3118 The Idiot Replication Program - Call In Show - October 30th, 2015
Question 1: [1:28] - Given all of the momentum towards a collectivist and leftist society, what makes you believe that philosophy can turn the momentum around? Might the more effective method of turning society around be to withdraw and give the leftists exactly what they want, and to wait for the inevitable collapse that will follow as a result of their policies? Basically Atlas Shrugged. You have said yourself that crazy today has to always be given an out, and people won't face rationality until they have no other options. Wouldn't giving in be the fastest way to make them face reality, rather than prolonging the process by trying to convince then with evidence?Question 2: [40:37] - How might the free market react when people are "unemployable" as a result of advanced automation? We are on the cusp of developing intelligent machines capable of replacing a significant portion of the workforce. What are your thoughts on a Universal Basic Income?Question 3: [1:22:00] - Why does "self-ownership" arise out of the connection between a conscious being and motor control? Undoubtedly, the average body is controlled by the consciousness within, by why ought they have some moral dominion as a result?
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom in Radio.
I hope that you are doing well.
Tonight we had three great questions.
The first was, how on earth can philosophy work to turn around a society hurtling so steadfastly towards economic, social, and cultural disaster?
Perhaps what we should do is go galt, we should go out and shrugged, we should withdraw and just let the system take a crap on its own future and then help dig people out of the wreckage, maybe get the Bernie Sanders types in power, have them crash and burn it and see what we can do after that.
I had something to say on that topic, which I think you'll enjoy.
second question was, all right, giant robots doing everything that is economically necessary for the species, what are we going to do with all people who become unemployable as intelligent machines capable of replacing a significant portion of the workforce come around?
Does this put us in the neighborhood of a universal basic income or a guaranteed basic income?
And the third was a somewhat technical but interesting question about ethics and self-control.
You know, the basic argument, we control ourselves, we control the effects of our actions.
Why does self-ownership arise out of the connection between a conscious being and motor control And why does that mean that we have morality?
Again, a great question.
I love digging into the UPB stuff, the universally preferable behavior stuff.
So, good chat on ethics there.
Without any further ado, let's get started.
Alright, up first is Jonathan.
Jonathan wrote in and said, Given all the momentum towards a collectivist and leftist society, what makes you believe that philosophy can turn the momentum around?
Might the more effective method of turning society around be to withdraw and give the leftist exactly what they want, and to wait for the inevitable collapse that will follow as a result of their policies?
Basically, Atlas shrugged.
You have said yourself that crazy today has to always be given an out, and people won't face rationality until they have no other options.
Wouldn't giving in be the fastest way to make them face reality rather than prolonging the process by trying to convince them with evidence?
That's from Jonathan.
Well, hello, John.
Hi, Stefan.
How are you doing?
Well, how are you doing?
I'm doing all right.
Is there anyone in particular in your life that you think this applies to?
No, I think I kind of came up with the question, there's a recent poll that came out that says basically, I think it was a poll of 18 to 30 year olds where socialism has basically a 49% Approval rating or 49% of people 18 to 30 view socialism positively.
And capitalism is actually lower now at only about 46%.
So I guess that's what kind of got me wondering, well, it doesn't look like the momentum is going to change anytime soon.
It seems to be going faster toward kind of a socialist leftist society.
Of course it is.
Yeah.
Because people automatically defer to their caregivers and so many young men and young women are growing up in single mom households with big daddy government being the provider that it's sort of like saying, okay, what do you think of your parents?
Socialism is my father.
And so I like him.
I mean, that's one of them.
Of course, public schools are getting worse and all of that.
But it would be weird if that wasn't the case.
Right.
So I guess the question that kind of begs, and I've seen in several episodes, you know, you advocate peaceful parenting as a way to turn that around.
You advocate, you know, philosophy as being a way to spread reason and rationality.
But then you said in other episodes, well, you know, a lot of people don't listen to reason and rationality.
You know, you present them with facts and a rational argument.
And They basically close down and don't listen to any of it.
So I guess what I'm kind of curious about is, I guess, why do you think that philosophy is a way to turn it around rather than waiting for it or trying to, I guess, almost getting it to collapse as quickly as possible?
Well, so if you're skeptical about the value of philosophy, my question, which is the basic philosophical question is, well, John, compared to what?
What is more valuable than philosophy?
Do you think that a general social collapse is going to make people more rational or less rational?
Well, see, I could understand it going either way.
So, like, for example, you know, there have been...
Some countries, New Zealand, I guess, would be, you know, a somewhat example of, well, it got too far to the left and then kind of a pendulum swung and it swung back in the opposite direction when the government almost went bankrupt.
And, you know, on the other hand, you've got countries like Russia that were, you know, when the pendulum swung, it didn't swing much toward freedom or it didn't swing...
Very far away.
You know, it's still a very, you know, controlled, it didn't swing very far toward freedom, I guess.
So, would maybe the best, and I'm not saying that philosophy doesn't have its use, but maybe the best way for I guess for rationality and reason and a free society to spread would be to almost like wait for...
I don't know, I guess I've begun to doubt, I guess, whether there's anything that can turn it around short of the system collapsing.
Yeah, I mean, I don't see any evidence that people are scintillating the able-to-listen-to-reason now compared to when I started.
I mean, I've been talking philosophy with people for 30 years and doing it in this format for a decade almost, so I have some experience in this matter.
And so, no, people will not listen to reason, but when they face an extremity, they may listen to solutions.
So I don't think that there's any words that can stop this careening, self-destructive, brakeless truck of acceleration towards a brick wall full of dynamite that we're currently experiencing in society.
But when society hits the wall, see...
This is one thing that people who've not been exposed or don't know a lot about conflict, particularly internecine or civil war conflict throughout history, is that we are very ferocious eventually when cornered.
And people...
For the most part, the best way to keep your genes going is to kind of duck down, lay low, and just have your kids and nod and bow and scrape to those in power.
But there comes a time where that becomes impossible.
In other words, when genes are facing extinction because of existing social circumstances, then we are all programmed to erupt in what seem to be completely crazy ways.
And you can see this, I've mentioned this before, that the British population in the 1920s and 1930s was like, no war, whatever we do, no war, the bomber has made it, the bomber in the 1920s and 1930s It was the equivalent these days of nuclear weapons.
They thought that the bombs would just create these firestorms and civilization would be wiped out.
And so they wanted to appease Hitler and they wanted to appease Mussolini.
And so they appeased, they appeased.
Oh, we're going to go send Cable and over.
He's going to sign the piece of paper in Munich that brings peace in our time and so on.
And shortly thereafter, they were at war.
And then when they were at war...
They were at war like, screw you and your ancestors, and we are going to piss in your wells, and we're going to salt your ocean, and we are going to let out the blood of your kids, and we are going to burn this thing down at the root.
And that's what happens when people are cornered.
You know, even a rat will fight a bear if it's cornered.
And so, at some point, there will be a pushback, and the longer and the more off course things get, the more the blowback is going to be eventually.
But we need philosophy to point that blowback in the right direction.
So I don't view this as any more than a recipe for what to do when the smoke starts to clear.
The idea that myself or other thinkers can stand between the...
Decaying, dysgenic self-interest of an increasingly illiterate and uneducated and frankly idiotic clan of human beings is a complete fantasy.
Words are not magic, right?
We may have spells, which is just an analogy for priests, but we can't stop it with language.
We can't.
When people look at the extremities that I talk about, like, you know, ostracizing people who want to use violence against you, and they're like, that's like, that's totally the worst thing ever.
I mean, how crazy is that?
And it seems crazy.
I get it.
But because I know what the alternatives are if people don't take a stand, that it gets much worse.
And then you're ostracized by, say, war, or famine, or disease, or gulags, or concentration camps, or, you know, whatever awful stuff happens when the shit hits the fan economically in particular.
So, um...
Yeah, I'm sort of laying out the arguments so that if I keep predicting what's going to happen and then it happens, hopefully I'll gain enough credibility that some decent proportion of society will look to philosophy for solutions.
And I may well be in the forefront of providing those solutions.
But, you know, should we try and accelerate its cause?
Should we not try and accelerate its cause?
You're like making the suggestion like you're like the guy at the bottom of the Rocky Mountains and like a nine quintillion ton Avalanche is coming down and you're saying, I don't know, should we get on top of it and push?
It's like, I don't think it really makes any difference.
It's going to do what it's going to do.
Maybe an analogy I guess maybe I would think of, or it comes to mind, is you've got liberals on the left and conservatives on the right.
And I don't mean...
Conservatives as in libertarian.
I mean very religious that aren't necessarily pro-freedom.
They're pro-Republican in the case of America.
They're wrestling for the steering wheel of a vehicle headed toward a cliff.
And I guess rather than trying to convince these two Kind of idiots.
Hey, we're headed in the bad direction.
Would it almost be easier to, say, see you and jump off the truck and find a completely different...
Sorry, you're going to have to speak a little faster.
You know, I've got my listeners' old age to consider here.
Okay, just get to the point.
Do you think that we should, like, start an island or go to the moon?
I'm not sure what you mean by you say this.
I don't know.
Like, is there a way to, you know, to kind of start, you know, to withdraw almost from...
I've got to finish this for you.
Yes, you can withdraw from society.
You can go and live in a self-pitched shack in the woods somewhere.
But all you do is you take yourself out of the equation of where society goes from there.
Right?
I assume you don't have kids, right?
No.
Okay, so you can go live in the woods and you're not really affecting anyone but yourself, I suppose.
But since I'm a father, that option of going to live in the woods and letting society go to hell kind of...
Went out the window when my daughter came out the hoo-hoo.
So it is...
Yeah, you can do that if you want, but you're just taking yourself out of the fight, right?
I mean, but I think we need people in the fight.
I mean, you can run away from a very necessary combat with a growing evil.
But for those of us who stand and fight, you know, I'm telling you, we're going to curse your cowardly disappearing footprints.
Okay, I guess my question now...
Maybe it comes down more to, is the fight winnable?
I don't know.
What the hell do you mean if it's the fight winnable?
When has that ever been a guarantee in a war?
Geez, do you remember?
I don't know how old you are, but in 2003 they're going in, oh, this thing's going to be done in six weeks.
Who the hell knows if a fight is winnable?
I mean, if you knew for sure, you'd put a lot of money on one side or the other.
But the reality is nobody knows.
That's why you exercise will.
Because if I thought the fight was going to win itself, I wouldn't bother fighting and then we'd all lose if everybody made that same decision.
So I can guarantee you that if you go live in the woods, bad people are going to win.
I can guarantee you if you don't fight, you're going to lose.
But, you know, are you going to win a gold medal in the Olympics?
I don't know.
Train like hell and run as fast as you can.
And be from Kenya.
That's all I can tell you when it comes to that.
Alright.
But it's the lack of knowing that makes life worthwhile.
Right?
I mean, because you don't know, you can expend your maximum effort in the achievement of something virtuous.
That's great.
Because if you knew for sure you were going to win, you'd try less.
And if you knew for sure you were going to lose, you probably wouldn't try at all.
Not knowing is the spur to excellence.
Not knowing and the accompanying panic is the spur to excellence.
Okay.
Well, then what about maybe a different approach might be?
What if...
I don't know.
What if...
What if the best way to bring about the change that would give a free society would be almost...
What if...
Like hypothetical, okay?
What if you ran as...
Dude, for fuck's sakes, for fuck's sakes, hit the gas on your conversation.
It's like you've got pauses I can drive a truck through.
Unless you're currently being abducted, just spit it out, man.
Alright, so what if you were to run as the most socialist candidate in the history of Canada?
And you would, you know, believing what you actually do believe, if you were to run as the most socialist candidate and implement all of the socialist policies that people vote for, and then when it collapses, basically, what if the best way to Bring about the change is to try and encourage the collapse.
Are you going to do that?
I mean, I think...
I actually think that there might be...
Are you going to run for office as a socialist?
No.
Okay.
I'm not going to run for office as a socialist.
You're not going to do it, so what the hell does it matter?
What if there are people who actually...
I don't know.
What if basically some of the liberals that...
that...
Advocate for these kind of policies actually know that they won't work and then are...
What if the best way to bring about the change is to prove that these policies don't work?
Prove to who?
Based on what?
Facts don't matter.
Facts don't matter.
Socialism has been a complete and total clusterfuck every single place it's ever been tried.
There's one more piece of evidence is not the missing cognitive...
Pick that's going to get through the lock of other people's idiocy.
We have dozens if not hundreds of examples of socialism being a complete and total mess.
Causing unbelievable economic, social, and often military destruction.
So that's all evidence.
That's all there.
But people can just wish things away.
They can just wish things away.
People live in a psychotic world of imaginary justifications for their base genetic needs.
That's all they do.
Idiots don't like to compete in the free market, and so they like to talk about socialism because they're always on the receiving end of socialism in general.
Whereas people who have a lot to contribute are going to get taxed a lot generally are on the side of the free market because they're the ones being taken from.
And so...
The idea that somebody who has been so broken and is perhaps so non-functional in their lives that they are basically reduced to not shaving, barely bathing, wearing some Green Day t-shirt, sitting on a sidewalk, And demanding that the government give him free stuff taken from people who got up relatively early that morning, had a shit shower and shave and went to work.
The idea that somebody who's reduced to that level of a pathetic, codependent, parasitical existence, where they're thumping their chest with their moral bat wings of smoky evil, demanding that everyone give stuff to them, And calling it moral and threatening to throw them in jail if they don't,
somebody who's reduced to a petty, whiny, hippy shakedown of moral pomposity, the idea that that person's going to say, oh, wait, but the evidence shows that...
What, right?
I mean, this is not...
This is just survival.
This is what they perceive as survival.
Sorry, it's a war.
It's a win-lose.
Now, There is a time in life where you panic if you're not thoroughly ensconced in the welfare state.
And I remember this very vividly.
I was just thinking about this the other day, that there was a time in my life where, you know, I've been a hard worker, but for a variety of reasons we don't have to get into here.
It was sort of after I graduated from my master's and the economic recession, which was just brutal, was still going on.
And I was like, holy shit, I'm gonna run out of money.
Like, I could see that.
I could, like, I'm out of seed crop, man.
I'm out of money.
And I thought, well, I guess I could go maybe ask this person.
But I'd already borrowed a bit of money.
And anyway, so...
I was a temper.
And I just called this...
I called them up.
And I, like, I called everyone up.
And I'm like, I gotta get a job.
Like, I have to get...
I'm gonna be out of money.
I have to get a job.
And I... Just did what was necessary because I was cornered.
And we see this all the time.
You know, people whose unemployment benefits are just about to run out get mighty hungry on the treadmill of chasing that illusory, carot-y job, right?
Well, not always illusory, but...
When people panic, when people are in a corner, boy, you'd be surprised.
Necessity being the mother of invention and so on.
And so, you know, this dewy-eyed socialist hippie dude, he's just trying something so that he doesn't run out of options and thus become himself.
Right?
When we are manipulating other people, We are ghosting ourselves.
We are turning ourselves into slithery, foggy, tentacled brain parasites.
We are not ourselves when we are manipulating.
And all socialism is just a bunch of manipulation trying to get shit for free out of other people who've earned it.
And so, in order to avoid actually coalescing into becoming material, into becoming who you are, who you actually are, outside of trying to manipulate and bully and whine and beg and complain and Browbeat others.
Once you actually hit that corner, or you hit that wall, that corner you can't get out of, then you erupt into corporeality, into who you are, without being able to jive and manipulate and bamboozle others.
Once you stop conning, you start creating.
And this same guy, you know, he's going to say, well, I guess...
The gig is up.
I'm out of options.
I can't con anyone else.
I can't manipulate anyone else.
Even the people I want to manipulate don't have any more money to give me.
I guess I'm out of options and so I have to become real.
I have to become a non-parasite.
I have to become a producer.
And people don't like that moment.
I didn't like that moment.
Lots of people don't like that moment.
I fully understand it.
Nonetheless, that moment is entirely necessary to live a virtuous life.
Stop manipulating.
Not you.
Stop manipulating.
Stop being annoying.
Stop begging.
Stop lying.
This is the thing about the socialist stuff.
It's all lies.
You want free stuff?
I get it.
I get it.
You want free stuff.
Because if you really cared about the poor, you'd go start a fucking company and hire some poor people.
That's what I did.
Go start a company and hire some poor people.
And that way, you're helping people develop skills, become useful and productive members of their society, learn how to deal with customers, learn how to get up on time, learn how to show up at work, learn how to deal with conflicts.
And they have pride because you've gone out and you've started A business.
Now, if you have money and you're better at giving money than starting money, no problem.
Go out and start a charity and go help people.
But no, these people just...
Government, a kind society would give people stuff.
I'm going to tell the government to go give...
Go do it yourself.
The second-hand virtue is really hideous to watch.
And just go and start a business.
Go start a business, hire some people, or start a charity and go help some people if you want.
But no.
No!
We can't have any of that.
Because it's institutional, man.
It's the structure.
It's structural violence.
It's the system.
It's just the way that it is.
You can't fix it, except with the government.
See, you can't fix nothing.
It's the system.
And the system is screwed, and therefore I'm going to talk about the system, and I'm going to have a structure, the superstructure of scaffolding that props up the racism and the sexism and the homophobia and the trans, whatever it's going to be.
So, It's the system, man.
And so I can't do anything within the system.
Now, when people start talking about the system, they're saying one thing and one thing only.
I want stuff that I haven't earned, but I'm going to cloak it in sympathy for others when what I'm really trying to do is set up a system where cheddar rolls downhill and I'm at the bottom with a big open mouth.
That's all it is.
Oh man, it's the system.
Hey, is the system preventing you from starting a business and hiring some poor people?
Uh, yeah, because I don't have access to capital and because I don't have that kind of credit history that you get if your father's Donald Trump's father's senior head.
Whatever it's going to be.
Oh my god.
It's like, shut up about the system and go fucking do something.
Put down the drum circle.
Ha ha!
Go start something that puts some customer money into somebody's pocket.
No!
I won't do that because I don't like to get up that early.
That's the moral barrier that I have.
So it's just this falsehood.
That's all I want to say to these people.
Have you hired anyone?
No!
Then what the hell do you care about the working poor?
Oh, you want other people to give stuff around, which you'll obviously be on the receiving end because you are out here in the park at 2.30 in the afternoon when a lot of people are not because they have jobs.
So it's just this lying.
Now, can you go to those people and can you say, well, there are property rights and they're not an initiation of force and a whole bunch of failures and hell out of a lot.
They don't care because they haven't hit the wall.
Now, once they hit the wall, and you've run out of people to lie to, and you've run out of people to manipulate, and no amount of bellowing, and no amount of sneering, and no amount of tying your fucking dreadlocks up in a gay bag of rainbow socialist hell is going to get you what you want, okay, then you become real.
Then you become real, and you stop being a parasite and And you realize that yelling at the structure to change is just a selfish way of putting your sneaky little Starbucks hands into other people's pockets.
And you've got to go out and you've got to start living the values that you're yelling at everyone else to implement at the point of a gun.
Go help the poor people.
Go start a business.
You start a business, you've raised the wages of everyone.
You hire one person, you've raised the wages of everyone.
You start one charity that's self-sustaining, that's going...
Just go do something.
Go...
Stop...
Holding signs and go and open a soup kitchen and go and start a collective farm and go and start some business that's going to hire a bunch of people.
And that way, of course, if all the socialists went out and started businesses, we wouldn't even need to worry about the minimum wage having to be legislated at $15 an hour because they would create such an enormous demand for workers that the minimum wage would be $25 an hour.
But no!
See...
Starting a business?
Man!
That's tough.
I mean, I gotta do stuff for people that they like.
And they might say no.
See, the government doesn't say no.
When you yell at the government to have more power, the government's like, yeah, thanks.
That's great.
I like the power.
Hey, coke addict!
Want some more coke?
Yes, I do!
It's pretty easy.
Pretty easy.
So, no, they're...
They're just a bunch of posers and a bunch of postures.
And the same thing is true on the right as well to some degree, you know, in terms of like, we want free markets.
What, cut government subsidies to corporations?
Okay, we're not that free.
What, farmers?
Hell no, not that free.
So, yeah, people have to hit the wall and to some degree we have to enjoy the spectacle.
This...
The fear and hostility that we have towards human suffering has truly become hysterical.
Has truly become hysterical.
And that is really the final mark of decadence and imminent collapse in a society is psychotic levels of fear and hatred towards human suffering.
You said something that upset someone.
And you're white.
If you're black, that's fine.
But that reality that we have become so are selected and so paranoid about negative emotions, and this has been the whole result of the welfare state and subsidies to both rich and poor and all of that, is that, you know, it's hard to go out and make money.
And there's a lot of failure in startups, and it's very difficult.
You might work for two years, 80 hours a week, and the whole thing might crater, leaving you $100,000 in debt.
It's really hard.
It's really tough.
And it should be.
Because resources are very scarce.
And it should be tough, and it should be hard.
And so for me, at least, when the system hits the wall, yeah, there's going to be suffering.
Good!
I'm not talking about people starving to death and having to eat their baby's placenta or anything.
What I'm talking about is there's going to be suffering and people are going to have to change.
So what?
So what?
Deal with it.
Life has changed.
Shit happens.
Stuff goes down.
I mean...
I've changed a lot.
I've had to change a lot over the course of my life.
Industries that I thought would last forever kind of came and went in a heartbeat.
I started off doing very well in acting, then got kind of bored of it.
You change a lot.
You change a lot.
And you adapt and you'll be fine for the most part.
It's all this staving off of any kind of change.
This person is upset.
We've got this dread of upsetting people.
Like there's any progress without pissing people off.
Hey!
You know who was a really content society for the most part was that single photocopied Mandarin day of the Chinese empire that lasted about 6,000 years of Bill Murray chasing Andy McDowell around with a big furry animal in the title.
That's pretty much no change.
It's not a huge amount of upset.
You know how you know there's progress in society?
A lot of people are really upset.
You know, there were people who trained their whole life scooping up and shoveling shit from horses in cities.
And then, asshole car comes along.
I guess they can become gas station attendants or something.
But, yeah, there's change all the time.
Hey, just finished learning COBOL! What?
Obsolete?
I gotta learn something new?
I could be a maintenance programmer, but then I'll want to die rather than get out of bed in the morning.
Hey, here's some undocumented code from 1978.
Can you fix it?
It's only 400,000 lines with a whole bunch of go-to statements.
I think there was one go-sub in there, but I'm pretty sure it was a variable name and or a typo.
Oh, and none of the variables were declared as types.
All their care!
So, yeah, I mean, progress means upsetting people.
You know those...
Those people who are really good at making rotary dial phones, the original touch, not so screen.
Yeah, really great at making rotary dial phones.
They had patents and everything.
Have you seen a lot of rotary dial phones that aren't imitation iPad screens?
No.
All that machinery, all finely calibrated from making rotary dial phones.
Ooh.
Hey, mainstream media.
Remember when you just push around Republicans and mean total assholes and they had nowhere to go?
They have somewhere to go now.
It's called the internet.
So I'm afraid, NBC, you are SOL. So we've given up on progress because we're afraid of offense.
We're afraid of upsetting people.
And we've got this kind of girly mentality.
And not all women are like that, but we've kind of got this girly mentality of what you're doing is really upsetting Aunt Flo.
She's upset.
She's run off into the other room and she's sobbing because you said something about public school not being great and her sister is a public school teacher.
She's really upset.
Go in there and apologize to her.
I can't believe that you made her upset.
How cruel and cruel.
Right?
And that's a kind of girly thing.
You have to not let the girly manipulations take over society.
Otherwise, hey, guess what?
No society forever.
At least until that problem is solved.
Whereas, you know, there are not a lot of guys who, if they seem to be down in their fantasy football league, run sobbing from the room and throw themselves on a big pink pet spread and stain it with their hysterical screaming tears until someone comes along and makes them feel all better.
It's just not the way guys work.
Or at least it's not the way guys used to work.
Maybe it's the way guys work now.
And the last point that I wanted to make is, you talked about Australia.
Well, Australia, you see...
I like multiculturalism in a lot of ways, but there's a big problem in multiculturalism, which is that when you have a largely homogenous society, right?
Let's say Haiti, right?
Haiti's a lot of blacks and so on, right?
And so if there's a big change to be made in society, let's say Haiti runs out of money or, as you said, right?
New Zealand ran out of money until the giant...
Hobbit research and economy hit them with the Peter Jackson money bombs.
But if you have a largely ethnically homogenous society, that when the shit hits the wall and people have got to change, there's not really that much infighting.
There is a sense of, okay...
We're all going to pull together.
We all have kind of the same color eyes and there's no point turning on each other because we kind of all got in this together.
So we all have to pull together to get out of it together, right?
So when you have an ethnically homogenous society, when the shit hits the wall, you don't dissolve into massive race-baiting wars, which is, you know, a problem that happens because...
Skills and abilities have not been distributed evenly by Mother Nature between various ethnicities.
And what that means is that when the shit hits the wall, it hits some ethnicities a lot harder than others, and then you get endless screams of racism.
This is one fundamental reason why America is having trouble solving these problems, is that everybody knows that if you cut spending, which community is it going to hit the hardest?
Hint, it's not Korean.
So if you cut social spending in America, it's going to hit the black community the hardest because they are the community that has the most dependence on welfare.
They are the community that has the highest crime rates.
They are the community that's most dependent on government aid.
And they are the community where almost three-quarters of the kids are born to single moms who are dependent upon the state.
So if you cut social spending evenly across the board, colorblindedly, what's going to happen?
Well, It's going to hit the black community the hardest.
And then everybody's going to scream racism.
And this is one fundamental reason why multiculturalism is kind of paralyzed, is that every now and then, everybody needs to pull together as a team to solve really difficult and intractable social problems like, say, I don't know, borrowing almost $17,000 every single second.
I don't think that's hugely sustainable.
I've been in Monopoly games.
Doesn't really work.
And so this is another reason why this multi-ethnic societies is a problem.
It wouldn't be as much of a problem if the ethnicities all act the same, roughly.
Then it's not really a big problem.
People say, oh, well, you know, the Germans came over and the Irish came over.
Yeah, and, you know, they kind of ended up acting pretty much the same after a certain amount of time, a generation or two.
But the problem is, among the blacks and the Hispanics, they don't end up acting the same as the white population or the Asian population.
And the white population doesn't even act as well as the Asian population in terms of murder rates and income and unemployment and so on and single motherhood and family stability and so on.
So we all need to turn Japanese.
That's my first point.
But my second point is that when the shit hits the wall and the government starts running out of money, well, it doesn't end up affecting ethnicities in the same way.
And that way, every government cut is called racist.
And because racism is like the new nigger, like the nigger is the most offensive term that you can come up with in the past.
Now the most offensive term is racism.
And of course, generally, it's not often applied to those Koreans or the blacks or the Hispanics.
There's white people who get called the most offensive racist name now, which is racist, if there's cuts in government spending.
And so this is another reason why Ethnically diverse societies have a huge problem trying to control the size and power of the state.
Because when you reduce state spending, it hits some communities a lot harder than others.
Said communities then scream racism until the money flow is turned back on.
And this is, of course, you know, the Republicans have just voted to give Barack Obama the infinite Godspree visa spending card from now until like 54 days into the next president's term and forever.
And part of that, of course, is that Barack Obama has so much power to bring down the magical airstrike of race baiting on the community and the society as a whole that anybody who tries to cut spending is immediately going to cause massive problems in the black community.
And because you've got the racist in chief currently manning the helm and the media, of course, compliant and willing to scream racist at anyone who points out basic fact based differences between ethnicities, you've got you've got a problem.
You can't deal with the situation until Obama's out, or until people understand that ethnicities in America and all around the world tend to act differently, incollectively.
Individuals are always different, but Collectively, ethnicities around the world tend to act differently.
They tend to have different incomes.
They tend to have different rates of marital stability.
They tend to have different rates of criminality.
They tend to have different rates of different accumulations of assets.
They tend to have different levels of education.
You go on and on and on until people accept that and say, okay, well, if we cut Government spending, it's going to affect the black community the worst.
It's going to affect the Hispanic community the second worst.
It's going to affect the white community the third worst.
And I think Asians will heave up a giant sigh of relief that they're not being taxed with a giant plumbing suction hole through the butt.
So...
Until these facts are either dealt with or until people give up race baiting, I'm not sure which one I consider to be more likely, trying to deal with these problems is a real challenge.
And because you have a race baiter in chief in charge of the White House, the Republicans, I think, are very loath.
To start cutting spending because it's going to hit the black community and they've got this giant klaxon of racism in the White House who's going to amplify it through the mainstream media to the point where society will probably hit a revolution.
All right.
All right, man.
Got to move on to the next caller, but thank you so much for your great questions, great ideas.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Up next is Brandon.
Brandon wrote in and said, How the hell did you know I'm in fact a robot from the future, Brandon?
Well, you know, it's hard to tell.
I see the videos, but With technology these days, you can never know, right?
I mean, everybody knows I'm solar-powered.
And four-head!
Thanks, no, I'll take a six-head.
Well, no, it's a great question.
I've been thinking about it all day, so I appreciate the comment.
Is there anything you wanted to add or share?
I mean, I don't really particularly hold any specific view on it.
I've been doing some research on the side.
Just kind of like an open discussion on the idea of it.
Because there are, you know, good reasons for it and strong reasons in opposition to it.
Just kind of like getting a clear understanding.
Okay, so we're talking about a free society first, right?
So in a free society, there's a soft landing.
In so far as, like, you know when they jack up the minimum wage, the people who supply touchscreen customer-entered cashier stations to McDonald's are like...
Woo, ka-ching!
Big Macs for everyone, fired up the nose with a giant robot cannon.
I'd actually go to that restaurant, but that's another story.
So when the government starts making things, like making people really expensive to hire by layering bureaucracy and taxes and regulations and legislation and minimum wages and unions and health benefits and crap like that, when the wages of, or the costs, not the wages, when the costs of employees are artificially inflated through government power, That drives automation very quickly, too quickly, for society to adapt, right?
Right.
So in a free society, the process would be slower, I think.
Possibly.
Again, it could be faster because without the government, there'd be much more innovation.
But I don't think that it's a big problem.
So let's say that right now, an IQ of 70 is considered, you know, borderline non-functional, right?
That's where sort of really, I don't know what the current, mentally challenged or retarded, right?
IQ of 70 means, right?
Now, IQ of 70 in the Stone Age...
I mean, you were like Oscar Wilde, you know?
Yeah.
Oogsy rock!
Oogjuggle rock!
Oh my god, it's Noel Coward!
And so, you know, the baseline for like how you can really add to society goes up over time, right?
Because society gets more complex and...
It's tougher to compete.
And of course, it's easier to automate jobs, which less intelligent people do, right?
Right.
Tough to automate philosophy.
Right.
A little easier to automate, I drove something, right?
Right.
So, in a free society, I don't see it being a problem.
The reason being that automation would bring such efficiency that the price of goods and services would drop so rapidly, right?
That charity would be a no-brainer.
And what I mean by that is, so I don't know, like to live comfortably in the West now, pick a number, like $3,000 a month, right?
Right.
Now, if you had massive amounts of automation, the goods and services produced, you could buy the $3,000 prior for like $300.
Let's just pretend that money's all normalized, right?
It's a 90% price reduction, right?
Right.
And it would be even more, like how much cheaper is it to send an email as opposed to send a mail?
Well, the answer is it's as close to infinitely cheaper as you can imagine, right?
Right.
This is something that I kind of discovered when I was doing some preparation for the call and some research on making sure I had some of my facts straight before I came and stuff.
And one of the things that I discovered was, like you're saying, In this automation, what you're going to have is a skyrocket in production and supply because you have robots that are doing all this stuff.
The only inevitable thing is a shift in the supply-demand curve, and that would drop prices.
Right.
If prices had dropped, and let's say that you need an IQ of 85 to have a job in the new economy.
These are generalizations, but there's going to be millions of people from 70 to 85 who, let's just say, are kind of functionally unemployed.
Now, of course, that's going to retard because when you automate something, you throw a whole bunch of people out of work.
And so they're looking for work, and that drives down the price of labor in other areas, because everything gets automated at once, right?
Right.
So if you put in automated taxis, then there's a whole bunch of taxi drivers now looking for work.
That drives down wages in other areas, but it also increases wages because everything's more efficient, because you've got to...
But the thing is, when you drive down wages in other areas, it slows automation down in those areas, because wages are cheaper, right?
Right.
Okay, I can see that.
So, it's sort of a seesaw, right?
Now, as society automates more and everything gets ridiculously cheap, Because, you know, all the taxi drivers thrown out of work, nobody wants to sit there and say, well, now they're going to earn less because taxis got automated and that kind of sucks.
It's like, well, yeah.
But what they're buying will also be far cheaper.
So even though they may make less in terms of the numbers, the purchasing power of their dollar will be continually increasing.
Now, at some point, let's say, I don't know, you need an IQ of 115, like a standard deviation above the norm in order to have a job in 100 years or something, right?
Okay, so the vast majority of people I shouldn't say.
The majority of people won't be able to handle that, right?
Like, I don't know what, 80% of the people, 85% of the people won't, right?
But so what?
Because you're going to need like $4 and change to live for a month, right?
So to me, it's like, okay, so then you got a whole bunch of smart people.
They obviously don't want to see less smart people starve to death, or even if they don't have any compassion, they don't want a revolution because you're still outnumbered.
Right.
And so, setting up a kind of charity to take care of people, I think that would be very easy.
Right now, taking care of people is very expensive.
Taking care of people in the future, when you have automated hospitals, automated doctors, automated surgeons, automated cars to get you there, automated fruit picking, you know, giant space cathedrals of fruit that rains down on you every morning at 7am.
Like, who knows what's going on in the future.
But everything's going to be so ridiculously cheap and automated that you probably...
I can't imagine that you'd need to work more than a day or two a month to get sort of the minimum.
I mean, if you want a fortune, then whatever, right?
But you just aren't going to have to work that much.
And as a result, you can take care of someone else just by working an extra day a month if you want to just donate your proceeds to that.
That makes sense.
So everything's just going to be so ridiculously cheap.
And of course, we've already done these transitions as well, because, you know, the turn of the last century, in the 1900s in America, like 70% of people were involved in agriculture.
Now it's like down to 2%.
Right.
It's through automation.
And that makes everything cheaper because automation removes the human labor from the equation, which frees up human labor to go and pursue other things.
It's like magic addition of wealth into society because, oh, automation throws people out of jobs.
I mean, it's just complete nonsense.
We could have full employment tomorrow, just ban a combine harvester and we're all out there with nail files hacking down wheat.
Oh, look, everyone's employed.
Oh, look.
90% of the population has starved to death, and they've ended up eating their nail files.
When you get this kind of automation, you get price reductions, you get increases in efficiency.
And where people don't see this, like in the healthcare field, it's because of red tape and bureaucracy, and you've got to see the doctor, and the doctor's got to write you the prescription.
And we just cut an interview with a great doctor from the States who was pointing out...
It's illegal in some places to look at something over the internet.
Like if you've got a rash, he was saying, like, you go see it.
You've got to drive 300 miles if that's the closest dermatologist.
It's crazy expensive, right?
Whereas if you're just like here, I took a picture with my cell phone.
And the guy looks at it and says, oh yeah, I know what that is here.
And then he, you know, sends a little requisition to the pharmacy, who then 3D prints, I don't know, whatever, the medication, or just sends a drone out and drops it off.
It could be that efficient, but the government gets in the way of all of that stuff and won't let those efficiencies make things easier.
And of course, you know, the ridiculous defensive medicine that needs, we're going to get a whole thing about that.
But so, you know, let's say that there are machines that render a lot of the population, it's half the population, really can't compete a lot.
Well, so what?
If everyone's making the modern equivalent of $5 million a year, do you not think that you might, you can shave a million of that off and give it to people and so on, right?
But the reality, of course, is that we have increasing automation at a time where there's a downward pressure on intelligence as a result of the dysgenics of the welfare state.
Oh, I'm so against eugenics.
Well, so am I. I'm against any artificial manipulation of the human gene pool, which is why I'm against the welfare state.
Right, yeah.
Not only is it immoral, but it's eugenics as well, because there are strong studies that show, you know, the old idiocracy argument that the smarter you are, the less likely you are to have kids.
So at a time when technology and the remnants of the free market are increasingly automating things and driving up the requirement for intelligence for economic success...
In the world, we have a giant idiot replication breeding program that is pumping out as many lower intelligence people as humanly possible.
And given that no one knows how to change people's intelligence, that's a big problem.
Kind of working at cross purposes here because the way that it should work in society and the way it worked in the Jewish community for the last 700 years is the smartest people have the most kids.
See, smart people tend to make a lot of money.
Having a lot of money means you can afford a lot of kids.
Dr.
Penman we talked to, like 10 kids, and I think that was just like that afternoon.
And so you have a system in society when there's freedom, which is that you are constantly escalating people's intelligence.
Because the smartest people make the most money, have the most kids.
And, you know, there's lots of arguments that say that intelligence is, you know, 60 to 80 percent genetic.
So in the Jewish community, the smartest people had the most kids.
You had rabbis who knew four languages having like eight to 12 kids.
And they've shown that the Jews who had less income and lived in smaller houses had far fewer children.
And so the smartest people had the most kids, which is why you've got a standard deviation above the white norm for the average Jew.
And of course, even higher, if you just pick up in verbal skills, they're up in the 120s.
So there's a society that focused on...
Intelligence, as part of their master plan to take over everything, of course.
You know, bang a rabbi, because in 450 years, we get a movie studio.
But go down on that furry bastard, right?
So that's what we had, you know, in some communities we can see that, and we can see that, of course, in successive waves of the Black Deaths and so on throughout Europe in the past that tended to wipe out the less intelligent.
And again, please understand, I'm not talking about wiping anyone out, I'm just talking about the natural trends of nature.
So in a free society, smarter people have more kids, and you're generally wafting up with human intelligence to take into More automation, that's fine.
If more people are getting smarter, more automation is great.
But if you have more automation carving off The lower third of economic value from the less intelligence, while at the same time you have a giant government idiot breeding program called the welfare state, well, you're gonna face a real challenge.
Or, if you're super selfish like the Catholic Church, I know, let's take the very smartest people who can learn ancient Greek and Roman, possibly Aramaic, and cut their balls off with doctrine so they can't have any kids at all.
Anyway, so I don't think it's a problem in a free society.
I think in our current and existing society, yeah, it is a problem.
There used to be this thing.
Any argument?
See, I'm telling you, man, there used to be this thing.
So there used to be this thing where if you had to go on social assistance, back when this stuff was private and run by the church or other charities, if you had to go on social assistance, well, you had that big L on your forehead, right?
You were a loser.
If you had to go on social assistance, you were openly confessing, I'm either too stupid to make good decisions, or I'm smart, but I make really bad decisions.
Either way, not a lot of good decisions coming out of me at this particular point in time, or say for the last 10 years.
And so it was a confession of being an idiot or being a failure to go on social assistance.
And there was this general thing, it's like, okay, well, we'll give you the money.
But first recognize you're an idiot and you need to now listen to us and you need to change what you're doing because what you're doing led you to be dependent on us.
So you're not very smart or you're smart but making terrible decisions.
Either way, you need to surrender your judgment.
To us, you know, sort of like when you go to a rehab center, you know, you don't get to sneak in a whole bunch of cocaine in your shoe.
I guess you can try.
But they basically say, look, and you can see this on Dr.
Phil when he does his interventions.
It's like, you all don't know what you're doing.
So we're bunching in the experts here who are taking the kid out of the equation.
They're going to lock her in some teen ranch for the next six months.
And then they're going to fix her, right?
Like you need to surrender your will to other people if you screwed up so badly that you need to go on private social assistance.
Now, It's not supposed to be humiliating.
You are a mouth breather.
You had too many children.
You ran away from having a job.
Anyway, I don't do that for too long because otherwise they poke me in the throat with a sharp stick and I can't really blame them for that.
So there was a confession of, I'm an idiot and I've really screwed up and I throw myself on your mercy and yes, I'm going to do what you tell me to do because clearly me sailing my own ship not worked out very well in particular.
And so now, with the welfare state, that doesn't happen.
Like, people can screw up their lives so badly that they've got to be on government assistance, and nobody says, sorry, you've made some really stupid decisions.
You need to change, and we're going to tell you what to do.
And that's what used to happen with private charities.
So right now, of course, it's really changed.
The idea of...
drug treatment programs, right?
They get caught with a whole bunch of drugs and the court puts them into a drug treatment program.
And let's say that there's like 10 counselors and 100 drug addicts in some area.
The idea that everyone would get a vote about what happens in that rehab facility and that vote is equal would be incomprehensible.
Right.
You know, hey, we've got 10 people who are drug therapists who probably were drug addicts in the past and that's why they're doing what they're We've got 10 drug therapists, and we've got 90 squirrely, not-there-by-choice drug addicts, and everyone gets to vote.
Woo-hoo!
Drug party!
Right?
I mean, it's like...
Shipping in NBA players and rap artists and punk bands and their girlfriends.
And it's Amber Rose spinning around like a top on a pole.
And I don't know who that is.
I don't either.
I just made that name up.
I... Might cut that.
Anyway.
So it's all...
Oh, come on.
Everybody wants to be a rapper for half a day, right?
I couldn't...
My constitution couldn't take it for a whole day.
But I like to move it.
Sorry, sorry.
Anyway.
So you couldn't give a vote to people who screwed up so much that they're involuntarily put into a rehab facility because they're coke fiends, right?
So this idea that you can have messed up your life so badly and so that you have to be on the welfare state and you get to vote about the welfare state...
It would make no sense.
No sense whatsoever.
And people who don't want to hit bottom, people who don't want to change, people who don't want to confront the demons that have led them off the cliff, well, they love the welfare state because they get the charity, but they don't get to slap upside the head and straighten up and fly ride stuff that you get from any kind of real private charity, which is actually designed to help you rather than help you avoid your mistakes.
You know, there was this thing I was reading a few days ago after...
Urban Schiff passed away.
My condolences go out to Peter and his family.
I was reading through one of his things that he wrote about this cartoon.
I forget what the title of it was, but it was these three guys on an island, Abe Bob and Charlie, probably names are wrong.
Anyway, one of the scenes in there, they were establishing a government and a voting system.
And initially what they did is, they had this idea, you basically paid to vote.
And by doing this, you ensured that the people who were actually changing the way the government was running had kind of like a stake in it.
Right?
So...
I felt like you could hate Bob and someone at ABC. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There was this...
I don't remember the length for it.
This is how it used to work.
In the 19th century, you had to have property in order to vote.
And it was well understood because everyone said, look, if everyone gets to vote, the poor outnumber the rich, the poor will vote to take away the money of the rich, and everyone will become poor.
So you had to have some property, and it wasn't exorbitant, sort of lower middle class, but you had to have some property in order to have a vote.
Because if you don't have property...
Why are you interested in property rights?
Practices that are being enacted are being enacted by people who know what they're doing and for the right reasons.
Yeah, one of the things that dumb people hate about the free market is that it relentlessly sorts by intelligence and it relentlessly sorts by hard work and it relentlessly sorts by dedication.
It's constantly sifting and constantly sorting.
And that is...
Really insulting to the vanity of less intelligent people.
You know, there's a music industry that relentlessly sorts by musical talent, which is why I'm doing this show and not opening for Taylor Swift.
And so, you know, if you've got delusions of grandeur about your capacity to be a rock star, right?
And that noise is why I'm not.
But if you have delusions of grandeur about...
How great you are as a singer or a front man or whatever, then go try it.
And if you suck, then you'll be the guy that everyone goes to the bathroom with when your number comes up on karaoke.
You won't be opening stadiums, right?
Right.
And so the music industry, acting industry, relentlessly sorts by acting talent, the writing industry...
But society as a whole relentlessly sorts by intelligence.
And this sort of top 1%, why does it bother people so much?
Of course there's injustice in the current system and so on.
But there's less injustice than there used to be.
Everyone's bitching about the 1% and so on.
According to a recent study, 70% of wealthy Americans actually earned their wealth, inherited money, earned their wealth.
And in 1940, that was only 40%.
And it's because the means of production, like my microphone, this camera, and all of that, The regular oxygen tents that I have to go into after my rants in order to re-inflate, you know, like a puffer fish.
All of that is relatively cheap.
A computer, you know, you can do a podcast on a $20 a month cell phone and you can do a video podcast on a $20 a month cell phone.
The means of production are nothing.
You don't need a $10 billion chip fabrication plan to compete with Intel.
You could just go get a, you know, so the means of production are much more available and accessible to people at the moment, which is why more people are getting rich who want to.
And so this relentless sorting of humanity into smarter, harder working, better at satisfying customer needs and so on, the relentless sorting is really annoying to people who either won't compete, don't compete, or can't compete.
And of course, stupidity is a gene set that wants to survive as much as any other gene set in the world.
And so stupidity is constantly trying to get resources from smart people.
It just has a tough time doing that in a free society.
So it has to have this big giant government in order to take resources from smart people so that, you know, the welfare state is how stupid genes breed.
And single motherhood is how stupid genes breed.
And I know that sounds harsh and all that, but, you know, when I say smart, people don't get offended.
And when I say stupid, well, relative to smart, a lot of people are stupid.
And that's just not other people, like relative to, I don't know, Stephen Hawking, like I'm retarded when it comes to physics.
Relative to, I don't know, most people who can do math without taking off their shoes, I'm kind of stupid when it comes.
So it's not like meant to be derogatory, it's just sort of a reality.
That the stupid genes want to survive, but in a free market, the smart genes thrive and the stupid genes start to die off.
And so as the smart genes thrive and the stupid genes start to die off, the stupid genes get cornered and start fighting back.
Now, they can't fight back in terms of I'll be smart, start companies and go get resources.
So they have to fight back the way that stupid genes have always fought back, which is to attempt to inflict guilt, to put themselves forward as helpless victims of forces outside of their control and appeal to the case-elected sympathies of smarter people and get resources that way.
Now, when those resources don't work, the case-selected smarter people generally tend to stop applying them, which is why you need a government to force them to keep doing it.
And so that's foundational that if you have a free society, the intelligence genetics are going to be on a constant upward swing.
When you have a mixed economy, like when you have a status society, they'll be stable or slightly negative.
When you have a mixed economy, you get this, what's this growing division of income, right?
I mean, there's this, the rich are the rich, the poor are the poor, and all that kind of stuff, this divergence in a growing income gap and divergence of incomes.
Well, that's arising because smart people are getting a lot of resources and dumb people are getting a lot of resources.
So, of course, you're going to get a widening gap.
You know, if you feed the fish in this pond a lot of food and you feed the fish in this pond a lot of food, you get a lot of fish in both ponds.
And in the smart pond and in the dumb pond, we're feeding a lot of fish.
So, yep.
Sorry if you're in the middle.
You're toast.
So, I hope that's it.
That's a really interesting understanding, the wealth inequality that's growing, that's evident.
I never really looked at it from that perspective, that it's an inflation of, you know, when we look at just facts, inflation of the R-selected lower IQ population, that's, you know, trends to make less money, and that would clearly amount to an unequal wealth distribution because you're just adding more R-selected lower IQ people to the population.
You're propagating that gene.
Well, and that gene is using the welfare state to propagate itself.
Right, right.
I mean, the people who are up there thumping the podium say, take care of the poor.
It's like, hey, man, poor genes like to fuck, too.
And I know all these rich genes are out that are fucking making a lot of rich genes, but hey man, throw some cheddar to the poor genes, because, you know, we like to breed too.
And this competition among gene sets is foundational to evolution, and the R and the K gene sets are in competition, which to some degree, though not exclusively, translates into the more sophisticated, less sophisticated, smarter, and dumber gene sets.
But, oh yeah, no, the dumb gene sets, the welfare state is like, you know...
I mean, it's like free food and shelter for them.
I mean, it's like injecting straight sugar into the protein dish.
Breed, breed, breed, breed, breed, breed, breed!
And that's pretty horrifying to the rich gene set.
And that's why when you're talking about the free market, This is why we were talking about the first caller.
Why aren't people listening to Reason?
Because genes like to reproduce.
So when you start talking about cutting government spending, basically you're setting up a whole bunch of reality snipers with their lasers trained on the dumb gene set.
And again, I just want to...
I'm not talking about shooting anyone.
It's economic results, right?
Natural selection.
It's not about killing anyone.
And it's not about letting anyone starve.
People get all hysterical about this stuff.
I'm just talking about the natural consequences of freedom.
Like, let's say, let's just go out on a limb here.
Imagine a free society and imagine there is some highly irresponsible Roman in the gloaming tramp who just, you know, she's like, she takes her vagina and like firms it up, turns it into a slight banana bend and just throws it around like an Australian Outback guy trying to catch down an emu with a boomerang.
Just whack it to You know, she's just out there like catching dick like she's a catcher at the Mets, right?
And let's say she's had a whole bunch of kids, right?
And then she goes to, you know, with low-quality men, right?
Like men who have to slither themselves up from a puddle in order to impregnate and then disperse into the loser wind, right?
Yeah.
And then she goes to a charity and she says, I got these 19 children, I got no daddy, and I've still got 10 years of fertility in me.
Can I get some cake?
They'll be like, okay, we could help you mostly because of the children, but basically you have kind of a rapid fire ovary set.
Like you're spitting out more kids than old faithful sneezes into the lower atmosphere.
So we're going to have to circle back a little bit.
We're going to help you out, but you need to put this little implant in there, little lady, so that you can still go around spreading your diseases, but not creating quite as many children in the process, right?
Right.
And so that would be one potential, right?
Now, the irresponsible R-selected gene set that that would represent doesn't want that birth control, because that's interfering with the reproduction of the gene set.
And so if somebody's so irresponsible that they keep having kids, then one of the prerequisites of charity will be stop fighting.
Fucking put down the penis.
Take a step back because you're bringing down society with your boomerang hoo-hoo.
Please stop whatever you're doing.
Step back from the vajayjay.
I'm afraid you're...
Because you're socializing your children, I'm afraid we're going to have to socialize that vagina and lock it down.
We're going to have to lock it down tight.
We're going to have to basically lock it into a sub and send it to the bottom of the ocean.
But...
Sorry, there's semen in a sub, so that would probably...
That would probably do it too.
So that gene set, they don't want private charity, right?
It doesn't want private charity because that would interfere in the reproduction of the gene set.
Our gene set, as I talked about in the Gene Wars presentation, wants to create this infinite abundance scenario.
That doesn't happen with private charity.
Private charity comes with very strict guidelines about do this and don't do that.
Like you try smuggling a bunch of coke into a rehab facility, you are out on your ass and you may be back in jail.
Serious consequences, right?
They don't want that.
If you were into serious consequences, you wouldn't be R-selected in the first place.
So I would say that the government is perfect for that R-selected gene set or the less intelligent gene set.
So when you're talking about let's cut government spending, what you're talking about is gene death.
Gene death.
And that's not immediate.
But of course, gene death is not supposed to wait until the last one.
Because when you're down to one, you're pretty much it anyway.
Because, you know, unless you're some disgusting space alien or one of those weird slugs that can have sex with itself that I really wanted to be when I was 14.
But they wouldn't let me into the zoo exhibit.
Not in the suit I was wearing.
Anyway, that's a topic for another time.
But yeah, when you're talking about cutting government spending, you're talking about cutting off the protein drip to the idiot bacteria that are currently breeding.
And when you're talking about privatizing things, when you're talking about the free market, you're talking about, hey, dumb people resources are shifting to smart people.
How do you feel about that?
Oh, and if you want the help of smart people because you keep doing dumb things, you're going to have to start doing smarter things.
Oh, if you do smarter things, by the way, you'll also be killing off the dumb gene set because you'll be either not having kids or you'll be having kids with smarter people, which also weans off the dumb gene set.
And so one of the big insights for me over the last year or two has been just this growing realization that society is a series of gene wars.
And that people, I mean, they can talk all they want out of their mouth holes, but they're basically just sock puppets being run by their genetics.
And I find it hard to find arguments against that, like I resist the idea, I resist the idea.
But as the evidence accumulates, you know, it's kind of tough to avoid it.
How do dumb people do in a free society?
Well, they're taken care of, and nicely, but they sure as hell aren't given resources to breed endlessly.
Because that's bad for everyone.
And so how do dumb people do in a free society?
Well, do you see a lot of Neanderthals around at the moment, other than staring squintily from deep within the recesses of a Swede's blue eyes?
No!
So anyway, I just wanted to mention that.
The thing that kind of worries me is, like you said, I completely understand and agree with what you're saying, the R and the K and the differences in IQ as far as survival goes, especially in a free market.
They'll definitely come up point around 2030, 2040.
I read this book by Ray Kurzweil called How to Create a Mind, and in it he talks about that in those years, 2030, 2040, around there, we'll be having machines that have exceeded IQ of 150.
So at that point, hopefully we're in a position where the most intelligent humans don't get weeded out in this natural selection process by more intelligent machines.
On my list of things to be concerned about, what robots may be able to do in 2050...
Not very high on my list.
Yeah, 15 years.
Oh, has he got it down to 15 years?
Really?
Ray Kurzweil, yeah.
Has he had standard predictions before where he can tell what technology is going to be like in 15 years?
Yeah, he's the CTO at Google.
He's like a genius.
In 1990, he made 174 predictions that would happen by 2012.
And out of those 174, 84% came true.
He's got a good reputation for that.
He's making the prediction that by 2029 we'll have machine intelligence that is equivalent or surpassing humans.
No.
Look, I'm sorry.
I mean, because for him to make that prediction, it means that he must understand what human intelligence is, how it works, and how it can be artificially surpassed.
There's no...
And I've talked to a lot of brain researchers, right, as you know, right, in this show.
And...
Nobody knows how human intelligence actually works.
Like, nobody knows what is the relationship between the subconscious and the conscious mind.
Nobody knows what inspiration comes from.
Nobody knows why some people are funny and some people aren't.
So for him to say we've got machines capable of reproducing the human mind in, what is it, 14 or 15 years...
What is it that makes someone charismatic?
What is it that makes someone able to write great music?
What is it that makes somebody able to have a perfect memory?
What is it that makes...
Nobody knows!
So the idea that this guy knows what is going to replace human intelligence means that he must know what human intelligence is to a very, very significant degree at the moment, and he doesn't.
Because nobody does.
Now, if he's talking jetpacks, I'm with him.
You know, if he's talking about, you know, we could have, you know, spacesuits that allow us to walk on the seabed, you know, whatever, right?
Yeah, I'm with him because these are all, you know, extensions and they don't require.
And he may be right insofar as there may be stuff that happens in 10 or 20 years that can replace human intelligence.
I mean, anything's possible.
But he would have to say, I know what human intelligence is.
We've mapped that to 100%.
Robots are currently at 20%, and they're gaining 10% every year.
So by golly, in eight years, we'll have it, right?
But nobody knows what that 100% of human intelligence is.
Nobody has any clue.
Again, and I've read a lot about it.
I'm in a privileged position of having to talk to quite a lot of brain researchers over the years in this show and outside the show in other ways.
So...
You know, I'm impressed with the guy's predictive abilities.
Sounds fantastic.
I'm glad to, you know, such a smart guy is taking my AdSense dollars.
But I guess the question I would have for him, you know, Ray, come on the show.
That would be...
No, I'd love it.
But what I'd ask him is, okay, so if you've got a prediction that says, you know, in 15 years we're going to have robots with an IQ of 150, okay, so then you must know what human intelligence is now and why are you keeping it such a secret from all these brain researchers?
I don't think he is.
It's not just a matter of processing, right?
It's not like we just process, because of course computers can process things.
Virtually infinitely faster than human brains and have much greater retention and so on.
These spontaneous connections of inspiration and creativity and so on, I don't know.
I mean, dreams are a very important part of creativity, which is why we talk about them a lot on the show.
When people want to bring that topic up, I find it fascinating to talk about.
Dreams are a very important part of creativity and nobody knows.
Where dreams come from.
Nobody has any clue why you have a particular dream and not another dream.
And so to reproduce human creativity, human intelligence, you need to figure out exactly why the unconscious is doing it and exactly why the unconscious comes up in an autonomous way.
I never know what the hell I'm going to dream at night.
And I wake up in the morning like, the fuck?
That's my first thing in the morning.
Fuck!
Why?
Like I dreamed the other night I was dreaming about This boss I had years ago died recently.
I had this, like, giant involved dream about his funeral and his family and weeping and eulogies and...
God!
Why?
Why?
I don't know.
And so, if Ray Kurzweil, I think he said, if Ray has figured out...
If he can predict my dreams...
Well, Steph, I can tell that you're going to have a dream about...
And Ariel's head on Amber Rose's body.
Okay, sorry, that's not fair because I have that dream every night.
But let's say it's a dream that I don't have every night.
Under the sea.
Let's say that it's a dream I don't have every night.
If he can say to me, okay, this is the dream you're going to have tonight.
And if he can tell me that, okay, I'm going to start listening to him about intelligent robots in the future.
But I don't think anybody knows that yet.
I don't think anyone's close to knowing it.
And so the idea that he knows what can replace the unknown is something I don't find believable at all.
Again, maybe he's right.
Maybe there's something I don't understand about what he said.
But once people can predict dreams, then I think that they really have understood the brain in a very significant way.
And even if they can only do it at like 70% accuracy or 50% accuracy or whatever, that to me is very impressive.
But nobody knows where creativity comes from.
Nobody knows how the human mind spontaneously self-organizes.
Nobody knows the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious mind.
And nobody knows fundamentally where free will is in the brain.
You know, all this kind of stuff.
So I just, I don't know.
Yeah, I'm skeptical.
I have to tell you that.
Yeah, I'm not qualified enough to go into it, but from my research, I feel like there's people who are, if they don't understand that, they're very close.
And just more so decoding the way our neurons interact in our brain and these pattern recognizers and the hierarchy of What?
Do you find that the organization in your brain is very systematic?
Can you tell me how to do that?
I'd be very interested.
Just as an example, picture 100 neurons.
You group them together.
We're going to call that a pattern recognizer.
Hang on, hang on.
Hang on.
Wait, what was that?
No, just kidding.
Just like a group of neurons, right?
Group of neurons.
Okay.
And so that group of neurons is just a pattern recognizer.
And all it does is it recognizes a pattern.
So picture the letter A. And the left slant of the letter A is one pattern, that diagonal line.
So you would need three of these pattern recognizers to come together.
When they all fire in your brain, they recognize the left slant, the right slant, and the middle.
Then your brain's saying, oh hey, I see the letter A. And this is at the lowest scale, but it goes all the way up to higher levels of empathy and irony and love and humor.
These are just patterns coalescing into a large group.
Yeah, patterns coalescing does not illuminate things to me very much.
Stuff that is more complex is made up of stuff that is more simple.
I get that.
There's an event horizon after which human consciousness has exploded into something unprecedented in the universe, and it's that part.
I get, you know, yeah.
You can train a zebra to recognize the letter A, but zebras aren't writing any concertos anytime soon because they're too busy not getting their asses chewed off by lions.
So I get that, yeah, there's patterns in the brain and neurons fire and electrical impulses and chemicals, and I get that.
But that doesn't illuminate as to what the hell is actually going on.
You know, that's like, you know, putting your ear to the ground and saying, I hear rumbling.
There must be something going on to do with energy and motion in the earth.
I'm a geologist!
Right?
I mean, so, you know, and until we can actually start talking about IQ, I mean, geez, you can't even talk about IQ with the general population.
Yeah.
Because they, I don't know, they think that you're some sort of evil guy or some sort of determinist or whatever, right?
So, in China, you can because China actually cares about...
China actually cares about gaining knowledge and solving diseases and so on.
So they're not quite as scared of this stuff.
But you can't even talk about IQ in society as a whole.
So I'll wait for that conversation to begin.
And people who study IQ get, of course, attacked by politically correct people and drop that research and so on.
So we'll see.
We'll see.
And, you know, I reserve judgment.
And I apologize because, you know, it sounds like I'm just saying, Ray Kurzweil, what the hell does he know?
I mean, I'm in my basement, so clearly I would be right.
I get that that's a ridiculous perspective to have, but nonetheless, I am in a fairly unique position of having talked to a lot of people about this stuff.
Nobody knows what the hell's going on in the human brain, so I'm skeptical about people who say they know when it's going to be replaced.
That's fair.
That's fair.
All right, Manny.
You know the question?
Mike, that's it for callers, right?
Do we have just two tonight?
I've got one more.
One more.
Okay, man.
Do you mind if I move on?
Yes.
Yeah, of course.
Thank you so much.
Were you dying for another question there?
No, no, no.
That was it.
I fully appreciate it and I love your show.
Thank you so much.
Oh, thanks.
You were great to chat with.
I appreciate that.
Alright, up next is Ben.
Ben writes in and said, Stefan, in your book UPB, you forward the following argument.
The very act of controlling my body to produce speech demands the acceptance of my ability to control my speech, an implicit affirmation of my ownership over my own body.
He continues, Why does self-ownership arise out of the connection between a conscious being and motor control?
Undoubtedly, the average body is controlled by the consciousness within.
But why ought they have some moral dominion as a result?
That's from Ben.
Welcome, Ben.
Thank you very much, Stefan.
How are you doing?
Well, thanks.
So you accept self-ownership, is that fairly correct?
Well, I'm not...
I'm not straightforwardly disavowing that it exists, but I want to know, I'm curious as to where it arises between the relationship of consciousness and motor control, or if it's somehow inherent within consciousness or inherent within choice.
I don't know.
That's too complicated for me.
So let me just start off something more simple.
Sure.
And we'll get there.
Maybe we'll get there.
Okay.
In the letter that you wrote that Mike just read, Were the keys that you wanted to hit, did you hit them in the right sequence that you wanted?
Certainly.
Okay, good.
And you did that because you had a question that you formulated in your mind that you wanted to translate into, in this case, typed speech in an email, which then has been converted to sound waves and thoughts and ideas in other people's minds.
So...
You had an idea that you translated through using your fingers to choose the correct words and key presses and spacebar presses and send clicks or whatever it is, right?
Undoubtedly.
I'm not going to deny the causal connection between choice, consciousness, and, you know, the actions of a bot.
Okay.
Now, if you had sent a death threat instead, right, it would not be any different fundamentally in terms of you had made choices and you had typed out things and you had sent them, right?
Yes.
Okay.
So, I think we may have answered the question.
I think we may have answered the question, right?
So, the mind has choices.
And again, I know that we're begging the question, what if there's no free will and so on, which I've talked about other areas.
But if we just say, for the moment, right, I've got a three-part series on free will, just not for you, but for other people.
So the mind makes choices, and then the mind controls the body to enact those choices in reality.
And the reason that that matters is we can say, well, the mind has thoughts, but if you never communicate those thoughts or they never transpire into anything outside of your mind in any way, shape, or form...
They don't exist socially.
Sure.
Right?
And philosophy is not about being psychics.
Philosophy is about that which passes from human being to human being, because that's the only realm where empiricism takes root.
Is that sort of a behaviorist kind of take?
Well, just behaviorist is more around being programmed and reacting without free will, according to the Skinnerian model, as far as I understand it.
But what I'm saying is that if you have a thought in your head that never affects your behavior and never communicates, never communicate to anyone else, it has no presence in philosophy because it's nothing empirical, it's nothing provable, it's nothing that can be measured, it's nothing whatever, right?
Right.
Like that dream I just had about a boss of mine who died.
If I'd never talked about that with anyone, it would be nothing to do with philosophy.
Right.
Because philosophy could never determine the truth or falsehood or whether I had it.
It wouldn't even know that I had it because it would be something in my mind.
Didn't affect my behavior.
Didn't call up his family and say, oh, I'm sorry, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
And so when a thought is translated into something empirical, into the world, into reality in some manner.
then somebody's caused that to happen, right? - Absolutely. - You had a thought and you thought, "Oh, I'd like to talk to Steph about this." And you made the decision to send it in, and you made the decision to be around for the call tonight and wait for me to finally shut up and talk to you from other people or whatever, right?
And so that does not exist outside of your head.
It must exist inside your head.
Right.
And there must be some capacity for volition that has caused you to do this.
Right.
So the fact that you own yourself and that you are responsible for the effects of your actions, right?
You say, Stephan, in your book, UPB, you don't say, in the book, UPB, that mysteriously ended up on your website, but I think was written by David Icke, Right?
You don't say that, right?
You say, Steph, your book, right?
So, Steph, I had the ideas.
I typed them out.
I read them off and all that kind of stuff.
And we put them on the website for free.
You can get the book on ethics at freedomainradio.com slash free.
So people say, well, your argument, your book, your statement, your quote, your whatever, right?
And so they're saying, okay, well, Steph, you had some thoughts and you translated them using your control of your body into some sort of communicable objective form.
By objective, I don't mean all my arguments are objective.
I just mean it's typed in letters that are objective, right?
I mean, they are objectively the words that they are, not that every argument is objective.
Like if I say two and two is five, well, I've objectively made that argument just now.
Put it out, right?
Right.
So, if we've got self-ownership, in other words, I control my body, and that's a physiological thing, right?
The brain is connected to the...
I can't remember how the song goes, but it's really...
I don't want to get it in my head because I just got it out after two years with my daughter.
But, you know, the brainstem is connected to the nervous system, connected to the spine, connected to all of the massive web of impulses that can make your hands...
Do that gay French thing that Jerry Seinfeld got in trouble for.
And so you can physiologically know that it is my brain that is physically attached to the nerves in my body and it is my brain that is...
You can trace these, right?
The impulse to move your hand starts in your brain and then travels down your arm and goes to your wrist and then you can do what you want with your wrist.
And so this physiological stuff, right, that the brain is usually...
Now, there are very rare occasions, like if you touch something really hot with your hand, there's a little short circuit that goes, like, in your arm will jerk back before the pain signal even reaches your brain.
So there are times where you've got, or the doctor hits your knee with a hammer to see if you want to kick him in the tit.
And so...
That is all physiological.
Brain attached to these things.
You can see that those impulses traveling through the nervous system and they originate in the brain and so on, right?
Sure.
And so all of that is not really open to philosophical interpretation.
Those are sort of medical or biological realities.
And so I must be responsible for the effects of my actions because I have the choice as to whether I... Put my thoughts into action or not, right?
You had a choice as to whether you just sit with this idea or question that you had or whether you're going to send it in and talk to me or not.
If I sit there and I'm, you know, somebody crosses their leg on the subway and kicks me, you know, there's that little top part of the ankle that if you wrap it, it's like, oh, pain!
And so somebody crosses, their heels hit my, right, and it's a flash of pain that's surprising and then I have a choice, right?
I can say...
Hey, be a little more careful.
He's hit me.
Or I can elbow that person in the head, right?
And I have that choice.
Now, if I am so impulse-driven that I just do it without thinking, well, that's the result of me not making that choice a whole bunch of times, and I'm still responsible for that.
So I think that we've kind of chewed through it and found that...
Since ideas originate within the mind, and we can't control our thoughts necessarily, but we certainly can control whether we enact our thoughts.
Because when we can't, it's not called free will, it's called epilepsy or something like that, involuntary motion or tachokinesia or whatever the hell it's called, which you can get as a side effect from certain psychotropic drugs.
Okay.
And so I think we've got thoughts originating in the mind.
The mind has the capacity to control whether the thoughts are translated into some sort of empirically measurable format, whether that's an email or a death threat or a murder or a flower that you planted or something like that.
And I think that's gone A to Z through what you've talked about.
But do you want to just go through the question and see if we missed anything?
I started basically almost 100% with everything you said.
I grant consciousness, I grant free will, I grant its ability to physiologically affect the body.
What I'm still unsure of is why there is...
It's true of the fact that I do control my body, but is there a reason I ought to?
In other words, is there a reason someone who, let's say, could, you know, tap into my brain stem and control my body shouldn't do that, other than the fact that I was born this way and I was given these abilities by nature?
Well, they can do whatever they want if it's your choice, right?
Like when I went in for surgery, they knocked me out, right?
Sure.
In a way, they reached in through anesthesia and turned off my brain, or at least turned off my conscious mind.
And, you know, my whole life when I was a kid, I was like, I really want to know when I fall asleep.
I really want to know when I fall asleep, right?
I'd love to know that slow slide off that treacle cliff into deep sleep.
Of course, I'll die never knowing it because the moment you say, oh, am I asleep yet?
Oh, I just woke up.
And then you wake up.
It's like, oh, man, I missed it again.
And so I thought, well, if I go into surgery, right?
Same thing happened.
I'll never know that slow...
Slide off that Niagara velvet tricot cliff into sleep.
And I guess I'll just go to my grave dissatisfied with that.
But that's alright.
Got a lot of other stuff to be satisfied about.
So if you want to give people the choice, right?
If there's some rap module that you could...
Like a rap fish that you could slip into your ear like the babble fish from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
And it gave you all these kind of cool rap moves because it took over your body and just turned you into...
I was going to say the name of the guy in high school, the Oriental guy in high school who was the best breakdancer, but let's keep that private.
But yeah, if you put that thing in, then it died, and then you whatever, or you could sneeze it out or something, then yeah, okay, you...
You've given up control of your body to the dancing rap babblefish.
Yeah, then we have a show title.
But it's your choice, right?
Now, if somebody decides to somehow hack your brain and use some sort of I don't know, blood wave generator to control your brain.
Well, that's stealing your control over your body or whatever it is, right?
But doesn't stealing...
Okay, so that's where I get caught up.
Doesn't the whole idea of stealing or anything you would invoke to say against that person come from the whole idea that self-ownership exists in the first place?
Isn't that circular?
Well, no, we just went through self-ownership, right?
We just spent 10 or 15 minutes going over self-ownership.
We can't say that it's tautological now to assume it because we just established it.
So I would agree that self-ownership can come from the...
Let's say it does come from the ability of someone to control their body.
But...
My question is, if that's where the rest of property rights arise from, would the skeptic say, who's not yet convinced, would the skeptic say, I don't think that there's anything moral about that.
I find all those facts, all those physiological facts, simply amoral.
They have no moral nature.
Well, sure, but self-ownership is something that needs to be established as necessary but not sufficient condition for morality, right?
Clearly, let's say that I say, here's a cool Iron Man suit you can get into, right?
And you climb into the Iron Man suit and you expect to, like, walk around like you're in some upgraded version of Unreal Tournament.
And you're in this suit and then I push a button and the suit makes you go and punch a nun, right?
And, like, clearly you would not be responsible for punching the nun.
And we wouldn't put the suit in jail.
We'd put me in jail for making you go punch the nun in your robot suit, right?
Right.
That's assuming I wouldn't punch the nun anyway.
Okay, let's not be that way, okay?
Let's not be every single conceivable possible logical loop or we're never going to end the conversation, okay?
Let's just go with the flow a little bit because these interruptions will make us never get anywhere, all right?
So, clearly, I'm the one who would be responsible for that because I've taken over your body and my robot suit made you punch the nun.
And so, you would not be to blame.
The robot suit would not be to blame.
The remote control would not be to blame.
I would be to blame for pushing the punch a nun button, right?
Absolutely.
Okay.
So, if you don't have control over what your body is doing because you're in my robot punch a nun suit, then...
You are off the hook, right?
Because I am controlling your body, not you, right?
Yes.
And so we can't have any morality if there's no such thing as self-ownership.
And we know that because when you're not in control of your body, then you are not morally responsible for the consequences, right?
Like, I mean, if I walk up and punch you out of my own free will, I'm morally responsible for that, or at least I'm responsible for that, even if we forget about the morality of it.
But if I have an epileptic attack and I elbow you in the head and it's the first one I've ever had and there was no, then clearly that's an unfortunate accident, but I'm not a murderer, right?
Absolutely.
Gotcha.
So, first we must establish self-ownership and responsibility for the effects of one's actions.
Now then, once we have that, we have something that's necessary but not sufficient for morality.
In other words, without that, there can't be any such thing as morality.
But with that, we have created at least a possibility of morality.
Now, if somebody says, well, okay, you own yourself, you own the effects of your actions...
But I'm a moral nihilist.
Well, that's another question.
And that's another discussion which is around how to establish ethics in the presence of moral nihilism.
In other words, how to establish ethics without a god who's going to burn you if you disagree or a government's going to throw you in jail if you disobey.
Now, that we're not going to have because I've got a whole book about that called UPB and I don't want to start reading it and all that kind of stuff, at least not right now.
So, yeah, somebody can say, oh, I accept self-ownership.
I just don't accept ethics.
Okay, well, that's fine.
Then you have the discussion about ethics.
But your discussion here in particular was self-ownership.
Absolutely.
That's absolutely right.
Now, could someone else...
Not someone else could.
So Mill takes the position that I believe self-defense, the right to self-defense, is an end in itself, some sort of intrinsic value.
And we touched on intrinsic value earlier.
Do you think there are good reasons for not accepting those arguments?
Well, I mean, it's been a while since I've read Mill, but something like intrinsic value is not an argument, it's just a statement.
This thing has intrinsic value.
Okay, well, if you agree with it, I guess you agree with it, but if you don't agree with it, that's not going to budge you, right?
Right, right.
I like sailing!
I like sailing too, or I hate sailing!
Okay, well, I mean, so saying that something has intrinsic value...
Or is necessary for society or is productive for civilization or is whatever, right?
It adds to a lot of people's happiness and so on.
So that's not philosophy.
You know, and I know it's an outlandish statement to say, well, John Stuart Mill, you know, right?
But saying that something has intrinsic value just based upon your reporting of the argument, that's not...
That is no philosophical content.
That's fair.
Totally fair.
Okay.
Oh, just one thing.
So I wanted to...
An earlier caller touched on the whole idea of robots and consciousness and stuff, and you're 100% right.
The hard problem of consciousness is one that is so far from being solved that it's possible, but it never will be.
But I believe it's Sam Harris.
Sam Harris attended a private conference with Elon Musk and some of the top scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence.
And what they said that, or what his report was that they are scary close to something that might not be creative like a human being, but could apply concepts, Learn new concepts and employ them in unfamiliar contexts.
Fantastic.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Sorry, what?
Well, it's just fantastic.
I mean, the degree to which robot intelligence can supplant human abilities or prop up human abilities is fantastic.
You know, I mean, so, you know, if I have to go hack down a field of wheat, it's going to take me a hell of a long time.
If I can drive a tractor or a combine harvester...
Fantastic.
You know, so much more productive.
My memory is not bad, but it's not spectacular.
But the fact that I have Google on a phone or whatever it's going to be that I'm going to look things up on a phone, that means that I have somebody, like a technology supplanting my human abilities.
So I welcome and I'm thrilled that our new robot overlords are going to be really great at supplanting human beings' capacity for creativity and intelligence.
But the degree to which they will eclipse us, I think that robots can replace government workers.
I think that robots can replace street sweepers and so on.
Robots can probably replace maids at some point in something more sophisticated than a Roomba, but still, of course, dressed in the same sexy Jennifer Aniston outfits.
But I don't think that, you know, this, well, we're going to get a new robot Einstein.
I mean, nobody even knows how Einstein did what he did.
Okay, he had a very big spatial reasoning center, but nobody knows if that's cause or effect.
So, like, of his capacity, so...
I have no fear whatsoever.
I have no fear that in 15 years you're going to see robot staff doing philosophy.
This is not going to happen because I have no fucking clue what I'm doing.
I don't know where this inspiration comes from.
I know that I have choices about...
How I enact it.
I don't have choices about how rigorous I am in going through the process of codifying what it is that I come up with.
But when something bubbles up, like some analogy or some approach, I swear to God, I don't want to lift the lid too much on what could laughably be called a process.
But half the time I'm talking to people, especially if it's about intensely personal, historical stuff, I'm asking them a bunch of questions.
I have no idea why.
And then like half an hour later, I'm like, that's why.
That's why.
That's why I had to establish all of that.
And I'm like, well, the reason I asked you these questions was, right?
And so I don't know what I'm doing half the time.
I mean, that sounds like I'm driving blindfolded.
I don't mean that at all.
It's just that, you know, you talk to Danica Patrick after she's being at 45 degrees for an hour and a half, you know, in burning rubber going through her nose.
And you say to her, well, what were you doing here?
I don't know.
I was just driving.
I was doing the best.
You know, your training takes over and you just do your thing.
And so the idea that there's going to be robot staff doing a philosophy show, analyzing dreams and talking reason and evidence and coming up with new theories about gene wars, I have no fear whatsoever.
And if there is, let's say there is that capacity, I think that would be a fascinating world to live in.
I love being eclipsed by smarter things and smarter people.
I love reading people who are a lot smarter than me.
I love being around people who are smarter than me.
I love being around entities that are smarter than me.
And intelligence tends to drive morality, good behavior, right?
Which is why, as I've said before, high IQ people are like the treasure that we need to spread in society.
They are the gold pixie dust of peace and non-violence and all that stuff that we need to get out into the world.
I've no, like, evil genius robots, you know, genius tends to be pretty nice overall.
The evil genius metaphor as a whole is just the projection of insecurity and general immorality that less intelligent people tend to feel projected elsewhere, right?
Right.
That, you know, people who are less intelligent, overall in general, not everyone, but people who are less intelligent tend to be less moral, tend to be more impulsive, tend to be more violent, tend to be more criminal, tend to have more substance abuse problems, tend to get divorced more.
They don't work very well in a modern society.
Maybe they work really well in a less modern society.
They sure as hell don't work in a modern technological society.
And so they look at this evil genius and what it is is that smart people make dumb people feel dumb.
And they don't have abilities to compensate.
You know, again, I'm speaking to physicists and I'm like, can you show me that with a ping pong ball?
Because my brain just went into a squid heart attack.
But I'm fine because I'm really competent and smart in other areas.
So I'm perfectly fine to wander into areas I know very little about and learn from experts.
And, you know, I'm not hanging my hat on being brilliant at everything because that would be insane.
But, you know, people who aren't smart in anything, well...
Smart people come along and, you know, they know likey, right?
So they project all of this insecurity and the immorality that clusters around lower IQ people, they tend to pretend is somehow the result of genius.
You know, it's like, I might be dumb, but at least I'm not sending nuclear weapons to create a San Andreas Fault and a new sort of shoreline along, I don't know, I lost some of that Superman stuff.
But he was cool when he was flying, man.
That was great.
And apparently you can turn back time by flying backwards around the...
Anyway, so...
Yeah, you know, I think it's cool.
I've heard a lot of technological predictions that ain't have been coming true so much.
But I know that computers, the way they're currently constituted, all they've got is binary processing sped up to eye-bleeding speeds.
But the human mind is...
A ridiculously, insanely complex ecosystem of a wild bunch of colliding shit that we can't even guess at as yet.
And so it's not like, well, if I take this Pong machine and make it run a billion times faster, I get the Algonquin Roundtable.
I get Christopher Hitchens.
Super Pong!
Well, actually, I think after a couple of days of drinking, that might be an apt...
But a human brain is not a sped-up computer.
And there's no amount of speeding up a computer that you can do that will produce a human brain.
It will produce fantastic capacities that the human brain can hugely benefit from offloading.
But a human brain is not just a faster calculator watch.
And again, I have some experience in technology.
And you can program some computers and do some pretty wild stuff.
There are, of course, neuristic learnings and so on and neural net learning and so on.
And it's really fast.
But it's not creating patterns.
It's just following the binary.
That's all it is.
You want to know what a computer is?
You see those little peg boards and you drop a ball and it goes...
That's all the computer is doing.
And, you know, we are not a really fast peg board.
I've got to tell you.
So, again, I'm not an expert in this area as far as artificial intelligence goes.
But...
And computers will be doing some cool stuff that will simulate some capacities of the human mind.
But...
We ain't about to be replaced by robot philosophers.
That's my...
Well, that sounds about right.
And I think you've answered...
Well, you've done more than a good job of answering all my questions.
I just wanted to say that, you know, two, three years ago, I was one of those people who I think your first caller was concerned about.
I was probably left of Lenin.
And...
Wait, John or Vladimir?
But after listening to arguments, I really did come to realize that my concerns were artificial and that libertarians stand on the side of reason.
And I just want you to keep fighting the good fight and thank you for being reasonable.
Well, I appreciate that.
I'm not sure that I would take the word libertarianism and unite it with reason, although there is a Reason magazine, but I appreciate your kind words.
And listen, I really appreciate your open-mindedness when it comes to hearing new ideas.
You know, I just did a video, how I was wrong about socialism, and I used an analogy.
And apparently, analogies are capitalist, because the socialists really did not understand what I was talking about.
And of course, because I don't think that they were necessarily the cream of crop of socialist thinkers, naturally the fault was all mine.
Mike's got a comment from that video.
I looked at a few comments and then I just had to stop.
In the same way, it's tough to eat caviar while standing in a sewer.
It's tough to have a good idea while reading some YouTube comments.
Mike's taking his time.
Maybe he's typing it out again.
Oh yeah, here we go.
Comparing geocentricism to socialism and libertarianism to the heliocentric view of the universe is just about the laziest philosophical analogy you could have possibly ever made!
One is an empirical claim regarding the accounting of data derived from observations of the universe.
The other is you attempting to justify your biased, untested, subjective economic worldview by comparing it to an empirically based science.
This, mind you, is entirely disregarding the fact that you not only don't have, but haven't collected the data to support your argument regarding the objective value or truth of libertarianism over socialism.
Yeah, just, you know, people who throw insults and think that they're doing anything other than smearing feces on their own face and calling it modern art.
I mean, it's just funny, right?
I mean, the basic analogy was, when you are consistent, you make huge leaps forward in human progress.
And the heliocentric model of the universe supplanted, and rightly so, the Earth-centered model of, sorry, the solar system of the universe, of the universe, supplanted it because it was more consistent and because everything fell, everything moved, and it was in accord with the evidence.
And so my point was that when you are more consistent, you tend to move ahead.
And then I said, well, in the same way, property rights, you can't just create arbitrary distinctions between a toothbrush and a factory and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But, you know, suddenly it's like apparently I'm just because I mentioned the word solar system, I'm insane, right?
It's just, it's an analogy to say that consistency generally has progress, and in the same way we have progress in the physical sciences, because we assume consistency until proven otherwise, we have the same thing when it comes to property rights, and once you have consistent property rights, you can't have socialism.
You know, that was sort of, there was more to it.
Wait, Mike, do you want me to do another one?
Really?
So you'd be bad for people?
All right.
Go for it.
Are you ready?
This is not in reference to you, the caller.
Are you ready?
Yes.
Fucking idiot.
You can't be against socialism, air quotes, right?
Because socialism is not one specific idea, nor a fixed ideology, nor even a rigid set of values.
Apparently it's whatever you want it to be.
Socialism can be used to describe almost every critic of capitalism at any point in history.
No definition of capitalism here.
Apparently capitalism is richly defined.
Socialism is just a free-floating bong hit exhalation.
There are as many different ideas of socialism as self-proclaimed socialists.
I know this is hard to get through your skull for all you randroids and pallbots Wait, shouldn't there be something tarred as well as to really hit the intellectual peak?
But not everybody on the face of the planet is a teenager without ideas of his own or an ideological clone created by the ruling classes.
Wow, one of the worst videos I watched for too much completely irrelevant information.
After you started, you turned away from socialism.
It took over 10 minutes to get to it!
10 minutes!
Ten minutes.
Wow.
Ten minutes to talk about logical problems I had with socialism before actually dissecting why I turned from it.
Ten minutes.
You know, that's like 20 commercials.
You know, that's a long time, you know.
Boy, you should try reading a Marcel Proust novel once in a while.
Ten minutes to get through the fucking chapter titles.
Anyway.
And you oversimplify the effects of people's start in life.
If you start in the ghetto, your chances are very slim of getting out, despite what you do.
Really a bad video.
And you clearly have no idea how to implement socialism.
This comes down to little more than a hit piece against socialism by yet another person who claims they used to be a socialist.
A liar!
More like.
It's like, again, this is just a bunch of like...
There's word salads and then there's like word salad bars.
And the comment section below this is a word salad bar of truly delightful, though sad to see in some ways self-delusion.
It's sad, you know, as I said, nothing can make you hate government schools more than seeing their products, right?
And these are people who are just like, you know, like turd-flinging monkeys, some guy on the internet, right?
It's like, They're just throwing shit at something and thinking they're making an argument.
Then people have no idea how to...
I don't even know.
I've done some stuff on this before.
I don't know how to break it down even more.
They have no idea how to analyze an argument.
And they have no idea how to disprove an argument.
They basically just throw negative words at it, hoping it's going to go away.
And they're like people throwing their own babies at ghosts.
It's such a superstitious and self-destructive action to do that...
I don't know.
And I don't think that these people can be helped, but that's neither here nor there.
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