Transcript for:
Jordan Peterson's Announcement and Interview with Destiny

hello everyone I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024 beginning in early February and running through June Tammy and I an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the US you can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on my forthcoming book out November 2024 we who wrestle with God I'm looking forward to this I'm thrilled to be able to do it again and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon bye-bye when you look at like the fall of the Soviet Union or you look at the failure of like socialist or communist regimes I don't know if the issue there was so much redistribution that was one of many issues I don't think it was an issue at all actually I was what do you mean redistribution wasn't an issue what the hell do you think they did to the Kola if you believe climate models or if you believe that we're heading in a certain direction I don't believe any of those presumptions people keep saying but we just got another one of the hottest years on record That's a classic leftist argument why wouldn't Putin why wouldn't Gan pink why wouldn't anybody else in the world call this out it was as horrible as it was there are plenty of people attempting to call no you really think that you're in a position to evaluate the scientific credibility of the trials for the vaccines do you hello everyone I'm here today talking to Steph banel known professionally and online as Destiny he's an American streamer debater and political commentator he really came to my attention I would say as a consequence of the discussion he had with Ben Shapiro and Lex fredman and I decided to talk to him not least because it's not that easy to bring people who are identified at least to some degree with the political beliefs on the left into a studio where I can actually have a conversation with them I've tried that more often than you might think and it happens now and then but not very often so today we talk a lot about well the differences between the left and the right and the dangers of political ideology per se and the use of power as opposed to invitation and all sorts of other heated often heated and contentious issues and so you're welcome to join us and um I was happy to have the opportunity to do this so I guess we might as well start by letting the people who don't know who you are get to know who you are with a little bit more precision so why have you become known and and how has that developed it's a pretty broad question um I think I started streaming around 15 years ago when it wasn't really a thing yet there were a few people that did it uh I started early on I was a well I guess back then you weren't a professional gamer yet because the game had just started to come out but there was a game called Starcraft 2 and I screamed myself playing that game I was a pretty good player was pretty entertaining to watch and then I kind of grew uh over I guess maybe the next seven years uh just streaming that people would watch streaming on YouTube um well back then I started on a website called live stream then I switched to Ustream then I switched to a site called Justin TV and then that turned into twitch.tv uh so after streaming there for like s or eight years I was a semi-professional Starcraft 2 gamer that game kind of came and went but I had a lot of other interests around 2016 I started to get more involved into the world of politics it's kind of a left leaning figure uh because my background on like Esports and internet gaming and internet trash talk I got I had more of a kind of like a combative attitude and that was kind of rare for left leaning people at the time so it's basically where my early political popularity came from I think from like 2016 to 2018 was debating right-wing people so was there a game likee element to the debating do you think and and is that part of is that part of why that morphing made sense no I wouldn't say so I mean if you if you get really reductionist everything in life is kind of a game but that's not very satisfying uh I think I grew up like very argumentative my mom is from Cuba so my family was like very conservative and then I grew up like listening to the news all day listening to my mom's political opinions all day and then I argued with kids in high school and everything and I've always been kind of like an argumentative type A aggressive personality so I think that probably lent itself well to the political stuff in 2016 yeah was that useful in gaming um that that personality in some ways yeah and some ways no um I don't know directly for the games itself I don't know how much it necessarily mattered uh but for all the peripheral stuff in some ways it was really beneficial I could kind of like cut out my own path and I could be very unique and I could kind of be on my own in some ways it was very detrimental uh I'm very I can be very difficult to get along with and I'm very much kind of like I want to do this thing and if you try to tell me what to do I don't want to have like a sponsor or a team or anybody kind of with a leash on me so yeah I guess it worked out it's interesting because that the temperamental proclivity that you're describing that's associated with low agreeableness and generally well and that's more combative it's more stubborn it's more implacable it's more competitive the downside is that it's more skeptical it's it can be more cynical it can be less Cooperative but generally a temperament like that is associated with is not associated with political belief on the left because the leftists tend to be characterized by um higher levels of compassion and that's low agreeableness so you know that element of your temperament at least is quite masculine and then a lot of the ideology that characterizes the modern left has a much more temperamentally feminine nature so so all right so why do you think the shift from your popularity to political commentary worked and you said that started about 2016 and why do you think that that shift happened for you like in terms of your interest I think I've always been interested in a lot of things like I grew up with a very strong political bend it was conservative until I got into my streaming years probably five or six years into streaming I slowly kind of started to shift to the left um I would say that uh I guess in around around 2016 when I saw all of the conversations going on with the election and all the issues being talked about I just I felt like the conversations were very low quality and in my naivity I thought that maybe I could come in and boost the quality at least in like my little corner of the internet to have better conversations about what was going on and so that was my basically my injection Point into of that was yeah fting about those political issues and then arguing with people about them doing research and reading and all of that yeah and so did you do that by video to begin with as well yeah it was all streaming yeah it was all streaming and so you I presume you built an audience among the people who were following you as a gamer first and then that started to expand is that correct basically yeah with without getting too much into like the business or streaming side of things basically um actually this probably carries over to to basically to all media I would imagine is you've got people that will watch you for special events uh so maybe you're like a commentator of the Super Bowl or maybe you're hosting like a really huge event then you've got people who will watch you every time you're participating in your area of expertise so for me that's like a particular game I might be playing um it might be when you're on like a particular show or something that people watch you for and then the fundamental fan like the best fan that you're converting to the lowest and most loyal uh viewer I guess is somebody that's watching you basically no matter what you're doing and these are the people that will follow you from area to area and I think because of the way I did game and I talked about a lot of other stuff whether it was politics science current events whatever I had a lot of loyal fans that kind of followed me wherever I went so quite a few of stablished the reputation so how would you characterize your reach now how would you quantify it uh I think my can you be more precise how many people are how many people are watching your a typical video that you might produce and and what are you doing for subscribers Say on YouTube and total any idea about total reach yeah well I mean I guess my subscribers on YouTube I around I think think now it's around 770,000 on my main Channel I think I probably do between all three channels I think around 15 to 20 million views a month um and then I live stream to anywhere from 5 to 15,000 concurrent viewers a day for hopefully around eight hours a day uh yeah okay okay so you have quite a substantial reach and so you said that initially you were more conservative leaning but that changed what okay what did it mean that you were more conser ative leaning and how did that how and why did that change uh when I say I was conservative leaning and I was writing uh articles for my school newspaper defending George Bush in the Iraq War uh I was like very much like um I don't I think it's like an insult now what people say like neocon but I was like very much like a conservative a bush era conservative uh so supported big business supported um traditional all of the conservative I guess like foreign policy you know hawkish policy uh for whatever that meant as like a 14 15y old um right was the whole elen Gonzalez in uh incident that was very big for uh Cuban Americans where um there was a Cuban boy that tried to come to the United States with several other people and his mother and their raft I guess crashed or something happened I think his mom died and some other people died and there was a huge debate on whether or not to send him back to Cuba and Clinton ended up sending it back to Cuba and I know that my mom was super irritated and all that um to say the least and then but once they hit College I think I supported Ron Paul in 200 would have been 2008 uh so was a big Ron Paul libertarian uh guy in high school when I went from I went to a Catholic Jesuit High School and I kind of became atheist in that process I started reading Ein Rand uh so I was very very very very very conservative um on the libertarian end it sounds yeah I would say so yeah initially on the like that makes more sense in relationship to your temperament libertarian yeah yeah yeah initially it was like Christian conservative and then it became like libertarian conservative um without my life kind of took like a wacky path and then as I I started working I kind of had to drop out of school I was working and then I got into streaming and once I started streaming I had a son basically around the first year I started streaming uh as I started to go through life and I went from kind of being in this like Working Poor position to making a lot of money uh especially through the lens of my child I saw how different life was when I had more money versus less and I guess like the um the differences between what was available to me and then my child as I made more money uh while I was really wealthy versus not as wealthy it kind of started to change the way that I I guess you got more attuned to the consequences of inequality isas it yeah okay and so that okay how did that lead you to develop more sympathy for left leaning ideas particularly I guess the my my core beliefs have never really changed but I think the way that those uh become applied kind of change uh so much the same way that uh you might think that everybody deserves a shot to go to school and have an education that might be like a core belief where as a Libertarian or conservative I might think that as long as a school is available everybody's got the opportunity to go and study but maybe now as like a liberal or Progressive or whatever you'd call me I might say okay well we need to make sure that there's enough you know maybe like food in the household or household or some kind of funding program to make sure the kid can actually go to school and study basically so like the the the core Drive is the same but I think the applied the the applied principle ends up changing a bit based on what is your concern essentially something like um the observation that if people are breed enough of substance let's say that it's difficult for them to take advantage of equal opportunities even if they are presented to them let's say yeah essentially yeah and and you're you you have some belief and correct me if I'm wrong you have some belief that there is room for State intervention I at the level of basic provision to make those opportunities more manifest yeah to varying degrees yeah okay okay how okay so let let let's let's start talking more broadly then on the political side so how would you characterize the difference in your opinion between the left and the conservative political viewpoints umof uh on a on a very very very broad level um if there's some I would say if there's some like good good world that we're all aiming for I think people on the left uh seem to think that a a collection of taxes from a large population that goes into a government that's able to precisely kind of dull out uh where that tax money goes uh you're basically able to take the problems of society you're able to scrape off hopefully a a not super significant amount of money from people that are that can afford to give a lot of and then through government programs and redistribution you target that uh that those taxes essentially to people that kind of need whatever bare minimum to take advantage opportun deci yeah and then for on the conservative end um I guess a conservative would generally think that why would the government take my money I think from a community point of view through churches through Community Action through families we can better allocate our own dollars to our own friends and family to help them and give them the things that they need so that they can better participate in and thrive in society basically okay so one of the things that I've always found a mystery I I think there's an equal mystery on the left and on the right in this regard is that the more conservative types tend to be very skeptical of big government and the leftist types tend to be more skeptical of big corporations right well you okay so following through the logic that you just laid out you made the suggestion that one of the things that characterizes people on the left is the belief that government can act as a agent of distrib can and should act as an agent of distribution okay a potential problem for that is the gigantism of the government that does that now the conservatives are skeptical of that gigantism and likewise the Liberals the progressives in particular we'll call them progressives um are skeptical of the reach of gigantic corporations and I've always seen a commonality in those two in that both of them are skeptical of gigantism and so one of the things that I concerned about generally speaking with regard to the potential for the rise of tyranny is the emergence of of Giants and one potential problem with the view that the government can and should act as an agent of redistribution is that there is an incentive put in place two kinds of incentives number one a major league incentive towards gigantism and tyranny and number two an incentive for psychopaths who use comp passion to justify their grip on power to take money and to claim that they're doing good and I see that happening everywhere now in the name of particularly in the name of compassion it's one of the things that's made me very skeptical in particular about the left and at least about the progressive edge of the left so I'm curious about what you think about those two first of all it's it's a paradox to me that the conservatives and the leftists face off each other with regard to their concern about different forms of gigantism and don't seem to notice that the thing that unites them is some antipathy this is especially true for the Libertarians some antipathy towards gigantic structures per se and so then I would say with regards to your antithesis between liberalism and conservatives the conservatives are pointing to the fact that there are intermediary forms of distribution that can be utilized to solve the social problems that you're describing that don't bring with them the Associated problem of gigantism and like this is a it's been shocking to me to watch the left especially in the last six years Ally itself for example with pharmaceutical companies which was something I'd never saw never thought I would see in my lifetime I mean for for decades the only gigantic corporations the left was more skeptical of than the fossil fuel companies were the pharmaceutical companies and that all seemed to vanish overnight around the covid time so I know the story that's a lot of things to throw at you but it sort of outlines the territory that we could probably investigate productively yeah so a couple things I would say that the current political landscape we have I think is less uh I understand the the concept of conservative supporting corporations and liberal support uh supporting like large government I think today the Divide we're starting to see more and more is more of like a populist uh anti-populist rise or even like institutional or anti-institutional rise so for instance I think conservative city in the United States are largely characterized with uh I would say with populism uh and that they're supporting like certain figures namely right now Donald Trump who they think alone can kind of like lead them against the corrupt institutions uh be them corporate or government I feel like I feel like most conservatives today are not as trustful of big corporations as they were back in like the bush era where we would you know conservatives would Champion you know big corations I think that's right yeah um I a strange because it makes the modern conservatives a lot more like the 60s leftists potentially yeah um I mean that brings us into the issue too of whether the Left Right divide is actually a reasonable way of construing the current political landscape at all and I'm not sure it is but right now it kind of is but only because so many conservatives are following Trump so like your populist anti-populist thing kind of maps on kind of cleanly to the left and right it doesn't work with progressives though or the farle because they're also anti-large everything so in a surprising way on very very farle people you might find them having a bit more in common with kind of like a mega Trump supporter uh than like a center left liberal so for instance like both of these groups of people on the very far left will be very doish on foreign policy probably a little bit more isolationist they're not a big fan of like a ton of immigration or a ton of trade with other countries uh they might think that there's a lot of institutional capture of both government and corporations so both all of the Mega supporters and the far farle might think that corporations don't have our best interest at heart and the government is corrupt and captur by lobbyists like yeah you'll see a lot of overlap there right um I think that sometimes uh there's a couple things one uh this is something I feel like I've discovered people have no principles uh I think that people are largely Guided by whatever is kind of satisfying them or making them feel good at the time I think that's a really important thing to understand because people's beliefs will seem to change at random if you're trying to uh imagine that a belief is coming from some underlying principle or is governed by some internal uh you know like moral or reasonable code or whatever I think generally there are large social groups and people kind of follow them along from thing to thing which is why you end up in strange worlds sometimes where uh you know like the the position on vaccines and being an antivaxer might have been seen as something you know 10 years ago as kind of like a hippie leftist and now maybe it's more like a conservative or uh it's Associated more with like Mega Trump supporters or whatever I think as a result of how the social groups move around um when it comes to the you mentioned this like gigantism thing that's another I'm not sure if people actually care about gigantism or if they're using it as a proxy for other things that they don't like like I could totally imagine a I care about it sure yeah you might yeah sorry just in general that's okay um cuz like I could imagine somebody saying that like they don't trust like a large government they think there's too much uh you know prone to tyranny or something like that but also be supportive of an institution like the Catholic Church which is literally you know one guy who has a direct to they can't tax um well I mean there and they don't have a military and they can't conscript you and they can't throw you in jail that is true yeah I mean well those are major those are major and significant I mean I get I get the overlap don't get me wrong sure but I'm saying like even if you had a local government like a local like if you had a state government or a tribe usually they've got some form of enacting punishment it'll be sometimes more brutal but they can throw you in jail uh conscription hasn't existed in the US since the Vietnam War um I mean yeah yeah true yeah yeah true um so yeah I think that um I guess when I look at so this is so let's go back well let's go back to to the redistribution issue I mean we pay 65% of our income at say upper middle class middle class to upper middle class level in Canada it isn't obvious to me at all that that money is well used in fact quite the contrary in my country now um our citizens make 60% of they produce 60% of what you produce in the US that's plummeted over the last 20 years as state intervention has increased I'm not convinced that the claim that the interests of people who lack opportunity are best served by state intervention and there's there's a couple of reasons for that I mean first of all I'm aware of the relationship between inequality and social problem there's a very well-developed literature on that and it it essentially shows that the more arbitrary the the the broader the reach of inequality in in a political institution of Any Given size the more social unrest so we're PE where all people are poor there isn't much social unrest and where all people are rich there isn't much social unrest but when there's a big gap between the two there's plenty and that's mostly driven by disaffected young men who aren't very happy that they can't climb the hierarchy there are barriers in their way and so there is reason to amarate relative poverty the problem with that to some degree is that most attempts to ameliorate relative poverty tend to increase absolute poverty and they do it dramatically and the only solution that we've ever been able to develop to that is something approximating a free market system I wouldn't call it a capitalist system because I think that's capture of the terminology by the radical leftists it's a free exchange system and the price you pay for a free exchange system is you still have inequality but the advantage you gain is that the absolute levels of privation plummet and I think the data on that are I think they're absolutely conclusive especially and that's been especially demonstrated in the radical decrease in rates of poverty since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 because we've lifted more people out of poverty in the last four decades than we had in the entire course of human history up to that date and that's not least because the statist interventionist types who argued for a radical state sponsored redistribution lost the Cold War right and that freed up after Africa to some degree and certainly the Southeast Asian countries to pursue something like a free trade economy and that instantly even that instantly made them Rich even China so well so that's an argument let's say on the side of free exchange but it's also an argument two-fold argument pointing out how we amarate absolute poverty which it should be a concern for leftists but doesn't seem to be anymore by the way and also an argument for the maintenance of a necessary inequality like I'm not sure that inequality can be decreased Beyond a certain degree without that decrease causing other serious problems and we can talk about that but but it's a complicated problem yeah let for one point of clarification when you say leftist what do you mean by that well we I was going with your definition like essentially that the this the core idea being something like the the central problem being one of relative inequality and distribution of resources and the central solution to that being something like state sponsored economic intervention I mean there's other ways we could Define left or right and we do that but but I'll stick with the one that you brought forward to begin with gotcha gotcha okay I I only want to be clear on that because um uh because people get mad if I call myself fpst um often times online or in especially in Europe or worldwide leftists will uh refer exclusively to like socialists or communists and anybody to the right of that would be considered like a liberal if you usually a fascist well depending very rapidly yeah yeah um I just wanted to be clear on that uh so I'm absolutely a pro capitalist Pro premarket guy um I'm not I'm never going to okay okay okay okay okay well that that's good it's good to get that clear why yeah um because uh I would argue that when you look at like the fall of the Soviet Union or you look at the fail failure of like socialist or communist regimes uh I don't know if the issue there was so much redistribution I think the problem that was one of many issues I don't think it was an issue at all actually I would say I think the issue was uh Commander wait a wait wait a minute what what do you mean redistribution wasn't an issue what the hell do you think they did to the kulac that was forced redistribution it resulted in the in the death of six million people so maybe I'm not understanding what you mean but that was redistribution at its at its like Pinnacle and forced redistribution was brutal when I when I think of the um when I think of the strengths of capitalism um the ability for markets to dynamically respond to shifting consumer demand is like the reason why capitalism and free market economies dominate the world when you've got socialist or communist systems uh command economies where a government is trying to say this is how much this is going to cost this is how much you're going to produce and make the this is a failed way of managing a state economy even in places where they still do it there are always Shadow economies and stuff they were in the Soviet Union that prop up where people tried to uh basically amarate the conditions that are resulting from said horrible command economy practices uh so I guess in a way you could argue a command economy is kind of like redistribution it's a form of it but no it's a worse problem I if you're if you're pointing to the fact that that's a worst problem I'm I'm I would say that's definitely the reason why these places uh failed because they just weren't able to respond to changing okay so what's the difference between going online without expressvpn is like leaving your kids with the nearest 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extra 3 months free that's expressvpn.com Jordan okay so what's the difference between a state that attempts to redistribute to Foster equality of opportunity and and a command economy is it is it a difference of degree like are you looking at models let's say like the Scandinavian countries or I wouldn't use Canada by the way because Canada is now uh what would you call predicted predicted by economic analysis analysts to have the worst performing economy for the next four Decades of all the developed world so maybe we'll just leave the example of Canada off the table Scandinavian countries are often the polies that are pointed to by I would say by people who at least in part are putting forward a view of redistribution for purposes of equality of opportunity like you are but they're a strange analogy because they're very small countries and up till now they were very ethnically homogeneous exactly and that makes a big difference when you're trying to flatten out the redistribution plus they're also incredibly wealthy which makes you know redistribution let's say a lot easier so so so so what's why why doesn't the government that's bent on redistribution fall prey to the pitfalls of command economy and and forced redistribution for that matter how do you how do you protect against that I I think you have to do is very very very difficult is people get very ideologically captured by both ends and they feel very uh I guess like committed or they feel very Allegient to pushing certain forms of economic organization and I think sometimes it blinds them to some of the benefits of what exists when you incorporate kind of multiple models or I mean you'd call them mixed economies which is really what every capitalist economy today is it's some form of free market capitalism combined with some form of like government intervention to control for negative externalities these are the ways that all economies even in Scandinavia in the world work and I think that recognizing the benefits of both systems are the best way to yeah make work fair enough and and the Scandinavian countries seem to have done a pretty good job of that like I said they have a simpler problem to solve let's say than the Americans have negative externalities that's a you know that's an interesting Rabbit Hole to wander down because the problem I have with negative externalities you made a case already that and again correct me if I've got this wrong but I I think I think that I understood what you said um a free market free exchange economy is a gigantic distributed computational device basically yeah right exactly enough one of the big problems for command economies is called the computation problem because no central body can actually compute you know the right exactly right that that's not yeah that's that's a fatal problem right because it doesn't have the computational power it certainly doesn't have the the speed of data recognition it doesn't have on the on the ground agents if if all of the perception and decision- making is centralized right it's way too low resolution it's going to crash okay so and I think that that's comprehensible technically as well as ideologically all right so but having said that with regards to externalities all the externalities that a market economy can't compute are so complex that they can't be determined centrally by the same argument and so there are ways to account for them though really that work with tell me how I can't see that because I can't see how that they they can be accounted for without the same computational problem immediately arising yeah and I understand that and I think that's a problem sometimes of people very far on the left when they want to deal with certain problems uh I think that they want to bring like heavy-handed you know like things like price controls in to say well we need less of this so let's just make this cost this particular thing which ironically enough introduces a whole other set of externalities that will happen when you get a lot of friction between where your price floor or ceiling is set compared to what a market was set it at but ideally if you're a reasonable person and you view economies as mixed economies what you try to do is you try to take these externalities meaning things that aren't accounted for with your primary system so in a capitalist system an externality might be something that cause a negative effect but it doesn't cost you any money pollution would be a good example of that and rather than saying like well no company can pollute this much or you know if you're a company you have to use these things because we the other things are making too much pollution all you do is you say okay well if we've determined that say carbon is bad for the atmosphere we're just going to attach a little price to that government is going to say that yeah if you pollute this much here's the price and then if you want to pay for it you can but that type of uh intervention in the economy basically allows the free market to hopefully do its job because the government has tacked on a little bit of a price that it tries to account for the cost of that externality yeah great that's a great example we can go right down that rabbit hole carbon okay so first of all um one of the things I've seen you tell me what you think about this something that I've seen that actually shocks me that I was interested in watching over the last five or six years I wondered what would happen when the left the progressives ran into a conundrum and the conundrum is quite straightforward if you pursue carbon pricing and you make energy more expensive then you hurt the poor and I don't think you just hurt them in fact I know you don't you just don't hurt them I heard a man two days ago who's fed 350 million people in the course of his life um heading the un's largest relief agency make the claim quite straightforwardly that that misappropriation on the part of inter interventionist governments increased the rate of absolute privation dramatically in in the world over the last four or five years and not and that has happened not least because of carbon pricing not just carbon pricing but the insistence that carbon per se is an externality that we should control now Germany's paid a radical price for that for example so their power is now about five times as expensive as it could be and they pollute more per unit of power than they did 10 years ago before they introduced these policies that were hypothetically there to account for externality and the externality was carbon dioxide I don't think that's a computable externality and I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever that it's actually an externality that we should be warping the economic system to ameliorate if the cost of that and it will be will be an increase in absolute privation among the world's poor so and here's a here's an additional argument on that front with regards to externalities you get that wrong and here's something you could get right in said if you ameliorate absolute poverty among the world's 1 billion billion poorest they take a longer view of the future and that means they become environmentally aware and so the fastest route to a sustainable Planet could well be the remediation of absolute poverty and the best route to that is cheap energy and we're interfering with the development of cheap energy by meddling with the hypothetically detrimental externality of carbon dioxide and so it's it's I think this is a complete bloody travesty by the way we are putting the lives of hundreds of millions of people directly at risk right now to hypothetically save people in the future depending on the accuracy of our projections a 100 years out and these these interventionists these people who are remediating externalities they actually believe that they can calculate an economic projection one century out that's utterly delusional so okay so just as a to be clear the first thing I was just giving an example of how you can use like a government intervention to make a free market track something which which is what C and trade or like carbon taxes would do um I wasn't necessarily speaking to the strength of that individual thing but yeah but that's a good thing to focus on externality we can focus on that as well so um the first thing uh this is going to sound mean uh but I'm you know I'm very realistic uh there needs to be a better argument than just it disproportionately impacts the poor classic leftist argument it might be right but it's the same argument you made to justify your swing to the left at the beginning of our discussion you said that you were looking at economic inequalities that disproportionately affected the poor so I can't see why and I'm not trying to be mean about this either I can't see why you could base your argument that it was moral it was morally appropriate for you to swing to the left from your previous position because you saw disproportionate effects on the poor and I can't use that ARG arent in the situation that I'm presenting it right now well because it depends on if we think it's a condition that ought to be remedied or not for instance if I walk you know around and I see homeless people and I'm like man this is really sad we ought to spend more home money on homeless people because it seems like they're disproportionately affected by their living conditions and then somebody says oh well do you think we should still lock up you know rapists and murderers aren't they disproportionately poor I'd probably say well yeah we probably should go well isn't that hypocritical well no I think that rapist and murderers should probably be in jail but we can also help the homeless at the same time I think that just helping the poor isn't an argument like a blank check to do every possible thing to satisfy poor people it's going to depend from that's fine because the poor everyone who's poor is not a victim some people who are poor are Psychopathic perpetrators and it's very useful to distinguish them but I was making a much more specific argument my argument was that the fastest way out of absolute privation for the world's bottom billion people is through cheap energy yeah I I understand what you're saying there so just towards that um yeah I just want to say that just because something targets the poor is not necessarily an argument against it another depends on how hard it targets them and it depends on whether Mass starvation is the outcome the outcome is important that I agree with so for instance like a syntax outcome will be masturation I'm get to it okay syntaxes on like cigarettes and alcohol are always going to disproportionately impact the poor or even sugar we might say right but just because that disproportionately impacts the poor is that a good thing or a bad thing these are probably the people that suffer the most from those particular afflictions right right and that is an immediate versus delayed issue too right because the reason I mean obesity is an immediate I don't think Al the reason for the tax is is to stop people from Pur pursuing a certain form of short-term gratification at the cost of their longer term well-being correct and that that that exact same idea if you believe climate models or if you believe that we're heading in a certain direction uh in terms of climate the overall warming of the planet would be the same argument you would make for climate change if you believe that you could model Economic Development 100 years into the future well we're not trying to model we we're more concerned with modeling climate development economic developmentally no well okay tell tell me how I'm wrong I don't believe that because what I see happening is two things we have climate models that purport to explain what's going to happen over a century on the climate side but we have economic models layered right on top of those that claim that there's going to be various forms of disaster for human beings economically as a consequence of that climate change and so that's like two towers of Babel stacked on top of one another and so because if if people were just saying oh the climate's going to change there'd be no moral impetus in that it's the climate's going to change and that's going to be disastrous for the biosphere and for Humanity but that's an economic argument as well as a climate based argument it's it's both but the the worst the worst projections of what would happen if the climate took a disastrous turn are worse than the worst projections of what is our planet going to look like economically if we hardcore police why would you okay but understand the distinction between the models well the argument would be that whatever pain and suffering poor people might endure right now because of a move towards green energy that pain and suffering is going to be short-term and far less than the long-term pain and suffering right but that's dependent on the Integrity of the economic models and the and and the climate models as well right exactly but that but in exactly the Stacked manner that I described and like there's nobody in 1890 who could have predicted what was going to happen in 19 90 economically not not a bit not a bit and and if we think we can predict like 50 years out now with the current rate of technology and calculate the potential impact of climate change on economic flourishing for human beings we're diluted no one can do that and then and so and it's worse so imagine that as you do that and you project outward your margin of error increases that's absolutely definitely the case and at some point you're certainly on the climate side the margin of error gets rapidly to the point where it subsumes any estimate of the degree to which the climate is going to transform and that happens even more rapidly on the economic side potentially right now I think right now this is a disagreement on the fact of the matter though not the philosophy of what we're talking about in terms of controlling externalities if we think I'm so I'm curious let's say that we think we can accurately predict the climate and the economic impact and we think that the climate impact would be far worse if we don't account for that both in terms of human conditions I don't believe any of those presumptions I think but but I mean like obviously if I agreed with that that factual analysis I would probably agree with you on the prescription here too right and like none of the climate models were accurate couldn't accurately predict well they're not sufficiently accurate that's the first thing and SEC because they have a margin of error and it's a large margin of error they don't even model cloud coverage well that's a big problem they don't have the resolution they don't have nearly the resolution to produce the accuracy that's claimed by the climate apocalypse mongers saying that but we just got another one of the hottest years on record how many times are we going to have another hottest year on record how many times are we going to have an increase of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere before we're finally like okay I don't know and the the reason I don't know is because it depends the scientific answer to that question depends precisely on the time frame over which you evaluate the climate fluctuation and that's actually an intractable scientific problem so you might say well if you take the last 100 years this variation looks pretty disal and I'd say well what what if you took the last 150,000 years or the last 10,000 or the last 10 million you can't specify the damn the time frame is incredibly important that would be like saying look at your you know uh let's say somebody developed cancer and they didn't realize it and the person is lost you know 40 or 50 pounds in in the past six months and like you you look very sickly and you're like okay well look at my weight fluctuation over the past 10 years say well it doesn't really matter what matters saying the time frame isn't important saying that it is important saying don't know how to specify it well you would probably specify with the beginning of the Industrial Age right why because when that's when carbon dioxide which is a gas is trapping uh more heat on the plan why is that relevant to the time over which you compute the variability because it seems like as carbon dioxide has increased in the atmosphere the surface temperatures have risen at a rate that is a departure from what we'd expect over 150,000 year cycles of temperature variations on the planet no not with that time frame that not the case absolutely the case no what do you mean you just flipped to 150,000 to your time span what I'm saying is that if if we expect to see a temperature do this in 150,000 year time span in a 100e time span seeing it do this that's very worrying Michael man's hockey stick the one that's under attack right now in court by a major statistician who claimed that he falsified his data mean that Spike the I'm talking about the record temperatures that are declared that have been declared for like the past five years that have also increased with the uh with the concentration of parts per million of carbon dioxide of the atmosphere um I mean I'm going to tell you that every model is perfect right now sure but right now we're like standing in traffic with our eyes closed saying the car hasn't hit me yet so I don't think there's any coming I think it's pretty undeniable at this point that there is an impact on climate across the planet I just I think that's highly deniable we have no idea what the impact is from we don't know where the carbon dioxide is from we can't measure the warming of the oceans we have terrible temperature records going back 100 years almost all the terrestrial temperature uh uh uh detection sites were first put outside urban areas and then as right and then you have to correct then you have to correct for the for the movement of the urban areas and then you introduce an error parameter that's larger than the purported increase in temperature that you're planning to measure this isn't data this is guess and there's something weird underneath it there's something weird that isn't oriented well towards human beings underneath it it has this guise of compassion oh we're going to save the poor in the future it's like that's what the bloody commun said and they killed a lot of people doing it and we're walking down that same road now with this insistence that you know we're so compassion that we care about the poor a 100 years from now and if we have to wipe out several hundred million of them now well that's a small price to pay for the future Utopia and we've heard that sort of thing before and the alternative to that is for is to stop having global level Elites plot out a utopian future or even an anti- dystopian future and that's exactly what's happening now with organizations like the wef and if this wasn't immediately impacting the poor in a devastating manner I wouldn't care about it that much but it is you know I watched over the course of The Last 5 Years the estimates of the number of people who were in serious danger of food privation rise from about 100 million to about 350 million that's a major price to pay for a little bit of what what would you say for for progress on the climate that's so narrow it can't even be measured I don't think the increase in in hungry people on the in the planet is because of climate policies why not because I don't think that countries in Africa are being pushed away from fossil fuels the most developing course they are they can't even get they can't even get loans from the World Bank to produ pursue fossil fuel development and there's plenty of African leaders who are screeching at the top of their lungs about that because the Elites in the west have decided that well it was okay for us to use fossil fuel for so that we wouldn't have to starve death and our children had some opportunities but maybe the starving masses that are too large a load for the world anyways shouldn't have that opportunity and that's that's direct policy from the UN fostered by organizations like the W wef they're going to have to turn to Renewables yeah well good luck with that because Renewables have no energy density besides that they're not renewable and they're not environmentally friendly and then one more thing there's one more weird thing underneath all of this okay well let's say if carbon dioxide was actually your bug bear and it was genuine well then why wouldn't the greens for example in Africa the progressives be agitating to expand the use of nuclear nuclear energy especially because Germany has to import it anyways especially because France has demonstrated that it's possible we could drive down the cost of energy with lowcost nuclear and there'd be no carbon production and then the poor people would have something to eat because they'd have enough energy and that isn't what's happening and that's one of the things that makes me extreme ly skeptical of the entire narrative it's like two things the left will sacrifice the poor to save the planet and the left will de-industrialized even at the nuclear level despite the fact that it devastates the poor and that's even worse because if you devastate the poor and you force them into a short-term orientation in any given country where starvation beckons for example they will cut down all the trees and they will kill down all the animals and they will destroy the ecosphere and so even by the standards of the people who are pushing the carbon dioxide externality control all the consequences of that Doctrine appear to me to be devastating even by their own measurement principles we're trying to fix the environment well boys and girls doesn't look like it's working all you've managed to do is make energy five times as expensive and more polluting you were wrong that didn't work and so and I can't understand you can help me that's why you're here today talking to me I can't understand how the left can support this just one quick thing let's say that everything you've said is true what do you think is the plan that what is the goal what is the drive like why push why push obviously horrible ideas for the planet and the poor that's a good question that's a good question do well because you're positive it right so what what do you think is the driver goal well I listen to what people say here's the most terrible thing they say there are too many people on the planet okay so who says that I've heard people say that for 30 years perfectly ordinary compassionate people well there's too many people on the planet and I think well for me that's like hearing Satan himself take possession of their spine and and move their mouth it's like okay who are these excess people that you're so concerned about and exactly who has to go and when and why and how and who's going to make that decision and even if you don't even if you're not conscious ly aiming at that you are the one who uttered the words you're the ones who muttered the phrase what makes you think that the thing that possessed you to make you utter that words isn't aiming at exactly what you just declared and so that's you know that's a terrible Vision but when you look at what happens in genocidal societies and they emerge fairly with Fair regularity and usually with the utopian Vision at hand the consequence is the mass destruction of millions of people so why should I assume that something horrible isn't lurking like that right now especially given that we have pushed a few hundred million of people back into absolute poverty when we were doing a pretty damn good job of getting rid of that and I just don't understand what's happening in Germany or in the UK like it's insane like look man if they would have got rid of the nuclear plants and made energy five times as expensive and the consequence would have been they weren't burning leg night coal as a backup and their unit production of energy of pollution per unit of energy had plummeted you could say well look you know we heard a lot of poor people but at least the air is cleaner it's like NOP air is worse and everyone's poorer so like the explain to me how the hell the left can be anti-nuclear okay I don't understand it at all gotcha all right um this is something that I brought up earlier that is concerning to me um I feel like when people people get political beliefs I feel like what happens is what we think happens what we hope happen is you have some moral or philosophical underpinning and then from there you combine this with some epistemic understanding of the world and then you combine these two things you engage in some form of analysis and your moral be nice if that was true yeah you start to apply like prescription so maybe I'm religious maybe I analyze society and I see that uh particular TV shows lead to premarital sex so my societal prescription is we should ban these TV shows right ideally this is how you would imagine this process works what I find happens unfortunately all too often is what people do is they join social groups and then with those social groups they inherit something that I call like a constellation of beliefs and this constellation of beliefs instead of rationally building on each of these you basically get this like Jenga tower that is like floating over a table and every block is like supporting itself and no real part of the tower can be addressed because you pull out one piece it all falls apart so people become like very stuck in all of this combined constellation stuff and none of it is really given like any analysis and you can't really push anybody from from one way or another uh in terms of like reevaluating any of the beliefs that are part of this constellation um I wish I 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better just mix beam dream into hot water or milk stir or froth and enjoy before bedtime if you find yourself struggling to sleep give it a shot get up to 40% off for a limited time when you go to shop beam.com Peterson and use code Peterson at checkout that's shop bam.com Peterson and use code Peterson for 40% [Music] off that's fine that's right well you know there are models now of there are models now of cognitive processing belief belief system processing that make the technical claim that what a belief system does is constrain entropy sure that's not surprising at all okay so and now now the signal for for released entropy which would be a consequence of say violated fundamental beliefs is a radical increase in anxiety right and a decrease in the possibility of positive emotion and so people will struggle very hard against that which is exactly the phenomena that you're describing okay I agree with what you said although so here's here's my yeah so I'm not sure why it's relevant to what to the issue I was here here's my issue okay so when I'm trying to evaluate a situation like to think that I have some uh I've got some insulation from the effects of what liberals think or what conservatives think is because on my platform I don't necessarily have an allegiance to a particular political ideology like right now I'm like Center left to Progressive but I break really hard from Progressive on certain issues I think Kyle Rittenhouse is in the right I think basically everything you guys are doing with indigenous people is insane uh including the complete Mass grave hoax uh I think that I'm a big supporter of the Second Amendment uh I have beliefs where I can break from my side you know pretty hardcore because I am not like Legion to certain political ideology one thing that worries me with this constellation beliefs thing is that sometimes when it comes to evaluating a particular policy or a particular problem I feel like it's part of the constellation and sometimes it inhibits people from like taking a step back and reasonably thinking about the issue so when we're talking about climate change you mentioned the WF sacrificing tons of people the UN Global Elites uh five times energy cost in Germany uh genocidal people I feel like this is part of like a whole thing where it's like okay well let's take a quick step back and let's just like think rationally about this particular issue for one moment okay well you asked me what the motivation for anti-poor policies might be so that's why I was well I did but but I got all of those things before I even asked that question um because I think it's totally possible that somebody might say okay well when you put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere it seems to cause an increase in surface temperatures this has been happening from about the 1800s and as we've started to track surface temperatures whether the thermometer is on top of the Empire State Building or in the middle of the field it seems like there's an average rise in temperatures and people all around the world are observing this in some places more than others if you live in Seattle and 20 years ago your apartment building wasn't built with air conditioner units you feel that now if you live in place in London and you've never had an air condition before now that's not acceptable I think that people on the ground can see that there are changes and I think that scientists when they look in Labs can see changes it might be that some models aren't precise enough and it might be that for reasons we don't even understand well the economic models certainly aren't precise enough sure maybe maybe maybe they can't even use them to predict the price of a single stock for 6 months the economic model models are not sufficiently accurate to calculate out the consequences of climate change over a century not in the Le when you I I like the comparison because economic models can't predict individual stocks but they do predict the rough rise of the market if you invest in the s for the cataclysmic collapse nope even with the cataclysmic collapse accounted for you're going to see about 7% Returns on average with inflation over long call an average a very sophisticated model analogous to climate change that's the difference between climate and weather though right is that climate isn't going to tell you what the temperature is on a given day but it might tell you the average surface temperature over a period of 1 year or 10 years and I that's the difference between climate and weather that's like it is a hypothetical but again we're seeing more and more and more data every single year that getting let's jump out of our cloud of presuppositions for a minute sure now one of the things that no wait I want to say there are there are some things that we've gotten as a result of investing in green energy that have been good so for instance uh the power of solar energy has dropped dramatically in the United States faster than anybody thought possible such that uh uh solar energy is like competitive or beating fossil fuels in certain areas if as long as you can set the solar panels up you're literally beating fossil as long as the sun is shining well it's I mean it still is we're not a nuclear winter yet but it isn't when it's cloudy and it why depending on where you live there are places equatorial places if you're trying to set up a solar panel in uh in Seattle you know you might not have as much like or New York City might much or in Germany true also I think Canada there are also other issues that are coming up that I think are obfuscating our ability to evaluate what's being caused by Green energy works is not when we look at energy increases in Germany um I think there's a similar constellation around nuclear energy for instance people don't want nuclear energy because they think of nukes and they think of nuclear meltdowns and they think of Chernobyl and they think of Fukushima and they think of atomic bombs and that's it and that's stupid and I agree with you but nuclear energy is a totally viable alternative to other forms of why does the radical left oppose it you think it's just this m see you for for the for the same reason the right opposes vaccines because it sounds scary it's a big thing and they don't trust it it comes well the right has a reason to distrust vaccines in the aftermath of the covid debacle because they were imposed by force and that was a very you get to choose if you have a nuclear power plant that's imposed by force too no you don't get to choose where your energy comes from if you live in a country you just you turn the light switch and hopefully you don't have a Chernobyl that melts down in your particular town right well you get to choose it because you can buy it or not Choice it but the nobody had a choice with the vaccines nobody had a choice whether or not they lived near Chernobyl or not nobody's a choice there's a nuclear well how realistic is it to move like 500 miles that's like telling conservatives when uh Biden tried to do the ocean mandate for vaccines like well you just get a different job right I don't want to debate about whether or not large nuclear power plants are frightening they are and there are Technologies now where that's not a problem so so and and I think I don't I think that's a coun place for our disc to go because I also understand why people are afraid of it but what I don't understand for example is why the Germans shut down their nuclear power plants and The Californians are thinking and have doing the same thing when they have to import power from France anyways like it's complet burn coal which is a million times worse not just coal liite yeah right and then with regards to these Renewable Power sources they have a very they have a number of problems one is they're not en they're not energy dense they require tremendous infrastr structure to produce they're they might be renewable at the energy level but they're not renewable at the raw materials level so that's a complete bloody lie they're insanely variable in their power production and because of that you have to have a backup system and the backup system has to be reliable without variability and that means if you have a renewable grid you have to have a parallel fossil fuel or coal grid to back it up when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow which is unfortunately very very frequently and so again and so and I'm not going to say there's no place for renewable energy like solar and wind because maybe there are specific Niche locals where those are useful but the logical uh what would you say antidote to the problem of reliability if we're concerned about carbon but we're really not would be to use nuclear and the greens haven't been like flying their bloody flags for 30 years saying well we could use fossil fuels for fertilizer and feed people and we could use nuclear power to drive energy costs down in a carbon dioxide free manner that seems pretty bloody self-evident to me and so then it brings up this other mystery that we were talking about earlier you know what's the impetus behind all this because the cover story is oh we care about carbon dioxide which I don't think they do especially given the willingness to sacrifice the poor it makes no sense to me and I think it's relevant to the issue you brought up which is that people have these constellations of ideas and there's a driving force in the midst of them so to speak they're not necessarily aware of what that driving force is don't we isn't it more likely that people are either misinformed or misguided than people are legitimately trying to depopulate the planet I'm look misinformed and ignorant that's that's plenty relevant and worth considering and stupidity is always a better explanation than malevolence but malevolence is also an explanation and no I don't think it's a better explanation because why would we waste so much money sending food Aid having Bush do uh you know programs through Africa for AIDS having other billionaires like Bill Gates invest so much money and anti-malarial stuff like why would all the global Elites be so invested in helping and killing the people here at the same time okay well some of it's confusion okay you know and some of it's the fact you know many things can be happening simultaneously with a fair bit of internal Paradox because people just don't know which way is up often but the problem with the argument Okay so so you you tell me what you think about this so you know Hitler's cover story was that he wanted to make the Glorious Third Reich and Elevate the Germans to the highest possible status for the longest possible period of time okay but that wasn't the outcome the outcome was that Hitler shot himself through the head after he married his wife who died from Poison the same day in a bunker underneath Berlin while Europe was inflamed well he was insisting that the Germans deserved exactly what they got because weren't the noble people he thought they were and then you might say well Hitler's plans collapsed in flames and wasn't that a catastrophe or you could say that was exactly what he was aiming for from the beginning because he was brutally resentful and miserable right from the time he was you know a rejected artist at the age of 16 and so he was working or something was working within him and something that might well be regarded as demonic whose end goal was precisely what it attained which was the devastation of hundreds of millions of people and Europe left in a smoking Rune and the cover story was the Grand Third Reich and so there's no reason at all to assume that we're not in exactly the same situation right now I think there's a great reason to assume I think that Hitler's motives and everything he was trying to do wasn't a secret I like I don't think that anybody had the guess that he was incredibly anti-semitic that his AR and Supremacy was going to lead to the destruction and the murder of like so many different people in concentration like none of this was a secret it's not like he was hiding it um some I mean like he he tried to maybe hide the death can but nobody in Germany was wondering like wow crazy the pograms are happening as Jewish people that's so crazy or wow they're all being shipped to just mainly the Jews to camps to work like that's kind of interesting or wow he talks about this a lot in mind comp but maybe it's just a coincidence uh I don't think you can compare like Hitler to people that are worried about climate change the worry that I have here because if we're applying this people thought hit people in Germany thought Hitler was perfectly motivated by the highest of benevolent if I would to take this standard of evidence apply this lens of analysis couldn't I say the exact same thing about the conservative constellation of belief they don't want to intervene anywhere in the world because they don't care about the problems there uh they're anti-immigration because they hate brown people Trump wanted to ban Muslims from coming to the United States because he's xenophobic uh conservatives uh don't want to have taxes to help the poor because they want homeless people to starve and and die in the winter uh like I feel like if I some of that's true and yes you can adopt that criticism I think the difference with regards especially to the libertarian side of the conservative Enterprise but also to some degree to the conservative enterpris is they're they're not building a central gigantic organization to put forward this particular utopian claim and so even if the conservatives are as morally idled as the leftists and to some degree that might be true they're not organized with the same gigantism in mind and so they're not as dangerous at the moment now they could well be and they have been in the past but at the moment they're not and so of course you can be skeptical about about people's motivations when they're brandishing the moral flag how would we why would we say that they're not as concerned about the gigantism I feel like everybody is when it's a particular thing that they care about you mean if whether they would be inclined in that direction for sure that conservatives wield the power of the government whenever they feel they need to adjust as liberals do right conservatives were very happy to see for instance abortion was brought back as a look that's a good that's a good objection I think that you're correct in your assumption that once people identify a core area of concern they're going to be motivated to seek power to implement that concern I think cancel culture is a good idea too I think conservatives uh prior to the 2000s if they could censor everything related to either LGBT stuff or weird musical stuff or something that they didn't want their kids to watch conservatives would do it but now that you see that like liberals and progressives are kind of wielding that corporate Hammer now conservatives are very much well hold on we need freedom of speech we need a platform everybody and now progressives are like well hold on maybe we shouldn't platform people I got I got no disagreement with those things that you said and I have no disagreement about your proposition that people will seek power to impose their their Central their Central Doctrine okay so then you might say and so we can have a very serious conversation about that what do we have that ameliorates that tendency in the United States we've got a de hopefully a form of decentralized government I can't speak to Canada as much but yes ex well yes that's that's true so that's one of the institutional protections against that because what that does is put various forms of power striving in conflict with one another right and so that's a very intelligent solution but then there are psychological and philosophical Solutions as well and one of them might be that you abjure the use of power right as a principle and so that and this is one of the things that was done very badly during the covid era let's say because the rule should be something like you don't get to impose your Solution on people using using compulsion and force there's a Doctrine there which is any policy that requires compulsion and force is to be looked upon with extreme skepticism now It's tricky because now and then you have to deal with psychopath and they tend not to respond to anything but force and so there's an exception there that always has to be made and it's a very tricky exception but look let let me let me tell you a story and you tell me what you think about this because I think it's it's very relevant to the concern that you just you just expressed and I I don't believe that the conservatives are necessarily any less tempted by the by The Calling of power than the leftists that's going to vary from situation to situation though I would say probably overall in the 20th century the leftists have the worst record in terms of sheer numbers of people killed so I mean it depends on how we're Quantified okay we just quantify ma how's that direct death of 100 million people so you know that's a pretty Stark fact and if we're going to argue about that well then we're really not going to get anywhere so I'm not disagreeing that there the hore happened as well the Soviet Union and the and China were a war of I'm just saying for World War II it depends on how much you attribute the war does to Nazi ger ET ET but but sure like largely speaking I I don't think that the left beat the right uh because the right wasn't trying I don't think it's because Hitler's lack of trying led him to kill L people than what who ended up dying during the Great Leap Forward or during the industrialization of yes well I also think it's an open question still to what degree Hitler's policies were right-wing versus leftwing and no one's done the analysis properly yet to determine that well what do we there was a national socialist movement for a reason and the Socialist part of it wasn't accidental well but the so I mean there was no uh you know cooperatively fored businesses that were owned by all of the people for the people and distributed to the people and I don't think redistribution was high on Hitler's list of things that's true it was Str mix of totalitarian Poli I don't think it was a strange mix I think it was a bid to appeal to uh mid-left and Center left the KPD and the German Socialist Party by calling themselves National Socialist I think it was very much like an authoritarian Ultra nationalist regime that pretty squarely fits with people get mad if you call something far right or far left because they have an you know one of the things I would have done if I would have been able to hang on to my professorship at the University of Toronto would have been to act extract out a random sample of Nazi policies and strip them of of markers of their origin and present them to a set of people with conservative or leftist beliefs and see who agreed with them more and that analysis has never been done as far as I know so we actually don't know and we could know if the social scientists would do their bloody job which which they don't generally speaking that's something we could know we could probably use the AI systems we have now the large language models to determine to what degree left and right beliefs intermingled in the rise of national socialism so that's all technically possible so and it hasn't been done so it's a matter of opinion sure I don't necessarily disagree um that that that's something you could do okay so I was going to tell you story okay well this has to do with the use of power so um I spent a time at uh with a group of Scholars putting and analyzing The Exodus story in Exodus seminar recently and so the Exodus story is a very interesting story because it's a it's a what would you say it's an analysis of the central the central tendency of movement away from tyranny and slavery that's a good way of thinking about it so the possibility of tyranny and the possibility of slavery are possibilities that present themselves to everyone within the confines of their life psychologically and socially you can be your own Tyrant with regards to the imposition of a set of radical doctrines that you have to abide by and punish yourself brutally whenever you deviate from them and we all contend with the issue of tyranny and slavery and there's an alternative path and that's what the Exodus story lays out and Moses is the Exemplar of that alternative path although he has his flaws and one of his flaws is that he turns too often to the use of force so he kills an Egyptian for example an Egyptian Noble who has slayed a Hebrews uh one of Moses Hebrew slave brothers and he has to leave there's a variety of indications in the text that he uses his staff he uses his rod and he uses power when he's supposed to use persuasion and legal or verbal um invitation and argumentation and this happens most particularly most spectacularly right at the end of the soour so Moses has spent 40 years leading the Israelites through the desert and he's right on the border of the promised land and really what that means at a more fundamental basis is that he's at the threshold of attaining what he's been aiming at what he's devoted his whole life to and he's been a servant of that purpose in highest order and the Israelites are still in the desert which means they're lost and confused they don't know which way is up they're still slaves and now they're they're dying of thirst which is what you die of spiritual thirst if you're sufficiently lost and they go to Moses and ask him to intercede with God and God tells Moses to speak to the Rocks so that they'll reveal the water within and Moses strikes the rocks with his Rod twice instead right he uses Force and so God says to him you'll now die before you enter the promised land it's Joshua who enters and not Moses okay and you're you might wonder why I'm telling you that story I'm telling you that story because those Concepts at the center of that cloud of Concepts that you described are stories right they're stories and if they're well formulated they're archetypal stories and this is an archetypal story that's illustrating the danger of the use of compulsion and force know and so one of the problems you're obviously obsessed by and that I'm trying to solve is what do we do as an alternative to tyranny whether it's for a utopian purpose in the future or maybe for the purpose of like conservative censoring music lyrics they don't approve of and one answer is we don't use Force we do the sort of thing that you and I are trying to do right now which is to have a conversation that's aimed at clarifying things and so that's a principle that that's something like the consent of the Govern right M it it it's something like but it's also something like you have the right to go to hell in a hand basket if that's what you choose and I'm as long as you don't you know in doing so you're not in everyone's way too much you have the right to your own destiny right and so and you and you don't get to use power to impose that that's the other thing that worries me about what's going on on the utopian front because the the problem is you know once you conjure up a climate apocalypse and you make the case that there's an impending disaster that's delayed and you might say well delayed how long and they response to we well we're not sure but it's likely to occur in the next hundred or so years which is pretty inaccurate you now have a universal get out of jail card that can be utilized extremely well by power mad Psychopaths and they will absolutely do that because power mad Psychopaths use whatever they can to further their cause so here's my this is my issue I think this is my issue with a lot of people when it comes to political conversations I think that everything you've said is true and I think that all of it is it's it's good analysis but I feel like it just gets wielded sometimes in One Direction and then people kind of miss that it completely and fully describes their entire side as well um and the thing that I feel like the only solution for this as you hinted at it um it's more than just conversation although that's a good start we have to go back to inhabiting similar areas we have to go back to inhabiting similar like media Landscapes I think that the issue that we're running into right now more than anything else is people live in completely separate realities at the moment such that uh if we were even to describe basic reality how many illegal immigrants came into the United States last year that should be a factual number that we can know how many do you think somebody um I the actual number probably in the hundreds of thousands I think some conservatives think it's 3 million per year over the past 3 years because they look at like border contacts or they look at a aslum Seekers and they're not looking 3.6 million came into the US and stayed yes through the southern border okay so you know the historical know average isli understand I understand this sh the hisory historically there's like 13 to 15 million people Full Stop in the United States illegally that's like the history of illegal immigration in the United States but some uh but hey maybe I'm wrong there right so we can say that that that's an example of us living in a fundamentally different reality um well the Pew research group has established quite conclusively that the variability over the last 20 years for illegal migration in the South border is between 300,000 and 1.2 million well the Pew research can only establish I think the number of people attempting to cross I don't know if they can know I don't know if Pew does like census analysis I'd have to see well I don't well that's that's a different issue right because I don't know how you measure how many illegal immigrants there are actually in the country understand I just want to I just want to point out I agree with you I listen to a lot of Rush limbo growing up I understand the fear of having a government agency say climate change therefore we have a blank check to do whatever we want that's a scary which is what they are doing the conservatives do the same thing though I'm not claiming otherwise yeah but the problem is I think people don't talk about it so for instance I heard so we can pretend now that the conservative argument was just compulsory vaccines are bad because they infringe on my freedom that wasn't the conservative argument the conservative argument was that mass deaths were going to happen Mass side effects were going to happen uh there was going to be all this corruption and stuff related to vaccine distribution to the crazier theories or microchips and blah blah blah none of that came true absolutely none of the conservative fear mongering related to the MRNA vaccines came to fruition but now that's all forgotten and that was us none of what do you make of the EXs imagine being able to transition academic papers textbooks websites emails or PDFs into an audio format that you can listen to while on the move the listening app offers exactly this it's a convenient and flexible solution for those who want to learn anytime anywhere the listening app offers life like AI voices complete with emotion and intonation for a realistic listening experience it allows you to indulge in your love for reading and learning even when you're on the go take your studying to the next level by uploading your notes and listening to them on the listening app with their note-taking feature every time you come across a key idea simply click the add note button and the app instantly adds the last few sentences to the notepad enhancing your learning experience have you ever experienced motion sickness while trying to read your favorite book during a journey the listening app has got you covered it allows you to easily convert text and listen anywhere making your travel time more enjoyable and nausea free normally you'd get a twoe free trial but listeners of the Jordan B Peterson podcast can get a whole month free right now just go to listing.com Jordan and use code Jordan at checkout that's listing.com Jordan and use code Jordan at checkout today forgotten and that was used what do you make of the EXs d there for related to vaccines there are almost none this the MRNA vaccines have been administered related to vaccines abolutely know we absolutely this is like settled sence what do we know in terms of vaccine related no that's not my question excess deaths in Europe are up about 20% and they have been since the end of the covid par sounds really high to me 20% I'll check afterwards but um is this including like the ukra war with Russia no no it's not including the Ukrainian War okay no are you implying that you think it's because of vaccines I'm not implying anything I'm saying the excess deaths are but what is your take on what's causing it you said that you said that in a counter to me describing Mr vaccines you said well the excess death for 20% that makes the implication is that the vaccines are causing it or okay first of all something is causing it well at that obviously something is causing or or some combination of factors now one possibility is that healthare systems were so disrupted by our insane focus on the covid epidemic that we're still mopping up as a consequence of that wait are these exit desk tracing back through covid as well postco just postco postco okay right they're terrifying right they're terrifying and and they're not well publicized and I excess trust are the fact that you're speaking to them right now seems like yeah but I far it down a lot of rabbit holes it's not like it's front bloody Page News on the New York Times sure but I think EXs do is that's a metric that you can Google and I'm pretty sure there are like three different huge organizations that track EXs do around the world and many more than three yes in every single European country right okay well so one relatively straightforward hypothesis is that it's a consequence of the disruption of the Health Care System the staving off of cancer treatment Etc the increase in depression anxiety suicidality and alcoholism that was a consequence of the lockdowns the economic disruption and there's plenty of reason to believe that some of that is the case but the other obviously glaring possibility is that injecting billions of people with a vaccine that was not tested by any stretch of the imagination with the thoroughness that it should have before it was forced upon people also might be a contributing factor partly we because we know that it led to a rise in myocarditis among young men and we also know that there was absolutely no reason whatsoever to ever recommend that That vaccine was delivered to young children whose risk of death at covid was so close to zero that it might as well have been zero when you're talking about a disease the risk of death isn't the only thing that you worry about for the talk about transmission because that was another thing that the yeah but it didn't do anything to trans absolutely did because of decrease for Trans getting affected it didn't destroy it didn't get rid of transmission but it reduced trans it claimed that it would get rid of trans if you take one read of one single quote I think that Biden said one time where he said no come on I've heard so many times cuz every say oh you can't take anything Trump says seriously Biden one time on the news says if you get the vaccine you won't trans do you know that our prime minister in Canada deprived Canadians of the right to travel for 6 months because the unvaccinated were going to transmit covid with more likelihood than the than the vaccinated so this wasn't one bloody statement this was like thorough government poliy saying there wasn't a state given that if you get vaccinated there is a 0% chance of transmitting the disease the idea is that vaccines were supposed to help because it reduces it reduces your hospitalization reduces death and it reduces transmission hopefully by making it so that people don't get sick or don't get sick for as long all three of those things the vaccines did exceedingly well they continue to do that to this day but especially for the first variant um and then the Delta variant the vaccines helped immensely here um they were tested the myocarditis rates are like seven out of 100,000 injections and the myocarditis is generally a and it's generly not as bad as even getting the Corona virus itself which will lead you also to much worse side effect than side effects that have caused other vaccines to be taken off the market before that a seven out of 100,000 rate of acute myocarditis or pericarditis is not a worst uh side effect that any vaccine I think that is a completely acceptable given that the disease itself is more likely to cause myocarditis or paric carditis yes I don't think the data suggests support that presupposition anymore the latest peer-reviewed studies show that that's simply not true especially among young men man that so there is an age bracket of young men where the elevated rate of myocarditis acute my from the vaccine might have been higher but we're talking about like three or four cases per 100,000 people and again myoc PES are generally acute conditions they the beginning I told you at the beginning of this conversation that the progressive leftists were on the side of the pharmaceutical companies it's not about being on the side of the pharmaceutical companies it's about really one really yeah well I see so what I see what I see as the Unholy part of that alliance with the pharmaceutical companies is that it dovetails with the radical utopian willingness to use power to impose their utopian Vision well otherwise how would you explain it because the leftists should have been the ones that were most skeptical about the bloody pharmaceutical companies and they jumped on the vaccine bandwagon in exactly the same way that you're doing right now pharmaceutical companies have helped us tremendously through right there we go fine no no I don't think so I think they're I see so you don't think that the far ceutical companies who dominate the advertising landscape with 75% of the funding are corrupt I don't corrupt is a broad no no it's you think corrupt with a tinge of malevolence willing to extract money out of people by putting their health on the line you do you think that we get effective drugs from pharmaceutical companies not particularly okay do you so do you think that any vaccines work yes do you think that any I don't think 80 of them work at once for babies I I think that's a little risky but yet we've been on this vaccine schedule for how many decades and bab don't this like this not like this not carefully I had a ton of vaccines when I was a child I'm pretty sure that was the norm for people there were a ton of vaccines there's way more now okay and you think that well you can understand why I mean look part of it no doubt No Doubt part of it is a consequence of the genuine genuine willingness to protect children but the moral hazard is quite clear and people on the left used to be aware of this what do you make where do you think the MRNA vaccine the speeding up of it came from how do you make for the fact that it was Donald Trump that did work spe Terror foolish panicking just like we're doing with the climate issue so you think Trump was was he in bed with the Pharmaceuticals was he working with the left or was it just a dumb that was the only panicky thing he made he didn't try to push for the mass lockdowns like other far lot people would have wanted him to do that was just the one mistake he made was the pushing for the vaccine no I think Trump undoubtedly made all sorts of mistakes and lots and it wasn't it certainly wasn't only the left that stampeded toward the forc co covid vaccine um um debacle but it was most surprising to me that it emerged on the left because the left at least had been protected against the depredations of gigantic predatory corporations by their skepticism of of of of the gigantic Enterprises that can engage in regulatory capture and that just vanished is it not possible that maybe people looked and they said hey if all the governments all the institutions all the schools all the private companies across all the countries around the world are saying the same thing maybe it is the case that this vaccine just helps is that not possible oh sure they probably that's sure of course it's possible but that didn't mean it was right well who they used Force they used Force Force for all sorts of things in terms of public we don't generally use Force to invade people's bodies how long have vaccine mandates been a thing in Canada the United sit in the entire world I don't think they should have been a thing that's great if you don't think they should have been when you say we don't generally use Force we absolutely use Force we use we've enforce vaccines for a long time it's an important part of public yes fair enough we did it on a scale and at a rate during the covid pandemic so-called pandemic that was unparalleled and the consequence of that was that we ejected billions of people with an experimental it wasn't a bloody vaccine of course no it wasn't no it isn't yes it is it's not have 100% success rate you think it's a definition of vaccine the whole point of the vaccine is to give your body a protein to train on the IM system techology who cares if it's not the same there's plenty there's different us the word vaccine so that they didn't have to contend with the fact that it wasn't the same technology there are different types of vaccines that are different Technologies the MRNA vaccines is a this used to be vaccines now this is vaccines no it was like this and now it's like this no no no it was like this and now it's like this the M&R Mna technology was a radical qualitative Leap Forward in technology you can call it a vaccine if you want to but it Bears very little resemblance to any vaccine that went before that the reason it was called a vaccine was because vaccine was a brand name that had a track record of safety and shoehorning it in that was one of the ways to make sure that people weren't terrified of the technology and you know reason call because they're injecting you something that's inoculating you against something in the future because of has proteins that resemble a virus that infect overlaps between between the MRNA Technologies and vaccines to be sure but they wouldn't have been put forward with the rate that they were put forward if they weren't a radical new technology and it's bad in principle to inject billions of people with an untested new technology isn't it also bad and principle for billions of people to get infected with a worldwide pandemic that initially was causing a decent number of deaths a ton of complications shutting down world economies maybe maybe it was maybe it was so should we to engage in that analysis and figure out like if we look at the we're not engaging in the analysis because now we're talking whether not vacin or even vaccines are not in St no no no we're no no don't play that game that is not what I was doing I was making a very specific and careful case the MRNA technology by wide recognition is an extraordinarily novel technology and doesn't make it not a vaccine though well okay it's a radically transformed form of vaccine I don't give a damn that still makes it something so new that the potential danger of its mass Administration was highly probably highly prob to be at least or more dangerous than the thing that it was supposed to um protect against and we are seeing that in the excess death are absolutely not saying so are you implying the ex were caused by the vaccines or well know what they're caused by well look if you're going to use aam's razor you're kind of stuck in an awkward place here absolutely not talking this is most administered vaccine of the or inoculation or what do you prefer to call the history of all of mankind every single organization around the world is motivated to call this out if it was a bad thing you don't think Russia or China would be screaming if Donald Trump or the United States warp sped through a vaccine that was having dilar effects on populations all around the world you don't think there wouldn't be some academic institution you didn't think there'd be more than a handful of and Joe Rogan and some conservatives saying this vaccine might have been bad if it was the case that American companies working with companies in Europe and Germany especially why because that's where biotech is from in order to create a or manufacture a vaccine that was causing excess dust all around the world there are so many different people that we motivated to call this out how do you explain call no it's a handful of people where are the governments calling out where the academic institutions calling out where are the other private companies calling it out wouldn't you stand to make a killing if you were a private company in Europe and you could say look the M vaccines for sure are causing all of these issues why wouldn't Putin why wouldn't P why wouldn't anybody else in the world call this out it was as horrible as it was there are plenty of people attempting to call nobody credible and no huge institution what do you make of the excess deaths you haven't come up with a bloody hypothesis I don't know if there are 20% at the excess deaths in Europe right now if I had to guess off the top of my head it's going to be like you said one might be lingering effects of an overwhelmed Healthcare System another one might be uh deaths related to the war in Ukraine another one might be rising energy costs that impossible that any of it could be unint consequences of a novel technology injected into billions of people I think that if acccess first of all there aren't billions of people in Europe so if there were access I understand but you're talking about excess deaths in Europe I'm not aware of excess deaths that exist in other places that are completely and totally unaccounted for where the only explanation could be the vaccine I think if there were I think more people be talking about it well we have well first of all the number of people talking about something is not an indication of the scientific validity of a claim why are you using mass consensus as a as the determinant of what con think because I think for something that was given to billions and billions of people if this was something have a measurable effect on people it would be it would be impossible to cover it up or ignore it we wouldn't have to look at the one case brought up on a on a documentary we would have to look at the one thing being talked about then what do you make of the v's data there's more negative side effects reported from the MRNA vacines then there were reported for every single vaccine ever created since the dawn of time time and not by a small margin so it's not just the excess deaths it's the v's datae what is vars data it's the data based that until the covid-19 pandemic emerged and we had the unfortunate consequence that there were so many side effects being reported it was the gold standard for determining whether or not vaccines were safe and now as soon as it started to misbehave on the MRNA uh vaccine front we decided that we were going to doubt the validity of the v's reporting system okay the Point say would never be the go Center for anything fars repointing is just if you want to report that there is some issue that you have after getting a vaccine that's it I think it's vaccine aders what the hell do you think it was set up for to report Adverse Events that happen after a vaccine to track and see if something was related to the vaccine so most people most people didn't even know vs existed until after the covid vaccine once people know that it exists of course more people are are going to engage with it but what happens sub no well it could be or couldn't be so what do you do when a bunch of you first of all might you might Begin by suggesting that maybe it's not all noise correct so when all of these things are admitted to vs what they do is from there they investigate all you can do all of their all theirs is is I might go and get a vaccine and maybe in three days they go hm I've got a headache I'm going to go ahead and like call my doctor and and make this report and they'll say okay well that's an advertisement after vaccine doesn't mean the vaccine caused the headache and now that more people say is not the gold standard of determining if working compared to actual uh longitudinal perspective randomized control trial you mean like the ones they should have done to the goddamn vaccines they did do for the VAC they continue to do to this day yes that is correct yes you really think that you're in a position to evaluate the scientific credibility of the trials for the vaccines do you no I don't so I have to trust you I don't trust I look at the bloody dat you have first of all you have to trust third parties to some extent when you go outside I don't have to trust course you do you do every day when you turn the keys your car you hope your engine doesn't explode when you're drinking water you hope that the public water or whatever tap or bottle water you got out of isn't contaminated or poison with chera when you that as a consequence of consensus no you of course you do no I don't I do that as a consequence of observing multiple times that when I put the godamn key in the ignition the truck started why do you know it's going to start the 50th or the 100th time why how many times with me know you don't know if the Denim and those genes isn't leaking into your bloodstream to some extent We Trust we have to trust third party in use Force when they use Force we trust the police officers we trust the Jal system we on the left trust the police do we to some extent do we if somebody's breaking into your house who I'm not I'm not a defund but if somebody's breaking into your house you can be the most defunded person in the world who you going to call you going to call your neighbor are you going to call Joe Biden are you gon to call Obama or you going to call the Black Panthers you're going to call the Cs okay so so tell me this tell me this then because the core issue here is use of force as far as I'm concerned you know we we examine some of the weeds around that politicians throughout the world and this would be true on the conservative side now in the aftermath of the covid um tyranny because it was more a tyranny than a pandemic okay were are now saying that we actually didn't force anybody to take the vaccine so what do you think of that claim like so let's define force I think it's technically true but I think it's silly what do you mean it's technically true def technically true and that in the United States at least I think the idea what they tried to do they weren't able to do it because the Supreme Court shot it down was Biden tried to make it so that OSHA who's the body that regulates job safety could make it so that employees had to get vaccinated now eventually it was or theyd lose their job okay does that qualify as Force that's why I said technically but I'm it's a serious question I mean because we need to Define what constitutes Force before we can it seems to me you could argue it's a type of force sure I mean I think it'd be silly to say it's nothing it is a type of force it is the same as a cop telling you you have to do this you're going to be killed no but it's it's on the Spectrum of course yeah it's as much force as the M mRNA vaccines are vaccines sure it is a type of force and the okay so look I really think I really think the problem was with the covid response I really think the problem was the use of force I mean I can understand to some degree although I'm very skeptical of the pharmaceutical companies and far more skeptical than your insistence upon the utility of consensus might lead me to believe you're skeptical of them which is surprising I would say given very that's why I'm glad there's multiple companies multiple countries multiple academic institutes that do research and the FDA yeah I'm very skeptical you should be in any private system you should be skeptical to every private company of course whether we're talking media Pharmaceuticals or automobile manufacturers yeah but skepticism doesn't mean a blind adherence to the complete total opposite of whatever it is they're saying right they're indoubt undoubtedly like if you look at Alzheimer's research there's been groundbreaking Improvement on drugs to treat Alzheimer's research over the past 3 years that 5 years ago none of these drugs even existed and now yeah so I mean how about if you're skeptical of anyone who's willing to use Force to put their Doctrine forward then you're skeptical of literally every single person political ideology ever to ever have existed in all of humankind some degree of force you would I'm undoubtedly believe this right some degree of force is probably necessary for any kind of cohesive Society right no I don't believe that of course there is no even if you had a tribe of 100 120 people if somebody was a if somebody was stealing something right you have to punish that person I said earlier that that that that becomes complicated when you're dealing with the psychopathic types right so that's a complication but I would say generally speaking that the the necessity to use force is a sign of bad policy and no I don't think see I'm not particularly a hobbsy and I don't think that the only reason people comport themselves with a certain degree of Civility in civilized sociey is because they're terrified by the fact that the government has a monopoly on force that can be be brought against them at any moment I think that keeps the psychopaths in line to some degree but I think that most people are enticed into a Cooperative relationship and that formulating the structures that make those relationships possible is a sign of good policy I've got to I have to ask because I have watched a lot of your stuff in the past um I remember you speaking very distinctly on this that for instance when two men are communicating with each other there is an underlying threat of force that kind of puts on the guard rails those particular social interactions for the thread of forces don't be Psychopathic what is how broader is psychopathic here are we defining well I can Define it I mean sure yeah go for it while a psychopath will gain short-term Advantage at the cost of long-term relationship okay that's really the core issue well you know you you made it you made a a reference to something like that earlier in your discussion when you pointed out that people claim to be motivated let's say by principle but will default to short-term gratification more or less at the yeah yeah yeah exactly well the the exaggerated proclivity to do that is at the essence of psychopathy so it's a very it's with that with this definition of psychopathy does it's that definition of psychopathy it's not a it's not mine that's the core of psychopathy okay I'm not in the in the United States I think we call it all aspd now um no it's separate from that's antisocial personality disorder there thought that subsumed psychopathy and psychopathy is no Psy psychopathy is more like some it's more the pathological core of antisocial personality disorder okay maybe that might be okay that's a better way of think like the worst a small number of criminals are responsible for the vast majority of crimes it's 1% commits 65% something like that do you think a psychopathy something that can be environmentally induced or do you think this is core to a person it's both so for example if you're disagreeable like you are by the way one of the your proclivity if you went wrong would be to go wrong and an antisocial and Psychopathic Direction that's more true of men for example than it is for women that's why men are more likely to be in prisoned by a lot think it's 10 to1 or 20 to1 generally depends on the particular crime with it being higher proportion of men as the violence of the crime mounts so you could imagine on the genetic versus environment side so imagine that when you're delivered your temperamental hand of cards you're going to have a certain set of advantages that go along with them that are part and parcel of the without genetic determination and there's going to be a certain set of Temptations as well so for example if you're high in trait neuroticism you're going to be quite sensitive to the suffering of others and be able to detect that that's useful for infant care but the cost you'll pay is that you'll be more likely to develop depression and anxiety and if you're disagreeable if you're disagreeable extroverted and unconscientious then you're the Tilt the the place you'll go if you go badly is in the psychopathic or antisocial Direction and there are in environmental determinance of that to some degree sure gen Express themselves in an environment I I agree um when I'm just curious with the definition of psychopathy for short-term gain at the expense of long-term relationship that's probably the best B yeah when you look at stuff like people that are self-destructive say people that engage in Behavior least like obesity is that like a type of psychopathy to you or is that like something different or how do you define these types of things I guess or how do you view that type of thing well the the the no no there is an overlap in that addictive processes one of which might lead to obesity do have this problem of prioritization of the short term but the distinct so that overlaps with the short-term orientation of the psychopath but a psychopath is see an obese person isn't gaining anything from your demise at to facilitate their obesity right so there's a predatory and parasitical element to psychopathy that's not there in other addictive short-term processes do you think is it possible that there are things because then to Circle back to the the tribal example I gave isn't it possible that people can commit harms against other people where they're not necessarily gaining from their demise but it's just some other sort of gain that so for instance like say like I'm talking to some friends and I'm just gossiping or shitalking another person I'm not necessarily feeling good that I'm trashing them per se I'm feeling good because this group of friends might be me her more favorably because I have like a gossip or something to share with her well but but that's the gain right there is and you are contributing to the demise of the people you're gossiping about but I think there's like I feel like there's fundamentally different type of thought process between like I want to tell you something juicy about this guy because it'll make you like me versus I want to tell you something juicy about this guy cuz I hate this guy and I want him to like have a worse reputation among people feel like there's different drivers for that I would say that's that's an interesting distinction I would say proba probably that the hatred induced malevolence is a worse form of malevolence than the popularity inducing malevolence yeah the only reason tough one yeah the only reason I bring that up is because I feel like a lot of malevolence that we have social guard rails for is that type of like selfish malevolence where you're not I would argue even the majority of malevolence in the world is usually people acting selfishly or being inconsiderate not necessarily like I hate this yeah I think that's right I think that well that's why Dante outlined levels of hell right yeah well exactly that and I mean that that that book was an investigation into the structure of malevolence right he put betrayal at the bottom which I think is right I think that's right because people who devel post-traumatic stress disorder for example which almost only accompanies an encounter with malevolence rather than tragic circumstances they are often betrayed sometimes by other people but often by themselves and yes there are levels of hell you know and you outlined a couple there so I guess then my question is just that if you have people so the kid that steals an orange from a stand not because he hates the shop owner but because he wants the orange or he's hungry without some type of societal it doesn't have to be the government it could be family religious without some type of of use of force do you think that Society ever exists without use force on your wife um well what are we considering force is withholding sex for instance is that considered force or is uh you know saying we're going to cation of an expected reward is a punishment so so you could well no but but I mean this is a serious question I mean look look if we're we're thinking about the optimization of social structures we might as well start from the base level of social structure and scaffold up sure so like if a wife is upset at a hband for instance would that be considered uh use of force I think a negative punishment you're removing a stimulus to punish a person for something yeah would you consider that like a use of force or I would say it would depend to some degree on the intent the intent is to punish well if the intent is to punish then then it's starting to move into the into the domain of force I mean look look while we've been talking you know there's been bursts of emotion right and that's because we're freeing entropy and trying to close and to enclose it again and so that's going to produce it produces negative emotion fundamentally most fundamentally anxiety and pain and secondarily something like anger because those emotions are quite tightly linked and So within the confines of a marriage because we might as well make it concrete there are going to be times when disagreements result in bursts of emotion and those bursts of emotion don't necessarily have to have an instrumental quality right it's when the emotion is used manipulatively to gain an advantage that short term for the person and then maybe that's at the expense of the the other person or even at the expense of the person who benefits future self then it starts to tilt into the manipulative there's a there's a tetrad of of of traits so narcissism melanism that's manipulativeness narcissism is the desire for unearned social status that's what you'd gain for example if you were gossiping and elevating your social status melanism narcissism psychopathy that's predatory parasitism and those culminate in sad M and that cloud of negative emotion that's released in the aftermath of disagreement can be tilted in the direction of those traits and that's when it becomes malevolent and that's when the problem of force starts to become Paramount because I I think I think that your I think that your fundamental presupposition was both Hoban and ill-formed I do not believe that the basis for the Civilized poity is force now you're saying that you know you can't abjure the use of force entirely and I would say unfortunately that's true I agree with you but if the if the policy isn't Invitational if I can't make a case that that's powerful enough for you to go there voluntarily then the policy is flawed now it may be that we have some cases where we can't do better than a flawed policy because we're not smart enough and maybe the incarceration of mult of criminals with a long-term history of violent offenses is a good example of that we don't know how how to invite those people to play they they have a history generally from the time they're very young children from the age of two of not being able to play well with others and it's a very very intractable problem there's no evidence in the social science literature at all that hyper aggressive Boys by the age of four can ever be socialized in the course of their life the penological evidence suggests that if you have multiple offenders your best bet is to keep them in prison until they're 30 and the reason for that is it might be delayed maturation you know biologically speaking but most criminals start to burn out around 27 so it spikes it's a big spike when puberty hits and then stability among the hyper aggressive types so actually what happens is the aggressives at four tend to be aggressive their whole life and then they decline after 27 the normal boys are not aggressive they Spike at puberty and go back down to Baseline right and so you don't really rehabilitate people in prison for obvious reasons I mean look at the bloody places there are great schools for crime in in large but if you keep them there until they're old enough they tend to mature out of that except the worst of them tend to mature out of that predatory short-term oriented lifestyle so yeah the force issue yeah I agree I agree so I fundamentally to to clear uh my my um I guess my stance up I agree agree that fundamentally you're not Building Society on force uh if for no other reason because there'd be so much friction it would fly apart of the seams right you can't force get resistance if for fundamentally we're building off of cooperation you want to invite people to participate in society I agree with that I just I feel like once you start to hit certain threshold or certain points and You' got so many different types of people involved um at some point we're going to have to have Force around the edges on the guard rails just to make sure that we don't allow are you fam with like tit fortat systems ESS yeah tit fortat is probably a really important part of evolutionary biological history and an important part of the animal kingdom and I think to some degree that Tit for Tat punishment is important to force or Justice you can call it what it is no no no I'm curious what you think I'm I'm this's a very serious question yeah because the Tit for Tat the Tit for Tat is very bounded right it's like you cheat I whack you and then I cooperate right so and I do think that there's a model there for what we actually conceptualize is Justice it's like you don't get to get away with it but the goal is the reestablishment of the Cooperative Endeavor as fast as possible of course I agree but in a reductionist way we're kind of just using Justice here as a standin for Force right a TI for Tat system a tit for a TI so there are different types of Tit for Tat systems right you've got tit Tit for Tat you've got tit for tatat you've got there's all sorts of type systems where maybe you'll let somebody make a mistake one or two times but you can't have a ti ti ti ti tit system because then somebody can come in and take advantage of it so that which is the problem with the compassionate left by the way for to some extent sure it can be um or a problem with the right that's far to forgiving of Donald Trump um but I would say that that tat part the you can call it justice I think Justice is a perspective of force right where some people might consider a force to be just the cop that arrests the murderer and other people might consider that force that tat to actually be Injustice because the the murderer was responding to environmental conditions blah blah blah or was a stupid theory that responding to environmental conditions Theory because here's no it's not I mean because essentially that's written house self-defense ising with so if you assume that there's a causal pathway from Early Childhood abuse to criminality let's say which is the test case for environmental determination of the proclivity for the exploitation of others okay then it spreads to it spreads near exponentially in populations that isn't what happens so here here's the data most people who abuse their children were abused as children but most people who are abused as children do not abuse their children and the reason for that is because if you are abused there's two lessons you can learn from that one is identify with the abuser the other is don't right exactly and what happens and if this didn't happen every single family would be abusive to the core very rapidly what happens is the proclivity for violence is self it dampens itself out with as a consequence of intergenerational transmission so the notion that privation is a pathway to criminality that's not that's not a that's not a well-founded that's not a well-founded formulation and and there are an infinite number of counter examples and they're crucial some of the best people I know and I I mean that literally are people who had childhood so absolutely abysmal that virtually anything they would have done in consequence could have been Justified you know and they chose not to turn into the predators of others and that was a choice and often one that caus them to re-evaluate themselves right down to the bottom of their soul and so that casual Association of relative poverty even with criminality we know also we know this too you take a neighborhood where there's relative poverty the young men get violent they don't get violent because they're all hurt and they're victims they get violent because they use violence to seek social status and so even in that situation it's not oh the poor poor it's no wonder they're criminal cuz they need bread it's like sorry buddy that's not how it works the hungry women feeding their children don't become criminals the extraordinarily ambitious young men who feel it's unfair that their Pathway to success become violent and that's that's 100% well documented and generally by radically left leaning Scholars sure I don't disagree with any of that wealth inequality in areas is a much better predictive crime than than poverty than AB right but it's a very specific form of crime it's status seeking crime by Young men right well but but that shows you what the underlying motive is it's not even redress of the economic inequality it's actually the men striving to become sexually attractive by gaining position in the dominance hierarchy I think you have to be really careful with that assessment though because you can say that it's not economically uh it's not seeking economic why do you have to be careful the biggest predictor well because we're assuming that people that commit crime in these types of circumstances are status seeking and not trying to seek uh ecomic remedy but it exact what we're assuming but it might be the case for instance that in economically prosperous areas that the men there aren't actually seeking economic Prosperity they're also just trying to elevate status but they do it through economic prosperity it's potential right they do it they do it with a longer term vision in mind sure they're trying to elevate I wouldn't disagree with that in in the least but they do it with a much longer time Horizon in in mind and we know this partly because there have been detailed studies of gang members for example in Chicago who are trying to ratchet themselves up the economic ladder but they do it with a short-term orientation most of them think they're going to be dead by their early 20s sure so they're trying to maximize short-term gain so it has nothing to do with the with the redress of economic inequality except in the most fundamental sense and it is status driven because they're they're looking for comparative status I just I don't think any human being has baked in a desire to seek economic Prosperity I think that that's like a third order thing that we look for and fundamentally it's probably more like safety security for ourselves and then status seeking for other things I think that changes when you have children um well I mean the status is irrelevant or starts to become irrelevant at that point I mean depending on how you view your status right you can't do that every time we have a discussion say for instance one of the important things for my child is to be able to send my child to a good school I need to have an elevated status right I need to be able to buy a house at the right School District or I need to be able to pay the education but you're not telling me I hope that the driving Factor behind your desire to care for your children is an elevation in your status no but I'm saying that the elevation of status might be what allows you to take care of so for instance one of the biggest predictors of getting married is already Stat or position well that's what I'm saying I'm saying there's like a there's a all these play into yeah okay look we're running out of time you're good go back I say that that Tit for Tat thing I was just saying that the tat thing there is some underlying built into probably our genes right because we see it all throughout the animal kingdom that there's some level of punishment or some level of force you call itce no but but I think I think it's the right I Justice when you're the tatter not when you're the titter though right the it's just retribution no no I don't think that's true either look if you read crime and punishment for example one of the things you see that emerges when Rolen kov gets away with murder and it's a brutal murder and he gets away with it it's completely clear and he has a justification for it and what happens as a consequence is that that disturbs his own relationship with himself so profoundly that he can't stand it such that when a just punishment is finally Meed out to him it's a relief and that's not rare and that is like there isn't anything more terrifying this is why crime and punishment is such a great novel there isn't anything more terrifying than breaking a moral rule that you thought you had the ability to break and finding out that you're somewhere now that you really don't want to be and then that you know you know there's nothing worse in your own life than waiting for the other shoe to drop if you've transgressed against the moral Rule and now you're an outsider because of that you live in no man's land the fact that you have just retribution coming to you that can be a precondition for your atonement and your integration back into society but it's probably important to note that depending on the system you exist in those moral transgressions just aren't right so to take it back to I'll use your leus example you might consider a threat of force for somebody to get a vaccine to be a highly immoral thing that might be a transgression against some fundamental moral thing but a person the left might think that they're satisfying their moral requirement to society by doing so much the same as a Child Soldier or or or not I want use Child Soldier but maybe an older person that's committing inata or some kind of Islamic terrorist thinks that they're fulfilling some moral calling as well no doubt no doubt that that's the case that's why I was focusing in on the use of force is that I think it's a rule of A good rule of thumb policy that if you have to implement your godamn scheme with Force then there's something wrong with the way it's formulated we could have used we could have used a pure Invitational strategy to distribute the vaccine it would have been much more effective and it was bad policy rushed we're in an emergency we have to use Force it's like no no you weren't it wasn't it wasn't the kind of emergency that justified force not least because behavioral psychologists known for decades that force is actually not a very effective motivator it produces a vicious Kickback so you know one of the things this is going to happen for sure you know is that the net deaths from people stopping using valid vaccines as a cons consequence of General skepticism about vaccination is going to cause in my estimation over any reasonable amount of time far more deaths than covid itself caused you you violate people's trust in the public health system at your great Peril and you do that by using force and we did that and so you can see already that there's hordes of people who are vaccine skeptic very this generalized skepticism that to some degree you were rightly decrying it spreads like wildfire and no wonder because if you make me do something I'm going to be a little skeptical of you for a long time you know this conversation we're here voluntarily like we're trying to Hash things out and in good faith you know but neither of us compelled the other to come here and neither of us are compelled to continue and so that makes it a fair game and a fair game is something that everyone can be invited to and I suppose that's something that's neither right nor left you know hopefully right something we could conceivably agree on and I also think that I don't have any Illusions about the fact that there are people on the right who would use power to impose what they believe to be their core their core what their core the core what would you say their core Idol of course the the temptation to use force is rightly pointed to by The leftists Who insist that power is the basis for everything it it isn't the basis for everything that's wrong it's really wrong but it's a severe enough impediment to progress forward that we have to be very careful about it so look we have to we have to stop sure sure yeah I want to know if there's anything else you'd like to say before we stop because unfortunately we have to stop rather abruptly and so uh I think I yeah I feel like we got I feel we got pretty far into this um what are you trying to accomplish let's start stop with that we we found a little bit about we found out a little bit about who you are I mean you formulated your your proclivity in terms of to some degree in terms of delight in argumentation or facility at it which you certainly have um the danger in that of course is that you're you can be oriented to win arguments rather than to pursue the truth and that's the danger of having that facility for argumentation but what are you hoping to accomplish by engaging in conversations like this in the public sphere elevation of status you know that's one possibility no I I feel like um I think debate or argumentation is good because it forces two sides to make their ideas somewhat commensurate to the other uh if two people are having a conversation they have to be able to communicate set ideas to the other person otherwise it's just a screaming match and I think there is a good for the sake of like just being bipartisan or having a collection of people in a certain area and having different people together just that in and of itself without anything else happening I think produces a good at least for a Democratic Society uh for instance like I would agree that uh School uh maybe not faculty but administrators are very very very very very far left today dangerously so I don't have to talk to you about this obviously um but I think part of the responsibility to that I think rest at the feet of conservatives who instead of uh maintaining participation in the system decide that they're going to throw their hands up and disengage uh when I go and forced out or be forced out my Cas that's F yeah sometimes it can happen but I think that rather than rather than accepting being forced out or rather than uh encouraging other people to disengage the engagement has to happen Sy going here like it because in a democracy sometimes the guy you don't like wins sometimes the policy that you don't like is enforced sometimes a guy you don't like is somebody you have to share an office or a classroom with and we need to be okay with that and I'm worried that like the internet is driving people into these like very homogeneous but very polar G the data on that by the way aren't clear like whatever is driving polarization doesn't seem to be as tight related to the creation of those internal Bubbles as you might think like I I've looked at a number of studies that have investigated to see whether people are being driven into homogenized information Bubbles and it isn't obvious that that's the case directly although it the polarization that you're pointing to that you're concerned about that seems to be clearly happening so and why that is well that's a matter of you know intense speculation I feel like the homogeneity I I feel like it's not so much this is not resarch based at all just a total feeling so I'll admit that but the feelings that I have is it's not necessarily that homogeneity has increased it's that homogenity has increased as a byproduct of the bubbles becoming larger so for instance it might be that I'm from Omaha Nebraska it's a town in or city really in Nebraska right it might have been that 50 years ago uh there are bubbles in living in Omaha and there are different bubbles for living in Lincoln and there might be bubbles in Toronto or neighborhoods in Toronto or there might be bubbles in Vancouver but now as the internet exist and Things become more internationalized these bubbles are it's not just a bubble that exists in these cities now the bubbles have come together and as a result of GM problem sure yeah or a globalization problem or a communication problem but you run into this issue where somebody might be in a particular city or state and have a really strong opinion about what AOC says but they don't know anything about their local political scene and I think that that's an issue because the bubbles have gotten so large and they're encompassing so many people now and you're expected to have like a similar set of beliefs between all of these different people people now that might live in totally different places that's I think a big issue we're running into yeah well that could be we'll close with this I think that might be one of the unintended consequences of hyperconnectivity sure right is that we're driving levels of connectivity that we that get rigid and that we also can't tolerate yeah all right well that's a good place to stop um well thank you very much for coming in today that's much appreciated and um you're a sharp debater and and good on your feet so that's that's fun to see and I do think that your closing remarks were correct is that the the alternative to talking is fighting MH right so when we stop talking it's not like the dis disagreements are going to go away yeah we will start fighting yeah right marriages too even talking right absolutely and talking can be very painful because a conversation can kill one of your cherished beliefs and you will suffer for that although maybe it'll also help you but the alternative to that death by offense is death right yeah right so better to substitute the abstract argumentation for the actual physical combat for sure sometimes like the worst relationships are the ones where uh where couples fight a lot and some really bad ones where they don't fight ever and then all of a sudden the couples the couples who fight and reconcile are the ones yes exactly all right all right well that was good thank you very much and for everyone watching and listening on the YouTube platform thank you very much for your time and attention and to um we're going to spend another another half an hour or so on The Daily wire side so uh if you're inclined tune in to that and we'll find out a little bit more about the background of our current of our current interviewee Destiny see you later [Music] guys