Surviving insanity, Stefan Molyneux's theory of Universally Preferable Behaviour versus Kant and Hoppe, the joys of generosity, the necessity of philosophical dedication, and is desensitization to violence really such a bad thing?
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio on the 24th of July 2011. | |
| Don't forget, this is your chance to come by the Free Domain Radio BBQ, which is in six days. | |
| On the Saturday, you can go to amiando.com forward slash FDR2011 to sign up. | |
| Please sign up by the end of the day because we need to order. | |
| I need to order the food and the drinks. | |
| The lunch is free. In the evening, we're going to go for a nice dinner, have some drinks, and then we're going to karaoke all All night, just to blister what's left of your inner ear by that time. | |
| So I hope you'll be able to come by. With regards to the True News video that I released about the Norway shooting, the shooting of the bombings in Oslo and the shootings in Norway, where this murderer has slaughtered over 90 young people. | |
| Horrendous. There is a... | |
| Somebody made a comment, which I sort of wanted to address, where they said that Muslims are only 2% Of the population in Norway and so I shouldn't be all that it's about Islam. | |
| Well, I did look that up. | |
| And it's interesting because in 1980, there were a thousand in the whole country. | |
| And now it's 70, 80, 90,000. | |
| But of course, in Oslo, it's 7.5% of the population, which is pretty considerable. | |
| And it's been growing very fast. | |
| Now, what's interesting is that in 1980, in Norway, only 10% of the Muslim population was part of a mosque. | |
| It was kind of foreign to their way of doing things. | |
| But the government, of course, is giving tax breaks and subsidies to the mosques based upon the number of parishioners or congregation members that they have signed up, which has led to an intense drive to sign up more people to these mosques, which means that they're going to, if the mosques are involved in radical talking, they're going to get exposed to that more. | |
| Again, the hand of the state is behind most things. | |
| I'm not sort of saying the state is responsible for For chicken pox and mildew and stubbing your toe, but it's the first place to look when you're looking at a big mess. | |
| Now, where are these people coming from? | |
| Where are these Muslims coming from? | |
| Well, they're coming from Pakistan, where hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of military aid has flowed from the West, in particular from the US. To them, they're coming from Somalia, where arms sales to warring factions are legion, and of course where Lots of toxic waste dumping is occurring offshore. | |
| They're coming from Turkey, which receives billions and billions of dollars in aid from the United States to prop up its government and so on. | |
| So every single one of the countries that is supplying the Muslims, so to speak, to Norway is subjected to massive amounts of military aid, which is basically arming the terrorists in charge of the state. | |
| And, of course, they're coming from Iraq as well, fleeing the war. | |
| So this is one of the prices that you pay for war. | |
| And there is an argument that says, well, they come here for the welfare programs. | |
| And, you know, I hate to sound harsh, but people, people, we really need to up our game when it comes to our thought patterns here just a little bit. | |
| The world is in too precarious a position for us to go. | |
| On the easy downstream crap of propaganda. | |
| We really need to think more clearly than that. | |
| The answer to this question is very easy and all you have to do is put yourself in their shoes. | |
| Not in the mosque, of course. | |
| All you need to do is say, okay, well in Qatar there's some pretty wonderful programs because it's such an oil rich country with a relatively small population and so in Qatar there is great wealth per capita and great state programs and lots of free stuff and goodies being showered on the population. | |
| Do I want to move to Qatar? | |
| No, of course not. I mean, very few people are going to say, well, I live in Norway, but Qatar has some slightly more generous government programs, so I'm going to move to Qatar. | |
| This is not what people do. People don't move for the sake of welfare programs or social programs. | |
| Now, that having been said, there are some statistics which seem to indicate that up to half or more of the Muslim population is dependent upon government handouts. | |
| Well, that is terrible. | |
| But that is simply cynical vote buying on the part of politicians who know that if they give money to the immigrant populations, then the immigrant populations will vote for them. | |
| That's as simple as it gets. | |
| There's nothing to do with they come here for social programs because the first round of immigrants that came in the 60s and 70s to Norway were gainfully employed for the most part. | |
| It's the second generation, the third generation that gets snared by the political process. | |
| So they don't come for the welfare programs. | |
| They flee the tyrannies in their own countries, which are funded to a large degree by the West. | |
| And I don't have any idea how much Norway, how many Norwegian arms sales are overseas, but I don't see Norway protesting a lot about American arms sales or British arms sales or French arms sales or Russian. | |
| But anyway, the reality is that these people are fleeing tyrannies and they don't come to Norway for the social programs. | |
| They do get a little bit snared, perhaps in the social program bribeocracy that is part of the modern democracy. | |
| But I just really wanted to point that out. | |
| I just need to think more clearly about these things and say, okay, well, if I were in their position, would I come all the way to Norway and leave my extended family and leave the language and the culture and the temperature that I was familiar with and where my people had been historically for hundreds of thousands of years? | |
| Well, of course not. Come for the welfare programs. | |
| They just get ensnared in them after a certain amount of time has passed. | |
| Anyway, I just wanted to point that out. | |
| Let's move on with the Sunday show. | |
| We've got some great questions already in the chat room. | |
| So James, did we have anyone on the phone who would like to chat? | |
| We absolutely do. | |
| It's free-for-all for whoever wants to jump in first. | |
| Hi, can you hear me this time? | |
| Yes. It's not. | |
| It's not. Yeah, last time I rang and there was some sound problem, so sorry about that. | |
| I think it was a band connection or something. | |
| Yeah, it's a little rough, so if you can keep your question brief, that would be good. | |
| Okay. Basically, it's just something I've noticed about myself, which I tried doing a... | |
| I've done a lot of work on in terms of journaling and looking up information and speaking with my counsellor about, but I still seem to find something quite difficult. | |
| So I just wanted to speak about that and hopefully maybe other listeners have experienced the same thing. | |
| Alright, so if I could just ask you to keep the pace up a little bit. | |
| So far, all you've done is spent a few minutes telling me what you're going to tell me about. | |
| So if you could just cut to the chase, that would be great. | |
| Okay. No problem. | |
| I'm just reminding you that we need to keep the conveyor belt moving. | |
| So please go ahead. Yeah, procrastination. | |
| Look, it's just nerves. I understand that. | |
| But, you know, grab the bull by the horns and let's get the topic going. | |
| Oh, absolutely, absolutely. | |
| Okay, so whenever I have been on my way to realizing something horrible in my life, facing it and thinking, right, that's where that comes from. | |
| Whenever I try to push forward and do something positive, like learn something new, That's going to help me, something that's going to benefit me. | |
| I push it away, and I get this really physical, panicky sense of dread. | |
| I've really suffered in the last couple of months, and I've done some silly things in the last couple of months. | |
| As I say, I know where it all comes from. | |
| I know the history of it, but it's kind of annoying now because it's like, right, I know I shouldn't be doing this, but it's still happening. | |
| You're being very abstract. | |
| Can you give me a more concrete example so I know what you're talking about? | |
| Yeah, I'll certainly try. | |
| Well, certainly in terms of the self-knowledge stuff. | |
| In terms of... | |
| I get incredibly jealous of people that achieve and when I try and achieve myself I've become very anxious. | |
| I've just started going to the gym. | |
| This is a really basic example. | |
| I've just started doing a fitness program in the gym. | |
| I've started learning the proper form, the proper technique so that I don't get injured. | |
| I'm getting really resentful about it. | |
| My friend's giving me all this great advice about it, and I'm getting really resentful with him about it. | |
| And the same thing with philosophy. | |
| And what is it specifically that you're resentful about when it comes to working out? | |
| I'm resentful about... | |
| So, you know, my friend said, oh, I said, my elbows are hurting. | |
| He said, well, maybe you haven't got enough shoulder rotation, external shoulder rotation, so that's why the mechanics of the weight is causing your elbow to hurt. | |
| And I just, I didn't want to hear that. | |
| I was just kind of like... | |
| Okay, okay. I think I'm going to interrupt you just because I want to make sure that... | |
| I think I understand what your issue is, so let me take a swing at it, and then you can tell me if I've connected at all, okay? | |
| Okay. Okay, so for most of human history, and I say this as a big topic because I really want you to accept and understand your essential humanity in your resistance to change and to growth, because this is what I think you're talking about, that you're trying to grow and you're trying to change. | |
| Hugely admirable. But I hope you understand that it is entirely human, in fact it would be inhuman to not feel this, it's entirely human to feel great resentment and irritation and frustration and anger and sometimes even rage at climbing out of the well of dysfunction. | |
| It would be weird if you didn't feel that, to feel resentment. | |
| About that. And this, I believe, I mean, what do I know? | |
| This is just my opinion. I believe this is an adaptive mechanism designed to not get you killed. | |
| And I'll tell you what I mean by that. | |
| Throughout most of human history, we were dominated by psychopaths and sociopaths and murderers and, you know, peyote-engorged Vision-induced break-with-reality lunatics. | |
| And as a result, see, insanity, which is most of human history in terms of the leadership and control of humanity, insanity is incredibly rigid. | |
| If you've ever been around somebody who's really into conspiracy theories or somebody who's kind of paranoid or whatever, it's incredibly rigid. | |
| It doesn't change. | |
| It goes round and round in these tight little circles and you can't ever escape it. | |
| There's a rigidity and a control in insanity. | |
| And human beings have had to adapt to survive in two environments. | |
| One is the sane world of resources. | |
| So if you want to go and hunt, you have to be very rational and empirical about it. | |
| And if you want to farm, you have to be very rational and empirical about it. | |
| So there's the sort of one thing that we adapt to as human beings is reason and evidence and logical steps and project management, planning and all these kinds of things. | |
| If you want to survive through the winter as a farmer, you don't eat all of your food in the summer and you don't eat your seed crop that you need to plant in the spring. | |
| So we have had to adapt to reason and evidence but like in the world of resource growth and acquisition and we've had to at the same time had to adapt to rigid, deranged, foaming at the mouth insanity in terms of culture, in terms of religiosity, in terms of all of the weird superstitious crap that passes for human society or at least has throughout most of history. | |
| Now, this has caused a huge split in the human personality. | |
| Sometimes it's called the mind-body dichotomy or the brain-mind dichotomy or whatever, but we don't sort of have to get into that. | |
| But the reality is that we are designed, whenever we come across or begin to really understand the insanity of society around us, then We feel great fear, because people who questioned or opposed to the insanity of their society throughout most of human history got themselves fucking killed. | |
| And quickly, too. | |
| And quickly, too. | |
| I mentioned this before, but there was a book that I read when I was an undergraduate called Montaillou. | |
| Which was an examination of late medieval village life in France. | |
| And this was all recorded, I think, during the Inquisition. | |
| And one guy said, I don't think that God was involved in the world. | |
| I think the world was born by shitting and fucking. | |
| Or something like that. I'm sort of paraphrasing. | |
| And, you know, you go and talk to the Inquisition like that. | |
| What's going to happen? Well, they're going to string you up by your short and curlies. | |
| And it's bye-bye to your gene pool for the rest of time. | |
| So when we begin to say, look, I would like to have a little bit more sanity in my social environment, I would like to not be trapped in insanity and dysfunction and abuse and all this sort of stuff, we get really scared. | |
| For the same reason that we get really scared when a snake lands on our leg. | |
| Because, yeah, maybe the snake's okay, but maybe it's not. | |
| And maybe you do live in a society, which exists largely in the future, maybe you do live in a society where Growth is rewarded and applauded and all these kinds of good things go on. | |
| But maybe you live in a society where that's going to get your face ground into a rock and your arms and legs torn apart by four horses with chains running in different directions. | |
| So I just want to sort of empathize and sympathize with your resistance to change and to growth because it's really, really, really dangerous throughout most of human history. | |
| It would almost always get you killed. | |
| So yeah, if you grew up in a situation, like a family situation, and school is incredibly rigid for the most part. | |
| So if it's school, if you grew up with religious indoctrination, it's incredibly rigid. | |
| Everybody knows that there's so much shit you can't ask when you're a kid brought up in a religious tradition. | |
| Like, you know, talking snake? | |
| Really? Really? | |
| So the snake could talk, which means that he had to have a brain that was larger than about 10 times his body weight. | |
| And he learned how to talk and he learned how to count without having any fingers or toes. | |
| It's a magic snake though. | |
| It's a magic snake. | |
| Well, okay, yeah. But I mean, but you understand, like there's so much shit that you cannot talk about when you're a kid. | |
| And my daughter is teaching me a lot about this because my daughter is in the phase of Maybe it's a Molyneux trait, I don't know, but my daughter's in a phase of endless correction of everyone around her. | |
| She wants stories all the time and sometimes I'll tell her a story of like a movie or a book and sometimes I'll just make something up. | |
| Even if I've just made up a story once and I'm telling it again a week later, she will remember if I get a detail wrong and she will correct me. | |
| No, it wasn't red, it was blue, right? | |
| And so she will correct me. | |
| And this is innate and instinctive to children. | |
| Because they're comparing three things. | |
| Language, reality, and authority. | |
| And I want her to always go with reality. | |
| Always go with reality. | |
| And so when she questions or opposes what I'm saying, if she's right, I'm like, hey, you're absolutely right. | |
| I'm sorry, I forgot you're correct. | |
| And sometimes we'll get into a debate about it. | |
| But she is very keen on correcting me about errors and mistakes, and she's two and a half years old. | |
| Do we not think that children have the same impulse when it comes to religion, when it comes to cultural prejudice, when it comes to nationalism? | |
| Well, of course they do. But most times, that would get children killed. | |
| Infanticide was so rampant throughout history that it is the greatest genocide of the species, so you really had to get along. | |
| You had to go along in order to survive. | |
| So if you're starting to break out of a sort of medieval mindset that has come from your family or your education or your religion or whatever, you have every right to feel A huge amount of resistance within you. | |
| That resistance is trying to get your head from being, keep your head from being dashed upon a rock in some ritual for unbelievers, right? | |
| Or sinners, or cynics, or whoever, right? | |
| So, you know, respect it and be patient with it. | |
| It's natural. It's not a sign of dysfunction. | |
| It's a sign that you actually want to live. | |
| Right, yeah. Well, I mean, even when I'm When I'm when I'm out and about and I just see um I don't know if there's been holidays or something but the amount of parents I've seen just talking to their kids like this girl today got shouted at got told well very passively aggressively got told off for showing manners she said to her mum or something I'm sorry could you repeat that and the mum went oh your nan says that and it's like Really sarcastic tone, | |
| and I'm like, oh great, you're berating a child for showing consideration and manners. | |
| I've just noticed that lately, and I think it resonates with me. | |
| And as I say, I know where it comes from. | |
| I've managed to take all these people in my head and say, look, I know that you were false, and I want this respect back for myself. | |
| But I'm still left with this really horrible physical panic. | |
| And yeah, it would be nice to sort of get rid of that. | |
| I'm trying my best. | |
| Well, you can't get rid of it. | |
| It's trying to help you, right? | |
| It's like saying, I really want to get rid of my immune system. | |
| Well, no, you don't, right? | |
| It is important. Look, it is risky to think for yourself, even in sort of the modern West, which is a... | |
| Pretty great society in many ways, relative to what's going on throughout history. | |
| But there's significant risks. | |
| I mean, you've seen maybe on the message board people saying, well, you know, there's lots of people at work who praise the war, right? | |
| Well, what are you going to say? | |
| There's lots of people who praise God at work. | |
| Well, what are you going to say? There's lots of people who say, my country is the best at work. | |
| There's lots of people who get really fanatical about sports at work. | |
| Or at the dinner table. | |
| Or among my friends. | |
| And how much truth can you bring to bear in these situations? | |
| Well, that is a fine line. | |
| That is a fine line. | |
| And so you need that fear. | |
| That fear is helpful to you. | |
| I know it's annoying. I know it's frustrating. | |
| I know you just want to blast it aside and rise like a rocket to the new world that awaits you beyond the clouds of error in the high blue clear skies of truth, reason, empathy, virtue and all that kind of good stuff. | |
| But it's tricky. It's tricky. | |
| What you're trying to do... | |
| Is you're trying to escape from a crowd that is armed with swords and currently practicing all their swings. | |
| You have to be careful. | |
| You have to be delicate. | |
| You have to move. You have to fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee, and sometimes roll like a cheap quarter. | |
| And so, yeah, you have to be careful. | |
| This caution is important. Don't try and elbow it aside. | |
| Don't think of it as a sign of cowardice or dysfunction. | |
| It is the same caution that We feel when we are stepping towards a cliff edge. | |
| We have to be careful. | |
| We don't want that caution to go away. | |
| So, you know, try and work with it. | |
| Thank it for trying to help you. | |
| Work with it. Let it panic. | |
| Talk with it. Absorb its lessons and then try and reason with it. | |
| And ask whether it wants to be the guardian of everything new and the terror of all new things for the rest of time or whether it would like to join you in exploring what is possible. | |
| In original thinking, even in a somewhat crazed society, so that would be my suggestion. | |
| Yeah, well I mean that was all I wanted to sort of say really. | |
| There's a lot of other things that I've been going through but I've been working on it myself and I have been feeling a lot more confident about who I am as a person. | |
| And I think the key to that was taking all this sympathy that I was giving towards these abusive people, because they pretended that they were victims, but they weren't. | |
| And then I kind of took it back and had it for myself, and then I had this realisation that I was actually this great guy, you know? | |
| So that was quite helpful. | |
| But yeah, I appreciate what you're saying, I appreciate what you're saying, and things are well with you. | |
| Thanks so much. That was a great question, and I appreciate you bringing it up. | |
| It's really, really a very important thing for us to remember. | |
| Thank you. Thank you. | |
| Okay. Bye. All right. | |
| Do we have another caller, or should I go with a text question? | |
| Hello, Stefan. Hi. | |
| How are you doing? I'm just great. | |
| How are you doing? I'm doing pretty well. | |
| This is Chris R. from the forums, also known as The Rational Empiricist. | |
| Oh, hey. How's it going? Did you change your name recently? | |
| You said formerly known as The Rational. | |
| Okay. Okay. Yeah. | |
| I think I saw that. Awesome. | |
| I would like to talk about UPB. Is that okay? | |
| Oh, let's do it, baby. | |
| Bring it on. Fantastic. | |
| Let's try and comb over your UPB and reveal its shape for the nth time, but it's well worth it. | |
| Thank you. Go ahead. Okay. | |
| A little bit of a background on me, if that's okay. | |
| Yeah, yeah. I talked to you previously in a podcast about my experiences in Catholic school and all that stuff. | |
| I was raised as a Catholic with some sort of Amalgamation of divine command theory and natural law theory. | |
| So that's sort of where I was coming from. | |
| Once I became an atheist, that sort of went out the window, obviously. | |
| And I was really in search of some sort of ethical theory to justify my intuitions about how child abuse is wrong, murder is wrong, all that stuff. | |
| And one of the first theories that I came across that was not based in gods or governments or genealogies was yours, and I was really excited about that. | |
| After reading UPB several times and going over a lot of the other work, I still felt very confused, sort of like a fog. | |
| And I think your explanation of that to me was that it might have something to do with my own history. | |
| So over the past year, I've been doing a lot of therapy and also more research into other ethical theories such as Kantianism, desire utilitarianism, and stuff like that. | |
| And in coming back to UPB, I think I now get what you're saying, but I would like to present my version of UPB to you and see if we're on the same page. | |
| Great. | |
| Awesome. | |
| Okay, last night I wrote something short up and this is just my interpretation of it. | |
| Please feel free to stop me and correct me where I go wrong. | |
| Sorry, do you want me to wait until you're done or do you want me to stop you in the middle? | |
| Please, stop me in the middle. Okay. | |
| Okay. Understanding universally preferable behavior. | |
| Abstract. In this informal essay, I will provide a reformulation of Stefan Molyneux's ethical theory, universally preferable behavior, henceforth UPB, in terms of the hypothetical imperative and the action-based theory of desire. | |
| Hence, by doing so, it is my aim to clarify and synthesize the theory so that it is more understandable and critiquable. | |
| One, general form of a hypothetical imperative in terms of the action-based theory of desire. | |
| A hypothetical imperative in terms of the action-based theory of desire takes the standard form of premise one. | |
| Sorry, the action-based theory of desire, are you referring to utilitarianism? | |
| No. I go on, I do that, I explain that a bit later in the essay. | |
| Okay, sorry, go ahead. I just want to make sure that I understand that term as you're starting to use it. | |
| Sure, yeah. This is a part of science. | |
| Science of motivation. | |
| Okay. Yeah. | |
| So premise one is I desire P. Premise two is that if I am to objectively fulfill my desire for P, then I am required to do action Q. Premise three, if I am going to objectively fulfill my desire for P. Conclusion one, therefore I am required to do action Q. And this is sort of like what you say about, I think you used the example of going to San Francisco. | |
| I used the example of, I desire to go to the North Pole. | |
| If I'm to objectively fulfill my desire to go to the North Pole, then I'm required to travel north. | |
| If I am going to objectively fulfill my desire to travel to the North Pole, therefore I'm required to travel to the North Pole. | |
| Does this make sense? Okay. | |
| Yeah. So this is now an explanation of what the action... | |
| And sorry, this is one way that you bypass the if-ought dichotomy, which I have some issues with, right? | |
| But... Or the is-ought dichotomy. | |
| So you can't say everybody has to go to the North Pole. | |
| You can say, if someone wants to go to the North Pole, they have to do X, Y, and Z. Precisely. | |
| And analogous to science, it would be, look, you don't have to use science, but if you want to say something coherent and rational and true about the physical world, you need to use the scientific method. | |
| You can't just pray or whatever, right? | |
| Right. I'm 100% with you there. | |
| Got it. It's for me to actually be eating cake. | |
| This is foiled against subjective fulfillment of desire in which I think I have objectively fulfilled my desire, but I really have not. | |
| Sorry, I'm a little lost on this one. | |
| If you could just explain it to me like you're talking to me. | |
| Sure. So let's say you want to go to the North Pole. | |
| And there's a difference between you actually traveling to the North Pole and you thinking you have traveled to the North Pole. | |
| Yes. What the action-based theory of desire says, and this is just a very small part of it, it's a standard view of current science, is that we are motivated not to subjectively fulfill our desire, which is just thinking that we're going to the North Pole. | |
| We are really motivated by wanting to objectively fulfill the desire. | |
| How does that explain prayer? | |
| Well, at least in this view, it's that we're praying because at least the person praying thinks that they are really changing the world. | |
| Ah, okay, okay. | |
| So there is still an element of subjectivity because somebody may believe that they're traveling to the North Pole when they're not. | |
| Right. And that satisfies their desire. | |
| So it doesn't actually have to be true, it just has to be something they believe is true. | |
| Yes. But if it turns out that, like, let's say the person praying, the person praying really thinks that they're praying and they're affecting the world. | |
| If it comes to them that they realize that praying doesn't work, and since motivation is based on objective fulfillment of desire, then they would no longer pray. | |
| Well, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to disagree with that, because there have been tons of studies that have been well-publicized, like truly scientific studies, Thousands of people double-blind that prayer does nothing. | |
| And prayer still continues. | |
| And the reason for that is that people pray, a lot of people pray, not because they think they're going to change the world. | |
| A lot of people feel kind of ridiculous talking to invisible friends when they're over five years old. | |
| But what they're doing it for is to avoid confrontation with other believers. | |
| It's the emperor's new clothes, right? | |
| Nobody wants to be the first one to say that the emperor has no clothes, so it's more around a desire for conformity with other people than a belief that prayer is really changing the world. | |
| Well, I think that that's a difference in what the person praying desires to actually do. | |
| Sorry to interrupt. So if they want to conform, then it doesn't matter if they find out that prayer doesn't work in the real world, because that's not what they're doing it for. | |
| They're doing it to conform. Right. | |
| In that case, the person praying, their objective desire or the objective fulfillment of their desire is not for prayer to actually work, but for them to not have to be in confrontation. | |
| Right. So if in the first example where somebody's doing it because they think it changes the world and you then give them studies which shows that it doesn't, then they'll stop praying. | |
| Whereas if in the second one, if they get more social approval suddenly by stopping praying, they will do that to avoid confrontation or negative judgment, right? | |
| Right. Okay. | |
| Like if everybody around them in the church suddenly becomes an atheist, then they'll stop praying. | |
| Not because that's their goal is to sort of get along with everyone around them. | |
| Yes. I think that we're in agreement on this. | |
| This is sort of tangential to what my point is. | |
| No, no. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry to go off. | |
| I really want to make sure I understand this because it's a phrase you've used a bunch of times. | |
| And if I don't understand the term, then I'm not going to understand the argument as it goes forward. | |
| So I agree. Let's not get stuck on this. | |
| I just want to make sure I understand it. | |
| Right. Okay. I should probably just give a little bit of background, just very quick, about why I'm using the word desire instead of preference. | |
| In studying other ethical theories and the science behind motivation and reasons for actions, it seems as though preferences are not our reasons for actions as much as desires are. | |
| Okay. I mean, to me, it's potato, potato, but I don't mind. | |
| I think we're using the same term when we use the term desire. | |
| I think we both understand that, and I'm willing to use that for sure. | |
| Okay. Sure. Awesome. | |
| Okay. So now this is a philosophical example of a hypothetical imperative in terms of the action-based theory of desire, which is something I think you've gone over just recently, even in this conversation. | |
| Okay. Right. | |
| As opposed to dreams, visions, chicken entrails, superstition, intuition, that kind of stuff, right? | |
| Precisely, yes. Right. | |
| Okay, premise nine, I am going to objectively fulfill my desire to know the truth. | |
| Conclusion three, therefore, given premise seven, eight, and nine, I am required to judge propositions about the world with criteria of reason and evidence. | |
| Right. So, what I did with UPB to make it make more sense to me is outline it in the form of a hypothetical imperative. | |
| Right. So this is what the following is. | |
| I desire as ends to act in a way that is consistent with reason and evidence. | |
| I think that's what you mean by universally preferable, right? Yeah, that's a little closer to the Kantian categorical imperative, but certainly in terms of actions, that's a very good way of describing it. | |
| Okay, because I think that's one of my main points that he gets stuck on, and I talk about Kant a bit further in this. | |
| It's not too much longer, though. Please. | |
| Premise 13, excuse me, is that I'm going to objectively fulfill my desire to act in a way that is consistent with reason and evidence. | |
| Conclusion four, therefore, given the past three premises, I am required to hold and act upon principles for which it is possible for everyone else at all times and in all places to hold and act upon the same principles that I do. | |
| Premise 14, I desire as means to hold and act upon principles for which it is possible for everyone else at all times and in all places to hold and act upon. | |
| Right, which is Kant's argument that I should act as if my actions became a general law that everyone should follow. | |
| Right, precisely. But the difference between what I'm saying and what Kant is saying, if I understand correctly, again, I'm a whole, you know, I'm a noob at this, is that Kant implied intrinsic value in human life. | |
| And that's where he gets the categorical imperative. | |
| The argument that I'm using for UPB is simply hypothetical imperatives. | |
| Okay. Okay. | |
| So if I am going to objectively fulfill my desire as means to hold and act upon principles for which it is possible for everyone else at all times and in all places to also hold and act upon, then it is required that I not murder, not steal, and not rape. | |
| And this is sort of what you go into in the applied ethics section of UPB. Right. | |
| Premise 16, I'm going to objectively fulfill my desire as means to hold and act upon principles for which it is possible for everyone else at all times and in all places to hold and act upon. | |
| Conclusion 5, therefore I am required not to murder, steal, and rape. | |
| Now, as I'm sure you'll agree, hypothetical imperatives, if we accept them, imply the possibility of correction. | |
| Yes. Okay. | |
| So just for the listeners who may not really be up to date on this like we are, is if I accept the logical argument of a hypothetical imperative and I stray from the conclusion, someone can justly come up to me and say, hey, you're going away from your conclusion that you justly are at these premises. | |
| Therefore, I'm correcting you. | |
| Right. So if you say that, if you sort of come up with the, say, red-haired people can be stolen from, then someone's going to come up and say, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. | |
| That is not a universal, that does not conform with the universality requirement of your ethical propositions, and therefore you have to change that to accord with the ethical propositions, or you have to change a theory and get rid of universality. | |
| Right. Or, at least in the way that I formulated it, you have to get rid of having reason and evidence with something to be consistent with. | |
| Well, yeah, but see, once you get rid of reason and evidence, you can't be consistent with anything. | |
| Because if you say intuition, or dreams, or prayers, or visions from Jesus' pet dog smelly poo, you can't be consistent with anything. | |
| The only way to be consistent is through reason and evidence. | |
| Right, right. Right. | |
| So, the last part of this is trying to then justify how we can correct other people, which is something I got a little bit stuck on. | |
| So... I actually, so I'll just read this. | |
| Eight, the Kantian roots of UPB. | |
| For those already familiar with Immanuel Kant's work in moral philosophy, have probably made the connection between his work in UPB. | |
| Kant is credited with being the formulator of the hypothetical imperative, albeit in a slightly less refined form than presented here. | |
| But in Kant's mind, the hypothetical imperative could not be the basis of morality. | |
| This was because, unlike morality, which, if such a thing exists, must be a universal standard, the hypothetical imperative is conditional on the individual's desires. | |
| Kant attempted to solve this problem by positing a categorical imperative, which he stated as, I ought never act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law. | |
| End quote. | |
| Tant's words are similar to that of conclusion four, which said, therefore, I am required to hold and act upon principles for which it is possible for everyone else at all times and in all places to also desire and act upon. | |
| Kant meant his categorical imperative to be unconditional and universal so that it does not depend on any one individual's personal desires. | |
| He tried to do so by positing intrinsic value in the value of human life. | |
| Kant said, quote, always treat persons, including yourself, as ends in and of themselves, not merely as means to your own ends. | |
| Yeah, but see, and this is where I part ways with Kant, you know, with all due respect. | |
| I mean... You're just making up intrinsic value, but why? | |
| I mean, there is no intrinsic value in human life. | |
| There is no essence in human life, because he believed in a soul, right? | |
| But there's no essence in human life that is different from any other form of matter. | |
| I mean, we have this thing called life, and it certainly is different from death, but I think that he's just sort of plucking an abstract out of the air, inserting it into a human being, and say, there's morality, and it's like, well, but... | |
| Anyway, go on. No, I completely agree. | |
| And the next part of what I was going to say was, without diverging too far off the main thesis of this essay, the problem with intrinsic value is that it does not exist in the real world. | |
| The argument about this has been explicated on elsewhere, but the important thing is that Stefan accepts the non-existence of intrinsic value. | |
| If UPB is to succeed where other moral theories have failed, Kantianism, objectivism, and most forms of utilitarianism, then it must find a way to prescribe unconditionally without reference to intrinsic value. | |
| Right. And that's what I have tried to do for sure. | |
| And would it be fair to say that the way that you universalize the hypothetical in the UPB hypothetical imperative is by saying that by engaging in arguments, you are necessarily accepting the premise that you desire to act in a way that's consistent with reason and evidence? | |
| Now that's close to Hoppe's argumentation ethics, which I'm certainly no expert on, but I've got a call set up to talk further about that with somebody who is, so I'm hopefully going to But yeah, that's close to argumentation ethics. | |
| That's not quite where I would put UPB, but please go on. | |
| Well, that was basically the end of my little spiel. | |
| I had two other questions, or three other questions, if we have time, but I just wanted to make sure... | |
| No, let's just stop here, because these are the great, great things. | |
| And look, I really appreciate it. | |
| I know this is tough, tough stuff. | |
| So I really, really appreciate the work and effort that you put into it, and I think it's great. | |
| I like it. I like it. | |
| I hope that we can boil it down to a little less than 16 or 17 steps. | |
| That's... And I say this as a guy who spent hundreds of pages working on it, so I say that with all due humility, but UPB really comes down to theories must be consistent. | |
| Theories must be consistent. | |
| That's really all that UPB comes down to. | |
| It's embarrassingly simple, which is one of the reasons why it's so hard, is that theories have to be consistent. | |
| And so they have to be consistent with reason and they have to be consistent with evidence. | |
| And now people can say, well, I don't want my theories to be consistent with reason and evidence. | |
| It's okay. Then they're not what I would call a theory, right? | |
| Like if someone goes to a scientific convention and says, my scientific theory is that the truth of the universe is something I inhaled from a deep burp of a wombat and I can't explain it to you. | |
| But I think it's got something to do with a non-existent color and being north of the North Pole. | |
| Well, they would say, I don't know what he's been smoking, but this is not really a good venue for this because this is all about science, if that makes sense, right? | |
| Yeah, definitely. Or if a mathematician comes up and says, you know, I'm basing my complex 100-page thesis on two and two making five, then nobody would go to step two because it's like, dude, all the rest of the steps are irrelevant. | |
| So the key thing is theories have to be consistent with reason and evidence. | |
| And that's why I say UPB is an umbrella term for science, mathematics, philosophy, ethics, economics. | |
| It's an umbrella term which says that in any conflict between concept and reality, between concept and logic, it is the concept that must give way in deference to reason and evidence. | |
| So then the question is, well... | |
| Where does morality fit into this? | |
| Because morality is kind of a weird thing, because it doesn't exist, right? | |
| Any more than evolution exists, right? | |
| I mean, evolution doesn't exist, there's just The law of advantage in natural selection, that's not something that exists. | |
| The law doesn't exist, but obviously the physical mechanics do. | |
| So it's tricky. If I can just interrupt you for one second, I have a question. | |
| Sure. So I would say that... | |
| Yes. | |
| that's actually going on in reality. | |
| How do you steer that with morality not existing, the theory itself, but morality doesn't describe, it prescribes? | |
| No, no, no. | |
| But see, morality does describe to some degree, right? | |
| Like I've never heard a moral theory which says murder is good. | |
| Like I've heard it thrown up as a challenge to moral theories, but I've never heard a moralist seriously say that what we should do is, you know, get big boots on and slowly crush the skulls of kittens while simultaneously strangling the last remaining jaguar in the world or whatever, right? | |
| These are not serious. The moral theories in general, and this is the first bit of UPB, the book, which people get confused about, which of course I have to take responsibility for as the writer and the theoretician. | |
| But all moral theories say, don't steal. | |
| All moral theories say, don't murder. | |
| All moral theories that I've ever heard of say, do not bear false witness. | |
| Don't lie. Now, of course, people make up all these magical exceptions. | |
| So they turn theft into taxation, right? | |
| They turn murder into conquest or war or self-defense or whatever it is that they do with that sort of stuff. | |
| And so when we say that there is observability in the moral universe, when we look across the moral systems that mankind has, the moral propositions that they put forth are remarkably similar. | |
| And there may be some minor local deviations. | |
| But for instance, I mean, there's no ancient moral system that I've ever read that doesn't say respect your parents and so on. | |
| So there is some observability and that's not entirely unrelated to the theory of evolution. | |
| Because the theory of evolution cannot predict any particular gene. | |
| It cannot predict any particular circumstance. | |
| So the very first mammal might have been killed by a tree falling on it, right? | |
| In which case you'd be like, well, the gene is superior to the dinosaur in so far as, you know, it's better able to survive changes in temperature and all that kind of stuff. | |
| But it can't predict the survivability of any particular individual, only the long-term, highly rocky, highly, you know, it's a very jagged line that goes up, so to speak. | |
| And so there's no predictability in particulars, but there is predictability in generality and over the long term. | |
| And so in the same way, you can't predict whether any individual is going to lie in any moment or steal or not steal, but you certainly can predict that moral theories are going to say, you know, lying is bad, stealing is bad, and murder is bad. | |
| And this doesn't prove any of those moral theories, but it does mean that we have a commonality of observable theories which is worth investigating, which is worth exploring as to why they may have these things in common. | |
| Right, right. So that actually brings me to another one of my questions, if that's okay, which was, is UPB a consequentialist or deontological theory of morality? | |
| Because at least my, again, I'm a complete noob at this, so I could be getting- I would not say so. | |
| I would not say that you're a complete noob at this, but I think you should give yourself, you know, false modesty is just another form of hypocrisy, so take credit where credit is due. | |
| So is that your nice way of calling me a hypocrite? | |
| I think that you may have imbibed this idea that modesty saves you from attack, and it won't here. | |
| Anyway, just go on. Okay. | |
| So, is UPB a consequentialist or deontological theory? | |
| Because I've heard several podcasts in which you describe a true theory of morality would lead to better human life. | |
| I don't want to strongman what you're saying, but... | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's not. | |
| It's not. So, let's say that you're a biologist or a doctor, and you know that... | |
| Giving somebody arsenic or strychnine is going to kill them, right? | |
| Right. Well, that's simply a fact, that it's going to kill them. | |
| That is not to say whether they should or shouldn't be killed, right? | |
| That's simply an observable result. | |
| Now, it is true that when consistent morality, when consistent moral theories are applied, and the more universal they are and the more rational they are, the better off society is in terms of there's more wealth and there's less war and... | |
| Children aren't put to work in farmers' fields from dawn till dusk. | |
| It was the case in the Middle Ages. | |
| There's a general trend that when more people got property rights and there was freer trade, in other words, there was less initiation of force in the realm of property, that human beings did a lot better. | |
| That when slavery was ended and through the Industrial Revolution enough capital was accumulated that significant investments could be made in farm machinery, then society became Better, wealthier, and so on. | |
| Now, this is not to say that these things should happen, right, in terms of like it is a moral law that the economy should grow, but I think that we all recognize that having more resources is generally preferable to having fewer resources, and so it is evidence that if you think that having more resources is a good thing, and anybody who's arguing has to accept that because they're not currently gathering resources, they're living off stored resources, right? | |
| They have to be because they're actually not right now growing food or hunting game. | |
| They're debating, which means that they prefer there to be more resources than fewer resources because they're living off stored resources to begin with. | |
| They have to accept that, right? | |
| Otherwise, they have to stop debating and go hunt for some fucking squirrels or something to eat. | |
| So it is an observable phenomenon that society generally believes. | |
| It gets healthier, lives longer, has more to eat, is more successful economically, has greater resources when moral laws are followed in a universal way. | |
| The more universal they are, the better off society is. | |
| The less universal they are, conversely, the worse society is. | |
| This explains the success of free market capitalism and the failure of totalitarian communism or fascism and so on. | |
| Free market capitalism is in accordance with the universality of the moral law of self-ownership and property rights and the non-initiation of force, whereas these other systems are not. | |
| So the theory would predict that if you violate moral laws, things get worse. | |
| And the more you violate moral laws, the worse things get. | |
| And it doesn't prove it, but it's evidence that all theories have to make predictions, otherwise they're useless, right? | |
| Then they're just ex post facto whatever's, right? | |
| And so this is a prediction or an observable phenomenon that needs to be made. | |
| So of course, people who were into property rights and the non-aggression principle like Mises and Rothbard and Rand and Hayek and all of these other great thinkers, they predicted exactly what the West is going through economically at the moment and that prediction adds some weight to their other thinking. | |
| It doesn't prove that their thinking is true, but it adds a lot of weight. | |
| And, yeah, I agree with what you're saying there. | |
| And then maybe we can take that a step further in saying, though universal morality, if followed, doesn't derive itself from good consequences, we can use those good consequences to overcome Hume's idea that reason's the slave of the passions and want, in that way, show to people that they should want to Well, you could. | |
| I would never argue to someone that they want to be, you know, I think that people should be, right? | |
| But that's completely up to them. | |
| But it's sort of like the argument. | |
| So when somebody comes to me and says, more resources is not a value, then they're, you know... | |
| They're clearly contradicting themselves. | |
| It's like somebody who says, you should always be eating something, and puts down his fork to tell me that argument. | |
| It's like, well, dude, you just found something that's a higher value than eating, which is telling me that everybody should be eating. | |
| I try to look at really self-contained arguments, and this is closer, I think, to argumentation ethics, which is, again, I'm probably bastardizing the theory since I'm not too familiar with it, but it says, look, if you're going to try and reason me out of something, then you have to accept that reason is the highest value. | |
| If you're going to tell me that I'm wrong about something, then you have accepted implicitly a whole bunch of stuff. | |
| A whole bunch of stuff. You can't just come up to somebody and say, well, you're wrong, and that's it. | |
| No, no, no, because you've already said, okay, obviously you've said I exist in the Cartesian model. | |
| You've said the other person exists because you're coming up and debating with someone. | |
| You're saying that an objective reality exists between us because you're using language or sight or braille or massage or whatever the hell, I don't know, feathers on the back to carve out your argument. | |
| So you're saying that an objective medium exists between us. | |
| You're saying that language has meaning. | |
| It may not be perfect, but it's certainly not random. | |
| And you're saying that truth is superior to falsehood. | |
| You're saying that there's some objective reason that I should prefer truth to falsehood rather than it's my opinion that you're incorrect. | |
| You are incorrect. And so there's a whole bunch of, somebody comes up and corrects you, there's a whole bunch of stuff that is implicit. | |
| Implicit and absolute within the very statement or within the very action of correcting someone. | |
| And people will mostly try to pull a sort of switch on you, a switcheroo, right? | |
| So they come up and say, well, you're wrong. | |
| There is no such thing as objective truth. | |
| And it's like, dude, that's just so self-detonating. | |
| It's like watching that sock in Monsters, Inc. | |
| under the bowl go boom, right? | |
| It just self-detonates. Because if there's no such thing as subjective truth, then you can't correct anyone, even somebody who says there is. | |
| So anyway, I mean, this is not sort of a discussion about UPB in particular, but around sort of the framework as a whole. | |
| But all I'm saying is that we don't have to get into massive consequentialist arguments. | |
| We don't have to get into ontological arguments or praxeological arguments to some degree. | |
| What we have to get into is, this is what I try to bring people back, just think of two guys in a room. | |
| Can they both steal from each other simultaneously? | |
| No. Because stealing is taking property against the will of the other. | |
| But if both parties value stealing, there can be no such thing as stealing. | |
| Right? Just think of two people in a room. | |
| If you put forward a moral law, can they both follow it at the same time? | |
| If not, then the moral law is not valid. | |
| Because it contradicts itself. | |
| You know, there's this old thing in economics where they just think of like Robinson Crusoe on an island and they try and explicate all of these theories about economics with just, you know, one guy or two guys or whatever. | |
| And it's a great tool to get into the truth. | |
| And so with UPB, I just say, okay, well, somebody says murder is good. | |
| Well, can two guys murder each other at the same time in a room? | |
| No, of course not. Because murder has to be something which is... | |
| Not want it, right? | |
| Otherwise, it's euthanasia, which may have a different moral category, but it certainly isn't exactly the same as murder. | |
| So murder has to be violently resisted by one guy who has to hold it as the highest value, as a good, while at the same time he's violently resisting it. | |
| And this can't happen. It's like saying, I got a theory about physics that says the same rock falls up and down at the same time. | |
| Doesn't work. Doesn't work. | |
| Same thing with rape, right? | |
| Same thing with assault. | |
| It can't work even in the tiny universality laboratory of two guys in one little room. | |
| And that's the simple test of UPB. And what people will do is they'll come up with instances that break the universality. | |
| You know, like they'll say, uh, a guy comes and, you know, you're, you're the, what, the couple, uh, Hiding Anne Frank and her family in Nazi Germany and the Gestapo come and say, do you have any Jews in the attic? | |
| And what are you going to say? Yes, because, well no. | |
| Because morality requires choice. | |
| Saying that lying is the highest value is like saying non-violence is the highest value. | |
| No. It is the non-aggression principle. | |
| So you can use violence in self-defense and you can lie in self-defense. | |
| It's exactly the same principle. | |
| So Those are the approaches that I would take when it comes to first thinking about UPB. Just think of two guys in a room. | |
| Does it work? Well, you know what does work? | |
| The non-aggression principle. What else works? | |
| Respect for property rights, respect for self-ownership. | |
| Those things can both be practiced by two guys in the same room and none of the things which all moral systems... | |
| Say or evil, you know, rape, assault, murder, theft, none of those actions can be consistently held and performed, held as an ideal and performed as an action by even two guys in the same room. | |
| And so that's my approach to it, is can the theory be universal even to just two guys in the room and, you know, they all just bang, bang, bang. | |
| It's like with a BB gun and a tin can, you just knock them down, you can do it in five minutes. | |
| But it's very frightening and alarming for people because if the problem of morality is solved that simply and that easily and that elegantly without recourse to, well, there's a soul in the human being called value which you cannot disrupt. | |
| Well, no, there isn't. | |
| Or Ayn Rand's that which is good for man is the highest value. | |
| Well, fuck, human beings have different goals. | |
| You know, I mean, Hitler had a great time doing what he did. | |
| Obviously he did, otherwise he would have done something else. | |
| So, Nazism was pretty damn good for sadists who wanted to slaughter people and murder people by the millions. | |
| So, that which is good for man is to create an abstraction called man as if human beings all have the same goals, but human beings have highly oppositional goals at times. | |
| And so, the Randian formulation doesn't work. | |
| I have problems with the Kantian one, as we've talked about. | |
| So, yeah, this to me is the most elegant and short-term way to do it, but I know that it's hard as hell to do because we've got so much static in our heads about other things, like other approaches to morality. | |
| Right. I think I'm fogging a little bit, but yeah, I see what you're saying. | |
| Well, look, somebody can say there's no such thing as universality, but they've just made a statement of universality, right? | |
| Right, right, yeah. Somebody can think... | |
| Somebody can think that there's no such thing as ethics. | |
| So I don't care what people think because it doesn't show up on my radar at all. | |
| They could be fantasizing about me in a boa and a boa constrictor and a thong and a little girl's bicycle with tassels if they want. | |
| It doesn't matter to me because I don't know what the hell's going on in their heads. | |
| But the moment they open their mouths and talk to me about truth and falsehood and correct and incorrect and logical and illogical and contradictory, Then they've just accepted the whole premise of UPB, which is that things have to be consistent. | |
| Consistent with evidence and consistent with reason. | |
| Now, first thing they have to be is consistent with reason. | |
| That's just standard engineering, right? | |
| I mean, that's if you want to do anything intelligent. | |
| You don't just keep building bridges and hope that one of them doesn't fall down. | |
| You get your stressors and your load bearings and your whatnot. | |
| Who knows what? I don't wear that tin ring. | |
| But you go with theory first. | |
| You don't just keep building rockets until you get one that takes someone to the moon. | |
| You have a whole bunch of theoretical models and physics and engineering and all of that. | |
| So you do reason first and then evidence. | |
| And so things like murder is the good, they don't even pass a tiny logical test of two guys in a room. | |
| So, you know, out the window. | |
| Violations of property rights. | |
| Out the window. Rape. | |
| Assault. You know, they don't even pass the first test to two guys in a room so they can be safely disposed of and then you can just keep moving. | |
| But people find that kind of threatening. | |
| And this is why I don't get into a lot. | |
| I appreciate UPDB debates live. | |
| I simply don't do it on the boards. | |
| I try not to. It's like, ah! | |
| I hope I've lashed my hands back. | |
| I'm like... That, I don't know what that, Odysseus being lashed to the mast saying, do not untie me no matter how beautiful the siren songs, no matter how adroit and verbally skilled the people debating UPB on the board are, do not let me type, unplug the keyboard, smash my fingers with a hammer, but don't let me type. | |
| Because, you know, it's too easy to lose your way in text. | |
| Philosophy was originally a spoken medium, of course, not a message board medium. | |
| Anyway, sorry, does this help at all? | |
| Yeah, it does. Before, I want to critically examine UPB just to see for myself if it has any flaws. | |
| But for this conversation right now, I just wanted to make sure that I had UPB down. | |
| That was sort of like my first major step. | |
| I wanted to make sure I understood it and wasn't going to strawman any of your positions. | |
| No, and just all you got to do is substitute the word science or math for UPB. That's the easiest because that we already get by anybody who's scientifically literate or scientifically minded. | |
| That we already get. That's the easiest place to start. | |
| Just imagine you're at a science conference and somebody's putting something forward. | |
| That's sort of my suggestion. | |
| Okay. I don't want to take you much longer because I know there's other people on the call, but just how is this conversation for you? | |
| Oh, I love talking UPB. I love talking UPB. I think it would have been better if I had a chance to look at your text a little bit beforehand. | |
| So if you want to do it again, just mail it to me ahead of time. | |
| But I appreciate the work that you're putting into it. | |
| And I know UPB bores the living pants off some people and other people like it and it annoys most. | |
| But it is the most important thing in many ways about what we're all up to here as a community. | |
| So I appreciate it. | |
| And I will, of course, move on to a new caller now, but I certainly do appreciate you bringing it up. | |
| Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time, Stefan. | |
| Thanks, man. Great, great job. | |
| Rational Empiricist, he is renamed again back to his original core nomenclature. | |
| So, James, we have somebody else on the line. | |
| Yeah, we have AT Rising. | |
| If he's ready to go. | |
| Yo. Yes. | |
| Hello, my brother. Oh, I'm sorry. | |
| It's Kyle. Kyle's next. | |
| I got it mixed up. If he has something to say. | |
| Hey Steph, how's it going? Well, you've put that song in my head. | |
| For me, it's always Kyle, Carly Milogue. | |
| La la la, la la la la, la la la, la la la, I just can't get you out of my head. | |
| Anyway, song's in my head. | |
| I'm afraid I'm just going to have to take a 2x4 right after the call to see if I can dislodge it, where it will promptly be replaced by a Wiggles song. | |
| But anyway, what can I do for you, my friend? | |
| Well, I wanted to provide some evidence for a theory that you've talked about in the past that has to do with the effects on people in this conversation based on how much they're financially investing into it. | |
| Oh, you mean donations? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Are you saying that I'm getting the dream Sunday show call by going from... | |
| History to UPB to donations. | |
| Okay, let me just compose myself. | |
| I'm just getting into a cold bath. | |
| There's an image for you. Please, go ahead. | |
| Yeah, I'm only going to talk for about 30 seconds, and then you should be able to take it over, I think, for the rest of the hour. | |
| So, about a month ago, or three weeks, I upgraded my donator status to Philosophy King. | |
| And I just was thinking yesterday about how a series of events have taken place since that time, which have involved me kind of getting more serious about understanding my own history and just really trying to live rational principles and applying RTR a lot more to my My personal relationships and also kind of taking that approach to my own introspection. | |
| So, yeah, I just kind of wanted to list a couple things that have happened for me, and I think while you can't necessarily say that they're caused by me increasing my donator status, they're certainly kind of associated with it. | |
| So, over the last three weeks, I upgraded my donator status. | |
| And then, over these last three weeks, I've been having much more challenging and also much more successful RTR conversations with my housemate, who's kind of my main man in terms of talking about these topics with and... | |
| Working on self-knowledge together. | |
| And also, I think a week after I upgraded my donator status, I requested a private chat with you, which is something that I've probably been thinking about doing for six months. | |
| And I've probably, to some degree, been thinking about it since I heard my very first listener comment. | |
| I probably thought, well, maybe I'll do that someday. | |
| But I think that... | |
| I definitely had the thought that I felt more comfortable doing it because I felt like I was putting more financially towards free domain. | |
| I felt, I don't know if entitled is the word, but I felt like I could... | |
| You've bought me, baby! | |
| You've bought me! I've got the Kyle stamp on my forehead, and I believe I have a laser on my kidney. | |
| But yes, go ahead. | |
| Yeah, like I could rent your time for a little bit. | |
| Exactly. And then the next week, less than a week, I had a conference call with you and my housemate, and so again, that was something else that I felt more comfortable doing, and... | |
| Oh yeah, sorry, RTR, somebody just asked for those who are listening in real-time relationships. | |
| It's, well, taking as much philosophy as I could stuff into a free book at freedomainradio.com forward slash free on the philosophy of relationships and how to have successful relationships. | |
| So I just wanted to mention that for people who are joining us a little later. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. Sure, sure. | |
| And then I started therapy again about two weeks ago. | |
| I started with—I had seen one therapist the week before this, but I decided—well, the previous two weeks I'd seen a therapist, so I decided not to continue with. | |
| But I started seeing a different therapist about two weeks ago who I'm really happy with. | |
| So that's just something that's kind of happened over this time, which while it's not like an investment into FDR, I do kind of consider it sort of an investment into this conversation and the same sort of goals in mind in terms of personal freedom. | |
| And it's certainly an increase in my investment into that cause in my own life. | |
| And then last weekend, I called into the Sunday show for the first time. | |
| Which I've been feeling really scared to do for a long time because, well, I have a lot of social anxiety. | |
| Because I'm such a bastard, right? | |
| I know you're going to ream me, you know, so it's terrifying. | |
| It's really hard. I've been building up trust for five or six years just so I can turn on you all like a rabid jackal and rend you a little bit. | |
| Yeah, and I felt really good after the call. | |
| I think I only peed myself a little bit, so it was pretty successful overall. | |
| Right, right, right. | |
| Mini P is good. Mini P is good. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and then I decided yesterday, or it might have been the day before, but I implemented it, no, Friday, I decided to increase my therapy to twice a week because I just didn't feel like a week's going to be enough with sort of the uproaring in my motivation and the amount of time I found myself. | |
| Yeah, seize the day, for sure. | |
| Yeah, I just find myself focusing a lot more on this, and after all these things that have happened over the last several weeks, I just, I don't know, I feel much more invested, I feel much more motivated, and like it's time to get busy and really get serious about this stuff. | |
| So, yeah, sorry, go ahead. | |
| Well, look, first of all, I appreciate you bringing that up. | |
| I promise this is not me with a hand puppet and a non-gay accent talking. | |
| No, look, I appreciate you bringing it up. | |
| I'm very sensitive to the reality that me saying to people, you'll be happier if you donate, comes from what a lot of people perceive as a highly self-interested, greedy, materialistic place. | |
| You know, like, well, I'm telling you that... | |
| To be philosophical, you need to give me money. | |
| I mean, that just sounds ridiculous. | |
| And I completely understand that. | |
| And I understand people's skepticism and cynicism about me saying that. | |
| So it's hard to talk about. | |
| I've never liked the act of asking for donations. | |
| But, you know, I mean, the reality is that, you know, we just dropped over $4,000 on the server. | |
| And we had a day this month, we really uncorked the server and told the hosting provider to just put no limits on bandwidth, and we had 700 gigabytes of podcasts downloaded in one 24-hour period. | |
| That's some expensive shit. | |
| You know, it's 20 bucks for 500 gigabytes. | |
| It was 700 in one day. | |
| Do the math. You know, I got to eat and there's lots of technical equipment that I need to buy and maintain and replace when it wears out and backups and, jeez, I mean, the amount of Data, these podcast source files, and in particular the video files, it's huge, so I need lots of backup devices. | |
| Anyway, I sort of go on and on about all of this sort of stuff. | |
| I don't get paid for my speeches, and sometimes I have to eat some costs and travel, either somewhat or all on my own dime. | |
| When I went to go and speak at Drexel University last year, that was paid for by donators. | |
| I didn't even get my airfare, or I guess the couch costs covered. | |
| Thanks, Greg. So yeah, the reality is it costs money and we all understand the sort of free market. | |
| But I still want to reiterate the case that I do find it surprising. | |
| And I hate to bitch about listeners, particularly people who donate. | |
| But if people want sort of honest feedback from where I'm coming from, I will probably a couple of times a week get an email that is something along the lines of this. | |
| Steph, this is the most amazing conversation. | |
| This is the most amazing show I've ever come across. | |
| It has clarified my thinking so immensely that I can't even tell you how much I've progressed in reason and happiness and peace of mind, how much my relationships have improved, how much this has cut through the fog of murk and superstition and nationalism and religiosity and I feel this has just been a sunbeam and an explosion, a lava eruption of truth, reason, evidence, and passion and philosophy in my world. | |
| I can't thank you enough. My life will never be the same. | |
| Here's $15. I get those, and I have a little... | |
| Yeah, like I have, well, it's like, and they'll also say, you know, I'm up to podcast 700. | |
| Here's $15. It's like, dude, that doesn't even cover 20% of your download costs. | |
| I'm still at a net loss here. | |
| And I have a little pad, right? | |
| A little pad right in front of my keyboard. | |
| You know those little things you rest your mouse on. | |
| I have one of those so that when I get those emails and my jaw drops right down to my keyboard, it doesn't hurt as much because it happens so regularly. | |
| I need that little cushion, you know, a little cushion for when it goes down. | |
| Right. Now, some people, and it's, look, I'm not saying that, you know, I hate 15 bucks. | |
| 15 bucks is nice. | |
| You know, that pays for eight seconds of podcast downloads on free-domain radio. | |
| But it is really the disparity between the value that is received and the value that is returned is striking. | |
| And look, some people, they say 15 bucks and they say, listen, I'm a poor student programmer or I'm a, you know, a poor young guy or young woman over here in Belarus and I don't have, you know, two cows asses to rub together to make a fire. | |
| I completely get that. | |
| I understand that. And, you know, but people who just say, oh, this is the most amazing thing. | |
| Here's, you know, here's a, here's some pop bottles and a six pack, you know, it's just like, oh, but how does that fit together? | |
| I don't understand. And so, yeah, so I do prefer it when I feel that the remuneration that people send to Free Domain Radio is somewhat consistent with the value that they're getting from it. | |
| And I also believe, as I've mentioned before, that our unconscious does not care about what we say. | |
| It only cares about what we do. | |
| So we can, you know, our unconscious can, if you're overweight, right, our unconscious does not get particularly alarmed if we're just reading a diet book. | |
| Our unconscious gets alarmed when we do not order the double cheese-dipped, bacon-wrapped, deep-fried chicken sandwich. | |
| That's when our brain, our deep brain doesn't get bothered by us looking at a package of Nicorette in a grocery store. | |
| Our unconscious gets bothered and upset when we don't put a cigarette in her mouth and light it. | |
| So it doesn't really matter what you think or what you contemplate. | |
| It really only matters what you do. | |
| And if you want your unconscious to come with you in the journey of philosophy, then your unconscious is only going to look at what you do. | |
| And listening to podcasts is great. | |
| Of course it is, right? Just as reading books on nutrition is great. | |
| But at some point you have to change your diet and at some point you have to change your actions. | |
| And if you've received enough value from philosophy through Free Domain Radio to change your actions, then one of those actions that should change should be going from a non-donator to a denator. | |
| Why? Because it is a just exchange of value for value. | |
| It is a just exchange of value for value, particularly people who understand the free market and understand that there's no such thing As a free lunch, you need to act on your values. | |
| And of course, this is not the only value that you need to act on. | |
| But yeah, people need to act on their values. | |
| And if you've received a lot of value, then you should give some value back that is somewhat commensurate with the value that you've received. | |
| That's my particular pitch. | |
| And people can take it as cynically as they like, but I truly believe that. | |
| And trust me, there's not a soul in the world who's donated more to free domain radio than I have. | |
| So I'm actually living what I talk about. | |
| Right. Yeah, there was one other thought I had that I wanted to share, and that's that I had the thought that if therapy costs me $20 a session instead of $80 a session, I don't know that I would be as motivated to try as hard as I feel like trying right now. | |
| And in some respects, it's almost better that it's more expensive, you know? | |
| I mean, there seems to be... | |
| It seems like I have to almost maybe overpay. | |
| I mean, not overpay in maybe an objective sense, but I need to, like, pay ahead of time. | |
| And then in the meantime, I feel like, well, if I want to make that investment worthwhile, then I... Yeah, the more you pay your personal trainer, the more you're likely to show up for an appointment, right? | |
| For sure. And the other thing, too, is there is a kind of UPB element to it, a little bit, right? | |
| So, the only reason that Free Domain Radio is what it is, is because of donators, right? | |
| There's no other reason. | |
| It's because of donators. | |
| And... So people who've come into the show because, I don't know, like I've been on Alex Jones or I've been on, you know, these other shows or they've seen me speak at conferences or they've seen the videos of me speaking at conferences or whatever. | |
| Or they've seen me on Adam vs. | |
| the Man or the Kaiser Report or any of these sort of radio shows that I've been on or Free Talk Live or all these kinds of things. | |
| Or they want to come see me at Liberty Fest 2 or Libertopia or on the Liberty Cruise and so on. | |
| Well, this is only all possible because people have donated. | |
| And so therapy is for you, right? | |
| But free domain radio is for others. | |
| It's for you and others, right? | |
| Because therapy is you go to the therapist, you come out, and you're a better person. | |
| That has a domino effect on others. | |
| But it's not quite the same as the way that free domain radio can have an effect on the world as a whole if people donate. | |
| It's not just about... Individuals getting better. | |
| It's about the planet getting better. | |
| That's my dedication. I do not set my sights lower than complete world domination! | |
| No, I do not set my sights lower than having a permanent, positive, and irrevocable effect on the world. | |
| Of freeing as many human beings as humanly possible before I shuffle off this mortal coil. | |
| In putting in as much quality and taking as many risks as I did when I was doing my speech at Porkfest where I And caught some passion and went for a real barn burner of a speech. | |
| That's a real risk. That is a scary thing to do. | |
| That is right outside of my comfort zone. | |
| And so I will take any risk, make any kind of fool of myself, tell as many bad jokes, sing as badly or as well as people like in order to get people interested in philosophy because that is the way that the world is saved. | |
| And yeah, it's only possible because people donate. | |
| And so, yeah, people have heard about it because other people who have donated and have found value in it pay it forward. | |
| Donate so that we can go further and we can get bigger. | |
| And, you know, go to the next atheist conference in Australia if that's necessary. | |
| Right. Yeah, and... | |
| Just on the topic of how you're talking about how FDR is for other people, not just for you. | |
| It's kind of coincidental. | |
| I'm listening to the podcast series in order, or I have been for the last year. | |
| And the part of the series I'm in right now is the early 900s. | |
| And that was actually a pretty big topic. | |
| It was kind of a What's Next podcast, which was followed by conversations about this sort of... | |
| Doing it for other people, too, and not yourself. | |
| So if anyone is interested in that sort of concept, just to kind of direct them towards that part of the podcast, kind of the early 900s. | |
| I just happened to be listening to it recently, so I just wanted to put that out there. | |
| Yeah, and look, I mean, people who are interested in politics give tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to their political campaigns. | |
| People who are into their churches give hundreds or billions, probably hundreds of billions of dollars around the world. | |
| To their churches. And so far, philosophy relies on the table scraps of the table scraps that have fallen out of the table scraps being carried to the place where they put the table scraps. | |
| And we have to have an extraordinary effort if we're going to raise philosophy to any kind of level. | |
| And it doesn't have to be, look, if there's some other resource out there, the Rockwell or Mises.org or all of the other great, you know, Free Talk Live, all of the other great people who are out there doing fantastic work In the realm of liberty and philosophy. | |
| Go help. It doesn't have to be me, but whatever you're going to do, we have to put out an extraordinary effort as a community because it's not going to happen just because we're right. | |
| Philosophers have been right about so much shit in the past 2500 years and still remain a ridiculously marginalized group within society. | |
| That's because We don't do what the Christians do. | |
| We don't stare down the lions. | |
| We're not willing to get crucified, and yet nobody's asking those crazy things of us, you know, 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month, you know, whatever, a couple of hundred if you've got it to spare. | |
| We have to do at least 0.00001% of what the crazy people are doing if we're going to have any chance of success in the long run, and our success is the world's success. | |
| There's no other way to look at it, in my view. | |
| So, yeah, I think do some shit, whatever it's going to be. | |
| It doesn't have to be money-based. | |
| It can be just sit down For a couple of hours a week and promote websites that are philosophically minded that you think are of value to people. | |
| Have conversations with people. | |
| Get some cards printed up. | |
| Hand them out to people who are interested in philosophy. | |
| It doesn't have to be money based. | |
| It doesn't have to be giving me one thin dime. | |
| But do something. To support and spread philosophy because it's been two and a half fucking millennia that we've been marginalized and sidelined and handed cup after cup of the hemlock of irrelevance and indifference and unimportance and it's time that we turn this shit around and start acting like the people who are the most successful which means digging in with some passion and applying some resources To the promulgation of the only truth that matters. | |
| The truth of reason and virtue and philosophy. | |
| That's what we need to get ourselves down to. | |
| And if we don't do it, we're gonna lose. | |
| And we are the most to blame for that loss. | |
| Because we know the most about what it takes to win. | |
| We've had the examples of all the crazy people to follow. | |
| And we have the knowledge of truth, reason and ethics. | |
| And we know what is necessary. | |
| So if we don't do it with all of that knowledge, the world will fall into another dark age, I believe. | |
| And the people who will be the most guilty will not be those leaving us, but those who did not stand up before them and push the fuck back. | |
| Yeah, and if you kind of stop and reflect about that happening, I know for me, I feel pretty guilty. | |
| If I think about that things turned downhill and I don't feel like I did everything I could to have tried to improve the world... | |
| So, that's all I had to say. | |
| Yeah, look, I mean, trying to build a life without regret is important. | |
| Look, maybe it's too late, maybe we can't turn it around. | |
| But even if we can't, we can at least be, you know, Aristotle was kept by the Muslims throughout the Dark Ages and then returned to the West in the 12th, 13th, 14th century. | |
| So, maybe all we are is the time capsule of reason to be found by the future. | |
| But that's important nonetheless. | |
| Don't let... The world that is turned to ash because you're afraid of committing to philosophy. | |
| That doesn't mean committing to me or sending me... | |
| I just want to make real clear about that. | |
| It doesn't have anything to do with sending money to me. | |
| If you think I'm the best spokesperson out there doing the best work, then by all means. | |
| If you don't want to spend the time, spend the money, for sure. | |
| But... Don't look back if things go bad, and certainly without intervention from philosophy, things are going to go bad. | |
| I mean, there's no question. | |
| There's mathematical certainty. | |
| Things are going to get worse unless you act. | |
| Not me, not Kyle, not all the people in the chat room, not the tens or hundreds of thousands of people listening to this over time. | |
| It's going to go to shit if you don't act. | |
| If you don't act, if you don't get off your ass and do something for philosophy and do something for the world, it is going to go to shit and a half. | |
| And it's going to go to shit in half with all of the amazing, ghastly, horrible computerized goodies that the free market has handed over to the predatory, growingly fascistic states to the point where it's going to be really, really fucking hard to get back out. | |
| You could have a revolution in 1776 because you didn't have video surveillance. | |
| You didn't have identity chips. | |
| You didn't have centralized computer banks that could monitor transactions. | |
| But it's going to be a hell of a lot harder To get out of any kind of tyranny in the future if we don't act now. | |
| Prevention is by far the better part of cure from what we're facing now. | |
| So yeah, that's why I quit my career of 15 years and a pretty damn sweet income and a pretty damn sweet future to fight the good fight. | |
| Because if we're the only people who know what's making people sick, even if they don't want to listen to us, we have to keep repeating ourselves. | |
| We have to become uncomfortable. | |
| We have to be willing to be annoying. | |
| We have to be willing to be ridiculous. | |
| We have to be willing to be embarrassing to others. | |
| We have to be willing to be called names. | |
| We have to be willing to be viewed as conspiracy theorists and nutjobs and gold bugs and libertarian crazies and Ron Paul cult followers and we have to be willing to accept all of those labels because As the good Lord says, they know not what they do, but we know. | |
| And because we have that knowledge, we have a responsibility to act even in extremity, even in annoying people, even in alienating people, because it is that important. | |
| Anyway, thank you so much. | |
| Great, great point to bring up. | |
| And thank you for allowing me a cheap-ass venue to pontificate on this stuff. | |
| James, do we have another caller? We have time. | |
| We have several people on the call. | |
| There's an AET Rising. | |
| If you are ready to go. | |
| I see an AET Rising. | |
| Go ahead. Hello. | |
| Hey, how's it going? I like all these. | |
| I'm so glad I know everybody's board names now. | |
| I have some ridiculously embarrassing amount of posts now. | |
| It's like 20,000 or something. | |
| Yes, I know your board name. | |
| How are you doing, my friend? Not too bad. | |
| I called in to you on Thursday and I just wanted to follow up on the call. | |
| If you remember, we had a really short discussion and then my Skype kind of crashed. | |
| Yes, I'm so sorry to be annoying. | |
| Do you mind if we do this offline? | |
| Just because this is going to not mean much to people who haven't already heard that. | |
| So let's put that podcast out and then can we talk after? | |
| Yeah, if you want to. Yeah, I would just because without context it's going to be not too comprehensible to people. | |
| Okay. Yeah, just shoot me an email. | |
| We'll talk early this week. Okay. | |
| Sorry about that. I'm sorry if you like... | |
| You don't live in Muammar, so you're not up to like 4am for that, but sorry about that. | |
| It just will make more sense if people have heard the podcast first, or at least have the chance to. | |
| So can I just ask, can we do it after the call? | |
| I'm sorry, I can't. | |
| My daughter's going to be up. Okay, fair enough. | |
| Thanks anyway, Steph. Sorry about that. Yeah, I'm sorry about that, but it's going to make more sense to people. | |
| All right. Boy, that was an efficient one. | |
| Yet, strangely cold. | |
| Go ahead. We have Tom, if you're ready to go. | |
| Yeah, do you hear me? | |
| I do. Oh, cool. | |
| So, some thousand podcasts ago, you talked about... | |
| That sounds like the beginning of an epic tale. | |
| Thousands of podcasts ago, in a land shrouded in mist, where the footsteps of the gods trembled the treetops. | |
| The one about Somalia. | |
| Yeah, the one about Somalia. | |
| Right. You were talking about the psychological progress of the world, you know? | |
| So, that kind of... | |
| It clicked for me. | |
| You were optimistic in that podcast, the Thousands of Podcasts Ago podcast. | |
| You were optimistic. | |
| You said the world kept improving for thousands of years, from medieval times to capitalism and beforehand from Like Stone Age to Roman Empire or whatnot, that's psychological progress, right? And so why is it now going to shit rather than keep on improving as it did for the last 10,000 years of human history? | |
| Well, because the progress is not even, right? | |
| We have... The psychohistorians, Lloyd DeMoss in particular, you can look at this more on psychohistory.com, divide society into psychoclasses, right? | |
| So there are people like my daughter who are raised sort of peacefully and voluntarily and with negotiation and happiness and positivity and attention and all that sort of stuff. | |
| And then there are people who are, you know, Harry Potter-like, locked in cupboards and beaten and yelled at and sexually abused and so on. | |
| And so it's not even. | |
| It's not even. And the more even we can make it, the more rapidly and positively society can improve. | |
| But, yeah. | |
| And unfortunately, of course, the people in charge are, you know, just a complete bunch of evil lunatics. | |
| Yeah, but that's not new, isn't it? | |
| That's always been the case that the most violent people and with the shittiest upbringings and, you know, psychologically shittiest upbringings, not economically, but... | |
| Yeah, psychologically. Yeah, and that's always been the case. | |
| So why shouldn't psychological progress continue? | |
| Those were the same conditions that prevailed over, you know, less than 10,000 years till now. | |
| Right. Well, this is a big topic. | |
| I'll just touch on my thoughts about it. | |
| And nobody, of course, can say this for sure. | |
| But I think that there has been some significant steps forward in reduction of violence towards children, particularly in certain parts of Europe, where there's actually been bans on spanking, and spanking is now not considered okay for the majority of people. | |
| Like, you wouldn't spank... You're a kid in public. | |
| That would be considered a no-no. | |
| And, you know, people who spank children, I think, are pretty much bullies. | |
| And bullies tend to be kind of cowardly, and they fear their social disapproval, which is why it's so important to disapprove of bullies, because it's going to work. | |
| And so children are not getting hit the same way that they used to now. | |
| Of course, there's still states in the U.S. where you can be hit in school, and they've started reinstituting this in some places in England. | |
| So there is a backward drag, right? | |
| And so... There is some improvements there. | |
| What has been negative for children is the institutionalization of childhood, and that's pretty new. | |
| Well, at least it's pretty new relative to sort of the mid to late 20th century. | |
| And what I mean by that is the majority, well, sorry, a significant percentage of kids are in daycare, and daycare is wretched for children at just about every level. | |
| Children Yeah, you carry a room. | |
| You can tell me that. | |
| You shouldn't tell me that. | |
| I've been in daycare for my share. | |
| Yeah, it's wretched. | |
| Obviously, there are health issues. | |
| There are wolf children issues where kids are just dealing with no privacy. | |
| And you're on a regimented schedule that's... | |
| Some sort of farm feeding schedule. | |
| Everybody has to do stuff at the same time. | |
| And there is the problem of the experience of maternal abandonment is one of the worst things that a child can go through. | |
| And children who are separated from their moms at an early age for more than 20 hours a week experience the same symptoms as children whose moms just abandon them. | |
| And so it's pretty catastrophic. | |
| There's also a study that just came out Quebec, it's the province of Canada, has like $6 a day daycare, all subsidized and funded and licensed by the government. | |
| And they've just found that there's been a significant drop-off in language skills for the kids in those government daycare. | |
| And the drop-off is so significant that it is the difference in language skills between having a mother who's university educated and having a mother who's only high school educated. | |
| That's the difference in language skills. | |
| And so basically, if you're university educated and you put your kid in one of these wretched daycares, then they're going to drop as much language skills as if you never went to college and couldn't communicate them in that more advanced way. | |
| Your education has just been nullified as far as the advancement of your child goes. | |
| And so there are negatives to do with childhood. | |
| We used to look back at Farming off your children to wet nurses in the Middle Ages, oh, it's barbaric! | |
| Or you look at the boarding schools that I was subjected to for a couple of years when I was 6, 7, and 8, where we'd be hundreds of miles away from home at boarding school for lots of periods of time. | |
| I remember even having a Christmas, being like two other kids, with two other kids having Christmas there, because God knows what the hell was going on with my family at that time. | |
| We look at that as barbaric, but daycare is pretty rough. | |
| A lot of parents are waking their kids, hustling their kids out of At the home to drop them off at daycare by 8 o'clock or 8.30 and then they don't see their kids again until 6 or 6.30 at night. | |
| And then they got to hustle them home and they got to feed them and bathe them and it's all just rush, rush, rush and you're not seeing the amount of quality time you have with your kids is measured in the minutes per day, I imagine, rather than the hours, which is what it should be. which is what it should be. | |
| Well, so that's on the minus side of like future psychological progress. | |
| So what's next, do you think? | |
| Well, psychological progress is slow. | |
| Economic collapse is fast, right? | |
| So it's a race. Right, it's a race. | |
| Intergenerational change is very slow. | |
| And economic problems, debt and increases in regulation, right? | |
| Government size is increasing far faster than the intergenerational quality of childhood. | |
| And so there's a race. | |
| So I see you're not optimistic about the beating the government expansion. | |
| So... Pretty much, you know, lost economic opportunities is not that big of a deal when still there is psychological progress, don't you think? Well, look, you don't look at the statistics of morality. | |
| Morality is not a statistical science. | |
| Morality is not what are the odds. | |
| Morality is what is the right thing to do. | |
| The right thing to do is to encourage... | |
| The application of the non-aggression principle in all situations, but in particular with children. | |
| And so you do the right thing. | |
| You tell the truth about the evils in the world, you suggest viable and well-tested and rationally examined alternatives, and you grit your teeth against the sandstorm of social disapproval and attack, and you just do the right fucking thing. | |
| You know, if fat is killing people, you write a book about how fat is killing people. | |
| I mean, that's all you can do. | |
| Or you go and talk about it. | |
| And if a lack of philosophy is killing freedom and all that is valuable and worthwhile and quality in life, then you just go in as many people who will... | |
| Listen to you. You go and say that again and again. | |
| Whether it works or whether it doesn't is irrelevant to what the right thing to do is. | |
| That doesn't matter. Because there's no way to know that. | |
| There's no way to know that. | |
| I can't fathom what I'm going to be thinking tomorrow sometimes. | |
| I have no idea what the reaction of humanity is going to be to The eventual collapse of a violent, irrational, and superstitious-based system. | |
| I don't know. But I do know that if I don't act, we're that much more likely to be screwed. | |
| I don't know what percentage more likely. | |
| It may be tiny, but it doesn't matter. | |
| I'm still going to throw my weight behind it anyway. | |
| Right? If I don't act, if good people don't act, this is the old saying, right? | |
| The only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. | |
| And I really believe that. | |
| I read that when I was a kid. And I've believed it ever since. | |
| So I don't care whether we're going to be free in 50 years or 20 years or not. | |
| That has no bearing on my decision about whether I'm going to speak the truth as loudly, as repeatedly, and as passionately as I can. | |
| Because the truth and the integrity to speak the truth is all that matters. | |
| It's the only thing I have control over. | |
| It's not whether people listen, but how much quality and energy can I put into my communication. | |
| Cool, that answers it. | |
| Thank you. You're very welcome. | |
| You're welcome, my friend. | |
| And good, we've got a good conveyor belt of listeners. | |
| It sort of reminds me, if you've ever seen the movie Bee Movie, and if you've had a kid, you've seen it perhaps more than once. | |
| There's something called the Krellman, which is a bunch of bees rotating around, catching the last strips of honey and putting them in a bucket. | |
| And Barry, no. | |
| Adam the Beast says, can I work on the Krellman? | |
| He gets so excited about it. | |
| That's all he wants to do throughout the whole movie. | |
| And so we have a rotating Krellman of listeners with honey on their heads. | |
| I'm not going to work that metaphor too much further. | |
| Alright, so let's see here. | |
| We've got somebody who's very patiently typing a question. | |
| Let me just read it and see if I can answer it as best I can. | |
| So, Steph. Hey, Steph, you mentioned in a recent podcast that price stability is desirable. | |
| But I was under the impression that deflation was desired in the economy. | |
| I thought about this and wanted to ask you if my thoughts held any truth. | |
| This is what this person is saying. | |
| It seems to me that if prices fall too fast, the value of investing in capital goods will be reduced. | |
| If the value of money, the same as price falling assuming no fiat currencies, rises Too quickly, the amount of profit created from capital goods may be much smaller than the investment required for the creation of the capital goods. | |
| Making investment uneconomically viable as holding onto the money would be better thereby reducing the amount of wealth creation. | |
| I don't think the prices should remain static, just that they shouldn't fall so fast that it takes too long to see a profit from investment. | |
| I may be totally off-base. | |
| You know of an empirical evidence for this situation. | |
| Okay, so If prices fall too fast, so let's say you pay, I don't know, $100 million. | |
| Let me know if I've got this right. | |
| Just type in the chat window. I'll keep an eye on it. | |
| If you invest $100 million in a factory and prices are falling by 50% a year, then that factory would have cost you only $50 million next year. | |
| So you want to wait. | |
| And so if prices continue to fall, Then you will continue to wait, and it's really going to be tough to invest in capital goods. | |
| Now, the consumers are really happy, but the people who invest in capital goods aren't going to be happy. | |
| Well, I think that there is an example of this, which is obviously the technology. | |
| I shouldn't say obviously, but it's the technology industry. | |
| It has massive amounts of capital investment. | |
| I mean, it's billions of dollars to build a chip fabrication plant like Intel or AMD does or do. | |
| And they managed to do it, even when the prices of all of this capital equipment is falling, even as the price of what they're selling is falling. | |
| You simply will adjust your price downstream to make up for the loss in value of your capital equipment. | |
| I'm just putting my entrepreneurial hat on, and if somebody knows more about this than I do, which wouldn't be hard, then just let me know. | |
| But if I'm going to lose $50 million in building a factory, then I'm just going to make that up in price. | |
| And everybody's facing the same issue because prices are falling across the economy, so there's lots of ways to do it. | |
| So that would be my... | |
| The other thing to do would be to try and figure out which of the pieces of equipment which in which which of the price is falling the most and order those last and which of the ones are the most stable order those first and and you would arrange your construction of the factory to to do that domino thing based on lowest price drop to highest price drop so you get as much advantage as you could from that kind of price drop now So price stability. | |
| So I've mentioned in a recent podcast that price stability is desirable. | |
| Now what I mean by price stability is that it is easiest for people to make economic calculations if variability in currency rate is not a primary consideration. | |
| Of course, when you have variability in currency rates, you also have variability in interest rates, which means that loans become that much more unpredictable. | |
| So, it is generally, I think, for the best that prices as a whole remain as stable as possible for economic calculations. | |
| That, of course, has to be balanced, and this is a great point that you bring up, and I don't think I mentioned it before, but that has to be balanced, of course, by the consumers always wanting things to be cheaper. | |
| And so, that is something that's very, very important as well. | |
| I'm not saying that the same computer now should in five years be exactly the same price, but generally what is the case is that a good new computer usually costs around $2,000, right? | |
| So, I don't know, 10 years ago, what was it? | |
| A 486DX25 computer with, what, 128 megs of RAM was probably around $2,000, and now an i7 with eight Gigs of RAM, a good graphics chip, and a Blu-ray player is about $2,000. | |
| So a good new computer is usually around $2,000. | |
| A good new car is sort of around the same thing and so on. | |
| There is some constancy in that. | |
| And that's sort of what I mean. You don't want a new computer to suddenly cost $10,000 or $5. | |
| That's really going to be hard to predict. | |
| But they're going to build for those kinds of assumptions. | |
| So I think that's a really, really good point. | |
| I'm just going to check the chat window and see if that makes any sense. | |
| All the geeks are telling me that it was 15 years ago, which was a 46. | |
| Yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right, you're right, you're right. | |
| All the geeks, thanks. | |
| Hey, all the other geeks. | |
| So somebody has said, so you meant you wanted gradual deflation. | |
| Well, see, it's not so much what I want, it's sort of what everybody in the market wants. | |
| Everybody in the market wants to pay less, for sure. | |
| But that's not specific to any particular item. | |
| So what I mean by that is, you could pay less for your car if it didn't have air conditioning. | |
| And I can tell you that with great personal experience, my car is... | |
| It's 13 and a half years old. | |
| The amount of stuff that isn't working on it is really embarrassing. | |
| Of course, the aerial is gone a long time ago. | |
| The air conditioning doesn't work. | |
| The cruise control went out a couple of years ago. | |
| We've got problems with the locks. | |
| Some knobs have fallen off. | |
| I mean, it's still roadworthy and all that, but it's a beater. | |
| I think it's definitely a beater, and because it's a Volvo, it's a beater that costs $12 million to fix anything. | |
| So yeah, you can spend less if you want, but a lot of people will spend the same amount and just get better stuff, right? | |
| So that's sort of important. | |
| So buying a car, you can get anywhere from $500 to, I don't know, $300,000. | |
| But generally, people want prices to go down, but capital investors want prices to stay about the same. | |
| And so they will try to drive the prices down and that can happen if there's enough demand, right? | |
| If there's enough demand, prices go down because more capital equipment is manufactured which lowers the cost of production and so on. | |
| But price stability as a whole is going to be aimed for. | |
| So I'll sort of give you an example which I've mentioned before. | |
| The price of gold is, what, 1500 bucks an ounce now? | |
| I don't know what it was in 1900, but it was about the same as the price of a good suit, a really good suit. | |
| And now, a really good suit, you can probably get one for about 1500 bucks. | |
| So there's an example of price stability that a good suit is an ounce of gold 100 years ago, and it's an ounce of gold, like it's 111 years ago, and it's an ounce of gold now. | |
| And there's other measures of the constant value Of gold. | |
| And so that's what I mean in terms of price stability. | |
| You'll get a lot more price stability, of course, infinitely more price stability in some sort of non-fiat currency situation. | |
| But yes, deflation is ideal in many ways because it means that productivity is going up. | |
| And that's what people experienced throughout the 19th century in America and in other places was they experienced And so I think that's a really, really great correction. | |
| That is not just price stability, because I'm just looking at it from the capital investment standpoint. | |
| But the consumers, of course, want prices to go down. | |
| And so if people can achieve that and serve that up, that's what they'll do. | |
| So I appreciate that. That's a great, great clarification. | |
| What do we got here? 12 more minutes. | |
| Anybody else? I talked to everyone. | |
| Hello? Hi. | |
| Can you hear me? I sure can. | |
| How are you doing? Pretty good. | |
| I was wondering if you'd be interested in talking about the idea of being desensitized. | |
| Yeah. Can you just move your mic a little bit? | |
| It's just a bit buzzy because just move your mic away from your mouth a bit. | |
| Oh, how's that? | |
| A little bit more? Hold on. | |
| I just got this new one. How about that? | |
| Just go downstairs? No, I'm kidding. | |
| I'm downstairs, though. Is this okay? | |
| Is it, in fact, a yogurt cup with string? | |
| Is that what you mean by a new one, or is that... | |
| It's actually pretty nice. | |
| It's like a GameTronics or something. | |
| Well, this will not be an ad for the voice quality of GameTronics headphones, but anyway, go on. | |
| I should complain to the company. | |
| I was torn about the idea about being desensitized and Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. | |
| I kind of think about just random internet stuff. | |
| There's shocking pictures and how you see it for the first time and it's just a traumatizing experience, but now you're like something in the past and it's not really a big deal. | |
| I don't know if it's something of strength or growing a thick skin. | |
| Can you give me an example? | |
| I don't know. Goatee? | |
| I think everybody's heard of that. What? | |
| Maybe you don't want to know. It's just like a very gruesome, vulgar picture. | |
| I don't really want to describe it because that'd be a little embarrassing. | |
| Well, so for instance, somebody posted on the message board a helicopter picture of the recent slaughters in Norway. | |
| And it was a picture of the shooter aiming his gun at some poor young men and women who were in the water and shooting at them. | |
| Or there was the one that was decrypted by WikiLeaks that was the helicopter assault on the reporters in Iraq, I think it was. | |
| Do you mean that kind of stuff? That too, but I mean, I was starting with something more light. | |
| But yeah, definitely that as well. | |
| Just the whole concept in general, like I'm... | |
| Just kind of something I wanted to tackle. | |
| Well, first of all, if you're starting with something lighter, it means you haven't been too desensitized. | |
| So that's good. | |
| So tell me what... | |
| Well, give me the argument for... | |
| Because you say you're sort of ambivalent about it. | |
| So give me the argument for either case. | |
| Well, it's just sort of a natural process maybe that you're not exposed to something or you're told something is shameful and... | |
| Then you are exposed to, you know, like a vulgar picture, not necessarily, you know, something related to a tragedy like you're talking about. | |
| And that sort of thickens the skin a little bit and doesn't allow you to be controlled by guilt or shame or like some kind of religious complex where you think something is wrong. | |
| Holy crap, man. You are just abstracting this into the stratosphere. | |
| I don't mean to criticize. What the hell are you talking about? | |
| Give me some examples. | |
| Don't involve goats or whatever you were talking about. | |
| Goatee is actually not a goat. | |
| It's a very vulgar picture. | |
| That doesn't matter, but just tell me something that's a little closer to what you're talking about. | |
| I'm sure you've heard of Two Girls, One Cup. | |
| Something like that? Two girls, one cup? | |
| No. Sorry, I'm afraid I'm very sheltered from these things. | |
| Are you living in a monastery? | |
| Yes, it's somewhat. | |
| If it's not on the wiggles, I'm not too aware. | |
| Anyway, go on. Well, yeah, that makes sense. | |
| You have a kid, right? So, yeah, you probably don't want to get into this stuff right now. | |
| But, yeah, it... | |
| It's sort of like living in a sheltered life, living within sheltered rules and having an opportunity. | |
| This is like quite a few years ago that I've seen this stuff, but having that opportunity to cut away the, you know, peel the onion a little bit. | |
| I don't know if that makes any sense at all, but... | |
| Okay, so let me see if I can frame it in a way that works with what you're saying. | |
| So, at the one level, you don't want to be, you know, some Jane Austen heroine who faints at the sight of an exposed ankle or something like that. | |
| At the same time, you don't want to be like jaded masturbatory monkey man who requires extreme images to get excited by anything, whether it's sex or violence or whatever. | |
| So, you don't want to be on this escalation of requiring stronger and stronger images, which I think would indicate a sort of significant problem with the personality. | |
| But at the same time, you don't want to be like, oh, Lord Six, I need the vapors. | |
| You know, I just saw a shoulder exposed or something like that, right? | |
| Yeah, that kind of makes sense. | |
| And also, talking about the tragedies in Oslo recently, you know, you don't want to be callous to those things as well. | |
| Right, but at the same time, we all know, I mean, look, there is a... | |
| The world is such that sanity requires an avoidance of certain things, right? | |
| So... You know, there's probably a person being murdered every five seconds in the world, right? | |
| People being raped and wars occurring and starvation and all kinds of sexual abuse of children and so on, right? | |
| And if you sort of sit there in a dark room with these images flashing like you're the central repository hub of evil transmission in the world, you'd probably go pretty mental, right? | |
| So you have to have a selective attention to certain things, right? | |
| You have to block out things that you know are true that are awful because you have to live, right? | |
| Right, right, yeah. You don't want to be, what, say, paralyzing yourself, right? | |
| Yeah, I mean, you don't want to sort of be Jesus, right? | |
| Take on all the sins of the world and then be unable to function, right? | |
| I mean, because you could sit there and focus on all of that. | |
| And you would not experience a moment of joy, I would imagine, your whole life long. | |
| And you'd feel the desperation and futility and a sense of helplessness and so on, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. But I mean, this also, I think, who is the movie reference you were talking about? | |
| Is the Jane something? | |
| Sorry, did I talk about a movie just now? | |
| Sorry, somebody just described to me what Two Girls, One Cup is, and I'm just trying to block that image from it. | |
| You see why I don't want to describe it. | |
| I appreciate that. | |
| I am now the Jane Austen heroine, and I wish it was about an ankle or a shoulder. | |
| It's like, oh my god. Yeah, see, I think that would be something that might indicate a need for a little less desensitization. | |
| So let me just get that winking brown eye socket out of my head, and let's try and move on with the topic. | |
| Okay, sorry. That's why I lost track of what the hell I was saying, because that's an image that I'm going to need a lot of scotch and a laxative to get out of my body. | |
| Actually, something you might be interested in is they have YouTube videos of the reactions of people watching it. | |
| Yeah, I think I've just probably played those through in my head, but I think I'll just get clear of that stuff as a whole, right? | |
| And there is, look, there is supposedly, right, this is the slippery slope, right, that they talk about in terms of violence or sex, and it's always about violence and sex, right? | |
| So the traditional one about sex is, well, I found my father's playboy out in the shed when I was seven. | |
| This is, of course, dated because I don't know what the hell goes on with seven-year-olds these days on the internet. | |
| And I looked at it and I was curious and titillated. | |
| And next thing you knew, I needed to watch women with big boobs dressed up as SS vixens blowing up goats while simultaneously sticking their heads up the asses of... | |
| Of hens while simultaneously crushing eggs between their firm, ripe buttocks. | |
| And that's the only thing that could get me off. | |
| So there is this sort of slippery slope argument that if you look at pornography, you're going to need more and more and harder and harder. | |
| Oh, more, harder. Oh, sorry. | |
| Let me put the disco music on in the background. | |
| But you're going to need more and more because you're going to become progressively desensitized to it and it's going to turn macabre and disgusting and ugly. | |
| And next thing you know, you're going to watch dogs being blown up and that's going to be your sexual gratification. | |
| And then, I don't know, you just become some sort of mole man living in the New York City underground and a peeping tom to boot. | |
| So there's that sort of slippery slope argument. | |
| I've never found that particularly compelling, but there is that sort of slippery slope argument. | |
| And of course, there is significant arguments, I don't know if they're proven or not, which says that pornography has contributed to the significant decline in rape. | |
| And sexual assaults. | |
| I don't know if it's true or not. I'm just saying I've read it because I'm no expert in this area. | |
| But yeah, so I don't believe that stuff. | |
| I don't believe that violence, that you get progressively desensitized to it. | |
| So for instance, I remember when I was a kid, it's just so insane. | |
| saying, I don't know what the hell these people were thinking, but they showed us the Charlton Heston movie Omega Man when I was six or seven at boarding school. | |
| And it's about undead zombies ripping people's heads off or whatever. | |
| Not exactly great fare for six-year-olds or seven-year-olds away from home for the first time. | |
| And it freaked us the hell out. | |
| And I remember very vivid scenes from that movie almost 40 years later. | |
| And I also remember going to visit a friend of mine from boarding school and being upstairs. | |
| And we were having a sleepover and some brain surgeon popped on a vampire movie that also scared the living shit out of me, which I remember very vividly I remember nothing about that trip except that room and certain scenes from the movie, which was on a tiny little black and white TV. It was not a multimedia experience, but scared the living shit out of me. | |
| And I still find... | |
| I have found that... | |
| So I started off very sensitive and then I think I probably got somewhat desensitized in my 20s when I went back, but it was mostly due to alienation from myself as a result of childhood trauma, when I sort of went back into therapy and now I simply can't watch this stuff. | |
| You know when there's a violent scene coming up in a movie. | |
| I'll just skip it. | |
| I always will skip it. | |
| I don't care if I lose plot and dialogue. | |
| I'm just not watching that shit anymore. | |
| It is just too unbearable. | |
| So I think it's useful to sort of note that it just sort of ebb and flow at times in your life. | |
| I think if you can look at this stuff and not feel any negative feelings that may indicate a lack of empathy with the South or with the other that might be worth looking at, If you feel hysterical joy, then, well, I mean, nobody who feels that would ever listen to this show if they were that sort of level of sadist. | |
| But I think that it's one of these Aristotelian mean arguments, that you don't want to be insensitive to brutality, and you also don't want to be hypersensitive to brutality. | |
| I think that you need to be aware of it. | |
| I think you need to recognize... | |
| It's roots in childhood trauma and work as much and as hard as you can to reduce or eliminate those effects in your life and the lives of those around you and recognize that sacrificing the happiness of a good soul to the brutality of the evil soulless is not advancing the cause of morality but rather it's sacrificing a potential good for an inevitable evil and I'd certainly recommend against that. | |
| Right, that makes sense. And I just want to add that when you're talking about the hypersensitivity, I think that for the visual medium stuff, that it's more of artificial rules, that maybe you can find your own limit, but you don't have to have these constraints on you to find that limit. | |
| And when it comes to real life tragedies, the hypersensitivity, it's very easy to lose yourself emotionally over an issue. | |
| Oh, absolutely. I mean, just if you think about what the parents of these poor, murdered young men and women are going through and what they're going to go through for the rest of their lives. | |
| I mean, it's staggering just how much their lives have been ruined and what promise and what potential and, I mean, has been just snuffed out. | |
| It is absolutely staggering. | |
| And I don't know the exact statistics, but I imagine that 92 dead is probably a pretty good day in Iraq and Afghanistan. | |
| And, you know, if we fail to empathize with the victims of our government, we will also end up having to overemphasize, in a sense, with the victims in our own society. | |
| And so, the great challenge is to have sympathy and empathy for people who are not like ourselves. | |
| You know, I mean, somebody wrote to me after I posted my True News On the Norwegian shootings and said, yeah, if you want to get the world's attention, murder some white kids. | |
| And that's a brutal way of putting it, but tragically, that is very true. | |
| That is very true. You know, brown kids get blown up in Iraq and we don't even hear about it except in some dissident sites, antiwar.com and perhaps Democracy Now and perhaps through people like Noam Chomsky, but you certainly aren't going to see it anywhere in the mainstream media. | |
| But, you know, you blow away some white kids and that's all people will talk about for a month. | |
| So there is that tragedy. | |
| There is that tragedy. Until we UPB our empathy, these tragedies are going to continue, I think. | |
| Thank you. Thank you for the answer. | |
| And yeah, I think you made a lot of good points. | |
| And there's no donation big enough to take that image out of my head. | |
| But I appreciate you bringing up the question. | |
| I tried. You can see why I tried to be exact. | |
| I'm actually going to thank the person who typed The description of what you were talking about. | |
| Because, you know, there's that temptation. | |
| So it's like, two girls and a cup. | |
| Should I Google that? I don't know if you look at the internet, though, until you've seen that. | |
| No, no. So it'd be like, should I Google that? | |
| And part of me would be like, come on, Google it, you wimp. | |
| And the other part of me would be like, oh, no, I am a heroine. | |
| I'm going to just faint if I see it exposed. | |
| Whatever the hell that is. So I'm glad that somebody gave me the language. | |
| I could at least compose the image in my head. | |
| From a grainy Victorian photo distance rather than probably staring at it like a proctologist heading in with a miner's cap and a flashlight. | |
| So I appreciate that. | |
| Thank you for whoever posted that description. | |
| Somebody just said, yeah, best Steph quote, two girls in a cap. | |
| Should I Google that? I do think of should I Google that at least once or twice a day. | |
| And generally I say no. | |
| Particularly, what were they talking about? | |
| Skeptics breasts were being mentioned in the forum. | |
| I'm like, should I Google that? Nah. | |
| Forget about it. Sorry, somebody has just written, seems to me if you apply UPB to intellectual property, you arrive at the conclusion that enforcing a patent is the initiation of the use of force as you're telling people what they may or may not do with their property. | |
| You mentioned in a call that question exists as to whether someone has the right to future profits and may accrue for an idea. | |
| Yeah, I... I have been dragged intellectually unwilling closer to Steph Kinsella's argument and the argument of a lot of libertarians and certainly his knowledge of property rights and intellectual property is much greater and deeper than mine that I think that a patent is the initiation of the use of force. | |
| I think that the way to Try would be through, you know, if you want to protect your property, I think you should do so through, you know, kinds of encryption or sort of ways that makes it hard for other people to figure out what's going on. | |
| There is no way to escape patent trolling, I think. | |
| You know, certainly the government should never run any kind of intellectual property law because there shouldn't be any government, but anybody who sets this up, you immediately are going to create a sort of scam-based Quote, homesteading, which is people will just put in vague patents and then sue the shit out of anybody who even comes close inadvertently to this, | |
| right? So there's some developers who are pulling themselves out of the Apple Store in the US because they're just being trawled so hard by people who are going to sue them and because you don't make a lot of money per sale on an Apple product. | |
| And in these marketplaces, like, you know, 90% of the money goes to 10% of the applications, they're just not going to do it because they're just going to get sued. | |
| And so certainly patent trawling has just been my old college roommate who actually has popped back into my life recently. | |
| Hi Rich! He's working in this field now and I mean the stories of patent trawling are just horrendous and it's become a whole section of the economy that is just another one of these predatory scams enabled by the situation and the system that exists. | |
| So yeah, I am much more closer to patents being the initiation of the use of force. | |
| That having been said, people who steal other people's ideas and make money from them are not exactly the classiest kind of entrepreneurs in my opinion. | |
| But that's not the same as saying that they should have the use of force initiated against them. | |
| The whole patent system would be ridiculously complicated and would break down in a free society it seems to me. | |
| I think that's very true. | |
| The one thing that is very true About the society that we have is we don't know what is going to work because the costs of enforcement are all offloaded. | |
| So for instance, we know that slavery doesn't work if you have to catch and keep your own slaves. | |
| Slavery only works if the state goes and catches your slaves for you. | |
| So in a free society, if people had to pay their own costs of patent protection rather than outsourcing it to society as a whole, well, I think it would probably not work and would break down very quickly and an alternative would be found. | |
| So I think that's very true. | |
| All right. | |
| Well, I think that, yeah, oh my goodness, we're over time. | |
| Well, thank you everybody so much. | |
| I really appreciate your time in coming by. | |
| I know that it's a sunny day and I appreciate everybody's time in coming by. | |
| I appreciate the people who've listened to my rant about donations and have thrown a few shekels my way. | |
| Absolutely welcomed and I promise to put it to good use, which we'll of course be ordering soon. | |
| Massive copies of whatever photos I can find about these two girls sipping this latte, which is what I got from two girls and a cup, which seems like a very nice picture. | |
| And I accidentally did do two girls and D cup rather than A cup. | |
| Got a whole different set of images. | |
| I also thank you for those. | |
| So have yourselves a great week, everybody. | |
| Remember upcoming events, barbecue next weekend, ameander.com forward slash FDR 2011. | |
| Liberty Fest 2 in New York, September the 10th. | |
| I will be speaking. Libertopia, October the 23rd in San Diego. | |
| I will be speaking continuously. | |
| I'm going to be emceeing. | |
| And I will be closing down the conference with another barn burner of a speech. | |
| I hope that you can make it. Please go and check out my speech from Porkfest. | |
| You can find it in the feed box. | |
| Just search for WeAreStillHere at youtube.com forward slash free domain radio and I hope that you will enjoy it and have yourselves a great week. | |
| Thank you everybody for your support, your honesty, your openness, your curiosity, your brilliance. |