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March 21, 2024 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

02:04:34

Streaming, Politics, & Philosophy | @destiny | EP 433

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	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 U.S. 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 in 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.
	What do you mean redistribution wasn't an issue?
	What the hell do you think they did to the kulaks?
	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 that, 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 Xi Jinping, 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 out that.
	Nobody credible.
	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 Stephen Bunnell, 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 Friedman, 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 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 how has that developed?
	It's a pretty broad question.
	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.
	I started early on.
	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 streamed myself playing that game.
	I was a pretty good player.
	It was pretty entertaining to watch.
	And then I kind of grew over...
	I guess maybe the next seven years, just streaming that people would watch.
	Streaming on YouTube?
	Well, back then, I started on a website called Livestream, then I switched to Ustream, then I switched to a site called JustinTV, and then that turned into Twitch.tv.
	So after streaming there for like seven or eight years, I was a semi-professional StarCraft II 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.
	Because of my background in like e-sports and internet gaming and internet trash talk, 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 that'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-like element to the debating, do you think?
	And is that part of why that morphing made sense?
	No, I wouldn't say so.
	I mean, if you get really reductionist, everything in life is kind of a game, but that's not very satisfying.
	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?
	That personality?
	In some ways, yeah.
	In some ways, no.
	I don't know directly for the games itself.
	I don't know how much it necessarily mattered.
	But for all the peripheral stuff, in some ways it was really beneficial.
	I could cut out my own path and I could be very unique and I could be on my own.
	In some ways it was very detrimental.
	I can be very difficult to get along with and I'm very much like, I want to do this thing and if you try to tell me what to do, I don't want to have a sponsor or a team or anybody with a leash on me.
	I guess it worked out.
	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 higher levels of compassion and that's low agreeableness so you know that element of your temperament at least is quite masculine and 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 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 of streaming.
	I slowly kind of started to shift to the left.
	I would say that I guess in around 2016 when I saw all of the conversations going on with the election and with all the issues being talked about, I felt like the conversations were very low quality.
	And in my naivety, I thought that maybe I could come in and boost the quality at least in my little corner of the internet to have better conversations about what was going on.
	And so that was basically my injection point into all of that was, yeah, fighting 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 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.
	Without getting too much into the business or streaming side of things, basically...
	Actually, this probably carries over to...
	Basically to all media, I would imagine, is you've got people that will watch you for special events.
	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.
	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 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 gaming 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 you've established a reputation.
	So how would you characterize your reach now?
	How would you quantify it?
	I think my...
	Can you be more precise?
	How many people are watching a typical video that you might produce?
	And what are you doing for subscribers, say, on YouTube?
	Any idea about total reach?
	Yeah, well, I mean, I guess my subscribers on YouTube, I have around, I think...
	I think that'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.
	And then I live stream to anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 concurrent viewers a day for hopefully around 8 hours a day.
	Yeah.
	Okay, okay.
	So you have quite a substantial reach.
	And so you said that initially you were more conservative-leaning, but that changed?
	Okay.
	What did it mean that you were more conservative-leaning and how and why did that change?
	When I say I was conservative, I mean, I was writing articles for my school newspaper defending George Bush and the Iraq War.
	I was very much like, I think it's an insult now when people say neocon, but I was very much like a conservative, a Bush-era conservative.
	So I supported big business, supported traditional, all of the conservative, I guess, foreign policy, hawkish foreign policy, for whatever that meant as a 14, 15-year-old.
	Right, right. right.
	To say the least.
	And then once I hit college, I think I supported Ron Paul in 2008.
	So I was a big Ron Paul libertarian guy in high school when I went to a Catholic Jesuit high school and I kind of became atheist in that process.
	I started reading Ayn Rand.
	So I was very, very, very, very, very conservative.
	But on the libertarian end, it sounds like.
	Yeah, I would say so, yeah.
	Initially on the, like...
	That makes more sense in relationship to your temperament.
	Sure, maybe, yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Initially it was like Christian conservative and then it became like libertarian conservative.
	My life kind of took a wacky path, and then as 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.
	As I started to go through life, and I went from kind of being in this working poor position to making a lot of money, 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 differences between what was available to me and then my child, as I made more money, while I was really wealthy versus not as wealthy, it kind of started to change the way that I... So you got more attuned to the consequences of inequality?
	Basically, I would say, yeah, yeah.
	Okay, and so that...
	Okay, how did that lead you to develop more sympathy for left-leaning ideas, particularly?
	I guess my core beliefs have never really changed, but I think the way that those become applied kind of change.
	So much the same way that 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.
	Maybe now as a liberal or progressive or whatever you'd call me, I might say, okay, well, we need to make sure that there's enough food in the household or some kind of funding program to make sure the kid can actually go to school and study, basically.
	So the core drive is the same, but I think the applied...
	Right, so is your concern essentially something like the observation that if people are bereft 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 you have some belief, and correct me if I'm wrong, you have some belief that there is room for state intervention at the level of basic provision to make those opportunities more manifest.
	Yeah, to varying degrees, yeah.
	Okay, okay.
	So, 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?
	On a very, very, very broad level, if there's some...
	I would say if there's some, like, good world that we're all aiming for, I think people on the left seem to think that a collection of taxes from a large population that goes into a government that's able to precisely kind of dole out where that tax money goes,
	you're basically able to take the problems of society, you're able to scrape off, hopefully, a not super significant amount of money from people that can afford to give a lot of money, and then through government programs and redistribution, you target that That those taxes essentially to people that kind of need whatever bare minimum to take advantage of opportunities in society.
	And then on the conservative end, 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 a thriving society, basically.
	Okay, so one of the things that I've always found a mystery, and 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.
	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 and should act as an agent of distribution.
	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, 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'm concerned about, generally speaking, with regard to the potential for the rise of tyranny is the emergence of giants.
	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 compassion to justify their grip on power, to take money, and to claim that they're doing good.
	And I see that happening everywhere now, particularly in the name of compassion.
	And 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 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, 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, 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 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.
	I understand the concept of conservatives supporting corporations and liberals supporting large government.
	I think today the divide we're starting to see more and more is more of like a populist, anti-populist rise or even like an institutional or anti-institutional rise.
	So, for instance, I think conservatives today in the United States are largely characterized with, I would say, with populism.
	And that they're supporting certain figures, namely right now Donald Trump, who they think alone can kind of lead them against the corrupt institutions, be them corporate or government.
	I feel like most conservatives today are not as trustful of big corporations as they were back in the Bush era where conservatives would champion big corporations.
	Yeah.
	That's a strange thing, because it makes the modern conservatives a lot more like the 60s leftists.
	Potentially, yeah.
	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 far left, because they're also anti-large everything.
	So in a surprising way, on very, very far left people, you might find them having a bit more in common with kind of like a mega Trump supporter than like a center left liberal.
	So, for instance, like both of these groups of people on the very far left will be very dovish 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.
	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, far left might think that corporations don't have our best interest at heart and the government is corrupt and captured by mobbius.
	Yeah, you'll see a lot of overlap there.
	Right.
	I think that sometimes there's a couple things.
	One, this is something I feel like I've discovered.
	People have no principles.
	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 imagine that a belief is coming from some underlying principle or is governed by some internal, 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, you know, like the position on vaccines and being an anti-vaxxer 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 it's associated more with like mega Trump supporters or whatever.
	I think as a result of how the social groups move around.
	When it comes to the, you mentioned this like gigantism thing.
	That's another thing where 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 person— But I care about it.
	Sure.
	Yeah, you might.
	Yeah, sorry.
	That's okay.
	That's okay.
	Because, like, I could imagine somebody saying that, like, they don't trust, like, a large government, they think there's too much, 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 is a direct line to God.
	Right, but they can't tax them.
	And they don't have a military.
	And they can't conscript you.
	True, yeah.
	And they can't throw you in jail.
	That is true, yeah.
	Well, those are major and significant.
	I mean, I get the overlap.
	Don't get me wrong.
	Sure.
	But even if you had a local government, 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.
	Conscription hasn't existed in the U.S. since the Vietnam War.
	Yet.
	I mean, yet.
	Yeah, true.
	So yeah, I think that, I guess when I look at...
	So let's go back 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, 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 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 essentially shows that the more arbitrary, the broader the reach of inequality in a political institution of any given size, the more social unrest.
	So 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 ameliorate 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.
	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 Africa to some degree and certainly the Southeast Asian countries to pursue something like a free trade economy.
	And 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, a two-fold argument, pointing out how we ameliorate absolute poverty, which 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 it's a complicated problem.
	Yeah, for one point of clarification, when you say leftist, what do you mean by that?
	Well, I was going with your definition.
	Like, essentially, the core idea being something like 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 can do that, but I'll stick with the one that you brought forward to begin with.
	Gotcha, gotcha.
	Okay.
	I only want to be clear on that because...
	Because people get mad if I call myself a leftist.
	Oftentimes online or in, especially in Europe or worldwide, leftists will refer exclusively to like socialists or communists.
	And anybody to the right of that would be considered like a liberal.
	No, usually a fascist.
	Very rapidly.
	I just wanted to be clear on that.
	I'm absolutely a pro-capitalist, pro-free-market guy.
	I'm never going to...
	Okay, okay.
	Well, that's good to get that clear.
	Why?
	Because I would argue that when you look at the fall of the Soviet Union or you look at the failure of 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 would say.
	I think the issue was Command of Commons.
	Wait a minute, wait a minute.
	What do you mean redistribution wasn't an issue?
	What the hell do you think they did to the Kulaks?
	That was forced redistribution.
	It resulted in the death of six million people.
	So, maybe I'm not understanding what you mean, but that was redistribution at its, like, pinnacle.
	Sure.
	And forced redistribution.
	Sure.
	Brutal.
	When I think of the strengths of capitalism, 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 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.
	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.
	There were in the Soviet Union that prop up where people try to Basically ameliorate the conditions that are resulting from said horrible command economy practices.
	So I guess in a way you could argue a command economy is kind of like redistribution.
	It's a form of it.
	No, it's a worse problem.
	If you're pointing to the fact that that's a worse problem, I'm with you 100%.
	Yeah, I would say that's definitely the reason why these places failed because they just weren't able to respond to changing conditions.
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	Okay, so what's the difference between a state that attempts to redistribute to foster equality of opportunity and a command economy?
	Is it a difference of a degree?
	Like, are you looking at models, let's say, like the Scandinavian countries?
	I wouldn't use Canada, by the way, because Canada is now...
	What would you call it?
	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 polities 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 homogenous.
	Exactly.
	And that makes a big difference when you're trying to flatten out the redistribution.
	Plus, they are also incredibly wealthy, which makes redistribution, let's say, a lot easier.
	So why doesn't a government that's bent on redistribution fall prey to the pitfalls of command economy and forced redistribution, for that matter?
	How do you protect against that?
	I think what you have to do What we have to do is very, very, very difficult is people get very ideologically captured by both ends and they feel very, I guess, like committed or they feel very allegiant 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 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 and the world, work.
	And I think that recognizing the benefits of both systems are the best way to make things work.
	Fair enough.
	And the Scandinavian countries seem to have done a pretty good job of that.
	But, 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 think that I understood what you said.
	A free market, free exchange economy is a gigantic distributed computational device.
	Basically, yeah.
	Right, exactly.
	Which, funnily 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's a fatal problem, right?
	Because it doesn't have the computational power.
	It certainly doesn't have the speed of data recognition.
	It doesn't have the on-the-ground agents 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.
	There are ways to account for them, though.
	Really?
	Tell me how.
	Because I can't see that.
	Because I can't see how they can be accounted for without this same computational problem immediately arising.
	Yeah, and I understand.
	I think that's a problem sometimes of people very far on the left when they want to deal with certain problems.
	I think that they want to bring heavy-handed 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 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 causes 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 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, The 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 intervention in the economy basically allows the free market to hopefully do its job because the government is tacked on a little bit of a price and then 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, 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 just don't hurt them.
	I heard a man two days ago who's fed 350 million people in the course of his life, heading the UN's largest relief agency, Make the claim quite straightforwardly that misappropriation on the part of interventionist governments increased the rate of absolute privation dramatically in the world over the last four or five years.
	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 ten 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 here's an additional argument on that front with regards to externalities.
	You get that wrong, and here's something you could get right instead.
	If you ameliorate absolute poverty among the world's one 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...
	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 hundred years out, 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.
	To be clear on the first thing, I'll just give you an example of how you can use a government intervention to make a free market track something, which is what cap and trade or carbon taxes would do.
	I wasn't necessarily speaking to the strength of that individual thing, Yeah, but that's a good thing to focus on.
	That's a major externality.
	We can focus on that as well.
	So, the first thing, this is going to sound mean, but I'm very realistic, there needs to be a better argument than just it disproportionately impacts the poor.
	That's a classic leftist argument.
	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 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 argument 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 around and I see homeless people and I'm like, man, this is really sad.
	We ought to spend more 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 rapists and murderers?
	Aren't they disproportionately poor?
	I'd probably say, well, yeah, we probably shouldn't.
	I'd go, well, isn't that hypocritical?
	Well, no, I think that rapists 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 poorer people.
	Right, I agree.
	It's going to depend from issue to issue.
	Yeah, that's fine.
	But that's because the poor, everyone who's poor is not a victim.
	Some people who are poor are psychopathic perpetrators.
	Yeah.
	Sure.
	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 understand what you're saying there.
	Just working my way towards that.
	Yeah, I just want to say that just because something targets the poor is not necessarily an argument against it.
	It 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 sin tax.
	The outcome will be masturbation in this situation.
	Yeah, I'm getting to it, okay?
	Sin taxes 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?
	Well, is it immediate?
	I mean, obesity isn't immediate.
	I don't think alcoholism is.
	I mean, the reason for the tax is to stop people from pursuing a certain form of short-term gratification at the cost of their longer-term well-being.
	Correct.
	And that exact same idea, if you believe climate models or if you believe that we're heading in a certain direction in terms of climate, the overall warming of the planet, would be the same argument you would make for climate change.
	Only if you believe that you could model economic development 100 years into the future.
	Well, we're not trying to model...
	We're more concerned with modeling climate development and economic development.
	No, no, no.
	Yes, absolutely.
	No, well, okay, 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...
	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 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 both, but 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 Right.
	Why would you?
	Okay, but I don't 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.
	Right.
	And the climate models as well, right?
	Exactly, but in exactly the stacked manner that I described.
	There's nobody in 1890 who could have predicted what was going to happen in 1990 economically.
	Not a bit.
	Not a bit.
	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 deluded.
	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, 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.
	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.
	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 and— Sure, but then if you don't, but I mean, like, obviously, if I agreed with that factual analysis, I would probably agree with you on the prescription here, too, right?
	Well, I don't...
	Well, they're not sufficiently...
	That's the first thing.
	And 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.
	People keep 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 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 hundred years, this variation looks pretty dismal.
	And I'd say, well, 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 time frame of analysis.
	No, no, no.
	The time frame is incredibly important.
	That would be like saying, look at your, you know, let's say somebody developed cancer and they didn't realize it, and the person has lost, you know, 40 or 50 pounds in the past six months.
	And I'm just like, you look very sickly.
	And you're like, okay, well, look at my weight fluctuation over the past 10 years.
	Well, that doesn't really matter.
	I'm not saying the time frame isn't important.
	I'm saying that it is important.
	I'm just saying I don't know how to specify it.
	Well, you would probably specify it with the beginning of the industrial age, right?
	Why?
	Because that's when carbon dioxide, which is a gas system that's trapping more heat on the planet...
	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's just not the case.
	It's absolutely the case.
	No, what do you mean?
	You just flipped to 150,000 year time span.
	What I'm saying is that if we expect to see a temperature do this in a 150,000-year time span, in a 100-year time span seeing it do this, that's very worrying.
	You mean like Michael Mann's hockey stick, the one that's under attack right now in court by a major statistician who claimed that he falsified his data?
	You mean that spike?
	I'm talking about the record temperatures that have been declared for the past five years that have also increased with the concentration of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
	I'm not going to tell you that every model is perfect.
	They're not perfect.
	Sure, but right now we're 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 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 detection sites were first put outside urban areas.
	And then you have to correct...
	Then you have to correct 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 communists 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 compassionate that we care about the poor 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 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 five 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 would you say, for For progress on the climate front that's so narrow it can't even be measured.
	I don't think the increase in hungry people on 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.
	Of course they are!
	They can't even get loans from the World Bank To 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 so that we wouldn't have to starve to 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 direct policy from the UN, fostered by organizations like the 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 bugbear, 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 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 low-cost 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 extremely 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-industrialize 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 be devastating even by their own measurement principles.
	We're trying to fix the environment.
	Well, boys and girls, it 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 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.
	One quick thing.
	Let's say that everything you've said is true.
	What do you think is the plan then?
	What is the goal?
	What is the drive?
	Why push obviously horrible ideas for the planet and the poor?
	That's a good question.
	That's a good question.
	Well, because you're positing it, right?
	So 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 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're not consciously 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 with fair regularity, and usually with a 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 people back into absolute poverty when we were doing a pretty damn good job of getting rid of that.
	I just don't understand what's happening in Germany or in the UK. 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 lignite 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 hurt a lot of poor people, but at least the air is cleaner.
	It's like, nope, air's worse, and everyone's poorer.
	So, like, explain to me how the hell the left can be anti-nuclear.
	I don't understand it at all.
	Gotcha.
	Gotcha.
	All right.
	This is something that I brought up earlier that is concerning to me.
	I feel like when people get political beliefs, I feel like what happens is, what we think happens, what we hope happens, 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 through your moral view- and then you combine these two things, you engage in Yeah, it'd be nice if that was true.
	Yeah, you start to apply like prescriptions.
	So maybe I'm religious, maybe I analyze society and I see that particular TV shows lead to premarital sex, so my societal prescription is we should ban these TV shows.
	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 if 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 one way or another in terms of, like, re-evaluating any of the beliefs that are part of this constellation.
	I wish I would have.
	That's good.
	That's fine.
	That's right.
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	That's good.
	That's fine.
	That's right.
	Well, you know, there are models now of cognitive processing, belief system processing, that make the technical claim that what a belief system does is constrain entropy.
	That's not surprising at all to me.
	Now, the signal for released entropy, which would be a consequence of, say, violated fundamental beliefs, is a radical increase in anxiety and a decrease in the possibility of positive emotion.
	And so people will struggle very hard against that, which is exactly the phenomenon that you're describing.
	Okay, I agree with what you said.
	So here's my issue of words.
	I'm not sure why it's relevant to the issue I was pursuing.
	I'm getting that.
	Okay, fine.
	Here's my issue, okay?
	When I'm trying to evaluate a situation, I like to think that I have some, I've got some insulation from the effects of what liberals think or what conservatives think, 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, including the complete mass grave hoax.
	I think that I'm a big supporter of the Second Amendment.
	I have beliefs where I can break from my side, you know, Pretty hardcore because I am not, like, allegiant to certain political ideology.
	One thing that worries me with this constellation of 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 WEF, sacrificing tons of people, the UN, global elites, five times energy costs in Germany, genocidal people...
	I feel like this is part of a whole thing where it's like, okay, well, let's take a quick step back and let's just think rationally about this particular issue for one moment.
	Well, you asked me what the motivation for anti-poor policies might be, so that's why I was trying to push that out.
	Well, I did, but I got all of those things before I even asked that question.
	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 started to track surface temperatures, whether the thermometer is on top of the Empire State Building or in the middle of a 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 a place in London and you've never had an air conditioner 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 that might be true.
	Not maybe.
	They can't even use them to predict the price of a single stock for six months.
	The economic models are not sufficiently accurate to calculate out the consequences of climate change over a century.
	I like the comparison because economic models can't predict individual stocks, but they do predict the rough rise of the market.
	Yeah, except for the on-cataclysmic collapse.
	Nope.
	Even with the cataclysmic collapse accounted for, you're going to see about 7% returns on average with inflation over long periods of time.
	I wouldn't call an average a very sophisticated model, analogous to a climate change.
	That's the difference between climate and weather, though.
	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 one year or ten years.
	And that's the difference between climate and weather.
	Well, that's the hypothetical difference.
	It is a hypothetical, but again, we're seeing more and more and more data every single year that things are getting hotter and hotter.
	Let's jump out of our cloud of presuppositions for a minute.
	Sure.
	Now, one of the things that...
	Oh, no, wait.
	Before you do that, actually, because I don't want to say, there are some things that we've gotten as a result of investing in green energy that have been good.
	So, for instance, the power of solar energy has dropped dramatically in the United States, faster than anybody thought possible, such that...
	Solar energy is competitive or beating fossil fuels in certain areas.
	As long as you can set the solar panels up, you're literally beating fossil fuels.
	Yeah, and as long as the sun is shining.
	Well, I mean, it still is.
	We're not in nuclear winter yet.
	No, no, but it isn't when it's cloudy.
	That's why I said depending on where you live.
	There are places, equatorial places, if you're trying to set up a solar panel in Seattle, you might not have as much luck, or New York City might not have as much.
	Or in Germany.
	Or in Germany, true.
	Or in 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 versus not.
	When we look at energy increases in Germany, 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 fossil fuels.
	Then why does the radical left oppose it?
	You think it's just this matter?
	For the same reason the right opposes vaccines because it sounds scary because it's a big thing and they don't trust it.
	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 bad idea.
	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 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.
	That's a choice.
	Nobody had a choice with the vaccines.
	Nobody had a choice whether or not they lived near Chernobyl or not.
	Nobody has a choice if there's a nuclear apartment.
	They can move away.
	Well, I don't realize it's a move like 500 miles.
	That's like telling conservatives when Biden tried to do the OSHA mandate for vaccines, like, well, you can 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.
	And I think that's a counterproductive place for our discussion 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.
	Or burn coal, which is a million times worse.
	Not just coal.
	Lignite.
	Right.
	And then with regards to these renewable power sources, they have a number of problems.
	One is they're not energy dense.
	They require tremendous infrastructure to produce.
	They might be renewable energy.
	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, I'm not going to say there's no place for renewable energy like solar and wind, because maybe there are specific niche locales where those are useful, but the logical...
	Ah, 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 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.
	Isn't it more likely that people are either misinformed or misguided than people are legitimately trying to depopulate the planet?
	Look, misinformed and ignorant, 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 programs through Africa for AIDS, having other billionaires like Bill Gates invest so much money in anti-malarial stuff?
	Why would all the global elites be so invested in helping and killing the people here at the same time?
	Well, some of it's confusion, and some of it's the fact that 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 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 they 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 ruin.
	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.
	Like, I don't think that anybody had to guess that he was incredibly anti-Semitic.
	The secret.
	Why not?
	He hid a lot of them.
	He tried to maybe hide the death camps, but nobody in Germany was wondering, like, "Wow, crazy that pogroms are happening against Jewish people.
	That's so crazy." Or, "Wow, they're all being shipped to just mainly the Jews to camps to work.
	That's kind of interesting." Or, "Wow, he talks about this a lot in Mein Kampf, but maybe it's just a coincidence." I don't think you can compare Hitler to people that are worried about climate change.
	The worry that I have here is- Why not?
	People in Germany thought Hitler was perfectly motivated by the highest of benevolent...
	If I were to take this standard of evidence and 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.
	They're anti-immigration because they hate brown people.
	Trump wanted to ban Muslims from coming to the United States because he's xenophobic.
	Conservatives don't want to have taxes to help the poor because they want homeless people to starve and die in the winter.
	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 enterprise, is they're not building a central gigantic organization to put forward this particular utopian claim.
	And so even if the conservatives are as morally addled 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 people's motivations when they're brandishing the moral flag.
	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 whether they would be inclined in that direction?
	For sure.
	Conservatives wield the power of the government whenever they feel they need to adjust as liberals to.
	Right?
	Conservatives were very happy to see, for instance, abortion was brought back as a state-regulated thing.
	Look, 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, prior to the 2000s, if they could censor everything related to either LGBT stuff or weird musical stuff or something they didn't want their kids to watch, conservatives would do it.
	But now that you see that 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 to platform everybody, and now progressives are like, well, hold on, maybe we shouldn't platform people.
	I've 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 central doctrine.
	Okay, so then you might say, 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, hopefully, a form of decentralized government.
	I can't speak to Canada as much, but...
	Yes, well, yes, 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 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 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 psychopaths 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 me tell you a story and you tell me what you think about this.
	Because I think it's very relevant to the concern that you just expressed.
	And 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.
	I mean, it depends on how we're quantifying that.
	Not really.
	Okay, we'll just quantify Mao.
	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.
	I'm not disagreeing.
	The Holodomor happened as well.
	The Soviet Union and China were horrible.
	20 to 50 million people in the Soviet Union.
	I'm just saying, for World War II, it depends on how much you attribute the war to Nazi Germany, etc.
	But sure, largely speaking, I don't think that the left beat the right because the right wasn't trying.
	I don't think it's because Hitler's lack of trying led him to kill less people than who ended up dying during the Great Leap Forward or during the industrialization of the Soviet Union.
	Yes, well, I also think it's an open question still to what degree Hitler's policies were right-wing versus left-wing, and no one's done the analysis properly yet to determine that.
	Because he was a national socialist movement for a reason, and the socialist part of it wasn't accidental.
	Well, but there was no cooperatively formed 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 to do for...
	That's true.
	That's true.
	It was a strange mix of totalitarian policies.
	I don't think it was a strange mix.
	I think it was a bid to appeal to mid-left and center-left, the KPD, and the German Socialist Party by calling themselves National Socialists.
	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 attachment to these terms.
	Well, 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 extract out a random sample of Nazi policies and strip them 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 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.
	And it hasn't been done, so it's a matter of opinion.
	Sure.
	I don't necessarily disagree.
	That's something you could do.
	Okay, so I was going to tell you this story.
	Okay, well, this has to do with the use of power.
	So, I spent a time...
	With a group of scholars putting and analyzing the Exodus story, an Exodus seminar recently.
	So the Exodus story is a very interesting story because it's a...
	What would you say?
	It's an analysis of 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.
	We all contend with the issue of tyranny and slavery.
	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 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 invitation and argumentation.
	And this happens most particularly, most spectacularly, right at the end of the sojourn.
	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 is, 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 the highest order.
	And that 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.
	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 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.
	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 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 governed, right?
	It's something like, but it's also something like you have the right to go to hell in a handbasket 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 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 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 the response would be, 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.
	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 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.
	And the thing that I feel like the only solution for this is you hinted at it.
	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 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 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...
	The actual number, probably in the hundreds of thousands, I think some conservatives think it's 3 million per year over the past three years because they look at, like, border contacts or they look at asylum seekers and they're not looking at- Yeah, I think it's 3.6 million.
	Came into the U.S. and stayed?
	Yes, through the southern border.
	Okay.
	You know, the historical average is about a million.
	I understand the chart.
	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 hey, maybe I'm wrong there, right?
	So we can say that that's an example of us living in a fundamentally different reality.
	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 that.
	Well, that's a different issue, right?
	Because I don't know how you measure how many illegal immigrants there are actually in the country.
	I understand.
	I just want to point out...
	I just want to point out, I agree with you.
	I listened to a lot of Rush Limbaugh 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.
	Which is what they are doing.
	The conservatives do the same thing, though.
	They're 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 infringed 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, there was going to be all this corruption and stuff related to vaccine distribution, to...
	The crazier theories were 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 used as an excuse to...
	What do you mean none of it?
	What do you make of the excess...
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	What do you mean none of it?
	What do you make of the excess deaths?
	For related to vaccines, there are almost none.
	The mRNA vaccines have been administered for related to vaccines.
	We don't know.
	We don't know.
	We absolutely know.
	This is like settled science.
	What do we know?
	In terms of vaccine related deaths?
	No, no, no, no, that's not my question.
	Excess deaths in Europe are up about 20%, and they have been since the end of the COVID pandemic.
	Sounds really high to me.
	Go look!
	Go look!
	I'll check afterwards, but is this including the Ukrainian war with Russia?
	No, it's not including the Ukrainian war.
	Okay.
	Are you implying that you think it's because of vaccines?
	I'm not implying anything.
	I'm saying what the excess deaths are.
	But what is your take on what's causing it?
	You said that in a counter to me describing mRNA vaccines.
	You said, well, the X's does for 20%.
	That makes sense that the implication is that the vaccines are causing it.
	Okay, first of all, Something is causing it.
	Obviously, yeah.
	Something is causing it.
	Or some combination of factors.
	Sure.
	Now, one possibility is that the healthcare 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 deaths tracing back through COVID as well?
	Post-COVID. Just post-COVID. Post-COVID. Okay.
	Right.
	They're terrifying.
	Right.
	They're terrifying.
	And they're not well...
	Excess deaths, the fact that you're speaking to them right now seems like...
	Yeah, but I ferret 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 excess deaths, that's a metric that you can Google, and I'm pretty sure there are like three different huge organizations that track excess deaths around the world.
	There are 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 healthcare 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 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.
	So you're going to talk about transmission?
	Because that was another thing that the COVID vaccine pushed.
	Yeah, but it didn't do anything to transmission.
	It absolutely did because it decreased your chance of getting affected.
	It didn't get rid of transmission, but it reduced transmission.
	Yeah, but it was claimed that it would Only if you take one reading of one single quote, I think, that Biden said one time where he said, no, come on!
	I've heard so many times because I'm going to 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 transmit it.
	That is so silly.
	Do you know that our Prime Minister in Canada deprived Canadians of the right to travel for six months because the unvaccinated were going to transmit COVID with more likelihood than the vaccinated?
	So this wasn't one bloody statement.
	No, no, hold on.
	What I'm saying is there wasn't a statement 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 your hospitalization, it 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 and then the Delta variant, the vaccines helped immensely here.
	They were tested.
	The myocarditis rates are like 7 out of 100,000 injections, and the myocarditis is generally acute.
	And it's generally not as bad as even getting the coronavirus itself, which will lead you also to having myocarditis.
	It's a much worse side effect than side effects that have caused other vaccines to be taken off the market before.
	A 7 out of 100,000 rate of acute myocarditis or pericarditis is not a worse side effect than any of the vaccine.
	I think that is completely acceptable, given that the disease itself is more likely to cause myocarditis or pericarditis.
	Yes, I don't think the data suggests to support that presupposition anymore.
	The latest peer-reviewed studies show that that's simply not true, especially among young men.
	So there is an age bracket of young men where the elevated rate of myocarditis, acute myocarditis from the vaccine, might have been higher.
	But we're talking about like three or four cases per 100,000 people.
	And again, myocarditis and myocarditis are generally acute conditions.
	They don't last for very long.
	I told you at the beginning of this conversation that the progressive leftists were on the side of the pharmaceutical companies.
	It's not a It's about being on the side of the pharmaceutical companies.
	Really?
	Really, yeah.
	Yeah, well, I see.
	So what I see as the unholy part of that alliance with the pharmaceutical companies is that it dovetails with the radical utopians' willingness to use power to impose their utopian vision.
	Well, then what do you make of the fact that— Because 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 throughout the— There we go.
	Fine.
	No, I don't think so.
	No, I don't think so.
	You're just wrong.
	You're completely wrong.
	I see.
	So you don't think that the pharmaceutical companies who dominate the advertising landscape with 75% of the funding are corrupt?
	I don't...
	Corrupt is a very broad...
	No, no, no, it's targeted.
	Corrupt with a tinge of malevolence.
	Willing to extract money out of people by putting their health on the line.
	You don't believe that.
	Do you think that we get effective drugs from pharmaceutical companies?
	Not particularly.
	Okay.
	So do you think that any vaccines work?
	Yes.
	I don't think 80 of them work.
	At once.
	For babies.
	I think that's a little risky.
	But yet we've been on this vaccine schedule for how many decades?
	Like 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, and you can understand why.
	I mean, look, part of it, no doubt, no doubt, part of it is a consequence of the 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 think the mRNA vaccine, the speeding up of it came from?
	How do you make for the fact that it was Donald Trump that didn't work speed...
	Terror.
	Foolish panicking, just like we're doing with the climate issue.
	So you think Trump was...
	Foolish panicking.
	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 left 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 it certainly wasn't only the left that stampeded toward the forced COVID vaccine 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 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.
	Sure, of course it's possible, but that didn't mean it was right.
	They use force!
	They use force!
	We use force for all sorts of things in terms of public health.
	We don't generally use force to invade people's bodies.
	How long have vaccine mandates been a thing in Canada, the United States, and 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, but when you say we don't generally use force, we absolutely use force.
	We've been forced vaccines for a long time.
	It's an important part of public health.
	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 injected billions of people with an experimental—it wasn't a bloody vaccine— Of course.
	No, it wasn't!
	Yes, it was!
	No, it isn't!
	Yes, it is!
	It's not...
	Well, because it didn't have a 100% success rate?
	You think it's a definition of vaccine?
	Well, the point of the vaccine is to give your body a protein to train on so the immune system works in the future.
	It's not the same technology.
	Who cares if it's not the same?
	There's plenty...
	There's different types of...
	They used 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...
	There certainly are, man.
	...that are different technologies.
	Fine.
	The mRNA vaccines is a type of vaccine technology.
	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 mRNA 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.
	And 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.
	I think the reason it's called a vaccine is because they're injecting you with something that's inoculating you against something in the future because it has proteins that resemble a virus that infects you.
	There are overlaps 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 in 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 shouldn't we be able to engage in that analysis and figure out, like, if we look at...
	We're not engaging in the analysis.
	No, because now we're talking about whether or not vaccines are even vaccines or not instead.
	No, 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.
	That 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 probable to be at least or more dangerous than the thing that it was supposed to protect against.
	And we are seeing that in the excess deaths.
	We are absolutely not seeing that.
	So are you implying that the excess deaths were caused by the vaccines?
	I don't bloody well know what they're caused by.
	That's what you're implying now.
	Look, if you're going to use Occam's razor, you're kind of stuck in an awkward place here.
	Absolutely not stuck in an awkward place.
	This is the most administered vaccine in 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 warped spread through a vaccine that was having deleterious effects on populations all around the world?
	You don't think there wouldn't be some academic institution?
	You don't think there'd be more than a handful of doctors 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, because that's where biotech is from, in order to create or manufacture a vaccine that was causing excess deaths all around the world?
	There are so many different people that will be motivated to call this out.
	How do you explain the fact that- We are calling it out.
	No, it's a handful of people.
	Where are the governments calling it?
	Where are the academic institutions calling it?
	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 mRNA vaccines for sure are causing all of these issues.
	Why wouldn't Putin, why wouldn't Xi Jinping, why wouldn't anybody else in the world call this out if it was as horrible as it was?
	There are plenty of people attempting to call it out.
	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 even know if there are 20% 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 overall healthcare system, another one might be deaths related to the war in Ukraine, another one might be rising energy costs that have happened for a couple reasons.
	But it's absolutely impossible that any of it could be unintended consequences of a novel technology injected into billions of people.
	I think that if excess, first of all, there aren't billions of people in Europe, so if there were excess deaths, 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 would be the vaccine.
	I think if there were, I think more people would be talking about it.
	Well, we have to.
	Well, first of all, the number of people talking about something is not an indication of the scientific validity of a claim.
	I agree with that, but for a vaccine- Then why are you using mass consensus as the determinant of what constitutes truth?
	That's never been the case.
	Because I think for something that was given to billions and billions of people, if this was something that was having a measurable effect on people, 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 documentary.
	We wouldn't have to look at the one thing being talked about.
	Then what do you make of the VAERS data?
	There's more negative side effects reported from the mRNA vaccines than there were reported for every single vaccine ever created since the dawn of time, and not by a small margin.
	So it's not just the excess deaths.
	I agree.
	It's the VAERS data.
	What is VAERS data?
	It's the database 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 vaccine front, we decided that we were going to doubt the validity of the VAERS reporting system.
	Okay, the VAERS reporting system has never been the gold standard for anything.
	VAERS reporting is just if you want to report that there is some issue that you have after getting a vaccine.
	That's it.
	What the hell do you think it was set up for?
	To report adverse events that happen after a vaccine.
	Why?
	To track and see if something was related to the vaccine.
	Right!
	Why?
	So most people, most people didn't even know VAERS existed until after the COVID vaccine.
	Once people know that it exists, of course more people are going to engage with it.
	But what happens- So it's all noise?
	No, well, it could be or couldn't be.
	So what do you do?
	Well, first of all, you might begin by suggesting that maybe it's not all noise.
	Correct.
	So when all of these things are admitted to VAERS, what they do is, from there, they investigate.
	All you can do—all of VAERS is, I might go and get a vaccine, and maybe in three days they go, hmm, I've got a headache.
	I'm going to go ahead and, like, call my doctor and make this report.
	And they'll say, okay, well, it's an adverse event after vaccine.
	It doesn't mean the vaccine caused the headache.
	And now that more people know about this— I didn't say it meant it.
	I'm just saying that VAERS is not the gold standard of determining if a vaccine is working or not.
	Compared to what?
	Compared to actual longitudinal, prospective, randomized controlled trial studies.
	You mean like the ones they should have done to the goddamn vaccines?
	Like the ones that they did do for the vaccines and they continue to do to this day.
	Yes, that is correct.
	You really think that you're in a position to evaluate the scientific credibility of the trials for the vaccines, do you?
	No.
	No, I don't.
	So I have to trust- Then what are you doing?
	I don't trust them.
	I looked at the bloody data.
	First of all, you have to trust third parties to some extent.
	When you go outside- I don't have to trust- Of course you do.
	You do every day.
	When you turn the keys in your car, you hope your engine doesn't explode.
	When you're drinking water, you hope that the public water or whatever tap or bottled water you got it out of isn't contaminated or poisoned with cholera.
	Do that as a consequence of consensus?
	No, of course you do.
	No, I don't.
	I do that as a consequence of observing multiple times that when I put the goddamn key in the ignition, the truck started.
	Why do you know it's going to start the 50th or the 100th time?
	Don't play Hume with me.
	I'm not playing Hume.
	You don't know if the denim in those jeans isn't leaking into your bloodstream.
	To some extent, we trust, we have to trust, third-party institutions to make determination.
	Except when they use force.
	How about that?
	Especially when they use force.
	We trust the police officers.
	We trust the judicial systems.
	We do.
	We on the left trust the police, do we?
	To some extent, do we?
	If somebody's breaking into your house, who do you call?
	That's why we defund them.
	I'm not a defunder, but if somebody's breaking into your house, you can be the most defunded person in the world.
	Who are you going to call?
	Are you going to call your neighbor?
	Are you going to call Joe Biden?
	Are you going to call Obama?
	Are you going to call the Black Panthers?
	You're going to call the cops.
	Okay, 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 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 tyranny, because it was more a tyranny than a pandemic, are now saying that we actually didn't force anybody to take the vaccine.
	So what do you think of that claim?
	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?
	It's technically true in 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.
	Or what?
	Or they'd lose their job.
	Okay, does that qualify as force?
	That's why I said technically...
	Yeah, no, no, but 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.
	Is it the same as a cop telling you you have to do this and you're going to be killed?
	No, but it's on the spectrum, sure, of course, yeah.
	It's as much force as the mRNA vaccines are vaccines.
	Sure.
	It is a type of force, and the mRNA vaccines are a type of vaccine, so sure.
	Okay, so look, 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 I'm very skeptical of it.
	That's why I'm glad there's multiple companies, multiple countries, multiple academic institutions to do research, and the FDA. Yeah, I'm very skeptical.
	You should be in any private system.
	You should be skeptical of 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?
	Undoubtedly, like, if you look at Alzheimer's research, there's been groundbreaking improvements on drugs to treat Alzheimer's research over the past three years that five years ago none of these drugs even existed.
	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 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, I don't believe that.
	Even if you had a tribe of 100, 120 people, if somebody was stealing something, right, you have to punish that person.
	I said earlier 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 necessity to use force is a sign of bad policy.
	And no, I don't think, see, I'm not particularly Hobbesian.
	I don't think that the only reason people comport themselves with a certain degree of civility in civilized society is because they're terrified by the fact that the government has a monopoly on force that can 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 have to ask, because I have watched a lot of your stuff in the past, 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...
	It puts on the guardrails those particular social interactions.
	Yeah, the threat of force is don't be psychopathic.
	How broader is psychopathic here?
	Are we defining?
	Well, I can define it.
	Sure, yeah, go for it.
	Well, 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 made 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 drop of a hat.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
	Well, the exaggerated proclivity to do that is at the essence of psychopathy.
	So it's a very immature— I'm curious, with this definition of psychopathy, It's the definition of psychopathy.
	It's not an ad.
	It's not mine.
	That's the core of psychopathy.
	Okay.
	In the United States, I think we call it all ASPD now.
	No, it's separate from...
	That's antisocial personality disorder.
	I thought that subsumed psychopathy and sociopathy.
	Psychopathy is...
	No, psychopathy is more like some...
	It's more the pathological core of antisocial personality disorder.
	Okay, maybe that might be true.
	Okay.
	That's a better way of thinking.
	Like, the worst...
	A small number of criminals are responsible for the vast majority of crimes.
	It's 1%, commit 65%, something like that.
	Do you think is 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 in 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 imprisoned by a lot.
	I think it's 10 to 1 or 20 to 1 generally.
	It depends on the particular crime.
	With it being higher proportion of men as the violence of the crime mounts.
	So you can 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 that 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 the place you'll go if you go badly is in the psychopathic or antisocial direction.
	And there are environmental determinants of that to some degree.
	Sure.
	Genes express themselves in an environment.
	I agree.
	I'm just curious for the definition of psychopathy, for short-term gain at the expense of long-term...
	Relationship, really.
	That's probably the best bit.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	When you look at stuff like people that are self-destructive, say people that engage in behavior, at 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, 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.
	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 to facilitate their obesity.
	Uh-huh.
	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 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?
	So for instance, say I'm talking to some friends and I'm just gossiping or shit-talking 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 more favorably because I have a gossip or something to share with them.
	But that's the gain right there.
	And you are contributing to the demise of the people that you're gossiping about.
	But I think there's like, I feel like there's fundamentally a 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 because I hate this guy and I want him to like have a worse reputation among people.
	I feel like there's different drivers for that.
	I would say, that's an interesting distinction.
	I would say probably that the hatred-induced Malevolence is a worse form of malevolence than the popularity-inducing malevolence.
	Yeah, the only reason...
	It's a tough one, but...
	Yeah, the only reason I bring that up is because I feel like a lot of malevolence that we have social guardrails 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 person.
	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 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 develop 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 his 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 use of force, Do you think that society ever exists without...
	Use force on your wife?
	Well, what are we considering force?
	Is withholding sex, for instance, is that considered force?
	Or is, you know, saying we're going to cancel a vacation?
	Deprivation of an expected reward is a punishment.
	So you can...
	Well, no, but I mean, this is a serious question.
	I mean, look, look, if 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 husband, for instance, would that be considered a 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?
	I would say it would depend to some degree on the intent.
	The intent is to punish behavior, right?
	Well, if the intent is to punish, then it's starting to move into the domain of force.
	I mean, look, while we've been talking, you know, there have been bursts of emotion, right?
	And that's because we're freeing entropy and trying 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's short-term for the person.
	And then maybe that's at the expense of 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 tetrad of traits.
	So narcissism, Machiavellianism, 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.
	Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy that's predatory parasitism and those culminate in sadism 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 think that your fundamental presupposition was both Hobbesian and ill-formed.
	I do not believe that the basis for the civilized polity 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 would agree with you.
	But if the policy isn't invitational, if I can't make a case 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 criminals with a long-term history of violent offenses is a good example of that.
	We don't know how to invite those people to play.
	Mm-hmm.
	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 at 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 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.
	And that's the force issue.
	Yeah, I agree, I agree.
	So fundamentally, to clear my stance up, I agree that fundamentally you're not building society on force.
	If for no other reason, because there'd be so much friction, it would fly apart at the seams, right?
	You can't force them.
	You'd get resistance if you...
	Fundamentally, we're building off of cooperation.
	You want to invite people to participate in society.
	I agree with that.
	I feel like once you start to hit certain thresholds or certain points, and you've got so many different types of people involved, at some point, we're going to have to have force around the edges, on the guardrails, just to make sure that we don't allow...
	Are you familiar with tit-for-tat systems, essentially?
	Yeah.
	Tit-for-tat is probably a really important part of our 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...
	Is that force or justice?
	You can call it what it is.
	No, no, no.
	I'm curious what you think.
	This is a very serious question.
	Because the tit-for-tat is very bounded, right?
	It's like...
	You cheat, I whack you.
	Then I cooperate.
	And I do think that there's a model there for what we actually conceptualize as 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 stand-in for force, right?
	Well, I don't— That's a good— So, there are different types of tit-for-tat systems, right?
	You've got tit-tit-for-tat, you've got tit-for-tat-tat, there's all sorts of types of systems where maybe you'll let somebody make a mistake one or two times, but you can't have a tit-tit-tit-tit system because then somebody can come in and take advantage of it.
	Yes, which is the problem with the compassionate left, by the way.
	To some extent, sure, it can be.
	Or a problem with the right that's far too forgiving of Donald Trump.
	But I would say that that tat part, you can call it justice.
	I think justice is a perspective, a 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 murderer was responding to environmental conditions, blah, blah, blah, or was penentials or whatever.
	That responding to environmental conditions theory.
	I mean, it depends.
	No, it's not.
	Well, I mean, because essentially that's Rittenhouse.
	So here's why.
	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, then it spreads near exponentially in populations.
	That isn't what happens.
	So here's the data.
	Most people who abused their children were abused as children.
	But most people who were abused as children do not abuse their children.
	And the reason for that is because if you were 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 dampens itself out as a consequence of intergenerational transmission.
	So the notion that privation is a pathway to criminality, that's not a well-founded formulation.
	And there are an infinite number of counterexamples, and they're crucial.
	Some of the best people I know, and 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 caused them to reevaluate 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 because 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 predictor of crime than poverty.
	Right, but it's a very specific form of crime.
	It's status-seeking crime by young men.
	Mm-hmm.
	Right.
	Well, 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.
	There's nothing the least bit about it.
	I think you have to be really careful with that assessment, though, because you can say that it's not economically—it's not seeking economic— Why do you have to be careful?
	Because we're assuming that people that commit crime in these types of circumstances are status-seeking and not trying to seek economic remedy.
	That's exactly 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 with a longer-term vision in mind.
	Sure, they're trying to elevate.
	I wouldn't disagree with that in the least.
	But they do it with a much longer time horizon 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.
	So they're trying to maximize short-term gain.
	It has nothing to do with the redress of economic inequality, except in the most fundamental sense.
	And it is status-driven because they're looking for comparative status.
	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.
	Well, I'm in the States.
	Your 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.
	Well, I'm just saying, 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 in the right school district, or I need to be able to pay the education.
	Right, 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 yourself.
	So, for instance, one of the biggest predictors of getting married is already achieving...
	Well, that's what I'm saying.
	I'm saying there's a...
	I know, they're confounding.
	Okay, look, we're running out of time.
	You're smart, you're sharp.
	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.
	It's justice.
	No, but I think it's the right...
	It's justice when you're the tatter, not when you're the titter, though.
	No, 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 Raskolnikov 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 meted 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, there's nothing worse in your own life than waiting for the other shoe to drop.
	If you've transgressed against a 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.
	True.
	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 leftist 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 on the left might think that they're actually satisfying their moral requirement to society by doing so.
	Much the same as a child soldier, or not, I won't use child soldier, but maybe an older person that's committing intifada 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 good rule of thumb policy that if you have to implement your goddamn scheme with force, then there's something wrong with the way it's formulated.
	There's no reason 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 the kind of emergency that justified force, not least because behavioral psychologists have 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 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 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, 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.
	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 temptation to use force is rightly pointed to by the leftists who insist that power is the basis for everything.
	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 stop.
	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...
	I feel like we got pretty far into this.
	What are you trying to accomplish?
	Let's start with that.
	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.
	The danger in that, of course, is that 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 feel like, I think debate or argumentation is good because it forces two sides to make their ideas somewhat commensurate to the other.
	If two people are having a conversation, they have to be able to communicate said 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.
	For instance, I would agree that school, maybe not faculty, but administrators are very, very, very, very far left today.
	Dangerously so.
	I don't have to talk to you about this, obviously.
	But I think part of the responsibility to that, I think, rests at the feet of conservatives who, instead of maintaining participation in the system, decide that they're going to throw their hands up and disengage.
	Or be forced out.
	Or be forced out, sure.
	That's fine.
	Yeah, sometimes it can happen.
	But I think that rather than accepting being forced out or rather than encouraging other people to disengage, the engagement has to happen.
	It can't be a, I'm losing faith in the system, so all of us are going to go here and do our own thing.
	It has to be like, no, we're going to be here in these conversations, whether you like it or not, 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 the internet is driving people into these very homogenous but very polar grass groups.
	The data on that, by the way, aren't clear.
	Like, whatever's driving polarization doesn't seem to be as tightly related to the creation of those internal bubbles as you might think.
	Like, 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 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 I feel like the homogeneity, I feel like it's not so much, this is not research-based at all, just a total feeling of that, so I'll admit that, but the feelings that I have is it's not necessarily that homogeneity has increased, it's that homogeneity 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, 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 exists 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 them coming together...
	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 a similar set of beliefs between all of these different 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, right?
	Is that we're driving levels of connectivity that get rigid and that we also can't tolerate.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Well, that's a good place to stop.
	Well, thank you very much for coming in today.
	That's much appreciated.
	And you're a sharp debater and good on your feet, so that's fun to see.
	And I do think that your closing remarks were correct, is that The alternative to talking is fighting.
	Right.
	So when we stop talking, it's not like the disagreements are going to go away.
	Yeah.
	We will start fighting.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	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 couples fight a lot.
	Yeah, that's right.
	The really bad ones are where they don't fight ever.
	And then all of a sudden, there's a, yeah.
	The couples who fight and reconcile are the ones that, 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.
	We're going to spend another half an hour or so on the Daily Wire side, so if you're inclined, tune into that.
	We'll find out a little bit more about the background of our current interviewee, Destiny.

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