn't ask the conscious mind it does it automatically What I'm going to do now is to show you how elaboration works by bringing what is normally an unconscious process into consciousness So what I'm going to do is to start a word level and I want it to give you some words I'm going to launch the word to you and I'm going to then ask you to wait for about six or seven seconds until I say please report and then you turn it to a part in some distance near you and you report what happens in this surely brilliant box for your head Don't do anything special with the word let your reaction come and then you turn to a partner and tell them what happened in those five or six seconds Normally this happens at lightning speed and unconsciously Are you ready for the first one? So, when you hear the word just make it similar for a moment and then I'll ask you to report and then you report to a partner First word, policeman and please report to a partner by using this gesture and when you see me do this then you do the same It's a quick way of bringing people back and allowing you to go on talking if you're saying something important Okay, the next word is are you ready? Engineer Next one, nurse nurse and report That's elaboration at word level You can't help it No dictator has ever found a way of stopping people doing that I would suggest that this is what Ron Carter has called everyday creativity that every single human being has I mean, there may be some people with certain medical conditions where they don't feel this but most recently normally do this automatically this elaboration, this filling out things from inside which are evoked by the word coming in and I think this is a marvellous aspect of human beings that we naturally are so incredibly creative and now I'm going to go up a linguistic level from the word to some phrases and we're going to have phrases to do with time, temporal phrases same process allow moments of quiet and then report Are you ready? The first one late at night late at night and report Afternoon The last phrase a bit too early and report I will go up to sentence level and the guy I should to write this sentence down can I do your tiny interpretation Ready? He hesitated at second thoughts he hesitated at second thoughts and decided to put it down the sentence that follows that one whatever sentence comes to your mind No, not as a group, as an individual now for about 20 minutes which is a long time even for adults but definitely a very long time for teenagers so can I ask you to stand up and talk to the partner in the row behind you and read my sentence and your own At the end of the long conference towards the end of the long conference even a little bit of movement is a relief hence asking you to stand and I'm going to give you a second Notice that what happened there was as you wrote the sentence there will have been an unconscious process going on in your head and then when the instruction from me came please write the next sentence you will have begun that writing process consciously but from whatever you did below the level of consciousness as you were taking the dictation that's why with many cases people started writing quite slowly and it wasn't a great long pause because the speed of unconscious thought is unbelievable so the mainframe of computing came to speed while the speed of the conscious mind is pretty slow the second sentence there came out of what you did with the first sentence let me give you a second sentence and in this sentence reading a space between what you've just got on the page and the sentence I'm going to give you so there's a couple of lines between the sentence I dictated and the sentence writing above it so a little gap ready? she was overcome by the beauty of what she saw she was overcome by the beauty of what she saw can you write the sentence before that one and the sentence after write the sentence before and the sentence that follows this is quite simple from the earlier sentence a new exercise you have finished writing and when the person sitting next to you has finished writing can you read the whole little paragraph to them sentence before my sentence and sentence after at word level at phrase level and sentence level that happens very very naturally interesting thing is that this reality clashes with the way some language teachers teach because very very often the questions that they ask the students are based on the original text and not on the elaborated text not on what the student is with the text and that's quite an interesting and serious problem but before I move into that and I'm then going to tell you a story so that we move into pooled text level a little bit of housekeeping the institute that I work for Pilgrims in Canterbury has a magazine on the internet called humanising language teaching we wanted to call it at the beginning humanising language teachers Simon and I might be a bit cheeky so we call it humanising language teaching it started in 1999 it was quite early in the web development and it's now it's now visited by something like 5000 people per day it's not like a British Council and BBC site which has many many more people coming to visit but it's not too bad for a small issue this is an appeal for writers for the magazine especially from an audience like this where you teach many many different languages really very very interesting for you if you wrote something that motivates you about your thoughts on language teaching magazine has I remember one marvelous article it was a lady from Ekaterinburg in Europe East of the Euros who wrote an article to her three most pig-like students and she described what a little bastard saying it because that's the way she put it she wrote in a fantastic Russian baroque way though in English and then she said thank you to the three pigs she said you have taught me infinity more than the hundreds and hundreds of really decent friendly nice students have had so bastards though you were thank you very much and then that's an example of a practicing teacher really really saying something that she felt and I think that the president then editor Hamil Kulcheski is looking for as many articles where she can find of that sort where there is a real powerful personal contact as well as an intellectual one we sent out an email to remind people what's in the magazine does anybody get that email does anybody you do how often does it come usually what was that you should have had another one it's every two months if the initiative goes up okay fine and what did you give somebody your address oh it might have been one of the brass hats oh that's amazing because that was two years ago you've done that yeah anyway if things work out work out right put your name and address on this bit of paper name and email address is really enough and we will then try to send you an email in return and you wish it goes up can I ask you to pass this back down your row easy pass it back I'm going to tell you a story which was a marvelous event in my childhood in a way the reading of this book it was one of the first books that came I was born in 1940 and then we think all the second world in the class of five years and in about 1946 books began to flow into the country from other places and this book came from Canada and I still remember the illustrations in the book it was absolutely amazing amazingly different from the books we had around in UK during the second world war and the story is about the bear that wasn't so the bear was walking in the forest he looked up and he saw the wild geese flying to the south and the bear thought to himself oh when the wild geese fly to the south it's time to hibernate and then he walked on through the forest and he noticed the yellowy brown leaves falling down from the trees and the bear thought to himself when the birds are flying to the south and the yellowy brown leaves are falling from the trees it's time to go to sleep for the winter and slowly he shuffled towards the mouth of the cave where he would normally hibernate he went into the cave and found some nice dry leaves practically once from the year before and he piled them up and he lay down and very very soon went into a deep winter sleep now this was in October beginning of the memories of men in the forest they came with little instruments to look through and they had little black and white sticks and they used the instruments to look at the sticks and they made measurements and they drew primes and then these men were not very strong they were kind of very flaccid and non-athletic men disappeared and three days later big tough guys appeared with massive machines and with mechanical diggers and bulldozers and very very soon they knocked all the trees down carted the wood away and began building and digging and by January they had finished building this huge great ginormous factory right over where the bear was sleeping now bear sleeps very deeply in the winter so he wasn't disturbed and in the beginning at the beginning of Frederick the other men came from the city workers and they began working in the factory and the great chimneys of the factory began belching black smoke beginning of March and the bear began to stir he was somehow beginning to be time to wake up and maybe eat something and he opened one eye and he opened the other eye and he rubbed both eyes and he saw the light coming from the mouth of the cave and he lumberingly got up and he went to the mouth of the cave and he looked around where are the trees where's the grass and all he saw were the great chimneys belching black smoke and he thought, I'm dreaming, I'm still asleep so he rubbed his eyes very hard and he pinched himself three or four times and no, it was still the same and at that moment a man with a big cap came over the factory yard and he said who are you? and the bear said, I'm a bear sir and the foreman he said you're not a bear you're a stupid man who wears a fur coat and leaves the shape and the bear said, but sir, I'm a bear and the foreman said listen, I'm going to be patient with you I'm going to take you to the third vice-president and I'm going to ask him to try to persuade you of who you are you are not a bear you're a stupid man who wears a fur coat and leaves the shape and so they went into the third vice-president's office and there were two waste paper baskets and two typists and there was a big desk and a British man rather bald sitting behind the desk that was the third vice-president and the foreman said he says he's a bear sir and the third vice-president said you're not a bear and I need to tell you quite seriously and definitely you are no bear you are a stupid man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat and the bear began to he said, I am a bear but there was a beginning to be movement of whether he was a bear or not he'd just woken up and said he was asleep you could imagine his confusion and the third vice-president very kindly said to the bear I don't want to be too harsh on you I'm going to take you to the second vice-president and so they went and done one corridor and came to another and here there were three typists and three waste paper baskets and a bigger desk in a smaller man sitting behind with less hair and the third vice-president said excuse me sir to the second vice-president this strange man says he's a bear as you can see of course he is nothing but a man a stupid man who wears a fur coat and needs a shave and the second vice-president nodded and said yes of course and he said to the bear you are not a bear you are a foolish man and he said if you need more persuasion I will take you right up to the president's office they went there but the president was absent and so there was nothing left to be done for the foreman to take the bear and put him to do what a man should be doing because he would be working on a machine and so all through the month of March April, May and on the bear had to pull levers and look at dials and turn wheels on this huge machine and he worked and he worked all the way through the summer, the spring and the summer and then in September there was an oil crisis and the factory had to close down the men of course went back to the town where they'd come from but the bear the bear walked out into the forest then he looked up it was late September and he saw the wild birds flying into the south and he thought it's time to and he said I can't I can't hide away because I'm a man I'm a stupid man who wears a fur coat and needs a shed and then he walked on further through the forest and he saw the leaves fluttering down from the trees and he thought it's time to and then he stopped himself he said I can't hide away because because I'm a man and so he wanted to constantly through the forest and it got colder and colder and white stuff began to fall he'd never seen the snow before because he thought a proper bear is hibernating of that time and a long icicle began to form and hung down from his nose and he felt utterly miserable and then he walked back into the factory grounds he walked back into the cave and and he found some leaves and piled them up and he laid down and as he drifted off towards sleep he thought to himself I'm not a man I'm a bear I think I like telling this story because I was sent to a boarding school at the age of 13 and I was deeply confused about who or what I was at that time and I think that this story now has an explanatory effect for me in terms of not being sure of who you are and what you're going to be doing which I spoke about a year ago now I wonder what you were doing as I told that story were there some people who went meta and began to have thoughts about the business of storytelling you did so what were you doing in your head I was doing both I was enjoying the pleasure of listening and at the same time thinking parallel structures that's why we really enjoy this because it's a smaller man at a bigger office and the parallel structure has come back in front of us so you were thinking about the kind of symbolic structure of the story in a way I was thinking about capitalism actually that wasn't a factory and his comment was about very strongly people losing their identities so when did that train of thought come into your mind when the foreman met him I worked at a cheese factory for six months as far as the intellectual thoughts of our capitalism was also your own experience as a factory worker coming in did you hear that from strongly in parallel to the latter I was picking up the razor on the floor also I noticed there was an eraser here that must have looked really not a number level I was in many places at the same time yes exactly anybody else find that they went meta yes listening to the work how you were using your voice and the way you were changing it okay so you were listening to voice control okay did some people drift off and go somewhere else or think about what you're going to cook for someone yes when the bear started interacting with a person I went off on a bit of a tangent and I started thinking that's an interesting twist in the story and then I started thinking about are there any other stories that I know where that happened and you found one and there are people who will have found but thank you for that one there are people who will have found that other stories came in yes what happened to you well I'm sorry I'm you said the first she's sorry because she said the third president the third vice president then you said the second vice president and when the bear was going to see the first president you can guess who I thought of Berluscon okay why? terrible I think it's terrible that this that image should have come to you you hear him or see him no luckily you just in time said he wasn't there and then I said oh great so no he's not there thank God this is a very clear example of elaboration from my own experience well I must admit that at a stage my mind wanted to wonder a ways to what I'm going to cook tonight but at the same time I was trying to also concentrate and not miss the story line so you were double tasking yes you were cooking and you were also yes I was trying to think where this was leading to whether you were trying to talk about the environment and whether that was going to take okay then I could only stop myself and just focus on the story did you notice what the colleague before that said or one, two, three back was that she said sorry she started off my apologising for being a normal listener that's an extraordinary thing to do yes I was going to be something amazing at the end and then it was this kind of bad end happy ending it's not so bad end normally it kind of builds up the pressure and I was thinking there must be something amazing as a type of civilisation waiting for me next time did anybody find that other stories came yes when you said that I was taking another beer I remembered a play that I did with my students that was about America and I started thinking a little while that my students and I came back so so did you randomly drink the stories in Paraguay for a moment actually I got a little distracted for a moment think about the play of course you left me and then went off and you came back there are some people who managed to have two stories running in Paraguay they run parallel films, parallel stories ok now let me now go and hope that we can do much more work on this if we have time, if we don't I want you to think now about the sensory elaboration I guess some of you had pictures did somebody get pictures you got pictures this morning you showed us a picture about the Canadian sign in the forest and bears because he gave us a wonderful picture this morning about a sign in the woods in Canada saying make sure you have your make sure you have clean underwear on or something like that it was a public sign so immediately made a fool of us bears, smell and immediately so you've got somebody coming in on this morning you realise this is totally normal you realise this is actually you're just being ordinary human beings hyper creative ordinary human beings now I want to ask to explore briefly what you're doing sensory people who got a number of pictures as I told the story who did ok can I work with you can you, everybody else right now the questions I asked just the questions not the answers what's your name Rosie, were your pictures black and white or colour from the beginning and were they still or moving they were moving when did they start moving what point when the when the snakes started belching ah that point once the spider had been built ok up till then they were still ok were they still so yeah they were still up till then were they big or small for pictures large, I don't know large, I don't know my brain ok when you say large are you thinking sort of like that picture of that screen or were they far or near she was there they were inside my head there wasn't really a it wasn't really a sight to them but it was almost as if inside my head I was looking through a thin film ok they were flicking they were flicking right in the cinema like in an old cinema because you were talking about different scenes ok yeah so they flicking when there was a change of scene yeah were your pictures with a frame or till they go off into space no weren't you actually at any point in the picture I mean in the space rather than the picture you know in a dream sometimes you can be in the space of the dream rather than looking into them outside it was more than it kind of zoomed in enough as if it were like a camera I mean when you were talking about the chimney it was zoomed in and we were actually in the space you were actually in the space you were actually in the space or part of it in the second part which is a bit bizarre because it was in the office bit different it was a bit different it was a bit different because it was in the office but that's what you did don't deny what you did you were in parallel space parallel space sometimes people don't have external pictures sometimes they find themselves in the space where the action is taking place Rosie the first time I met someone who was in the parallel space the lecture of this work is exploratory so I'm delighted to be in the parallel space can you now turn to a partner and very quickly try to find out the nature of their pictures if they got pictures if they didn't get pictures ask them about sound that's what I mean about elaboration there's very much more extraordinary detail and life in there than I put in there you've got the equivalent of 30 pages of a novel in terms of verbal description and you did that in 5-10 minutes now let me just change role what colour were the leaves as they cut it down from the trees they were green and they made it green it was smart when I did that I talked very clearly about the colour it was really brown please pay more attention what do we know about the management structure of the company it's missing a first page there were three vice presidents and there's actually two vice presidents no they left one out it was really two and who else the mention of the leaves in the cave when the bear first went in to hibernate a probable shear do you see how stupid this question is do you see how actually asinine they are what does it matter whether the fluttering leaves are really brown or yellow as you said it's absurd and what I'm doing is I'm asking linguistic questions about the dead text of Mary and I'm ignoring what you've done isn't that a perverse idiocy and isn't this normal across all languages don't you accept didn't you have a moment of guilt that you couldn't give me a proper good student answer to me I'm remembering it forever as a student at night I mean I know how you understand how stupid it is to go back to the dead text and not to pay attention to the text that you were created is an absurd behaviour on my part so big question mark about the role of so-called comprehension questions in language teaching if you go to the BBC Herplus British Council website I run a blog for them this time last year and there's an article there about the whole problem of the comprehension question if you want to follow up that might be a nice place to go I think I need to stop there because there are other people who are going to work I have these books on display and if you want to buy in either or each trial quick there's a decent discount from what you pay in the shops thank you very much thank you very much mario


Well hello friends and welcome back to my channel. Today we're going to be working on a budget for August. If you guys have never been here before, hi, my name is Emily. I am a single individual. I have a dog and I live in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. I also run my own business as well. So some of the normal things that you would see in a normal person's budget you do not see here like internet and phone and healthcare and like things like that you won't see in my budget here but everything else is real numbers that I'm going to share with you today. I don't share incoming but I do share outgoing. The planner that I use currently for 2018 is, hold on, let me get there, the Aaron Condren Deluxe Monthly Planner. Aaron Condren just released their new planners for the 2018-2019 season and this is what it is. I got my new one. I'm actually setting this up a little bit differently this year but if you guys want to check out the video doing a walkthrough of this I will leave it up in a card for you guys. That other planner that I just put off camera is not going to be a budget planner for 2019. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do for 2019. I will still be doing budgets and budgeting videos but I'm just not sure if I want to maybe switch it up or do something different. I'm not really sure but anyway if you guys have been with me for a little while you know that I set up my planners in this way where August 2018 and then I always use these little long sticky notes also from Aaron Condren that has kind of like things that I might need to spend some money on. Actually CarTabs was last month. I forgot to put it in but it was $51 and it's already been bought and paid for. I still have to like slap them on my car. Probably should be like something I should do right? But State Fair is my like big expenditure that's not my normal expenses. So typically every month things look fairly similar but sometimes they look a little bit different. But I'll show you what I'm going to be using. I have these little like piggy bank stickers from Coffee Break Planner and then I've also got this sheet. This is an Aaron Condren budgeting sticker decoration sheet and then also from Aaron Condren I'm going to be using this book. It is the Aaron Condren designer sticker book in the monthly collection edition 2 and I'm going to be using this because I really want to use this up at the top. Also I have some washi from my shop. This is just like a really pretty like tropical looking floral and then I've got my Pilot Ultra Fine Point Permanent Pen in the blue and then this is also from Aaron Condren. It's a clip in bookmark so you can kind of just like clip it in if you want but we don't need to clip it in today. I do use this side of the page. I don't use this side of the page. I've never used this side of the page but fun fact in the new planner this page is not there and also this page isn't there either. There's a lot of changes so definitely check out that video if you guys are interested. But let's get into the decorating which is the most fun part. I am a decorative planner person.  It makes me stay on task. I mean I don't know if that's just like my brain telling me that I made a plan so I've got to stick with it but maybe I'm not sure but I don't know. I really like it. I find it helpful for me but you know I feel like I don't know isn't there like some study out there saying if you write something down you're like more likely to achieve the goal or do the thing or something. I'm pretty sure there is but I don't know. I'm not I'm not totally sure but probably. So I'll put my little August flag up there which looks super cute. Oh let me zoom you guys in just a little bit. Sorry. Oh wrong way Emily. Wrong way. Sorry I haven't had any like caffeination yet today. I need to work on that and then from this thing I'm going to put this one that says budget right here. Yeah you kind of can't see that. Okay well that's all right. That's okay. All right and I usually like to start out with this one that says bills on it. Put that right up at the top and then like I said most of my bills are the same every single month. Really what ends up being a little bit different is just extra expenses plus I have a friend coming to stay with me too so I'm going to put that in as well. Here are all of my bills. I kind of messed up on Netflix but that's okay. We're going to leave it in. My mortgage is $464.42. I get a lot of questions on my mortgage of why it's so low. If you all are interested I will put up in a card for you guys my mortgage details and how it is so low. So check out that video if you'd like to know more. My HOA is $158. My gas is $55. My collagen service is $3185. My electrical that's always an estimate. I always estimate about $75 this time of year. My garbage is $17.85. Water is $54. That's an estimate. It kind of fluctuates like three or four dollars and then my auto insurance is the same every month at $85.42 and Netflix is the same at $11.75. I'll get that totaled up in a moment. As for my fuel I'm going to estimate about $100. My grocery budget I'm usually about $200 but I am going to bump it up to $250. I have a friend coming to stay for four days, five days at the very end of the month. So I want to allocate some extra funds for things that I wouldn't normally buy that when they're here I can accommodate some of their dietary needs. As for dining I'm going to do about $100. Normally I have that a little bit lower but again since I have someone coming to stay here we might be going out to eat a little bit more often or maybe even ordering a pizza or something one day and then also the state fair I am allocating $100 towards the state fair. I know people think that that's a lot of money for the state fair but to be honest it's actually not that bad and that's going to go towards all of the entry fees, shuttle fees, food, any souvenirs or anything like that I want to get. So let's get this totaled up and then we'll go over it. All right so here are my totals so for my set expenses up here is $9.53.29 and then for kind of my fluctuating spending is $5.50 and then my August total is $1,503.29. I'm going to use one of these little piggy stickers too because you know cuteness right guys? I mean we got to make it look cute. So that is my budget for August 2018. Thank you guys so much for watching. If you are interested in seeing more from me feel free to hit the red subscribe button. You can also hit the little bell notifications if you want to be notified when I do upload new content for y'all. Also if you have any questions feel free to post them down below and if you have any suggestions on a good planner to use for 2019 for my budget let me know. I'm kind of open to different ideas possibly I might decide to just go with another Aaron Condren and do the same thing but I don't know I'm kind of in the mood to change things up but you never know. And you guys have the greatest ideas so let me know what system you use but again that is going to be it for me. Thanks for hanging out with me today and I will see y'all in the next video. Bye guys. Well folks it's time to kick it old school. So you can feel cool. Yeah.


Okay, welcome to our latest in this live stream series. I'm Zach Weismiller with my colleague here, Nick Gillespie. And today, I am thrilled to have just one of my favorite people joining us. He's a clear thinker, an extremely entertaining podcaster, a dad, a successful entrepreneur, the man, the legend, Camille Foster. Thanks for joining us, Camille. Thank you for that. I don't think he's that great, but it's good to see him.  Yeah. Well, you know, Camille, this is an honest, truthful outcome. This isn't one of your cable news programs. Fake news. I want to get a little meta this afternoon and talk about what it is that you like to talk about. And to set that up, I'm just going to play an intro to your podcast, the fifth column, which I have no doubt many of today's viewers are quite familiar with. We know of new methods of attacks. Greetings, and welcome back to another exciting installment of the fifth column podcast. This is your weekly rhetorical assault on the new cycle of people that made it. And occasionally ourselves, I'm Camille Foster. I do various things at Free Think. And today, we had a delayed start because apparently there's this really interesting, compelling, engrossing profile of. So you know, your weekly rhetorical assault on the new cycle and the people who make it, you like to talk about media. And in fact, I think of fifth column largely as a media criticism podcast. That'd be correct. Why is that such a foundational aspect of what you do? Well, I think media literacy is important in a free society. We need access to information. The people who bring us information play an important role, but they need to be held accountable. And citizens need to be equipped with the tools to be able to discern what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. I think there's an analogy that I've used of someone who's going down into a mine, which this is very filthy, difficult work. They bring up something. They kind of dust it off a little bit. And it sort of seems to sheen as a sheen and it's yellow. But is it gold or is it fool's gold? And making a determination between those two things is not always easy, but it is definitely worth doing. And I'd like to think that that's what we try to do at the fifth column with a great deal of levity. We operated a couple of different speeds. Sometimes it's very sober and serious.  But either way, it's worth your time and your money. So subscribe. Oh, yeah. Always be selling, right? What is the worst?   I've never actually I'm sure I've been in a mine. I've never worked in a mine. The worst job I've had was probably a clerical gig. I took it like 14 or 15. Apercash. Yeah, I understand. The physical labor that I've had to do has always been kind of rewarding, you know, like swinging an axe to chop wood or something like that. But it's fun. It's great. You get to be outside. How did you get kind of hip to the idea that the news is raw material or it's prepackaged in a way that you as the consumer, the reader, whatever, has to really do the work to figure out what this means and where does it come from? What does it mean and where does it go?    And I believe I was introduced to that in one of his books. It might have been the one about, I'm forgetting the title at the moment, but that was one of the first things that I remember kind of touching this skeptical bone that I have in my body. But at the same time, I was raised in a very devout household and was surrounded by literature. And specifically, he had to read a lot of the biblical account and can distinctly remember the first time I encountered like the Downing Thomas and this notion that there is kind of it's blessed to be someone who believes without seeing. And that never sat well with me because it just doesn't seem like a good quality to have. So I'm a bit of a skeptic. But I think in a very productive sense, I think it's necessary to have kind of a skeptical disposition so long as it's productive. I think that's very different from cynicism. Yeah, you're also very libertarian. How did you come to, so you're skeptical to begin with. That can lead to a lot of directions, but then you're also libertarian. How did that come about? I can say with some certainty that the very first libertarian thing that I read was probably Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom. I was in college and someone said to me during a conversation, Camille, you're far too bright to be a Democrat. And I don't know how he got me to this book, but he did. And in the introduction to the book, there's this treatment of Kennedy's speech where he talks about, he says, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. And Milton Friedman goes on to explain neither side of this is consistent with the ideals of a free man and a free society. And goes on to articulate this vision of free people working towards their several goals within a free society and our goal being to maintain that kind of system of freedom. And for whatever reason, I'm a sophomore junior in college and I'd never been exposed to that clear a distillation of what freedom could be, ought to be. And it was immediately appealing and resonated with me. And I went on from there to read a number of other things, including Bastiatz the Law and a couple of other kind of foundational books. And then I discovered Reason and Cato and I started reading some guy named Nick Billespie. And yeah, and then further radicalized from there. Well, then I found Rothbard and that's what really, really got me going. Well, we'll get to Rothbard first, man. Where did you go to college? And what did you major in? University of Maryland College Park. I started as a biochemistry major. My end of my first semester, I went home and started watching C-SPAN like religiously. And I discovered Washington Journal and I got really hooked. And without telling my mom, I changed my major to government and economics like the very next year. And I didn't actually end up completing the term in a normal way. After my second year of college, I started a telecom consulting firm and slowly built up this lifestyle business and ran that for about 10 years. But I eventually completed my two degrees in government economics and that was important. But I think having that kind of protracted undergraduate experience also gave me an opportunity to just a lot of independent reading and to find and pursue my interests and to select where there were elective courses, stuff that was really consistent with what was most interesting to me. And I think all of that probably contributed to my odd development. It's interesting hearing you kind of put skepticism at the center of what you're doing. Like, how does that interact with or I guess inform your politics? Yeah, well, I mean, I think like skepticism and fallibility are critical foundational pieces of what you need, like the kind of culture of freedom. Certainly like the notion of free speech is rooted in this sensibility that whatever the dominant ideas, there is some new perspective which might be heretical today, but is ultimately right. And it is vitally important that we actually have a system and a culture that is okay with people challenging the dominant perspectives that are on offer and overturning them and that this is a natural process. And I mean, I think even today in our very modern society, my sense is that most learned people believe we've kind of reached the definitive end of history and the end of philosophy that there are no new inspiring ideas that'll be brought to bear and that there couldn't be anything that they believe that isn't absolutely right and true. It's this like thoroughgoing fundamentalism and it exists on the left and the right. But I think people with this kind of classical liberal bent libertarians have a much better appreciation of just how difficult it's been for us to get where we are and how likely it is that we're wrong about plenty of things and the ever present possibility that we could retrace our steps and go backwards and fall into something worse. And I think it all kind of flows together in that way. Yeah, I'm very worried about the retracing the steps and maybe we can talk a little bit more about that in a second with as regards to kind of your skepticism of narratives that come to dominate politics or media. I think a really good example of that was you've been a guest a couple of times on your friends with Barry Weiss who hosts a podcast called Honestly which I very much enjoy. But you were on there a couple of times talking about the so-called Central Park Karen case. And I want to play an excerpt from your first appearance where you kind of explained your thoughts about all that. And I want to go from there and just talk about how representative it is of the way you think about much of how the media frame stories, why they do it, why it might be a problem. So let's play that clip first. All this is happening against the backdrop of America's racial reckoning which is just in its earliest weeks. George Floyd, I can't breathe, George Floyd. And during that period you had nightly protests all over the country and New York City was certainly no exception. More tense clashes around the country including this standoff at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn where a police car burned as officers. There were demonstrations in front of the mayor's house in front of City Hall in the streets of Soho and from what I've learned about the case, it's hard for me to ignore the likelihood that the decision to proceed with this prosecution against the odds was largely a public relations stunt. So I mean, why was this case so interesting to you? And just what are I guess some of the lessons you took away from digging a little deeper into it? Well, I think the best way to give you contacts for that is to explain how I discovered that there was something worth looking into here. Fully a year after this woman, Amy Cooper, I had her encounter with a man named Christian Cooper, in a relationship in Central Park. I was reading a story on NBC, I guess it's just NBC.com, maybe it's NBCnews.com, probably that, and somewhere buried in the story about a lawsuit that she'd filed against her former employer for wrongful termination was a couple of lines about this guy named Jerome Lockett who had had a previous encounter with Christian Cooper and the NBC story, all it says is that Jerome Lockett, that a letter from Jerome Lockett to NBCnews was included in the legal filing. And NBC, the article goes on to say that NBC spoke to Jerome Lockett at the time that the attack happened or the not attack but the encounter happened. And it doesn't provide any additional detail. And I went looking for any story that they would have written related to this Jerome Lockett situation and the situation with Jerome Lockett was that Christian Cooper, the gentle bird watcher who recorded Amy Cooper and made her famous, he'd had two physical altercations in Central Park in the previous four months, at least two that we know of. And he admitted to this in a private context and I found the audio for that. And I think if people know that, they probably approach the story about Amy Cooper and that 30 second video with a slightly different perspective.  And they never bothered to explain why they didn't run this story. I even reached out for comment to the editors and the reporters that were responsible for interviewing him at the time is kind of shocking. And what became more shocking to me was that as I continued to look around and I talked to more journalists, and I think this is ultimately, there's the human tragedy of sort of Amy Cooper being pilloried for something that isn't obviously what people imagine. But the heart of the story is that a number of journalists at media outlets, some conservative and some liberal knew about the additional details that there were other people and that they were too incurious or too afraid to actually complicate this story in a way that made it look like anything other than a crazy care in white woman calling the police on a black man in order to get him murdered. It didn't matter to them that Christian Cooper had in the weeks prior been advocating for more law enforcement in Central Park because he wanted to have cops there to enforce leash laws. He was not afraid of being murdered by the cops. At least that doesn't suggest those aren't the actions of someone who believes they'll be murdered by the cops. And yeah, does this kind of stuff happen? Sure. I think there are plenty of examples of it and we've seen lots of examples of rather crummy moral clarity, moral clarity is a phrase that we know now, motivated reasoning that is ostensibly supposed to be journalism, but is anything but. To Christian Cooper's credit, he really did not seem to want to pursue this once it became a media mouse drive. Now he's got like a Netflix show or whatever. But I was gonna say is it's readable. Christian Cooper decided that he didn't want to participate in the prosecution and at some point decided to no longer do media after having done a lot of media. I wouldn't want to prosecute either if I knew that when I got up on the stand and was cross examined, a great deal of things would be made public that thus far the media systematically ignored. Without focusing on him though, like the speed with which her employer canned her and the whole story became kind of set in stone that this is a woman who is the moral equivalent of the woman who said that Emmett Till had whistled at her, that was the narrative with capital letters. How do we guard against that in a world where there is a rapid response? We have all forms of media, everybody has a voice but some voices count for more. What, how do we slow the race to the narrative down in a way so we have better responses? Yeah, some voices count for more. And also we have this bizarre media ecosystem where you've got algorithms that press stories and journalistic outlets that publish stories instantaneously and a culture wherein we are primed to grab this 32nd clip, devoid of context and retweet it to all of our followers. And I think the best thing that we could do, the greatest safeguard would be for us to, one, be more skeptical, dutifully, rigorously skeptical. But two, to just develop and maybe that skeptical muscle is part of this, the appropriate set of cultural antibodies that allow us to exist in the world as we find it today. Like the current media ecosystem, the current level of connectedness is something that we are simply not designed to deal with. It manages to play on kind of all of our weird cognitive biases in ways that can be incredibly harmful. And I think it's imperative to imagine that this story that you're reading about the person who was purportedly the worst kind of person could be you. It could be that they said something inelegant. And if you actually care about the purported injustice that took place, then you should care enough to want to know the difference between an actual crime and an imagined crime between an impoliteness or a mistake and someone who is a vehement racist or an anti-semite. Like the difference matters. It's not trivial. It sounds like a good tee-up for some of the clips or go ahead. Yeah, I mean, one thing that I took from that was, especially the clip there makes it clear the context of this was coming on the heels of the kind of uprisings that were happening after the George Floyd killing. And there was all this energy around this issue. And so that's perhaps, one lesson for the skeptic to take is when there's a lot of discussion or energy around a particular issue, and then stories begin to pop up that just like very conveniently like further that, maybe that warrants an extra look. And like one of the political narratives that I think we could all examine right now as we approach the midterms is, and it seems like kind of the winds of political change might be coming. And there's a lot of stories, a lot of narratives about what exactly that means.  The reality might be a little more complicated than that, but let's play this clip from Hillary Clinton to get a sense of the message that Democrats are putting forward right now. This is for like a kind of pack that she is behind. It's like a, it's a fundraising appeal that this is the message that she feels is appropriate to be putting out right now. Extremis already have a plan to literally steal the next presidential election. And they're not making a secret of it. So what's your reaction to the discussion around election security, fraud, and the upcoming midterms? Anyone who's been paying attention ought to know that since the around the 2000 election, we're good Gordy Bush, which ended up in the courts in order to get decided. There's been growing skepticism in both political parties about the trustworthiness of our electoral process. And we've seen kind of a one-upsmanship in every single national election cycle in the midterms as well this year with people increasingly suggesting that the outcome is dubious, that the other side is cheating, that they're going to cheat, they'll definitely cheat. And you can tell who is going to, generally you can tell who's going to be the most full-throated in decrying the outcome of the election based on who wins and who loses. Except Donald Trump is the exception to the rule here because he was still insisting that the election had been kind of mucked with. Yeah, he never accepted the fact. Even when he won. Oh, yeah, because he was like, I would have won like with 54% of the vote if they counted all the ballots. Yeah, so he definitely has kind of perfected this entire thing in the worst sorts of ways, but this is hardly alien to Democrats and Hillary Clinton seems to be indulging in the same thing. And I mean, look, it's not as though there aren't extremists who are articulating their perspective on what ought to happen, on how elections ought to be taken, on reinstalling the former president of the United States. He himself continues to insist that it's ought to happen, but exaggerating the degree to which this is a thing. Referring to some marginal figure in the conservative movement in the fringes of the conservative movement and suggesting that there is this bold plan to steal the next election is precisely what Democrats would call this if Donald Trump was doing or any of his acolytes. It is dangerous rhetoric that increases concern and skepticism about the quality of our institutions at a time when what we should really be doing is talking about transparency, trying to build trust. And we're not doing that. And that is that's deeply concerning. Yeah, Hillary's that group is called the indivisible or indivisible. And she refers to them as the indivisibles. But, you know, their catchphrase is crush the coup. Yes. Like a violent image. That's crazy. Which is itself a violent takeover of the government. You have talked, you know, about how, yeah, I mean, there's no question. Trump is Trump is like the, you know, the Pavarotti of this, right? He can play, he can sing any song you want to hear about election fraud.  But then there's people like Stacey Abrams, who lost a gubernatorial race in Georgia a few years ago and has never conceded. What are your thoughts about the way she represents a kind of democratic mode of challenging the outcomes of clearly legitimate elections? Yeah, no. I mean, Stacey Abrams is a incredibly interesting character in American politics. This is a woman who has been sainted despite having never really won anything in electoral politics. She's most famous for losing an election, insisting that she lost by a fraud. And now, several years later, we know launching an incredible, perhaps the most expensive in the history of Georgia, legal challenge to this election. Let me pull up, I pulled some clips from this recent Politico article on that. I just wanna just to give everyone a sense of how expensive and failed this operation was more than $25 million over two years on legal fees, mostly on a single case with the largest amount, going to the self-described boutique law firm of the candidate's campaign chairwoman. There's a judge who ruled against her, said the challenge practices violate neither the Constitution nor the Voting Rights Act. That's a slam dunk. You know, what she had claimed after she lost to Kemp, 50 to 48 was that thousands of voters, a disproportionate number of whom were people of color were effectively disenfranchised by overly restrictive voting rules. So yeah, I mean, what message does that send about trustworthiness of our institutions and all that money spent to come up with very little at the end of the day? Look, it's impossible for me to read her mind. I can't know whether or not there was deliberate fraud here. I can't know whether or not she was acting in bad faith or any of that other stuff. I don't need to speculate about her motives, but what we can say is that it is incredibly unseemly to be enriching to the tune of tens of millions of dollars your very good friend and campaign manager while you are drumming up all of these rather wild conspiracies about what happened in the election. I mean, they even included in the original legal firing which was incredibly complicated and long. This voluminous legal filing claims about election machines that weren't acting properly, that they had been hacked in some way, shape or form because people were trying to push Abrams but that it would switch to Kemp. I mean, this is hypocrisy that would be risible if it wasn't so consequential. There's the connection that I see here between what we were talking about in media coverage and all the kind of innuendo swirling around elections is just this decreasing trust, being able to trust what you see, being able to trust supposed outcomes. And part of this, you were mentioning earlier this confusion that is being created by I don't know, digital media in general or inability to cope with information overload and so forth. And now layer on top of that, the ability to manipulate for, purposely manipulate media both in, just by clipping things out of context and just like outright all spring clips. And we did pull a couple of examples of that from various political operatives that have engaged in that. This first one here is Jill Biden. This was a recent one. Dr. Jill Biden. Dr. Jill Biden, my apologies. And this is a, just everyone, this is a doctored clip, so be forewarned. Realize that even the smallest flame can illuminate our path home. That the sweetest delicacies are made with love. That the most rewarding gifts are those we give.  Hey! And then there's also this one that I saw recently. This is from a kind of political operative named Bubba Prague on Twitter. And this one actually earned him the stay informed tag from Twitter and a little correction on the sidebar. This is incredibly obviously fake to me. I don't know why people fell for it, but it's got like 40,000 likes on Twitter. And you can kind of see how he frames it. He's like writing that line between, trying to say that it's satire, but actually I wanna also dupe as many people as I can with this, so let's play this real quick. This raid happened and it was a raid. It's not a raid.  Of course it was a raid. It was not a raid. They were serving a valid process in accordance with the laws and constitution of the United States and the state of Florida. They did it with integrity. They did it with honor. And to say it's a raid is disinformation. And you guys need to drive, excuse me. So yeah, I mean. Disinformation. Like problems I believe that I think, but. But that's fascinating, isn't it? Cause we now have, I mean, this was, you know, as somebody who was writing in the 90s about the rise of the internet generally lowered price and cost for technology. Suddenly you had, everybody became able to basically do really good fakes. And that obviously is only getting better and better. I don't know. I tend to find a lot of this stuff incredibly liberating because this is a millennial, millennia old impulse by people to recontextualize and reconfigure official discourse into whatever they wanted. I mean, in the middle ages, you could be in various principalities. This was true in England. If you were caught writing down what the king said in a public setting and you weren't officially his emmanuances, you could be killed because they wanted to control the, you know, the discourse. Right. So yeah, on a certain level, like I'm all for this kind of stuff and the more ludicrous and the better it is. Like the more believable it is, the better. But it does lead to cynicism, right? Where you cannot believe anything that you see. You really have to check.  Well, that's the old journalism dictum. And I think you make it a really great point, Nick. I had a conversation with someone about education the other day and they were saying something about these AI software is that can write entire essays for you.  And my feeling about this is, you know, it's easy to kind of fetishize the tech and to think about this as this intractable problem will never be able to solve. But the reality is that there's two things going on. One that we've been here before and you could always hire someone to kind of write a paper for you. You probably need, to the extent this becomes a widespread phenomena, maybe you need to change the model. We evolve and we do things a little bit differently. And the second thing is that our countermeasures to these things are improving markedly every single day. And there are some really impressive efforts underway to do things like put digital content on chain so that there is a clear chain of custody and you have a sensibility about authenticity and entire organizations that I suspect will exist at some point in the near future to help verify content and to verify the verifiers. And yes, that is the world we'll be in. But in a very real sense, it's a world that we've always lived in. When there were only three media sources, the capacity of the state to lie to you in various ways existed. It was real and tangible. And I would say that it was almost certainly greater than today. Is it hard to know things? Sure, I suspect that's, it's complicated. There's a lot of things going on. Martin Gurrey's book Revolta the Public is really informative on that. But it's always been hard to know things. And for a lot of us, I think we probably weren't unaware of the degree to which we were being fed oversimplified narratives or outright falsehoods that benefited someone which shouldn't make you cynical.  You know, Jeff, on that point of the essays, my ex-wife and her husband, who are both full professors at Chapman University, I went to dinner with them the other night and they were talking about this because college professors now use a variety of programs where they check essays to see if they've been plagiarized. There's a database that they check again. But they say the AI stuff because they have a lot of Chinese students from mainland China whose English is not good. And the one way that they know there's something up is when the grammar is perfect because the words may not make much sense but if they're grammatically perfect. So this is kind of like a man in the high castle world where they're selling fake replicas of the old West and if they're too good, you know it's a fake. The only option you had before that was Michael Moynihan reading your thing to find some weird cadence in there and say, oh, you're a plagiarist. It's amazing, I think a lot going back to the 90s when email became was the killer app and then there were viruses and email you didn't know about this or that. And it's like we took care of that problem. You don't hear about computer viruses the way that you did circa 1995 or 96. Yeah, and I think that the perspective here on offer is that hysteria probably isn't warranted but concern is fine. And there's a real question about who will win the arms race and whether or not things may get out of control before we have appropriate solutions and remedies. But there are appropriate solutions and remedies and it is the case that we have kind of sort of been here before in some respects. And I think in general with most things if we could just bring down the temperature a bit the closing argument in the midterms for both the left and the right is those other people are complete monsters who will destroy everything you hold dear if they win power, this is the end of America.  It's all preposterous and absurd but it doesn't mean there aren't reasons for concern but I think the thing I'm most concerned about at the moment is the fact that there is just this bottomless cynicism and hopelessness and an inability to trust one another and we have to live together. That's just the case. Like there's not a possible way. Can I say too, let's blame the people who are most responsible for this which of course are not one of us, none of the three of us or libertarians but Zach, do you want to play the Fetterman Oz debate clip because this is who the two major parties, right? Who have all the money, all the power, all the institutional might. These are the apparitions that they're coughing up to run in the world's greatest deliberative body or something like that. Tonight that you support fracking that you've always supported fracking but there is that 2018 interview that you said quote, I don't support fracking at all. So how do you square the two? I do support fracking and I don't, I support fracking and I stand and I do support fracking. Jeez. So I mean, talk about cynicism. I mean, it's hard not to be cynical when you look at the Pennsylvania race.  I mean, and then you have people like- And you talked about the rising inflation in the context of cruditech.  Yeah. David Soroto is a, you know, right in the nation, a person activist, work for Bernie Sanders saying, here's the truth, few will say aloud but I will. Being a senator is America's easiest job.  I mean, you don't really get much more cynical about politics.  Go all the way, right? Go all the way. It's opportunistic cynicism there though. I don't think he actually believes that.  But it's important when you're only willing to say it, when it is to your advantage to say it. And I think that's actually what's going on there. But yeah, look, I'd say this, I've been saying a number of bad things about cynicism is appropriate to be cynical about most of your elected officials. They are bad, self-interested cowards who aren't really willing to do anything that might get them into trouble if they actually think that it's the right thing to do. They won't vote against their party. They'll write a completely innocuous letter about Ukraine. And then moments later, when it seems politically unacceptable to their counterparts in Congress, they'll say, ah, that was a mistake. We're really sorry. But what is it? Why did you write the letter at all? Why did you sign it? Why did you think this was appropriate to notify the media again about, if 24 hours later, actually eight hours later, the thing wasn't going to matter at all. They're just unprincipled people that can't be taken seriously.  Everything is bad. Is that a message? Is that a message that helps anything, or does it just compound the problem? And how do libertarians talk about governance, policy, the individuals who are going to make this up in a way that doesn't just give in to the rankest form of nihilism, where it really doesn't matter who's in office. If you believe that they're always going to be terrible, what difference does it make? Well, I wouldn't say that it doesn't matter who's in office, but I do have kind of some heuristics and stratagems. Like I prefer divided government. So the Democrats control Congress. I probably want a Republican in the White House. And that's, you know, strategic thinking. Maybe that doesn't always lead to the best outcomes. But I think maybe the way to look at it is like government is endlessly corruptible, which is very different than saying like the institutions don't matter. I think that the institutions are actually important. I think our civic norms can be very important in certain respects when they're healthy, when they're kind of pro-free speech and anti-censorship, when there is a kind of visceral reaction to the notion that some corporation will be coordinating with government to shut people up who are saying things that might be unpopular, because you just know that that isn't the way that we do things here. I think it's important for us to cultivate a respect for that. I think it's important even to have an admiration for the uniqueness of the American experiment. And I'm a weird, like a narco-capitalist bozo, but I know how unusual it is for there to be a country that is founded on the kinds of ideals that America imperfectly is rooted in. And those are ideas that are worth defending and that are worth celebrating. And I think the reality is that the personification of those ideas is not to be found in the halls of Congress. And on any given day, it's probably not in the Supreme Court. It's in our associations with one another, the way that we pursue our own interests, the businesses that we build, the coalitions that we forge on our own. And if we can keep in mind that the goal of all of the governance stuff ought to be to enable that flourishing, to allow us to do and build things that are better than the things that existed before, then I think we'll be in a very good place. But if we imagine that either the revivalists who insist that what we need to do is retreat back to a time in the past when everything was perfect or the redistributionists who insist the future is hopeless, the best we can do is take some stuff from those people and give it to you, then we will lose ultimately. And unfortunately, I think that's what we find ourselves in it, in fact, the revivalists have become reduced redistributionists as well explicitly and openly, which is another problem. No. I'm curious if you think that there is like a clear, like libertarian friendly antidote to both the cynicism and the confusion that is happening in our media and politics right now. I mean, there is the libertarian party which is in some of these Senate races and covering the spread in like Georgia and Nick and I did a documentary about the takeover that happened there. The party is having an identity crisis at the moment. Yes, you're right. It's having an identity crisis. And it was before these kids took over as well. It's just a different sort of identity crisis. Well, it has an identity crisis, yeah. I'm curious like what you make of that identity crisis and what you hope comes out of it and what you hope libertarians will be offering and doesn't even have to be big L libertarians, but what are the things that you think libertarians could be putting on offer that's just not out there right now in either party or kind of the general discourse? I've been generally optimistic about some of the trends that I'd seen happening. I can still remember when there was a story in the New York Times about the libertarian moment, which I'm confident Nick was profiled in and mentioned in because he was part of that. And I was excited. You had Ron Paul and you had Gary Johnson. And you still have Justin Amash and even Rand Paul, that's right. He was on the cover of the story was has the libertarian moment finally arrived. And it was... And Rand is a complicated legacy in that regard, but in either case, they were pushing a certain set of ideas that were in fact resonating with a wider and wider swath of the country. And my hope was that after four years of Donald Trump and a great deal of dissatisfaction and a rather lackluster crop of candidates on the left to oppose him, that there might be a real opportunity for a moderate establishment even, I know that's a dirty word libertarian party to appeal to a lot of normies who might not be interested in or even prepared to have a conversation about all the roads being private today or abolishing all private schools tomorrow. I know it's shocking for some of us to hear as near and dear as some of those concepts are to my heart that moderation and pragmatism is actually a good thing. And it's helped to create the world that we live in today, which is undoubtedly, indisputably freer in so many important ways than the one that we lived in a couple of hundred years ago. And the fact that pragmatism helped get us there should say something about the importance of there being a political movement and a political institution that operates within the electoral system, within those confines to try and bring more and more Americans into the fold. And I think at the moment, the party has adopted this kind of shock and awe strategy of meaming their way to victory and outraging people who are both outside of the movement and in the movement of being incredibly polarizing. And this isn't to a person. I mean, I've had conversations with folks like Dave Smith and I think Dave is a good guy who is smart and bright and interesting and has a tremendous amount to offer. I wish that the people who are around him and that are operating the party would do so with a little bit more thoughtfulness. There's a tremendous opportunity here. And I think mocking people when they die, which is generally something that isn't regarded as, okay, whatever the circumstances, mocking their children after they've died, generally not acceptable. These are probably just not great strategies. Will it go viral?  Sure. Is that what you want? Even to the extent that's how you could potentially win, I don't want to win that way. But I also don't think you'll win. I think ultimately you'll burn an ignominy and we don't need that. We're already marginal at the moment. I don't need to be notorious also. I wanna give Camille the, I know Camille has to run soon. There were a couple of questions I just wanna throw up here for you, Camille. One was here, I'll put it on the screen. I think there's one about the age of consent that we ought to go to immediately. Oh my goodness. All right, that's how it goes. Like in that moderation. The moderation must weigh in on that. Camille, across America, there are many students of Friedman and Ron Paul since they won't sell out for votes. How do we amplify their voices? So I guess just asking, that might get to the question of pragmatism versus purity. Like, if there's someone like a Dave Smith who fashions himself as like, I'm carrying the torch of Ron Paul, how far can that approach get you, do you think? I mean, I think it can get you incredibly far. I mean, I think that the stuff that they've been doing with respect to foreign policy, with respect to criminal justice is incredibly valuable. It's worthwhile to continue doing that work. I think there are profound disagreements about the appropriate approach to addressing some of the weird social stuff that's happening. A lot of the controversies in schools, whether or not it's appropriate to ban certain things out of existence about some of these gender debates. But to the extent libertarians can be a font of reason in these troubled times that they can help to foster healthy conversations. I have to tell you that outside of elite circles where the fire is burning the most intensely, there are legions of Americans, I should say, who are interested in moderate voices, who are interested in sane alternatives, who want people who they can just say, God, you seem normal and nice. I could actually pull the lever for you. Like they're making a decision between Federman and Dr. Oz. And you wanna give them like meme warrior as the alternative? Right. I think we could probably do better than that. Again, it's just a strategy. Maybe try to do both things a little bit. I don't know. How do you, not a question, but that is laudable. You sound like a good decent human. How do you think about deprioritizing politics? I mean, for me, one of the reasons why I'm libertarian is because I dislike politics. I want it to be in as small a space as possible because it is zero sum on some fundamental level. There are certain things that are gonna be decided where 50% plus one vote makes the other 50% minus one vote, eat it, and you just gotta live that way. So you wanna keep that minimal. There was a, there were various periods. The nineties was an example of this where there was a kind of consensus at the end of the Cold War at the beginning of the internet and economic expansion. Politics wasn't that important. Let's go out and roam the world and have fun and do interesting stuff. That has been clawed back. And it started probably with the 2000 election, certainly 9-11, the economic crisis. Suddenly we live in a world now where God is dead, but politics reigns supreme. How do we start to recalibrate? So that we're talking more about culture, business, lived experience and voluntary aspects of our lives rather than politics. I don't know precisely. My own approach to this is to remain optimistic and to believe that's possible to kind of come back from the brink because we've dealt with things that are far more difficult than this in the past. And to be determined to be involved in the system and in the process and to try always to get beyond the most controversial aspects of the debate. If we're having an argument about abortion, it's probably best that we're not having it at the margins of whether it should be completely outlawed or whether or not mom should be able to have an abortion at nine minutes before she gives birth. That's not going to be very productive if that's the only conversation we have. We're working at cross purposes. And I think in a similar way, there's questions about what public education ought to look like. If the argument is between the 1619 project and some America first version of history, that's not going to be particularly good either. So we've got to find not a middle ground but some common ground. We've got to find ways to address the actual problem. And I think when we're having arguments about whether or not propaganda is being taught in the schools and ultimately know that the schools aren't really teaching kids much of anything, that that is a more severe problem. And then it suggests that we're having these debates completely disconnected from the things that actually matter with respect to the stuff that we ostensibly care about. If we care about kids and we care about them becoming well-informed individuals, thoughtful skeptics who can contribute in a meaningful way to the polity, then the way to do that is with a functional school system. And I'd say school choice ought to have always taken priority over these preposterous ideological battles. So you're objectively pro-groomer. Got it. Exactly. And it's reductivist thinking like that that's going to get us, it's going to take us far. It's going to take us to the moon. Camille, thanks for joining us. I know you've got to run soon. Let me leave you with these final two thoughts from our commenters. Maybe libertarians can put out there a charismatic candidate who never flies coach. That is an interesting idea. It's a finer point on it. Camille Foster, I think. And you obviously would do as well as Dr. Oz or Fetterman. Fetterman is a seasoned politician. Yeah, well, this is true. He's had some difficult, he's had a difficult year and probably should have pulled out of the race. It's, it's, yeah, yeah. No comment. I have to talk to my wife about 2024. She is the decider and chief. Okay. Yeah. Good luck with that. Thank you for joining us. Thanks guys, I appreciate it. Talk soon. You bet.  But are there other questions that we should engage in here? Let's see. One person asks here, can there ever be peace with Chris Rufo referencing our, our live stream from last week. I think there can be peace with Chris Rufo. I think there is probably not ever going to be agreement, at least on a wide range of topics with Chris Rufo. The reason we wanted to bring him on here to talk was I produced this documentary about Florida's Stop Woke Act and Camille was kind of getting into that near the end here about, well, are we going to spend our time fighting over whether a curriculum should be centered around the Colhanna Jones' 1619 project or some sort of patriotically correct project devised by the DeSantis team or something? Or are we going to offer some sort of alternative vision where people have much more ability to select their own education choice? And we want to apply that kind of thinking to just about every realm of life. And so that's just a fundamental difference that we have with somebody like Chris Rufo. So I appreciate him coming on. But I'm not going to be able to make, I've only made it go so far towards that. Well, and I think the question is like one of, what does it mean to live in a pluralistic and a tolerant society where we don't have to agree with him, obviously, but he also needs to respect our rights to teach our children the way we want. And we accord him the same right. It seems to me like a very clear and compelling case that there are going to be many different ways in which people want to talk about American history, where they want to talk about any given matter, even what schools should be teaching, broadly speaking. And it shouldn't be complicated, really. Like he's free to teach his kids the way they want and attract more and more people. And you and I would have difference of opinions. And then you throw in other people and let 1,000 flowers bloom on that. And pretty much on every possible issue. I agree. Another thing that Camille brought up that I thought might be worth discussing a little bit more is the idea that there are some emerging technological solutions to some of the confusion that we were talking about and some of the inability to tell what is real and what is not real. And that is kind of the promise of blockchain. I mean, Nick, you recently interviewed Balaji Srinivasan who talks really eloquently about a kind of chain of custody over information. And I do think that we are, that need is increasingly urgent because what I'm concerned about mostly is the kind of memory holding that happens routinely where people do stealth edits or pretend like something never happened. We have the Wayback Machine, which helps archive some of that, but that's not perfect. Some journalists has even got their Twitter feeds exempted from that. And when you think about even like classic works being kind of revised to take out problematic material, I think it is really important to have a record of how things were because that is, the ability to rewrite history is obviously a big concern for anyone and not least of all libertarians. Yeah, I totally agree. And this is where we've reached a point, on some level the impulse is understandable either that something is so hideous in the past that you want to kind of wipe it out so that we never have to contemplate it again or you wanna control the present to crib from, or well, you wanna control the present by controlling the past. But that is something, I think the term that Camille used was cultural antibodies, like these ideas we need a resilient system where we're willing to look at what's happened in the past or even what's happening now kind of honestly and openly and deal with our failures as well as our successes in the past and recognizing that it's a process. But I agree, it's also true that a lot of digital technology and I'm thinking or even in terms of things like radio which doesn't leave much of a trace, but television, modern technology, oftentimes of races, its own past, partly like a lot of TV shows in the 50s just disappeared because they were either performed live or the tapes that they were taped on got taped over, things like that. The historical record is really important and I think we've been short changing it for a very long time. Another comment here, CRT is a combination of sexual Marxism and racial Marxism. It uses every racial and sexual variation as a weapon for collectivist power struggles. So this is like the rhetoric that you hear a lot. Anytime you get into this debate around conversations that people are having about race and gender right now, I personally feel there's a lot to criticize in terms of like intersectional theory and the way that these things are applied in like diversity seminars I think is very, is often very clumsy and counterproductive. But this theory, there's this overarching theory that people try to advance, that it's some like coordinated Marxist plot. And that is where I just think it gets a little bit dangerous but you have to take these things one at a time. You can't lump it all together and when you kind of catastrophize things, then that is how you justify authoritarian intervention because you suddenly have this emergency and we need to give these special powers to people to crack down on the bad thing that is. Yeah, this is, ironically, it's a Marxist influence theorist, Giorgio Agamben, the Italian social theorist who talks about states of exception and that modern governance, particularly in liberal democracies is very prone to people getting whipped up and then saying, in order to preserve a liberal democracy where we have individual rights and civil liberties and things like that, we have to suspend them because of this intense threat and it could be 9-11, it could be the economic crisis, it could be COVID. And you end up inscribing, like in that comment, I have to say, I mean, I appreciate the person sending it, but it's nuts to think that there is a Marxist kind of conspiracy or then also to be focusing on racial and sexual categories as if Marxism is predicated upon the idea that there are groups, there are classes that are always at odds with one another and that everything is a twilight struggle where one will win and the other will lose. That is one way of looking at the world which was rejected by the world. And it's bizarre to me that in many ways it's conservative critics of so-called critical race theory or Marxism are the ones who are keeping alive Marxist analysis. We need something better than that. I do think it's, we are in a time where, for some of the reasons that we talked about in all of this, all of the kind of verities, all of the truths that we took for granted that there are men and women, that there are blacks and whites, et cetera, like those are eroding not because of some evil cabal but because we're, I think we're more sophisticated and interested in individualism and speciation and things like that. But for many people, the idea that these basic categories are morphing or changing is terrifying and they want to stop the movement of the world and say, no, this is the way it always has been and always must be otherwise madness lies ahead. And that's just not a way, that is not a way to create a productive and positive future. It's reactionary by definition and it doesn't get us anywhere except into a worse version of an imagined past that we thought was so great. And I wonder if to wrap up the stream, Nick, if you might talk about this terror that people have of that shifting ground and kind of what we've been talking about, the confusion that all the fakery and all the kind of manipulative media that is out there and the cynicism in our politics, what would you say is like part of the libertarian antidote to that or like what messages do you think libertarians could offer to help clear that fog of confusion or give people just something else to aim for rather than what is being served up and say the Pennsylvania Senate race? Yeah, I mean, it's, first and this isn't particularly libertarian, but echoing what Camille was talking about, the centrality of kind of media literacy, or actually it's not even media literacy, I would say it's critical thinking is a basic component and that's what our schools should be teaching is like how do you create people who are more likely to be able to kind of analyze things and come to their own conclusions? That's like the core project of our, should be the core project of our educational system as opposed to making good citizens or making good workers or something like that. We don't want compliant people, we want people who are independently minded. It is wearying and I say this as, I was like a real utopian in the 90s and I still remain that. I mean, I'm optimistic about the future and I think today is not just better than 200 years ago, but in most ways it's better than 20 years ago and I think that continues to proceed at pace even if we never want to discuss that. But I think what libertarians have first off is a true optimism and a belief in the individual that individuals left to their own devices and armed with a little bit of resources and a little bit of analytical skill which most of us have and most of us develop over time are pretty good at figuring out how to live an interesting productive life that is social and functional and kind of community oriented. And so very few of us are inwardly looking kind of narcissists who just want to run the world for our own benefit. We're not like that, we're not designed to be like that and we don't end up that way. So I think that's part of the libertarian message is one of optimism and belief in individuals that it's tough, it's hard, but we're pretty good at figuring out how to live a meaningful life and coming up with interesting stuff. I think the other thing and this is something that I think libertarians, including myself has spent years kind of knocking down institutions both public and private or public sector and private sector. And what we need to do is to kind of really come up with, start talking more and more about examples of places where things are going well and looking at why. What are the underlying institutions, the networks of association? The temperaments or mindsets of people and how do we broaden the scope of freedom of individuals being able to choose more in their life? This is right out of Mises and Hayek. The liberal project was about people having, starting out with very few choices that mattered in their life to having more and more choices. How do we model that? How do we kind of look at the places where it's working and build out from there rather than a kind of nihilistic dismissal of all politics is equally bad. All policy is equally bad. We need to be thinking more in those terms. What about you, Zach? What is, where do you go for that? I agree, building on what works. And also I like the idea of emphasizing the individual and creativity, unleashing creativity and imagination and innovation. Like these are all things that sprout from the bottom up and this is something that sort of seems to be missing and really has been just squashed a little bit over the past couple of years with the pandemic and the extreme overreach and this kind of just flattening of individuals into these broad groups that need to... These large statistical categories, right? Like if you have COVID, you don't have COVID, et cetera. Like an urgent need to break all that down and I'm not hearing it yet from anyone in politics, but it starts with, I believe it's all bottom up and it does start with the culture and hopefully we can push towards that, yeah.  I know I try to focus myself on this, but like this is where an understanding of history is really important. I am, you know, my grandparents came to the United States, all four of them in the mid-19 teens, my parents grew up during the depression, they were poor. And I mean, everybody was poor, but they were poor. I'm like one generation removed from the ghetto and what that has helped me and I didn't realize this until I was older, like having that in the near-review mirror was helpful to understand how things continue to get better and how much worse they could be, how much better they can be. My kids are living a life at least materially that is like, you know, was literally unimaginable by me as a kid and it's kind of great. And recognizing that progress, both material progress and moral progress, these are not things that have to happen, it's a choice and what are the ways that help make that happen, you know, that have worked in the past, that have worked in the present and kind of, you know, keeping an eye on history is really important because I think to the extent that we stay like mired in these small like inch by inch, you know, kind of battles over no man's land in every election, in every news cycle, all of this, if we're not thinking about transcendent values or where we wanna be, you know, then it's just every day is a slug fest and it's just like, you know, you're stuck in trench warfare from World War I or something, it's meaningless. So I think history, you know, and again, that's not particularly libertarian. I mean, people will interpret history in different ways but it gives a sense of perspective which is oftentimes the main thing that's lacking in debates over virtually everything. Yeah, I agree especially that there has to be both of these, the contending with history and what could go wrong and kind of like the villains, especially again, coming off the past couple of years, like we need to, that should be a reminder of how things can backslide because that really was kind of an experiment in like what happens if we suddenly centralize or politicize a lot of these processes that were left to the market and the outcome was not good and we don't want that. So that should be criticized and, you know, to some degree demonized, but when you demonize things, when all you talk about is, you know, the evil COVID regime and everything like that, but you're not offering like here is, you know, this is where we can be going and here are some concrete examples. That is what is sometimes lacking and sometimes much harder because it's easier to focus on an enemy, but much harder to sketch out that positive vision because then you actually have to answer the critics of what you're sketching out there. But I think that's probably a good place to leave it. And I wanna thank Camille for joining us today. Thanks for the talk again, Nick. And we'll see, thanks for everyone who left comments. Sorry, we didn't get to all of them, but we'll...  Why not? Why not? Why not economic Marxism? Yeah. Well, thanks everyone. We'll see you next week.