Speaker 1: Let's go next to how about Chris from Iowa? Chris from Iowa, What's on your mind today?
Speaker 2: Hi, David. Can you hear me okay? Speaker 1: Yes, I can.
Speaker 2: Wonderful. So this is a question from a expecting father myself to someone who
is currently a father in today's what you call the golden age of ignorance.
Some advice on how I mean, I know that your child is very young, but how to raise a child
with a lot of really poor influences out there. And when it comes to ignorance,
I currently live in Iowa and right now our state has got more and more down that road
of ignorance and it's very concerning. And I know you live in a much more,
you know, much more progressive area, but what advice would you have to kind of keep those,
you know, ignorant influences away while being aware that they still exist and
not being completely shielding from them? Speaker 1: So there's a couple of different
things here. First of all, there are some things where if your child is eventually
going to have access to media or be around other people, be in public, go to public school, etc.,
there are there are certain things that that are realistically not going to be you're not
going to be able to prevent them from seeing and being to some degree influenced by whether
you're in a red state or a blue state because of media and what is in media. So first of all,
you've got to be realistic. So unless you're going completely off the grid in the middle of nowhere,
you can't just kind of protect forever. I don't think that all being said. And this is a really
tough thing to even really talk about. But. If it comes down to what's best for your family,
I would understand people looking and saying, hey, you know, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama,
the Dakotas for picking a few states and saying, look at the infrastructure. Look at education.
Look at life expectancy. Look at the quality of the health care system. Look at crime. Look
at all these different things. And look at the countries that are equivalent when it comes to
those metrics, to those states. And then you look at states like Connecticut and New York
and Massachusetts and Vermont and to some degree, you know, Maryland and Delaware. And you say, wow,
the metrics in those countries are similar to if you were to live in Norway or Sweden or a lot of
the places we think are great at a certain point there is. There's the thought of am
I living in the right state for what I think is best for my family? And obviously I'm not
understating what it means to move to a different part of the country job, housing,
family, all these different things. I'm not understating it in any way,
but I think it is an important thing just to ask oneself am I in the right place for raising kids
the way I want to raise them? And, you know, it's it's a difficult question to answer in some cases,
but I think it's an important one to at least ask. Speaker 2: Yeah. No, I really appreciate that. You
know, just to follow up briefly on that, you know, I've always heard, you know, you hear the grass is
always greener somewhere else. But yeah, sometimes you got to mow your lawn, right? And I you know,
I truly think that Iowa 15 years ago was a purple state, if not progressive. Yeah. And I do what I
do feel like a civic duty to stay here and to at least, you know, do what I can to vote the people
who need to be in power. In the power. Right. At least, you know, do do as much as I can. 100%.
I do love this area, but I am quite concerned about the direction it has gone in. And,
you know, with a child coming on the way in the summer, you know, that just
exacerbates all the concerns that I have here. Speaker 1: Yeah. And I've talked to people
about this who say, hey, you know, what I would really like is to stay where I am and achieve
positive change. So it's a better place for my kid. Beautiful. I think that's fantastic. In
some places, what that change would be is so lopsided and so overwhelming. And your kids,
three, four, five, they're starting to enter the world in a certain way. I don't blame
anyone for saying I'm bailing out for the good of my family. Not everyone can afford
to do it. And there's all these ifs, ands or buts, but I wouldn't blame people for doing
it if that's what they decide is best for them. Speaker 2: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for
your for taking the time. I appreciate it. Speaker 1: All right, Chris from Iowa,
Let's take a very quick break. We're not done with phone calls. If you're holding on to talk to me,
just hang on, because we're going right back to Discord in a moment.