American Exceptionalism vs. The Precautionary Principle: Refugee Edition

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
- H. L. Mencken

Among the many objections to more liberal immigration policy, one stands out as more difficult to debunk than others. On questions of immigrants bringing with them crime, dependency, disease, or Communism, the empirical evidence shows that these are unambiguously overblown concerns. If anything, ordinary immigrants on average tend to be more industrious, healthy, independent, and conscientious than native-born Americans, again on average. It should be immediately clear why with a little reflection. Uprooting to travel to a foreign land is ambitious. The timid, the callow, the craven, the risk-averse will be marginally more likely to accept a mediocre BATNA and stay home. Emigration is an act of courage, of hope. Under normal circumstances, that is.

The objection of which I speak is of culture. Not of superficial culture, like driving courtesy or a tolerance for spicy food, but rather the deep appreciation for Enlightenment ideals that somehow still sort of drags its gutshot corpse through a post-William Jennings Bryan America. Will immigrants help keep the torch of free speech alive? Will they maintain a healthy skepticism of centralized political authority? Will they resist the urge to flaccidly permit the quartering of troops in civilian homes? Will they insist on procedural due process? Will they cherish the precepts of strictly delineated federalized power? Specifically,, will they support and defend American constitutional jurisprudence at rates comparable with natives?

The good news, is that yes, they will! I'll spare you the econometrics, but there's no statistically significant difference between immigrants and natives on issues of censorship and firearm ownership rights. In fact, when you control for education and IQ, immigrants actually beat natives on these issues. (source: author's analysis of GSS data 1974-2012)

The bad news is that everyone, immigrants and natives alike show an almost shocking disregard for the foundations of our national claim to natural liberty. Given the choice, only one in four respondents would preserve the freedom of expression, written or spoken, across a mere four categories of potentially bilious speech. In other words, we have met the enemy of the first amendment, and he is us.

But this is for ordinary immigration, under ordinary circumstances. Normal immigration builds character in a healthy nation, inviting hale, hardworking, determined men and women to our shores to truck, barter, and exchange with us and create a better life for them and theirs. This arrangement is to the mutual benefit of immigrant and host alike. Refugees are unlike ordinary immigrants in that they are compelled to migration thanks to especially gruesome BATNA. Death squads, systematic rape, homes incinerated, and mass exile will stir even the lumpiest of lumpenprole to pack up the ol' bindle and hit the long road to salvation.

It's this group that is utterly out of sample. I urge you to be skeptical of claims one way or the other about the desirability of permanently hosting refugees with an eye towards assimilation and eventual citizenship. If you'll permit a bit of #gertruding, the morality of providing aid and succor to displaced resident of war-torn nations is plainly obvious: giving aid to the afflicted is an almost universally-recognized moral and ethical duty. However, this duty is unrelated to the economic and cultural benefits of routine peaceful immigration.

The Precautionary Principle would tell us to refuse refugees entry for two reasons:
1) There is no assurance that their entry would not irrevocably corrupt American culture and the institutions that arise from that culture.
2) It is impossible to credibly commit to policies that would maintain refugees as non-citizen residents. (bleg: what's your favorite quick-n-dirty intro to the folk theorem you like to use in your undergrad courses?)

Refugees present a difficult conundrum not forwarded by ordinary immigration. As with difficult conundrums of all stripes, the Mencken quote above applies. How to fulfill the humanitarian demands of charity and sanctuary without risking the golden goose eggs is an enormously thorny question. But it is one not made any easier by conflating it with an immigration debate. The two are only superficially related.

Oenophilia Phobia

What is it about fine wine that enhackles the proletarian sentiments of the boorgeoisie? Sarah Miller investigates.

Her main point: all taste is acquired and if you've developed an eye for decent literature and an ear for good music, it's no more unusual to have worked on a palate for good wine. Cheap wine does indeed suck, I can aver. But that doesn't mean it can't be worth drinking. Hell, sometimes you feel like Olive Garden. Sometimes you want to watch Kevin Bacon in a lead role. Who am I to judge?

Is expensive wine euvoluntary? That's a trickier question. In last week's dipwad outrage of the moment, a typically semi-sentient politician made a hyperbolic remark along the lines of "why do we have X number of different kinds of deodorant when there are starving children in the world?" Or maybe it was "this country" since the moral sentiments of the typical politician can't see past their own constituency. I think that perhaps the same pedestrian intuition underlying this misapprehension of economics also supports anti-elitism aimed against wine lovers. What are you doing sipping fancy-pants fermented grape juice when there are children out there who go to bed hungry?

If that were the tradeoff, then of course it would be monstrous to drink good wine, or to buy a yacht, or to spend two months' salary on an engagement ring, or to really do much more than live hand-to-mouth and give away the remainder of your salary to hungry orphans. Every now and again, you do hear of someone doing that, but it's always noteworthy for its extreme rarity. It should be noteworthy for its long-term inefficacy, but I suppose I shouldn't expect too much of short news cycles.

Instead of worrying about what others spend their fairly-earned money on, perhaps it'd be more fruitful to examine what institutional barriers exist that prevent low-income earners from making a more comfortable living. Complaining about wine and deodorant doesn't help the poor the way eliminating licensing restrictions would, for example.

So go ahead and enjoy your fine wine. But if I catch you paying more than twenty bucks for a bottle of vodka, I'll know you're a poseur. Get the rotgut, send it through an activated charcoal filter a few times, and take the Pepsi challenge with top shelf neutral spirits. I guarantee you won't be able to taste the difference.

Fear

Fear, panic, terror: these things arise involuntarily, when the tyger tyger burning bright creeps past the perimeter in the night. I must wonder if they're truly involuntary however.

As far back as I can remember, there's always been some sort of moral panic. I'm not quite old enough to recall firsthand whatever the pearl-clutching du jour of the 70s was (to be fair, dealing with stagflation was probably of legitimate concern), but I do recall panics over: heavy metal music, the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game, Satanic worship, drugs, teen sex, vaccines, euthanasia, and on and on and on (remember acid rain?). And now, with Newsweek's latest cover story (h/t/ ENB), it looks like we're reaching the event horizon of sex trafficking. 

Actual humans who earn actual paychecks pay actual money for these easily-debunked, flatulent puff-pastry articles with the actual intent of reading them. I find it difficult to believe that people are so deliberately stupid that they'd be willing to accept with open hearts and minds that rubbish like "kids are sacrificing fatted calves to Lucifer in America's cemeteries at midnight" is even remotely true. I find it difficult (sadly, in the absence of decent evidence) to reject the hypothesis that people buy this tripe with the express intent to raise their dander.

Humanity has slain all the dragons. Child mortality is statistically indistinguishable from zero, at least compared to what it was even as recently as a hundred years ago. Proper bloody war is something that happens far from our shores. Bear attacks are rare. Even the ceaseless owl scourge has waned of late. There is little left in the natural world for ordinary folks to fear. Increasingly, there's little in the world of men for ordinary folks to fear (yes, this is an Anglophonic observation, but living standards are rising even among the bottom billion). So could it be that moral panics like the one pictured above is simply a way for a producer to meet consumer demand? People want to be scared of something once in a while. The wolves at the gate are all dead, so why not just pick some random bullshit with a kernel of truth buried in there really deep? Can't that be a euvoluntary transaction?

I suppose it's a matter of proportionality (#TeamAristotle). Moral panics about genuine problems can divert resources towards reducing genuine harms. By the time my daughter is old enough to learn what mesothelioma is, home asbestos insulation will be something from the history books. Maybe part of the trouble is that it's harder to generate indignant panics about chronic heart disease or inattentive driving the way it is about violence in video games. I am beginning to suspect that harm-reduction isn't actually the relevant margin for collective action. Perhaps the telos is that sweet, sweet hit of imminent danger.

Gossip

Is gossip euvoluntary? Gossip raises or lowers someone's relative social status without their knowledge or consent.

Gossip is dang close to ubiquitous among humans. It certainly predates civilization (pre-writing cultures in the Amazon Basin and on Papua New Guinea gossip just as much as your nosy Aunt Gertrude) and it definitely happens in early childhood.

The just-so story of atavistic gossip is something like this: subsistence foragers desperately needed to know whom to trust. Successful bands developed keen senses for when (and how) to communicate important social information relatively error-free. Gossip emerged from the selection process, together with all the attendant hedging (admissions of third-hand sourcing, "I heard", &c) and clear signals that the speaker is gossiping rather than doing some other sort of talk.

Q: do all the tacit norms surrounding gossip help keep it euvoluntary? I think folks understand that the problem isn't so much with the gossip as with the behavior that triggers it. And as long as everyone's in on what gossip is, what it means, and how (un)reliable it is, is it really a problem?

Ignoring for the moment that it's utterly impractical to attempt to curb gossip, I don't think anyone really wants to ban it. Sure, you'll hear folks in leadership positions urge people to exercise restraint, but very rarely do you find any sincere attempts outside of, say, military basic training to quash gossip.

Hm. Maybe if we thought about prices more like we think about gossip we wouldn't get so bent out of shape every time we think the rent is too damn high. Maybe what those prices are doing is hen-clucking around the water cooler about the relative value of that apartment.

White Hat vs Rent Seeking

Firms will often test security measures before rolling them out. They'll subcontract so-called "white-hat" hackers to test the systems to see how easy it is to gain entry. The White Hats then report back to the firm the results of their investigations so that changes can be made, patches applied, and systems secured.

Public Choice economists, along with a number of other disciplines, have noticed that quite a bit of regulatory legislation ends up benefiting the industries under regulation. Sarbanes-Oxley, for example was ostensibly intended to discipline naughty firms engaging in naughty accounting practices. The result of SarbOx, instead, is that it puts an enormous regulatory roadblock in front of any firm seeking to grow beyond the capacity that will trigger its requirements. It creates, in the parlance of economists, a barrier to entry, allowing incumbent firms the latitude to behave more like the textbook monopolists your econ 101 professor warned you about.

White Hat hacking is quite euvoluntary indeed. It's an excellent service that helps enhance customer confidence and reduces risks inherent in electronic commerce. Well, at least when it works as advertised. What do you think about a legislative equivalent? Politics is exchange, after all. Right? How about having a few independent contracting firms take a stab at finding all the "unwanted" loopholes in a piece of legislation and showing how to exploit them so that bills can head back to committee before they hit the floor? Wouldn't that be in the public interest?

Well, if you agree with Zach Weiner, yes. If the purpose of the legislature is solely to act in the public interest, then it'd be great to dot all the i's and cross all the t's before voting. But if I'm right and the legislature is chiefly Humean, there will be absolutely no interest in independent regime arbitrage hacking prior to the release of legislation, as it is not in the unspoken interests of the political elite.

At least, this is my prior belief. I'm not exactly sure how you could test it unless you actually had a legislator's ear. I could say "I bet that within 25 years, there will be no equivalent to a legislative white hat org vetting proposed legislation," but that wouldn't really vindicate the Humean model of political economy, would it? In the meantime, I thought it might be a cute little thought exercise. A what-if to keep in mind for when Andreessen finally funds my comet utopia.

Trade Unions

Generally speaking, folks who share the same camp as me tend to shy from supporting the idea of trade unions. Even absent the risk of corruption, even without union management slowly but steadily alienating the workers they represent, even when everything is going according to the stated goals of the organization, it's tough for folks who believe in the freedom of individuals to associate with whom they choose (under the contract terms they find amenable) to support exclusionary labor cartels with great cheer.

Part of Smithian political economy is devoted to the endless task of slaying the mercantile hydra without the benefit of a barrel of pitch. To use a well-worn metaphor, mercantilist economics is concerned with how to divide the pie of national opulence, whereas marginalist economics is concerned with how to make the pie bigger. Who cares, goes the argument, how large your relative slice is, so long as the absolute slice is bigger than it would have been under an alternative arrangement. That's why we here at EE get away with (or try to, anyhow) cheering suboptimal arrangements like sweatshops, organ sales, and drug and sex work legalization. It's not because we're fond of low wages, desperate hawking of a kidney to pay for bread, shooting smack, or visiting a dingy massage parlor. It's because the next most attractive alternative is often dirt farming, starvation, overdosing, and vice units stretched too thin to actually pay attention to the horrors of real-deal human trafficking. Sweatshops at least give their workers the slim change of scrimping a few bucks together to send their kids to college (or to America, God willing). No such options exist for subsistence farmers.

So why bother turning any attention to a dying institution? Trade unions, after all, exist to protect workers' share of producer surplus against a specific threat: the threat of cheaper domestic labor. Unfortunately for the needleworkers, auto welders, elevator constructors... well, check the wiki page for a full list, scabs aren't the only threat to union members' wages. Capital mobility means that firms can shutter domestic plants and hire labor elsewhere in the world. Capital deepening (and cheap credit) means that firms can more easily shift towards capital-intensive production (more robots). If you're a consumer, you welcome the greater abundance of material goods available at lower prices. If you're a neoclassical economist, you welcome the triumph of your discipline over the craven misanthropy of the mercantilists, or something. But if you're one of the poor saps with your leg caught in the transitional gains trap, smug smirks decorating economists' lips is salt in the wound. You, after all, are the one swept up in having to train for an economy that has little to no use of the skills you worked so tirelessly to perfect in yon Detroit factory.

"So you have to learn some new skills" they say, those tweedy, reedy economists. "The gain to society brought by greater productivity more than offsets your personal loss." They remind you from their tenured positions that job security is not in the description, and that uncertainty is an inescapable condition of life. While I share many of these sentiments, I also give occasional thought to alternative institutional arrangements that could both provide a robust, dynamic economy and make sure that workers (who retain dignity both on the clock as workers and off as shoppers) don't get bruised too badly when they get thrown out on their keister by the robot uprising.

There's something of an agreement in economics that the government should provide those public goods not produced by private voluntary associations. Depending on whom you ask, the set of public goods can be quite expansive, or it can be extremely narrow. I'd guess that if you polled a random selection of professional economists (the KFF Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy doesn't ask this specific question), a majority would claim that low, stable unemployment is a public good, while a very large supermajority would agree that an individual job is a private good (at least for the worker; many would also acknowledge that from the point of view of the public and the firm, labor is a production cost).

I confess to being a bit of a Cassandra when it comes to the pending demographic pressures faced by US residents. An aging population coupled with anti-immigrant sentiments, berserk spending by local and state political elites who find themselves unbound by any hard budget constraints, and a constituency characterized by a curiously strong faith in the ability of the sovereign to immanentize the eschaton by executive fiat. In other words, the US has some very large, very politically powerful public unions whose members will command immense tax-funded pensions upon retirement. And if taxation technology (remember that income taxes are merely one way of funding government) can't keep up with the promises made to police, fire, teachers, & al by politicians now decades out of office, the alternatives will be actuarially messy. Debt financing of pensions can lead to big-brick interest payments (and God forbid you actually have to start issuing debt in order to keep up with interest payments). Giving pensioners a haircut is an option, but the political fallout of that kind of decision would be nasty enough to give even a nation of Scott Walkers pause. You could default on the sovereign debt I suppose, but I'll leave the consequences of that as an exercise to the reader.

Thus the pickle: except for a few wild-haired libertarians, everyone agrees that society needs a decent police force, a reasonable public education system, and (as long as every other sovereign nation on earth is armed) some appropriate level of national defense. We also all mostly agree that the total lifetime compensation for this work should reflect the total social productivity of the work. But future taxpayers might not be able to afford it. Yikes yikes, triple yikes. You don't tug on Superman's cape, and you don't welsh on cop retirement pay (isn't that the plot of the first Robocop movie?). So how do we eat that pickle?

Well, a good start would be to reflect for a little while on the underlying exchange made between constituents and the folks laboring on their behalf. The euvoluntary exchange between police and citizen is the provision of law and order, not the banditry of asset forfeiture, not the goonery of no-knock drug raids, not the petty thuggery of stop-and-frisk. The euvoluntary exchange between educator and student is literacy, not teach-to-the-test one-size-fits-all Ritalin-fueled college prep. The euvoluntary exchange between ATF agents and individual is non-existent because the mere existence of drinking statutes contributes to non-salutary campus binge drinking and all the sexual misconduct that entails.

The culture of petty popular tyranny is not free, and the bill will come due once all the Baby Boomers retire to comfort, leaving the burden of their care to a nation weaned on the fiction of government-as-parent. I wonder whether or not it's too late to renegotiate the terms of some of these big ol' service contracts. Pot legalization is a step in the right direction, so let's not hope it's another disappointing case of closing the barn door after the cows have fled.

Hoc est Corpus Juris

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

So far I've proposed the following as an analytical adjunct to standard relative price economics:

1. Part of the rental value of certain spaces arises from a single-use characteristic. If it would be odd or off-putting to conduct the activities reserved for a particular location elsewhere, then such a space can command a higher rent than a general-use space. (lemma) Negotiation over these rents is not a priori obvious, and will tend to be historically and culturally contingent.
2. Single-use rents require that users observe the restrictions on the use of the space. Maintaining observation among users is a standard collective action problem in economics, and real-world solutions to these collective action problems is a task for post hoc investigation and analysis. 

So far, we have a church (RNC HQ | Apple store | strip club), we have parishioners (partisans | customers | clients), but I've not mentioned the clerisy. Nor have I explicitly mentioned what role the rise of the sharing economy might have on the generation and capture of sacred rents. This is relevant to EE because it is precisely the transitional gains trap that often gooses incumbents into obstructing innovations that benefit citizens. Moreover, if incumbents hold their privileged positions with the blessings of (constituents | clients | parishioners), dislodging them or buying them off will be exceptionally challenging. 

In this taxonomy, a priest is the residual claimant of a sacred rent. So is Tim Cook, so is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, so is Satoru Iwata. So also divine-right kings of yore (perhaps the King of Thailand today), so also a few Soviet premieres (Lenin for sure, probably Stalin too), so also Ieyasu Tokugawa. The faithful, the partisans, the devoted customers, the loyal subjects are tenants if you will: beneficiaries of the rental value of the sacred space. Threats to this rental value are treated accordingly.

This is one of the reasons I think the Team Red/Team Blue analytical framework could use a little scaffolding. Team members are opposed to each other, but in much the same way as the Knicks might be opposed to the Lakers: they're rivals, but at least they're both playing basketball. Team Gray (or is it 'grey'?) is a pack of apostates: they're playing intramural Frisbee golf. Apostates are generally ignored, unless they start actually threatening the institutions of the organization itself. Libertarians were a bunch of fringe kooks until 2008, when they sort of amorphously began to gnaw at the bunting around the debate stage. That happened, and hey-presto, both Team Blue and Team Red partisans began hauling out rhetorical cannon against all the astroturfing. Or you see zealots on Twitter castigating a Reason reporter who spills all her ink on topics like sexual liberation and reproductive rights as being a shill for oligarchs:

.@ckilpatrick @enbrown Whenever Ames' reporting fucks with oligarchs, the baggerbot smear machine starts wailing. Like an air raid siren.
— Yasha Levine (@yashalevine) November 7, 2014

 Gimme gimme that old-time religion.

In political space, at least in the US, Duverger's Law locks in the party monopoly. Even if you don't like the Knicks, you're still going to watch the basketball game regardless. But note very closely reactions to even modest threats to the overall institutional integrity of the system. Homeschooling is the Uber of the indoctrination of the young. If successful, it strips the secular priesthood of the devoted. Right now, Team Red isn't raising too much of a stink because it sort of looks like homeschooling is handing them the ball. But if it turns out that homeschooled kids grow up as political apostates, expect both teams to mount up and ride out against homeschooling in full force.

As a general-purpose apostate myself, I feel obliged to share my biases with you, my fine audience. I am of the opinion that sacred rents are a fine thing, an excellent thing. Such rents enrich the human existence. It is a wondrous delight to abandon yourself to those sublime moments when you connect yourself to a larger, mysterious other. A sense of belonging is simply critical to social animals enjoying the fullness this existence has to offer us. However, this does not imply that elevating a distinct class of elites to wield dominion over these rents is either wise or just. In this sense, I'm a thoroughgoing anabaptist: the clerisy exists to serve the parish, the statesman to serve the constituency, the retailer to serve the customer. Any time any residual claimant of a scared rent begins to extract unjust rents or to exert excessive dominion, the covenant is ruptured. Courageous parishioners, courageous citizens, courageous consumers of ethical game journalism are obliged to pick up their hammer and nail their Ninety-Five Theses to the doors of the Church | Legislature | Gamestop. Reclaim your sacred rents. Your heart is your own. Treasure it. If not for yourself, then for your children.

Exegesis in the Springtime

I often hear this or that thing being called "Straussian", but I never [hear] if people think Strauss was right in his main claims.
— robinhanson (@robinhanson) October 21, 2014

 There's good discussion appended, so I encourage you to click through for more.

For my readers unfamiliar with Leo Strauss, his main claims were that philosophers, poets, scribes, translators, and playwrights encode hidden messages and secret knowledge in their writing. Naive readers can enjoy the surface meaning of books, plays, poems, whatever and walk away content. But for the initiated, the hidden wisdom is what matters. Finding the hidden meaning of coded text is called "exegesis." The discipline of finding the hidden meaning in any work, written or otherwise is called "hermeneutics." As you might imagine, it's a tough claim to test empirically, though there are good game theoretical reasons to believe that writers with little direct political clout might wish to hide heretical ideas inside coded text.

The question then is: why should anyone bother to look for Straussian encoding in more modern works? There is no longer an Inquisition interested in strapping heretics to a dunking stool. Anyone in the secular west can write as they wish, without fear of state reprisal.

Answer (1): Straussian writing is a skill, and like any skill, it needs to be practiced lest it atrophy. Sure, there's little political suppression of disfavored speech these days, but forward induction urges risk-averse writers to keep their nibs sharp in case a totalitarian regime takes over, burns the books, and marches the heretics up the gallows scaffolding.

Answer (2): Straussian writing is a defense against the soft coercion of tribal exclusion. Are you a Team Blue partisan wishing to criticize the Chief Executive ca. 2009? Are you a Team Red partisan wishing to criticize the Chief Executive ca. 2002? Maybe you'll be gently dis-invited to write for DailyKos/NRO if you make your criticism plain. Even if the BATNA is not dire, it still remains unattractive.

Answer (3): Straussian writing is fun. Contrast a Straussian message with outright satire. Satire is an outrageous caricature of a position, with a very obvious exegesis; no special training is required to understand the "hidden" message. You simply have to be not-stupid. Straussian exegesis, to the contrary (when done properly) needs a key to unlock the mysteries held within. For example, if I'm guilty of Strausianism from time to time, the key is a passing familiarity with public choice economics. For the Tao Te Ching, the key is obtained after solving a series of koans. For Seussian Straussians, you need merely eat it in a box with a fox.

Answer (4): Straussian writing is accidental. Exegesis is prone to Type I errors, especially if the reader is actively on the hunt. Joe McCarthy was a hermeneutical Communist hunter. If you have the stomach for it, perform a search for "Illuminati" and browse what you find.

Answer (5): Straussian writing keeps out the riff-raff. If you want to go Full Nietzsche (never go Full Nietzsche), hidden knowledge should be reserved only for the eyes of those courageous few who have the fortitude to pass through the crucible of enlightenment. This is perhaps reasonable for some select religious texts. Recall that much of the Gospels are parables.

Get lost, Richard O'Brien

The risk of censure, be it political, religious, or secular, means that writing that could be salient to elites is not euvoluntary: writing plainly could result in outcomes unfavorable to the author. Straussian encoding is a partial defense against that. Hermeneutics makes writing more euvoluntary.

#GamerGate

Episode 6: Robin Hanson

Today I speak with my great friend Robin Hanson. I'm lucky enough to be an elevated fanboy. I knew Robin through his blog, Overcoming Bias and his appearances on Econtalk well before we ever met in person. Since attending GMU as a student, I've been fortunate enough to get to know Robin both personally and academically. I'm not kidding when I say that he's quite probably the smartest person I know. I can't recall a single time I've had an economics-related discussion with him that I didn't walk away understanding something better, and this chat was no exception. It was my great privilege to record this talk, and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it.


download

Also, around the 24 minute mark, I misspoke. I said that if the marginal benefit of each additional brain emulation approaches zero, it makes sense to produce a whole bunch. This is an obvious error. If the marginal cost approaches zero, new units would be produced even if the marginal benefit is small. I apologize to anyone I offended.

For anyone interested, the new thing I learned is the exchange around the 37 minute mark re: coordination. I claim that big social norms are examples of grand-scale coordination successes, but Robin cannily points out that enforcing violations of these big norms is always local. This is now one of those burning questions that I'm fixin' to tear up on Twitter (I'm @spivonomist, you can follow Robin under @robinhanson).

And near the end, we talk about KORROK without actually mentioning his name, which is pretty cool.

On a side note, I'm still working out how to get these talks up on iTunes or a similar service. Expect something in the near future (see what I did there?).