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Sept. 7, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:09:40

The Joys of Invisibility! Freedomain Call In

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	Should we try that again? Yeah, let's try that again.
	All right. Let's do that.
	No, it's fine. Good evening, everybody.
	Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is the 2nd of September 2022.
	Welcome to my birthday month.
	Oh, glorious. Glorious birthday month.
	Of course, because I'm very bad at birthdays, I will naturally give you a gift.
	So... Promo code UPB, uppercase UPB, 2022 at freedomand.locals.com.
	totally uncharged free access to the premium section of the premier philosophy conversation in the world, largest, most popular, and I guess now one of the most suppressed.
	So, you know, that's where the truth is, is where they tell you not to go.
	And everywhere they tell you to go is where the truth just ain't.
	So you can go to freedomain.locals.com and you can sign up.
	You can get my free novel, my new book, my Atlas Shrug called The Future.
	You can check out all of the premium materials, all of the great conversations, great people to chat with, and all of the really wild, too hot for prime time call-in shows that are lurking and nestling up there as well.
	So I hope that you will check that out.
	It's a really nice community. And I hope you had a wonderful week.
	And I hope you're doing well.
	So, let's see here.
	If you have, I've got something to talk about, but here we have somebody who wishes to talk to, I guess, the world, to me.
	Adam, if you didn't but request a chat, just unmute yourself and you're on.
	Hi, Savon. Can you hear me? Yep, go.
	I was wondering if I could ask you a question about UPB, specifically the scene in your new book, with Atticus and David when they're having their negotiation and in that scene you talk about how in the past like what the Christians would say their morality was you their morality which was absolute was used against them so their absolute rules that they commanded themselves to follow or God commanded them to follow were used against them and it made them weak whereas with UPB There is no absolutism in the same way.
	I was wondering if you could kind of expand on that, because I was trying to figure that out, and it is a little bit tough for me to understand.
	All right. So there is absolutism in UPB, and I would argue that UPB is the most absolute.
	I'm doing a whole history of philosophy.
	History of philosophers! Sorry, history of philosophy will be next.
	History of philosophers at the moment.
	And I've gone all the way from Confucius through to the Buddha through to Parmenides and into the pre-Socratics and so on.
	Next I wrestle with Socrates.
	And one of the things, of course, that I notice is that it's always create a rule and exempt yourself.
	Create a rule and exempt yourself.
	So... The two things that I always look at in a philosopher is, you know, you need the most morality where you have the greatest power disparity.
	And I always look in philosophers for how they handle the two situations in all human societies.
	All human societies have two situations of the state or some tribal leaders, right?
	The state, we'll say. The state and the parent, right?
	And this is the place where there is the greatest...
	Disparity of power. The greatest disparity of power is the parent, the second greatest is the state.
	Now everybody is a child and was raised by parents or parent equivalents and everybody lives under a state.
	So they can't claim to be ignorant of it, like it's not something that affects every moment of their life.
	So I look for that and what you continually see is an ignoring of these two topics.
	In other words, if you look at something like Confucius, right?
	Do not do unto others as you would have them not do unto you.
	It's a negative of the golden rule from Christianity.
	Do not do unto others as you would have them not do unto you.
	Now, let's think of a country called Barbistan ruled by King Bob.
	Now, Bob, King Bob, if somebody attempts to use aggression against him, And rule over him, either through some domestic revolt or through some foreign invasion, he will fight that tooth and nail.
	Bob does not want to be subject to somebody's rule.
	He does not want to have someone invade and overthrow him or revolt from within and rule over him.
	Even if he just became another citizen, he desperately fights against that, right?
	So King Bob desperately and violently does not want to be ruled over.
	Yet King Bob rules over everyone else.
	So this would be a perfect example.
	For a rational philosopher to say, do not do unto others what you would have them not do unto you.
	Okay, so don't rule over others, King Bob, because you sure as hell don't want to be ruled over yourself.
	You would fight that tooth and nail. So the creation of rules and then the creation of exemption for rules is constant in philosophy, and I think I'm making a very fine case for it as I go through these philosophers.
	And I've got to tell you, I mean, I sometimes can be quite critical of my work, but this history of philosophers...
	Some of the best stuff I've ever done and am ever likely to do.
	Because even if you don't have any particular interest in a Buddha or Parmenides, you're going to get amazing stuff out of these conversations because I'm really trying to, I don't think, succeeding in tying it in to all of the dilemmas that we have in our life at the moment, right? All these dilemmas that we have to deal with in life at the moment.
	So, when it comes to universal ethics, are they truly universal?
	And, of course, I would argue, of course, that UPB is the only truly universal moral system that has been developed, because it allows for no exceptions.
	It allows for no exceptions.
	Now, the question is, are the moral rules absolute regardless?
	Of circumstances. Sort of a very big question.
	Are the moral rules absolute regardless of circumstances?
	Now, the question then becomes, let's say, thou shalt not steal.
	Well, of course, pay unto, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, render unto God what is God's.
	So that thou shalt not steal in Christianity is not universalizable because an exemption is made for the rulers, right?
	So that's not universalizable.
	Or it's not universalized.
	Thou shalt not steal.
	If somebody steals your bike, obviously you can take it back.
	Now, stealing being defined as the, people normally say it's the unlawful removal of property and so on.
	And if you're stealing something back, I think everybody, some kid steals your bike, you go and steal it back.
	You're not really stealing. You're just restoring property back to its original state.
	And you would say, well, I'm not stealing because it's not actually his property.
	It's still my property. I'm just reasserting the ownership that he usurped.
	So, the way that I work with philosophy, with moral philosophy, I mean, as I have throughout my show, and certainly in the case of my novel, The Future, is to say that morality is not an absolute that you just have to follow.
	And that's to bypass arguments against the universality of morality, such as, oh, lying is bad, right?
	But somebody breaks into your house, and I talk about this with regards to Immanuel Kant, but somebody breaks into your house and demands to know where your wife is so they can kill your wife, and you know where she is, right?
	Are you supposed to tell the truth? Well, Immanuel Kant would say, well, yes, you do have to tell the truth.
	And I don't think that that's a valid argument.
	I think deep down we have an instinctive belief or acceptance that that can't be right.
	It can't be that you have to surrender your wife to these people who want to kill her.
	Something's not right about that.
	That can't be the way that things go.
	So my solution to that is to say, look, you don't owe these people any moral qualifications.
	You don't owe them any moral responsibilities because they're Being violent towards you.
	And, of course, we have a habit when we're looking at moral issues to say, well, only focus on whether you should tell the truth to the guys who break into your house and want to know where your wife is so they can kill her.
	Only focus on those guys.
	That's the key. You've got to focus on those guys.
	That's the important thing. And I would say, no, that's not the important thing.
	The important thing is that there are guys who broke into your house who want to kill your wife.
	And that's the only thing that matters morally.
	What you do in response is immaterial.
	You can tell the truth, you can lie, because they've already violated moral obligations.
	So it would be similar to if you order something over the internet, should you pay for it?
	Well, only if it gets delivered.
	And so in dealing with the ethics of these emergencies that are thrown up, you know, someone's got a gun to your head and they're forcing you to do something.
	Should you do it? Should you not? It doesn't matter.
	The only thing that matters is somebody's got a gun to your head.
	You have no moral obligations to somebody who is evil towards you, somebody who's violated you.
	The non-aggression principle or even defrauded you.
	You have zero moral responsibility towards that person.
	So the way that I work with things is that morality is not an absolute that is commanded.
	Morality is a relationship.
	And the reason that I... What I want to talk about is that the modern world is kind of self-detonating in this orgy of altruism.
	Altruism is that the moral obligations are there regardless of reciprocity.
	The moral obligations exist regardless of reciprocity.
	You owe your life to the state.
	If they draft you, you owe your life to the state.
	Well, why? I mean, they're not going to lay down their life for you or anything, right?
	Quite the contrary. They probably exploit your life quite a bit.
	So, I really work on morality as a relationship.
	That morality is a form of payment.
	And in order to earn my payment, you have to reciprocate, right?
	If you want to sell me a pen for a dollar, you have to give me the pen.
	I have to give you the dollar.
	I've earned you a pen by having the dollar.
	You've earned my dollar by having the pen.
	So it's a relationship.
	It's reciprocal. People who follow absolute morality where you have to do it no matter what are very easy to exploit.
	Because it's like if you're in a fight, right?
	Let's say you're in a fight, a fist fight, and you say to the person, no hitting below the belt, no biting, no kicking, like you're in a fight, right?
	Some recreational thing. Or maybe it's something desperate.
	Maybe it's something important. Maybe it's something serious.
	What do you do if the other person starts hitting below the belt and biting and kicking and going for your nuts or whatever, right?
	Well, I would argue that you no longer – if they've broken the rules, you no longer have any moral obligations to keep your side.
	Now, somebody might say, but you promised.
	It's like, well, they broke their promise.
	Well, it doesn't matter that they broke their promise.
	You have your own standards, your own standards of behavior, and you should – Follow good behavior on your part, regardless of what the other person does, right?
	I mean, we all remember this when we were kids, right?
	He started it. It doesn't matter if he started it.
	If he pushed you, you could walk away.
	You'd be the bigger kid. You don't hit back.
	You just have these moral standards that exist independent of other people's actions.
	So it doesn't make anything relative at all.
	It doesn't make the moral rules relative or subjective or conditional or anything.
	Moral rules are absolute, right?
	You cannot initiate the use of force or fraud against people.
	Rape, theft, assault, murder are all banned by UPB. This is really the concept of self-defense.
	There's nothing stunningly original about any of this stuff.
	It's at least this sort of reciprocity thing.
	It's like, yes, you can't shoot people unless they're trying to kill you.
	Then you can shoot people.
	You don't owe bodily integrity to somebody who's violating your bodily integrity.
	You don't owe a payment to somebody who has not delivered.
	The idea that morality is a relationship that is earned by good behavior on the part of others.
	If you have a friend who has consistently lent you money, and you've paid him back, and then he needs to borrow money for some emergency, is it reasonable that you lend him the money?
	Well, I think it's reasonable. You don't have to, but it's reasonable to lend him the money because he's earned your goodwill by being generous and kind and helpful towards you in terms of lending his money to you.
	Does that mean you have to lend everyone money?
	No, it doesn't. It doesn't mean that at all.
	But it does mean that if somebody has earned your trust, you owe them trust.
	If somebody has earned your goodwill, you owe them goodwill.
	It doesn't mean you're forced to provide any of these things.
	It just means it's a fair reciprocity thing.
	And so morality, moral considerations, are earned by good behavior.
	Morality is something that is earned by moral behavior on the part of others and other people.
	You earn their moral considerations by being moral towards them.
	The moral considerations are abstract and absolute, but absolute doesn't mean you have to follow it because it's morality, it's not physics.
	You have to follow physics. You don't have to, but you won't live very long if you don't.
	So the idea of morality is a relationship rather than Morality as an absolute, like physics that you have to follow no matter what, no matter what the other person does.
	You know, take the high road, be the bigger person, turn the other cheek.
	If somebody asks you to walk a mile with him or forces you to walk a mile with him, what, two miles?
	If somebody wants your jacket, give them your shirt as well, right?
	Those are moral absolutes, independent of exploitive or evil behavior on the part of others.
	And That morality would fundamentally – I'm not talking about Christianity here in particular, but that morality would be invented by people who want to exploit you and would be inflicted.
	You've got to do the right thing regardless of what the other person does.
	It's saying, well, you've got to pay the bill even if the person never delivered you the service.
	It's like, no, you don't.
	And that's a defense in any contract, right?
	He didn't pay me. Well, did you deliver the good?
	No. Well, what are you complaining about?
	So I hope that helps. I'm certainly happy to hear more questions, comments, and issues about it, but I really wanted that to be...
	In the future, I want a society where it's really hard to exploit virtuous people, right?
	I mean, this is the Alyosha from...
	The brothers Karamazov, the problem that virtue is naive, that virtue is easy to exploit, that the good man is easy to pillage, because you can be fairly safe and secure from retaliation.
	So I wanted, you know, in the novel, I wanted to show David as a good father and a good friend and a reasonable man, but I needed people to see his ferocity as well.
	Which is a more temperate and civilized ferocity than Roman has, or Roman displays.
	But no, they need to see that morality is not a peaceful, unarmed farmer that the Cossacks can ride through and exploit and take from.
	That morality has to be well defended, and to be well defended, it has to have positive considerations earned by Outsiders.
	And this is, you know, this is an old statement to my college roommate who ended up with two PhDs, I think, taught me this and I've accepted it since I was, I don't know, in my early 20s.
	And he said, mathematically, it's kind of been modeled out that the best way to work in life, like, you know, the prisoner dilemma that you've got a bunch of prisoners who are all exchanging things through holes in the wall, you can't enforce anything.
	How do you best optimize the prisoner's dilemma?
	And the prisoner's dilemma has been mathematically worked out to be the best way to do it is you treat people the best you can the first time you meet them.
	You treat people the best you can the first time you meet them, right?
	It's a beautiful thing. And after that, what do you do?
	In order to be not exploited, in order to have the greatest chance of success, you treat people the best you can the first time you meet them.
	And after that, you treat them exactly as they treat you.
	This is my, you know, when people call in to debate, I treat them very best I can.
	And after that, I treat them as they treat me.
	So I had a debate with some communists a while back ago, and I called them the worst fucking communists in the world because they were defending large corporations against a working class hero like me.
	And that's just terrible communism.
	But the reason I didn't have any particular consideration for them was they started off by insulting me.
	So it's like, okay, well, if that's the way we're going to play, that's the way we're going to play.
	So, yeah, you treat people the best you can.
	First time you meet them, and after that, you treat them as they treat you.
	And that is optimum, which is not an argument.
	That's a utilitarian argument.
	It's not a moral argument. But the moral and the practical should be one.
	So if you have a morality that does not align with...
	Treat people the best you can when you first meet them, and after that, treat them as they treat you, then you have a morality that's going to lose.
	Because if you have an optimal resource-gathering strategy, but you have a morality that goes in the other direction, then the bad people are going to gather more resources, control more of society, and end up taking over and subjugating the good people.
	So morality is only sustainable when it is practical and efficient.
	And so I hope that helps, and I'm happy to hear your thoughts about it if you have more or other questions that are floating around.
	Yeah, that does help a bit.
	Would it be right in saying that UPB is not something that's absolute in the sense that you have to always obey the standards, but more it's an absolute standard of measurement, per se, sort of an objective standard that...
	You can always use under all situations to identify if somebody is being moral.
	So, yeah, the best analogy for UPB is science.
	So, you don't have to follow the scientific method, but if you claim, if you make a claim that you're...
	Universal prediction or your universal rule for the behavior of matter and energy.
	If you say, I have developed a universal rule for the behavior of matter and energy, or universal observation that's predictable and absolute about how matter and energy behaves, like the inverse square law or law of gravity or something like that, right?
	So if you say, I have a universal description and prediction of the behavior of matter and energy, Then you're claiming to have what is the product of science.
	It must be internally consistent.
	You can't say a gas both expands and contracts at the same time.
	You can't say that my particular bird species, if you're a biologist, it breeds in summer and winter at the same time.
	Because summer and winter are not at the same time.
	So it has to be internally consistent.
	Non-contradictory because the behavior of matter is not contradictory, and it has to be consistent with observable data, and it has to be reproducible by other people, and so on and so on and so on, right?
	So, if you say, here's what...
	The truth is, in a universal abstract fashion about the behavior of matter and energy, then you have to have gone through the scientific method.
	And if you haven't gone through the scientific method, you're making an empty claim which nobody is obligated to accept because you have to go through the rigor of proving it through the scientific method.
	And I'm not talking peer review.
	Peer review is just a bunch of garbage for the most part that is a way of laundering Anti-scientific nonsense.
	Certainly in the social sciences, it's a way of laundering anti-scientific nonsense and giving it a sheen of respectability because you've got other well-paid conformists to check on your delusions, to put a check mark on your delusions.
	So, again, look at UPB. Just think of science.
	It's the closest analogy.
	And, of course, science is the most successful human discipline.
	So if you want to model something that's positive, it's a pretty good idea to model it after science.
	So to take the analogy from science to UPB. So if somebody makes a universal claim about matter...
	It has to be internally consistent.
	It can't be self-contradictory because you're describing matter, which doesn't behave in self-contradictory matters, right?
	Rain doesn't fall up and down at the same time.
	So if you make a universal claim about the behaviors of matter and energy, it has to be internally self-contradictory.
	Sorry, it can't be internally self-contradictory.
	It has to be logically consistent, and it has to accord with empiricism.
	So in the same way, if you're going to say, I have a universally preferable standard called whatever.
	Oh, your argument is inconsistent with the facts and therefore it's wrong.
	Your argument is internally self-contradictory, therefore it's wrong.
	You said that Paris is the capital of the Pacific Ocean.
	Well, it's not, so you're incorrect, right?
	So if you're going to have a universally preferable standard that says statements that are true, it sounds tautological, but statements that are true should be true.
	Statements that are true should accurately reflect reality.
	And for statements to be true, they must be internally consistent and they must accord with evidence.
	So according with reason and evidence in the same way that science has to accord with reason and evidence to be a valid theory.
	So if I say Paris...
	It's the capital of France and the moon, or France and Germany.
	Well, Paris can't be the capital of two different countries, so you don't need to go and check.
	You don't need to go and look that up, because I'm making an absurd claim that's...
	I mean, if you say to the police, so they say, where were you in the night of January the 22nd?
	And you say, well, I was in Paris and the North Pole at the same time, right?
	That's not physically possible, so they would simply discard that statement as false.
	They don't need to go and check. Well, we're going to need some receipts from Paris, and we're going to need a photo of you with embedded metadata or something at the North Pole or whatever.
	They just say, no, you can't be in two...
	There's the whole point of an alibi is you can't be in two places.
	So if you're proven to be in one place, you can't be...
	In another place. So, if somebody says that truth is a value, right?
	So you say, two and two make five, and they say, no, no, no, two and two make four.
	All the stuff that happened when we were four or five years old learning math, right?
	Two and two make four. And you say, two and two make five, somebody says, no, no, no, two and two make four.
	Well, they're correcting you according to a universal standard, right?
	The universal standard is reason and evidence, right?
	Two and two are just another way of saying four, right?
	I mean, you're saying that if you cut a cake in half, you get a cake and a bit.
	You don't get a cake and extra.
	You just get two halves of a cake.
	So somebody corrects you on anything.
	Then they're telling you that your statement is false, not according to my opinion, not according to my perspective, not according to, you know, was Led Zeppelin the worst act at Live Aid?
	And yes, I think to the point where the guitarist said, please, God, don't include this in the box set, right?
	So it's not a matter of aesthetics.
	It's not a matter of personal taste.
	It's not a, I like, I'm different, and so on.
	It's not like, well, I like Peter and you like bread.
	It's nothing to do with that. It's a, hey, don't shoot the messenger.
	I'm simply informing you That your statement is self-contradictory.
	Because if you're saying 2 and 2 make 5, and 2 and 2 is just another way of saying 4, then you're saying 4 is equal to 5.
	And 4 is not equal to 5.
	That would be impossible, both logically and empirically.
	You can't have 5 oranges and count 4.
	So... Sorry, your statement does not match reason and evidence, and therefore it is false.
	Okay, so that's a universally preferable standard.
	A UPS, I dare say.
	Tipping my hat to the shipping company, I suppose.
	A universally preferable standard.
	If you're going to make a claim about something that is true, it has to accord with reason and evidence.
	Okay, so if you're going to make a statement, and when you correct someone, you're saying that Facts are preferable to error.
	And not somewhat preferable.
	Like if you were to say to a teacher, right?
	You say, two and two make five.
	And the teacher says, no, no, no, two and two make four.
	And you were to say, okay, what about tomorrow?
	Hey, wait, what if I take a step to the left?
	What if I take a step to the right?
	And he's like, no, no, no, tomorrow, wherever you're standing, wherever you go, two and two make four.
	It's not, right? It's a universal statement.
	And you get marked down because you're supposed to be saying things that are true about numbers and their relations.
	And if you say something false about numbers and their relations, then you are incorrect.
	And you're not incorrect according to the perspective or the opinion or the subjective preference of the teacher.
	You're incorrect according to an objective standard.
	So the moment somebody corrects you, they're saying...
	If you want to tell the truth, you ought to tell the truth.
	And if you're not telling the truth, I will correct you and say that you're wrong.
	Because when you say two and two make five, you're making a truth claim about something that is independent of your consciousness.
	If I say, I like big butts and I cannot lie, well, you're not saying something that is true independent of your consciousness.
	Some men don't like these step ladders of big butts and prefer that tidy little Scottish butt or whatever they like, right?
	But if you're saying two and two make five, you're making a truth claim that is independent of your consciousness, and then you're subjected to standards of truth or epistemology that are independent of your consciousness.
	If I say, I like the color blue, can anyone tell me I'm wrong?
	It's impossible. This is one of the things, like if you're in negotiations or if you're in a relationship with people, if you say, I'm upset by what you said, Nobody can tell you that you're not upset.
	I mean, they might disagree with you for the reasons why.
	But if you said, you know what, if you try to say this to your girlfriend or your boyfriend, what you did really upset me.
	No, it didn't. Now, you might say you shouldn't be upset or it's irrational, but you can't say no, right?
	So subjective experiences can't be gains.
	They can't be... You can't be told that you're wrong because you're not making a claim outside of your subjective experience.
	You're saying, I am upset.
	You're not making a claim that is outside your subjective experience.
	You're not making a claim about universal truth or things that are real or things that are factual and all of that in the universe, right?
	And you might even say, you know, I think it's kind of crazy, but I got really upset about this, that, and the other, right?
	So, I know this all sounds terribly long-winded, but I'm just trying to give you the sort of full 360 on UPB. The moment someone corrects you, they're applying a universally preferable standard called truth over error, fact over fiction.
	Statements about reality that accord with reason and evidence.
	So they've already told you what you ought to do.
	If you're trying to make a truth claim, it ought to be true.
	If you claim to be making a truth claim, it ought to be true.
	Otherwise, you have to withdraw your claim.
	I mean, if you get into an argument with your grade two math teacher, she says two and two make four, and you say, no, two and two makes five.
	She says, no, no, here, let me draw it out for you.
	Count these, two and two make four, you count these.
	Nope, two and two make five. Well, nobody would allow you to do that.
	I mean, you could do whatever you want, but it would not be marked as valid.
	So, the moment that you correct someone, you are correcting them according to universal standards, not personal opinion.
	I mean, the teacher doesn't say, I'm going to be really upset because If you don't say that two and two make four, I can't prove it.
	It's not true, but I would really prefer it.
	I'd be really upset if you don't say that two and two make four.
	She wouldn't say that. She said, no, two and two make four.
	It's a fact. Don't get mad at me for facts, right?
	I mean, you can, but it's irrational, right?
	So, somebody corrects you?
	They're saying you are incorrect according to a universal standard called truth, reason and evidence, and you ought to correct your statement.
	And you don't have to correct your statement, but your statement is incorrect.
	So if you say this statement is true when I've just shown you that it's not, then you're lying and therefore you can't be trusted in intellectual discussions, right?
	I'll tell you a little thing here.
	So when I was very little, I don't know, maybe five or so, I was at my aunt's place with a bunch of my cousins and I had a little bit of a younger brother syndrome.
	Maybe I still do. I don't know.
	But I had a little bit of a younger brother syndrome back then, which is kind of tough to carve out your own personality.
	And there's a little bit of envy of the older brother and all that because, you know, they seem to have cooler friends and they can do more things.
	And the only thing I couldn't do was run.
	The only thing I could do was run faster.
	So, I was playing a game of Monopoly, and I did a calculation and handed over some money, and the person took the money, put it in the bank, and then they came back and said, wait, wait, wait, I don't think that calculation was correct.
	And people, my cousins, they talked about it with me, and they showed it to me.
	They were very patient, very nice, like some nice cousins, and they...
	They drew it out for me, and I got it.
	I got it within about a minute, but I just couldn't admit it, and eventually I did.
	Now, what I tried to do was I just said, okay, fine, and they said, no, no, no, not okay, fine.
	This is one of my first lessons In metaphysics, in epistemology, I couldn't have called it that by then.
	Because I was tempted, I guess as we all are tempted from time to time when we were five and in the wrong, they said, and again, they put the math out, they drew it out very carefully, they were very patient, very nice, they were nice cousins, great people to spend time with when I was growing up.
	And I was just, I was so petty and so like, I'm not going to admit that I'm wrong, that I was like, no, that's fine, that's fine, let's just keep playing.
	And they were like, no, no, no, no.
	No. Not it's fine.
	Is it true? Do you understand?
	Do you need for us to go over it again?
	No, it's fine. Okay, I accept it.
	I accept it. Let's just move on.
	It's like, no, no, no. It sounds like you don't accept it.
	Because we're not trying to impose our will on you.
	We're just trying to show you what is.
	We're not bullying you.
	We're just giving you the facts.
	And again, a very, very sort of powerful lesson.
	I don't think I ever did that again.
	But I'm sure we've all done this, where you just take a position, you kind of know that it's wrong, you kind of get that it's wrong, but man, is it hard to give up sometimes, right?
	I think we've all had that situation at one time or another.
	So yeah, someone corrects you.
	They're correcting you according to a universal standard, and they're claiming it's universally preferable behavior, that when you claim a true statement, it'd actually be true.
	So now we already have universally preferable behavior just in the act of correcting someone.
	So then it's simply a matter of saying, okay, so we already have universally preferable behavior because you just corrected me and not according to your preferences or your whims, but absolute facts.
	Okay, so we've established universally preferable behavior.
	Now all we need to do is figure out what universally preferable behavior actually is.
	What is universally preferable behavior?
	And then we go to the morals and so on, right?
	So correcting someone from an error, right?
	Somebody says, you know, let's say somebody stops you on the street and says, you know, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?
	And you say, practice, practice, practice.
	You say, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?
	And you say, oh, you go that way and you point to your left and then they just go off to the right.
	Okay, so they ask you something, they're making an error, they're going in the wrong direction, and that's fine.
	That's fine. Maybe somebody told them that where they want to go is the opposite of the way to Carnegie Hall, and maybe they are going in the right direction for what they want.
	But then when it comes to the imposition of will and violence and force, rape, theft, assault, and murder, well, universally preferable behavior has to have some relationship to rape, theft, assault, and murder.
	And we know that empirically because every single society has a legal relationship to rape, theft, assault, and murder.
	Even primitive societies have a relationship to rape, theft, assault, and murder.
	Some sort of ban or some sort of prohibition.
	And you have to have, when the question of theft comes up, it's either universally preferable behavior or it's not.
	Universally preferable behavior means everyone could do it at all times and under all circumstances.
	So you say, dancing the Macarena, is that universally preferable behavior?
	Well, no. People are asleep, people don't have legs, people are in wheelchairs, people get tired of the song.
	Macarena, right? So that can't be universally preferable behavior because not everyone can achieve it at all times.
	Not that everyone does, but everyone could.
	It could be universally preferable behavior because if it can't be universally preferable behavior...
	You can't propose it as universally preferable behavior.
	That is literally like proposing that to get to Carnegie Hall, you go towards Carnegie Hall and away from Carnegie Hall at the same time.
	It's a self-contradictory statement.
	Therefore, you don't have to go out and step it out and check.
	It's just incorrect. It's incorrect.
	Well, the answer to your question, what is the ideal shape, is a square circle.
	It's like, no, because the square circle doesn't exist.
	There's no such thing as a square circle.
	And so, you don't need to check it and draw it out.
	You can't draw it out. It can't be done.
	It can't be done. So, with the question of theft, can it be universally preferable behavior?
	No. No.
	Of course not. Because theft is the unwanted transfer of property.
	If I want you to take my property, it's not theft.
	It's asymmetric, right? You want to take my property, I don't want you to take my property.
	But if it's universally preferable behavior, everybody should want to have their property taken and take other people's property.
	Now, of course, it doesn't pass the coma test, right?
	People in a coma can't be evil and the opposite of moral.
	It's immoral. So people in a coma can't be immoral.
	So if you have to take everyone's property all the time, then people in a coma are deeply immoral.
	If that doesn't bother you, I don't know what to say.
	Then you're too abstract and not soulful enough to have these discussions.
	If that doesn't, yeah, well, I guess people in a coma are immoral then.
	It's like, no, no, come on. This is an old Aristotelian argument that if your moral system can be used to prove that Rape is great, then come on.
	I mean, you know you've made a mistake.
	Don't be me when I'm five playing a Monopoly game and refusing to admit that I'm wrong.
	Be older than me at five.
	I think that's a fair standard, right?
	So, yeah.
	Rape can't be universally preferable behavior.
	It doesn't pass the common test.
	And rape is unwanted sexual activity.
	But if rape is universally preferable behavior, it means everyone...
	Ought to rape and be raped.
	It's asymmetric, right?
	There's a doer and a being done unto.
	So everybody must want to rape and be raped, blah, blah, blah.
	It doesn't work, right? Because if the person wants to be raped, it's not rape.
	If the person wants to be stolen from, it's not theft.
	So, I mean, somebody might want to be assaulted.
	Right? Somebody might want to be assaulted.
	Right? You can think of various scenarios.
	A guy needs to get out of being drafted so he wants you to, I don't know, break his foot or something.
	Somebody might want to be assaulted. It's not assault.
	Somebody might get into a boxing ring or play a game of hockey or try to give speeches in Australia.
	Who knows? So, even the act of having a conversation with someone shows that they exist.
	You accept the validity of the senses.
	You accept that language has meaning.
	You accept a universal objective universe in which you're both communicating.
	You accept all these things. Everybody wants to start debating and jump past all the philosophical ramifications of having a debate in the first place.
	Everyone says, I want to jump into the bay.
	I don't believe that you exist. Why are you telling me that?
	If you really believe that I didn't exist, you wouldn't tell me.
	Russell Crowe, a fairly mediocre film called A Beautiful Mind.
	It's a guy who has all these visions, all these crazy visions.
	Sees people who aren't there, schizophrenic or whatever he is, right?
	So someone comes up to him later in the movie.
	And asks him a question. He turns to a guy walking down the hallway and says, can you see that person?
	And they say, yeah. So then he has a conversation with them.
	If the person said, I don't see anyone there, then Russell Crowe's character would not have the conversation.
	Because he'd know that person didn't exist.
	It was a figment of his own imagination.
	If you slow down the mere act of interacting and having a conversation, using words to convey meaning that is objective, Or objective enough.
	I mean, if I say brown, we may both be thinking of slightly different shades of brown, or maybe even significantly different shades of brown.
	But we're not thinking of an elephant in a helicopter, right?
	If I say helicopter, you might have different images of a helicopter.
	I guess it could be Lauren Southern's old joke about self-identifying as an attack helicopter.
	It could be any number of things.
	So if I say helicopter, you might think of an army helicopter, you might think of a personal helicopter, but you're not thinking of a whale and an asteroid.
	Objective enough, right? For us to at least begin the conversation.
	Say, ah, well, you know, it's a Belle, Huey, blah, blah, blah kind of helicopter, if we know what we're talking about.
	So now, the moment somebody debates with you, particularly if they correct you, they've accepted universally preferable behavior.
	Statements you claim to be true ought to be true.
	And if you've ever been in a debate with somebody who simply won't admit anything, any fault, if you are less patient than my cousins were when I was five in England, then of course you can continue to do it.
	I'll do it in public because I'm reaching an audience, but if it's just a one-on-one conversation, You know, like if you're saying, someone says, oh, London, I don't know, all cities have different places where they're like, there's a London in Canada, there's a London in England, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So, if you're saying that the speed of light is 4 miles an hour, right?
	In fact, it's 186,000 miles an hour.
	If you say speed of light is 4 miles an hour, right?
	And I pull it up on DuckDuckGo or whatever.
	I pull that up on a search engine.
	So, speed of light at 186,000 miles an hour.
	Oh, that's incorrect. It's 4 miles an hour.
	So, okay. So, the speed of light, then, if you turn on a flashlight, we get a flashlight.
	Let's say it's nighttime. We turn on the flashlight.
	4 miles an hour is a brisk walk.
	We turn on the flashlight. We ought to see the beams.
	Walking slowly, trickling out like treacle.
	We should see the light beam.
	And then we turn it on, of course, 186,000 miles an hour.
	It lights up a distant tree immediately.
	You say, well, I'm telling you, it's four miles.
	Like at some point, if somebody, like despite reason, despite evidence, despite whatever, right?
	If they simply refuse to admit anything, you're simply, they're crazy, right?
	Or trolling you or something.
	You simply won't, I mean, you wouldn't have a conversation with them anymore, right?
	So, yeah, somebody tells you you're wrong, somebody's using objective language, the evidence of your senses, empirical objective reality, they accept that you exist, all of these things.
	All of these things flow up to show metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
	Telling the truth is better than lying.
	Claiming to be accurate and actually being accurate is better than claiming to be accurate and not being accurate.
	Two and two makes four, not five.
	So they correct you, boom, UPB, done.
	Done and dusted. As well as a whole bunch of other metaphysical and epistemological realities.
	And so then it's just a question of, well, we accept that objective reality exists, we accept that words have meaning, we accept that each other exists, we accept that there's universally preferable standards, truth over falsehood, accuracy over error, so we just keep going on UPB. What's your relationship to theft?
	I mean, everything, every activity is potentially UPB compliant or not UPB compliant, right?
	Every statement about the principles and behavior of matter and energy is either scientifically compliant or it's not.
	I mean, if you say, I believe that the speed of light is four miles an hour because a fairy who lives in my left thumb cuticle told me that's not scientific, right?
	And of course, claims which are made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
	So, UPB, I know this is a long explanation, right?
	And I'm not expecting everyone to reproduce this, right?
	Because I really wanted to go into a good level of detail, right?
	If you're, in a sense, training somebody on a particular activity, you've got to slow it down and explain it to them in great detail.
	I remember taking tennis lessons when I was a kid and a teenager, and to really slow things down, and you had to go into a lot of detail, and then the whole point was to speed it up so that it becomes more natural and easier.
	And so, yeah, I don't believe in universally preferable behavior at all.
	It's like, okay, well, is that because it doesn't exist or you just don't like it?
	You don't like the accent of the guy who, like, I don't believe in universally preferable behavior at all.
	And again, essentialphilosophy.com, you can get this book, you can listen to it for free online, freedomain.com slash books.
	I go into the whole dialogue.
	If somebody says, I don't believe in universally preferable behavior.
	It's like, oh, is that because...
	It doesn't exist. No, there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior.
	So I should stop advocating for it?
	Yes, because there's no such thing.
	Okay, you just gave me UPB, which is I should not advocate and say that things are true and valid when they're neither true nor valid.
	So you just gave me universally preferable behavior by saying I should not be doing something not according to your own preference, but according to objective facts.
	So the moment somebody says there's no such thing as UPB, they've just accepted UPB and then It's like saying, well, you're going to have to use the scientific method to disprove the validity of the scientific method.
	It's like, no, you've got to use reason to disprove reason, man, using rational methods.
	It doesn't work. It doesn't work at all.
	So, again, long explanation, but I want to make sure that's relatively comprehensible.
	And, yeah, just the sequences.
	Somebody says that UPB is invalid.
	Okay, so should I not say things that are invalid?
	No. Why not? Because it's not valid.
	You say things that are true. Boom.
	UPB. Right there. Okay, so now we're just haggling over what is not UPB. And every action, every action you propose.
	Running for the bus, is that UPB? Well, can everyone achieve it, including people in a coma?
	No. So it can't be UPB. Because it can't be universal, right?
	The moment it becomes, well, if you are trying to get to the bus, and the bus is there, and you're late, right?
	Okay, but that's not a universal thing.
	Then it's very specific. You've carved it up.
	But if you say, the speed of light is 186,000 miles per hour, except on Thursdays, well...
	Then you're saying it's universally true that the speed of light is 186,000 miles an hour.
	That's your universal. And then you say, well, not on Thursdays.
	Well, then you just broke the universal.
	So you're saying that which is not universal is universal.
	That's a contradiction. There's a square circle.
	Right? Try again.
	Start again. No good.
	No how. No way.
	So, yeah, you can, and so then we, anything, anything.
	It's combing your hair, UPB. No, because I can't do it.
	Well, no, it doesn't pass the comb and test, blah, blah, blah.
	Okay, it's respecting, it's not stealing UPB. Yeah, it could be.
	It certainly, it is achievable.
	The guy in the comb is not stealing.
	The guy who's asleep is not stealing.
	The guy having a nap is not stealing.
	He's not actively taking things.
	So, respecting property rights is potentially UPP. I mean, it certainly could be achieved by everyone at all times under all circumstances.
	What about telling the truth?
	Is that UPP? Well, no.
	It doesn't pass the coma test. The guy in the coma is not actively telling the truth.
	So, and also he's not, you know, the question about violence is, is forcefully imposing your will on someone else's UPB? Is violently imposing your preference on someone else's UPB? Well, it can't be.
	Because if you're violently imposing your will on someone, they don't want whatever it is that you're doing, which means they can't prefer it as well.
	You and I can both walk past each other on the street and not steal from each other, right?
	It's perfectly possible, logically, for everybody in the world to respect property rights and to not violently impose their will.
	But the moment you say the violent imposition of will on another, Bob can assault Dave.
	Well, Dave doesn't want to be assaulted.
	Therefore, assault can't be universally preferable behavior.
	Or if you say the violent imposition of someone's will, the violent imposition of your will on someone else is UPB, then they get exactly the same right.
	Can two people assault each other at the same time?
	Sure. Yeah, I mean, somebody has to usually start it, but yeah, they could both be punching each other at the same time.
	But neither of them want to be punched, and therefore the violent imposition of will can't be universally preferable behavior because it has to be that I want this for you too.
	I want to violently impose my will on you, and I want you to violently impose your will on me because we're both people.
	I mean, universally preferable behavior is not just me to you or you.
	It's universal. But if I want you to violently impose your will upon me, we're in some weird Fifty Shades of Grey sexual dungeon fetish crap, and it's no longer assault.
	So yeah, moment someone corrects you, UPB. Now we're just haggling over the details.
	What's UPB, what's not? We already accepted that there is UPB because you corrected me, which is great.
	I mean, if I'm wrong, I want to be corrected, obviously, right?
	So then we're just haggling over what is or is not UPB. We already accepted that there is UPB by correcting other people.
	So now it's just a matter of let's just haggle over the details and rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be UPP. So, all right.
	I hope that makes sense.
	Adam, is there anything else you wanted to add?
	No, that's good. Thank you.
	I really appreciate it. Oh, listen, you never have to thank me for talking UPB, baby.
	You never ever have to thank me.
	That's like thanking Chris Farley for some ding-dongs and cocaine.
	So, no, that's really no problem at all.
	I appreciate you bringing the topic up.
	It's never a bad time to talk about UPB. Now, I have more topics for tonight, but if anybody else has questions or issues, clarifications, whatever I can do to serve you.
	And listen, please, I'll put out...
	The show that I did on the pre-Socratics.
	Because, I mean, I got to tell you, every time I'm doing one of these, I'm like, you know, sometimes I even amaze myself.
	So you got to check these out.
	Freedomand.locals.com. Promo code UPB2022, all uppercase.
	Ah, it's so good.
	The History of Philosophers. And I'm going to put two out.
	I've got two extra that I haven't done yet.
	And... They're so good.
	They're so good.
	All right. I'll just give a moment in case anybody else has any of the comments or questions.
	Otherwise, I'll move on to my other topic.
	Yes, now. Yes, now.
	Oh, you know what I should do? Oh, yes.
	Oh, yeah. Here's what I might do.
	I got a very nice, a very fine person who gave me some feedback on my noodle.
	On my noodle.
	All right. Let me see if I can find it here.
	You go freedomain.locals.com.
	It's pinned at the top. The future.
	All right. Let's see here.
	There's so many places people can contact me.
	All right. What have we got?
	I always wondered if Stefan ever watched Burn Notice.
	Michael Weston's abusive relationship with the government stems from his childhood.
	Okay, frankly, don't even get me started on Burn Notice.
	It is one of the greatest shows that was ever made on television.
	It is unbelievably great at every conceivable level.
	And Michael Donovan is a fantastic actor who plays a vaguely passionate cyborg with all the intensity you would expect from somebody with his background.
	I think he grew up on welfare.
	Yeah, so Burn Notice I watched, oh gosh, many years ago.
	And I'm starting it again.
	And it's fantastic.
	I really can't recommend it highly enough.
	Intelligence, passion, reason, history, the family stuff is unbelievably great.
	The family stuff is unbelievably great.
	The mother who, you know, the ex-spy Michael Weston, he had a violent, alcoholic, abusive father.
	His mother is...
	A child. And it's an insult to children.
	She is a manipulative, narcissistic, needy, bullying, resentful, petty, and vaguely affectionate human being.
	And he has this incredible exchange.
	And again, Michael Donovan is an unbelievably great actor who never eats.
	Well, he eats more than Gabriel Anwar, the woman who plays the stick figure known as Fiona.
	But there's a scene, it's in the first season, and his mother says to Michael, Michael, we're your family, you're just going to have to trust us.
	And he says, and where would I have learned how to do that?
	The writer is bad.
	It's such a little line, but he plays it incredibly well.
	Incredibly well. We are family.
	You have to trust us. And where would I have learned how to do that?
	And the mom who plays ignorant about what her son does, right?
	Both her sons are criminals of one kind or another, one state-sanctioned, one not.
	And they're very clear, you know, that if you have a bad childhood, you'll make a great spy because you're paranoid.
	And all the scanning and hypervigilant and all of that.
	And yeah, he's like spies are just criminals with a license, right?
	And so yeah, this sort of cynical and I think quite real nature to state power is fantastic.
	But his mom is like constantly playing dumb about what he does.
	And then he finally just calls her on it.
	He says, what do you think I do, mom?
	And she won't answer that question, right?
	The people who play dumb and you just ask them, just ask them, what do you think that I do, Mom?
	What do you think that I do? Oh, it's so good.
	I wish there was a little bit more of the family stuff in it.
	But yeah, I mean, both the brothers are criminals and both the brothers are irresponsible.
	One's lower IQ, one's higher IQ because, I mean, average sibling intelligence can differ by, I think it's an average of 12 points IQ difference between siblings.
	But yes, a burn notice.
	Watch it. It is Very good.
	And it also is masculine loyalty, and Fiona counts as a man because of her enormous pair of what looked like artificial – no, no, shoulders.
	I'm going to say shoulders, and in fact, her shoulders are enormous.
	But there's a lot of very interesting – and it was very interesting about how he fights, right?
	How do you fight as a spy?
	Right. How do you fight as a spy?
	And you fight intelligently.
	And he says, there are some fights you can't win.
	Some fights you can't win.
	And when he fights his enemies, it's 99% planning, 1% execution.
	And he's constantly using tricks and traps and deception, and he wins through intelligence rather than through brute force.
	It's really interesting. And of course, Michael Donov himself was an expert in martial arts, and he looks like a lollipop figure drawn by a five-year-old, a very fine physique, and a very handsome and interesting-looking fellow.
	And Yeah, the show is one of my favorite TV shows of all time.
	And I don't watch a lot of TV shows.
	I know everyone says that, but I really don't watch a lot of TV shows.
	But that one, Burn Notice, I don't think...
	I'm not sure if I ever actually watched it all the way through to the end for a variety of reasons, because I think it's like eight seasons or whatever.
	But yes, it is very, very good as a whole.
	So, all right.
	Let me get to... Oh yes, here we go.
	And there will be a couple of spoilers.
	So fast forward, I'll say when they are.
	Okay. So this was, somebody wrote this yesterday and I really, really appreciate this.
	And if you have listened to or read the book, you know, please shoot me an email.
	You can catch me at host at freedomain.com or you can just go to freedomain.locals.com, sign up for free and send me a message.
	So he wrote yesterday, he said, some thoughts on the future, right?
	That's my new book. He said it has been some time since I've been captivated enough of the book to put off sleep on a work night or forget I had videos downloaded to my phone during a four-hour flight.
	It has also been a long time since I read a book that made me pause multiple times due to the emotional weight of the content.
	The future is such a book.
	The characters are compelling and it's fascinating to see a vision of a future world dominated by ethical behavior.
	My favorite juxtaposition was reading a few pages while in line at the DMV. Oh, what a joy it must be to not be coerced by low-IQ mouth-breathers.
	Well, I found some of the dialogue to be a little on the nose at times.
	That is probably because I listen to FDR a lot and have heard most of them almost word for word before.
	Overall, this book was an amazing exploration of UPB. I also liked seeing valid points exposed through characters who were antagonists.
	For instance, the president's dad correctly told him, don't ruin your reputation for someone who isn't going to help themselves, and put his wife's sympathy in check by saying, would you want our daughter dating that loser?
	Same with his divorce is a disease talk.
	So, there's some spoilers here, so fast forward a couple of minutes.
	He said, I particularly found the contrast between Lewis and Roman to be interesting.
	They were both abused themselves and became child abusers, but Roman did love his children, whereas Lewis hated his own.
	And similarly, one chose the way forward while the other did not.
	I think these are two archetypes we can see abuses as, or as a mix of the two.
	On one side there's Roman, who's savable, and on the other side there's Lewis, who's just psychotic.
	Effectively, his ability to improve likely evaporated when he decided to side with the liars at the funeral.
	Yeah, Jane's funeral. The scene with the two abused boys was the most moving to me.
	The idea of apologizing to children and recognizing we, society, failed you.
	The bond between the brothers and the idea that there was, in fact, possible intervention for my own trauma was very powerful.
	This was the part I had to stop and process before I moved on.
	Finally, since you've solicited feedback on the book, there are a few things that didn't quite work for me as well.
	I thought the Roman storyline ended abruptly for how much time we spent with him.
	We got a glimpse at the end showing he came to genuinely detest child abuse but didn't get to see how the tribe came around.
	But we didn't get to see how the tribe came around and how he forged a relationship with his kids despite the trauma.
	The angels are still following them, making me wonder how much actually took.
	There's an issue about timeline, which I understand, and then the POV change away from Lewis in the courtroom was a bit confusing, especially when Mr.
	Staten could refer to two people.
	This is pretty minor, but I had to double back on a page to make sure I was following things.
	So yes, very, very much appreciate that feedback.
	I think there's a valid criticism as well, and I appreciate that enormously as well.
	I mean, I'm not sure it's good.
	I'm going to rewrite something. I've already recorded the audiobook, but it is definitely an important feedback for the sequel, if I get around to it.
	All right. So let me...
	Sorry, let me just pause to check in with you lovely listeners, since this is a live show, and people may have questions, issues, comments.
	I'll just give a pause here.
	If you wanted to raise your hand, I'm happy to unmute you.
	All right, it's just me, myself, and I. Well, and all you lovely live streamers, but yes, let us move on with...
	Oh, wait, wait! Aha!
	Bauga! Bauga!
	We have a caller. Wait, do I sound desperate?
	I don't mean to sound desperate!
	All right, Xander, you want to unmute?
	I'm happy to hear. All right, perfect.
	Sorry, you need to back off from your mic a little bit.
	You're like Linda. My apologies.
	Okay, yes. So can you just briefly get into why you left the back business?
	Because it's in the sound of a way, you're a very competent technologist and businessman.
	Yeah, I mean, I can touch on it.
	So, yeah, I left the tech business because I was never allowed to rise above chief technical officer because I was too valuable as a technologist, right?
	So if you're really good at technology, it's tough to move up.
	Maybe if you're in a bigger company or maybe if you're very patient and so on, right?
	So I wanted to be CEO. I wanted to be the in-charge one, as my daughter would say when she was younger.
	I wanted to be in-charge. Every time I would say I want to be in charge, they'd say, look, man, you're absolutely necessary where you are.
	You're a great coder, you're a great manager, you're great at sales presentations, and so we need you where you are.
	You don't take the fastest runner and put him on the shot put team.
	I could never be the CEO as long as I was such a good coder and manager.
	Now, the reason I wanted to be CEO was not because of some power thing.
	I think that if you've listened to my show for a while, you know that I constantly reject any power over people by saying, I never tell anyone what to do, and these are just my suggestions or thoughts or what I might do in your shoes or anything.
	I never tell anyone what to do. So the reason I wanted to be in charge was I wanted to have the ability to Tell the truth.
	Right? To tell the truth. Now, there were people who were out there representing the software, representing our capacities.
	Now, I'm not going to call them all liars, right?
	But what I will do is say that what they said was really accurate.
	I mean, I remember being in one situation where the customer believed a three-month implementation and it was 12 to 18 months.
	Now, that's not really fair.
	And so in the situation when everybody knows this, like the extreme end of the Elizabeth Holmes spectrum, right?
	The fake it till you make it stuff.
	So you've got, you know, four companies vying for, this is a common situation in the business world, where you get an RFP request for a proposal and four companies are vying for the business or maybe five companies or six or 10 or whatever, right?
	Now, one company tells the truth and other companies don't.
	You know, the one company says it's a six-month implementation.
	The other companies say it can get it for you done in six weeks.
	Now, the people who are buying, they don't know how long it's going to take to implement your software.
	They have to trust you. Somebody says six weeks.
	Everybody says six weeks.
	You say six months. Everybody says it's $100,000.
	You say it's a quarter million dollars.
	Now, if you're IBM, then it's a different matter because you have a lot of credibility that way and blah, blah, blah, right?
	But if it's a bunch of small organizations, what is the cost-benefit of telling the truth?
	Will you be able to...
	And everybody, like you understand.
	Everybody understands all of this kind of stuff, right?
	I think everybody has been in that situation.
	So, yeah, what is the market?
	If people don't know what they're buying, they don't know if you're lying.
	And so what happens is there's this drive, and this is just market economics, you know, I don't know exactly how, in a free society, it's all with the reputation ratings or contract ratings or something like that, but so you've got five companies, A, B, C, D, E, And A tells the truth and B through E don't.
	And the customer has no way of verifying this.
	Now, the company that tells the truth, are they going to get the business?
	Well, if they've been around for a long time and they have a really good reputation, but here's the thing.
	If you don't get the business to begin with, you're not around for a very long time.
	You never get that good reputation.
	So the companies that exaggerate and say it's six weeks, not six months, it's $100,000, not $250,000, it may end up being six months and $250,000.
	But by then, the people who've bought are already locked in.
	Their career is on the line.
	They've already signed the contracts.
	Their career is on the line.
	If it goes badly, then they're going to be in trouble.
	So they'll just say, well, we've had some scope creep.
	We need a little bit of additional budget.
	We've had an issue with the server.
	It's going to take a little bit longer.
	And eventually, it ends up at the quarter mil and six months.
	In fact, it probably would be more.
	So the people who tell the truth at the beginning versus the people who exaggerate, who gets the contract?
	Well, it ends up being the same price or more.
	It ends up being the same time or more as the person who told the truth.
	But you don't get the business.
	Now, again, this was in the 90s.
	It may have changed now. There probably is more skepticism about this kind of stuff.
	I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, sorry to interrupt you.
	No, no, go ahead. Your story is very relevant today.
	In fact, it's more celebrated because of all the VC money pumping into these companies and all these companies are just burnt out.
	Wait, are you in tech?
	Why do you have a potato microphone?
	You're calling me from a 1950s beach radio.
	Yeah, I'm sorry.
	The audio is too bad to really have much of a conversation.
	So I was willing at the CEO level.
	Now, here's the other thing, too. If you are in a RFP situation, your company A and all the other companies, you know that they're not telling the truth, right?
	It's really tough. It's a very delicate thing because if you're perceived to be trashing the competition, that looks kind of bad.
	And so, you know, the best you can do is say, well, I've heard some things you might want to check it out, talk to their prior customers and so on, right?
	But of course, you tend to, as a company, you tend to choose who the prior customers are that the potential customers talk to and all that kind of stuff, right?
	So it's a really tough situation.
	And it's a little different in traditional engineering because in traditional engineering, the people who are buying I kind of understand.
	Like if you've got somebody who's commissioning a bridge for you, they know how to build a bridge.
	Whereas if it's custom software, there's no custom bridges really in a way, right?
	But if it's custom software, they don't know your software.
	They don't know all the tools you have for integration, right?
	Because with software, you never really sell someone a piece of software.
	You sell someone a piece of their entire software ecosystem, right?
	So we had to integrate with, oh gosh, I mean, just about SAP. We had to integrate with various Oracle databases.
	I even integrated once with an Excel spreadsheet as a data source.
	I integrated it with text files, comma delineated, tab delineated, you name it.
	We had to have database synchronization across four different continents in one rollout, which given the speed of the internet back there, particularly intercontinental, was just brutal.
	And we ended up having to compress the data using custom compression algorithms, squirt it across, and then rebuild it on the other side.
	And you had to deal with records both being overwritten by different people and which one has priority.
	And yeah, it was wild stuff.
	It was wild stuff. And then integrating a wiring into other systems is notoriously brutal because then you wire it in and then the other systems might have a change.
	And, you know, they don't often have APIs.
	You may sometimes have to go to the data directly, in which case they could void warranties for the other systems.
	I mean, for me, it's a big, exciting, wonderful brain Rubik's Cube to try and solve, but it's so complex that people who don't...
	And you'll know this, too. You saw this with Elizabeth Holmes, right?
	In the Elizabeth Holmes scenario with Theranos...
	Not one venture capitalist bought into her system.
	Not one venture capitalist with any experience in the healthcare industry bought into her system.
	It was all, you know, like the Henry Kissingers and the people who just like, hey, I heard a good thing and they don't know what the heck's going on and they like having a, I don't know, blonde chicky poo around.
	I don't know, right? So, yeah, the more you know, the more skeptical you are, but particularly back in the earlier days of software rollouts, It was often a race to the bottom.
	It was often a race to the bottom, and I couldn't do it.
	And I got in trouble.
	We didn't make the sales.
	And you know what they would say, and this is a very common thing, right?
	I'm not talking about anyone specific here.
	This was just a general thing that I kind of got as a whole.
	We have faith in you!
	We believe in you.
	And it's like, well, why don't you believe me when I tell you it's a six-month implementation?
	No, no. We said six weeks.
	We believe in you. And I would view that, of course, as a challenge.
	And I would write the most incredible tools.
	I wrote something called the Database Builder, which took a spreadsheet because people knew how to use spreadsheets.
	And they said, give me everything you want to change about this system.
	Because we sold custom systems.
	And then my program would read the spreadsheet And would change everything about our software to match what the client had indicated.
	Every table, every query, every form, every report, every custom.
	I had custom report builders and custom cross-tab query builders, like everything.
	And then when we had a web interface, not only would it change the database and the Windows client, like the Thick client, but it would also change the interface for the Thick client.
	And so it was a database program that rewrote the entire database based upon the customer.
	And that way they would send in their changes and we would just push a button and like literally we would push a button and just go through all this wild code.
	And then I would write all the code to verify.
	Like when you double clicked on any number, you got a calculator pop up.
	When you double clicked on any date, you got a date pop up.
	And it verified that all that code was there in every single system.
	It verified the entire integrity of every layer of the database.
	It was an amazing piece of code.
	And I did that because I was given all these crazy deadlines.
	So the annoying thing was that when people weren't particularly upfront with clients, and then they would say, well, we believe in you.
	I was the one who pulled these rabbits out of the hat.
	And I think every technologist has been in this situation.
	I was the one who pulled these rabbits out of the hat.
	So they said, we believe in you.
	It's like, well, unfortunately, I've given you good reason to believe in me.
	And it was really just, you know, just chasing a rabbit that just got further and further away all the time.
	And, you know, maybe they were wise not to put me in the CEO position because I would have gone out, told the truth to the clients and ended up eating my own socks within a week.
	I don't know. I don't know.
	So does that make sense?
	Oh, that's perfect. That's perfect.
	I can tell you're the bonafide real deal, Steph.
	Don't you miss it? Yeah, there are definitely times.
	What I miss is having really simulating brain activity that didn't get me lied about.
	I was chasing lies.
	I wasn't being chased by lies.
	So it was nice having really engaging and enjoyable brain.
	I love coding. I love coding.
	When things work faster and better and that satisfaction you get when things just fall together beautifully, I love coding.
	And yeah, I do miss it.
	And I do miss that continual learning thing because the moment you got good at something in coding, something new would come along that you'd have to learn that would be fantastic.
	I mean, I went all the way from 16-bit software up to, you know, thin client design and all of that.
	And it was wonderful. And I liked the stimulation without the controversy, right?
	Because I mean, I find philosophy more stimulating than coding.
	But, I mean, similar activities, right?
	You're looking for logical consistencies and empirical evidence, right?
	The code has to be logical.
	I want to process it so fast it can complete an endless loop in six seconds or less.
	So if the code doesn't work, the code doesn't work.
	If it's logically self-contradictory, it won't compile, right?
	I mean, if you say that – if you define a variable as a number and then you try and stuff an ole object into it or a date, then it's going to – well, a date can be recategorized as a number.
	Let's say you define a variable as a number and then you try and stuff a picture into it or a piece of text.
	It's going to futz because a number is not a letter, and so it's going to futz on you.
	So it has to be internally – We're good to go.
	There's lots of good coders in the world, lots of great coders in the world, but great philosophy seemed to be – and this was the basic question I asked myself when I was deciding on whether to do philosophy or continue my tech career was, does the world need another tech entrepreneur or does the world need a good moral philosopher and really competent tech engineers?
	And man, I was tempted.
	Oh man, I was tempted.
	I was offered an obscene amount of money to come back to work just for three hours – sorry, three weeks – Sorry, three days a week.
	Three days a week. I won't even tell you the sum, but it was like, made my eyes water.
	And I just, I said no. I said no.
	So, yeah, you have to be able to walk away from that kind of stuff to do what's best for the world.
	And yeah, I think the world, I mean, in hindsight, the world needed a good moral philosopher more than it needed another tech guy.
	So, I'm glad I made the decision, but I'm not saying it's always been the easiest decision in the know.
	You know, there's some people who are like, well, I was a waiter, but then I became a movie star.
	It's like, do you ever miss being a waiter?
	What are you, crazy? Right? But it's just a little different.
	This was a little different that way.
	So, yeah, for the most part, it's been a great decision, a great choice.
	And the other thing, too, is that I'm building for the future.
	In software, you're always building for the past because it's going to be obsolete in three to six years if you are.
	I mean, probably two to four years.
	And so in tech, you're always building for obsolescence.
	But in philosophy, you're building for the future.
	And the code that you write will be obsolete within a couple of years, but the moral philosophy that you delineate will be around forever and will provide greater value in the future than it does even in the present.
	So yeah, it's a different mindset.
	Similar skill sets, but different mindsets.
	I hope that wasn't too much of a detour for everyone.
	I loved it.
	I loved it.
	Yeah, and listen, you can check out fdrurl.com/tgoa.
	I have a novel that's partly set in the software world, so that might be interesting for you as well.
	All right.
	Is it Timmy time?
	I think it is Timmy time.
	Tim has a question or comment.
	Happy to have you back. And for some reason it didn't take that.
	Let me try that again.
	All right, Tim, if you want to unmute.
	Thanks, Xander. I appreciate the question.
	Go ahead, Tim. Hey, Steph.
	Yeah, hi. Can you hear me okay?
	It's a little quiet, but not too bad.
	Go for it. Sorry, yeah.
	Yeah, okay. So I have a deep hatred of the coma test, and I want to argue against it.
	Okay, but you can only do that from being within a coma, so I'll just be patient while you do something horrible with insulin.
	Okay, go ahead. Actually, my strongest argument against it comes from your book.
	Actually, in the Telegram chat, I actually posted the page That shows that.
	And I can read it. Oh, was that mine?
	It was probably... I saw that, and I was like, hey, that's some good writing.
	Wait, that's mine? Yeah.
	You bugger. Using my own words against me.
	That's evil! Okay, go ahead.
	So, and I could just read it.
	On page 67, there's a spot where you say, we can reasonably say that where choice is absent or inapplicable, morality is also absent or inapplicable.
	Thus, the man in a coma, while his actions cannot be considered evil, neither can they be considered good.
	He exists in a state without choice, like an infant or an animal.
	Thus, he can be reasonably exempted from moral rules, since there is a physical state that objectively differentiates him from a man who can choose, which is allowable under UPV.
	And then, so, I think that another way of saying that is that the universally preferable behavior only, It applies universally to everyone in the same category, but for things outside of that category, it doesn't apply.
	And then in your book, you say that...
	And it's okay. That was a long time ago.
	Maybe you changed your mind. But in the book, one of the essential qualities of being in the category in which UPB applies is having the capacity to choose.
	And since a person in a coma doesn't have that capacity, UPB as a whole doesn't apply to them.
	So, like, the coma test, like, doesn't have anything to do with UPB, in my opinion.
	Well, I don't agree.
	I don't agree, but I'm certainly happy to hear more of the argument.
	Yeah, so you might ask, like, why does this apply?
	Or where this applies?
	Or how does this matter?
	And then, so, the kind of context was around the idea of positive moral obligations.
	And then, so, you know, a lot of times when people, or myself, you know, I'm like, I just, intuitively, it seems like they should.
	And Intuitively.
	So then I'm arguing for it.
	I'm trying to search out that feeling.
	And so I argue for the idea of positive moral obligations.
	And then I hear a lot of times from people, well, how could there be a positive moral obligation?
	If that was true, then it would make people in a coma immoral.
	Because they wouldn't be able to choose to do those things.
	But then I would cite your book and say, that's not true because people in a coma are exempt because morality doesn't apply to them because morality only applies where there is choice, if that makes sense.
	Okay, I mean, so this is part of a larger section, and I'm not going to accuse you of quoting out of context, because the paragraph is fairly self-explanatory.
	But what I'm working on saying here is, if you have a moral standard...
	So, I think we could reasonably say that if X is good, the opposite of X must be evil, right?
	Correct. Okay.
	So, if... Telling the truth is good, then lying is immoral.
	If going north is good, going south is evil.
	So if there's an opposite, then, I mean, good and evil are opposites and therefore behaviors and they're opposites.
	Behaviors that are defined as good, the opposite must be evil.
	Now, if you have a moral system that demands positive action, that's universal.
	All people at all times can achieve this, right?
	Are we agreed with that on the universal?
	Yeah, so yeah, I would, because I just think that if it's a negative moral obligation, then it's something you should never do.
	And if it's a positive moral obligation, it's something you should always do, like every second of every day.
	So it applies all the time to everyone in the category.
	Right. So when I say that a man in a coma can't be evil, I think we can agree on that as a baseline, right?
	Yeah. I mean, you just quoted this section from the book approvingly, so I hope we agree on that.
	Yeah, morality is like a concept that doesn't apply to them.
	It'd be like calling a tree moral or something.
	Even you said infants or animals.
	It'd be like calling a dog moral.
	Well, no, I wouldn't go that far.
	No, I wouldn't go that far because we don't want to extract from the fact that The man's going to wake up and he's got moral choices and his dreams may even be disturbed by moral choices or, you know, Macbeth style or whatever, right?
	So let's keep it on the human.
	But I think it's fair to say that a man who's asleep can't be immoral by the act of sleeping, right?
	Well, just because I just want to make sure.
	In the book, it said someone in a coma – and it's okay.
	You wrote this a long time ago and we're all changing and stuff – But in the book, you said he exists in a state without choice, like an infant or an animal.
	So, I'm afraid I'm paying too much attention to your book.
	Yeah, okay. I mean, that's not...
	Okay, so that's fine.
	We can leave the infant and the animal in.
	That's fine with me. Now...
	Yeah. So...
	Somebody who's in a coma...
	He's not raping anyone.
	He's not assaulting anyone.
	He's not stealing from anyone.
	And he's not murdering, right?
	Yes. He conforms with UPB. See, just to make sure, I would say that he conforms with UPB in the same way like a chair conforms with UPB. Because a chair doesn't have...
	An ability to choose to do those things.
	And then the person in the coma is not doing that, potentially for the same reason.
	It could be that this person is like a total rapist or murderer, and then the only reason why they're not doing it is because they're in a coma.
	Oh, no, no, I get that. I completely agree with you.
	But we do have to stay with the factual statement that a person in a coma is not violating UPB. But would you also say a chair is not violating UPB either?
	Well, no, but a chair is a category of inanimate objects that can never potentially violate UPB. Whereas humanity is in the category of concepts that can violate UPB. So the category man...
	I mean, again, this is a man who's taking a nap.
	This is a man who's...
	If he's going to the washroom, he's not currently killing anyone.
	At least we hope, right? So let's stay with the category humanity.
	So I wouldn't say it's the same as a chair because a chair is in a category that can never violate UPB, but humanity is in a category which can, which is why I talk about a man in a coma and not a chair.
	In other words, moral rules never apply to a chair.
	But they do apply to the man in the coma, in that he's not violating those moral rules.
	But they don't, just to make sure, they don't apply while he's in the coma, though.
	Right? Sure.
	So, I'm sorry, when you say sure, you mean you agree with that?
	Yeah, well, no, sorry.
	He is conforming to moral rules while in the coma.
	Now, the purpose of this section, if I remember rightly, is to say that if you have X as moral, and the opposite of X must be immoral, if you have a positive obligation, then not doing that positive obligation is then not doing that positive obligation is somewhere in the vicinity of the opposite.
	So, for instance, if I have a moral obligation that says don't rape, then raping is the opposite.
	And if don't rape is the good, then raping is the evil.
	Do you see what I mean? Yeah.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm kind of springing it on you.
	I feel like I maybe should have...
	No, no. I'm fine with it.
	Sorry. What's the issue you're having with the conversation?
	I don't know why this is a fun conversation and I'm happy to talk about it.
	I just felt a little bad that I was really prepared for it.
	No, no, forget preparation.
	Forget preparation. Just have a conversation, right?
	So have a conversation. So if not raping...
	Sorry, if respecting property rights is the good, violating property rights is the evil, right?
	Yes. If not raping is the good, raping is the evil.
	Yes. Yes. Okay, we're there.
	And conversely, if raping is the good, then not raping is the evil, right?
	True. Yes, yes.
	Okay, so if you have a positive moral obligation...
	Then performing the opposite of that moral obligation, which would be not doing it, would be the evil.
	And this is why I say, if you have a system where a man in a coma could be defined as evil, you've gone wrong, because a man in a coma can't be good or evil.
	Or he certainly can't be evil, right?
	So if you have a positive moral obligation, and the man in a coma can't fulfill that, then the opposite of a positive moral obligation would Is, right, moral obligation being the X, the opposite of that is not doing X, and therefore that's the evil, right?
	So if the positive moral obligation is don't steal, then stealing would be the evil.
	If the positive moral obligation is stealing, then not stealing would be the evil.
	Does that make sense?
	Do you see what I mean?
	I'm sorry, and I may need to think about it more, but the thing that I would really want to...
	So the thesis that I'm really pushing for, and I don't mean to avoid...
	No, no, no, no! Stop jumping ahead of the conversation!
	I'm trying to... Hang on.
	Let me be Socratic for a moment, right?
	Because you keep jumping out of it, right?
	Yes, yes. Okay, so just take a deep breath and stay with me.
	This doesn't mean that I'm right, but at least we have to finish this part of the conversation and then you can take me wherever you want to go, right?
	If you ask me a question, I'm trying to lead you through at least my version of the answer.
	Yeah, sorry. No, it's fine.
	So, if X is the good, then non-X must be the evil, right?
	If not raping is the good, raping must be the evil.
	If not murdering is the good, murder must be the evil, right?
	We agreed on that. Yes.
	Now, if stealing is the good, then not stealing, right?
	So if not stealing is the good, stealing is the bad.
	If stealing is the good, not stealing must be the bad, right?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So not stealing is the bad.
	A man in a coma is not stealing.
	Therefore, a man in a coma is the bad or the evil.
	And I'm saying moral rules can't apply to a man in a coma, So if you have a positive moral obligation, then the man in the coma is evil, but you can't say that a man in a coma is evil because he's not a moral agent.
	So that's the argument as a whole, which is why the coma test is important.
	Yeah, but one thing about it that I might change is that The choice factor is important.
	If I put a gun to someone's head and I say, go steal from this other person or I'm going to shoot you, I think there's a sense in which I'm removing choice from that person.
	Sure. Even though that person is stealing or obeying my order, he's not morally culpable for...
	That action, because I'm removing choice from that.
	Sorry, I was just trying to close off a logical argument, and now we're going in a different direction.
	I'm happy to go in this direction, but I'd like to close off the logical argument.
	I feel like we're about to land in the goalpost, or we're about to get somewhere, and the goalpost just shifts to some other argument.
	So if you can hold that thought, right?
	Let's just go back for a sec.
	We can close this off, because if we don't get agreement on anything, we're kind of spinning our wheels, right?
	Or disagreement that's explicit, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Okay, so if you have a positive moral obligation which says stealing is the good, then not stealing must be the bad in the same way that if you say not stealing is the good, then stealing must be the bad, right?
	Now, listen, you can give me a conditional agreement, right?
	Which just means I can see where you're coming from, and I'll review it later, but, you know, I get where you're coming from, and we'll put a conditional agreement in there.
	Yeah, I just wanted to make sure that part of it, it's not...
	This is a question.
	I think it's not just the action, but there has to be a choice along with it.
	Like, it's the choice to steal that's immoral.
	No, no, no, no.
	No, no. Hang on.
	Hang on. No, because then we've got universally preferable thoughts, not universally preferable behaviors.
	I might have the thought to steal something.
	I might go to the store and notice there's a really good security camera, security system.
	There's guards. There's bars in the window.
	I might really choose to steal, want to steal, get ready to steal, but don't steal.
	Am I immoral? Am I evil?
	Because then we've got thought crimes, which are unverifiable and subjective.
	To me, that's not completely obvious.
	To me, that's not a totally easy question.
	But that's the Christian thing, right?
	Which is to look at a woman in lust is the same as cheating, right?
	There are thought crimes in Christianity, and I don't mean to diminish it by saying, but there are sins that are merely mental, but we're talking about not...
	You're not talking to Jesus, you're talking to me, so we're going to have to go with UPP, right?
	It is behavior, right?
	Behavior is subjective and can be measured, and thoughts are not.
	So... Let's just go back to the coma thing, right?
	And again, feel free to disagree.
	I think this is ironclad logic, but I'm obviously happy to be corrected.
	I'm obviously invested in the theory and all that.
	If X is the good, the opposite of X must be the evil.
	If not raping is the good, raping must be the evil.
	If raping is the good, not raping must be the evil.
	But since a man in a coma is not raping, and not raping is the evil, the man in the coma is evil, which doesn't make any sense because a man in a coma can't be called evil.
	So what you've got from the book there is part of a thing that says, if you have a moral system that says, X is a positive moral obligation, thou shalt, not a thou shalt not, but a thou shalt, then everybody who's not doing that must be the evil.
	And since a man in a coma isn't doing much of anything, you've got a man in a coma to whom no moral rules can apply having a moral rule applied to him, which doesn't make any sense, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Sorry, I'm worried I might just need to think more about it.
	No, listen, your critiques are fantastic.
	So my response might be incomplete.
	I think it's fairly good.
	I think it's solid, but it might be incomplete.
	Now, I think that the logical problem that you're having is that Evil is a specific action, not doing something, for the most part, right?
	So evil is a specific action, like rape, theft, assault, and murder.
	Now, if you have a positive moral obligation, everything that is not that positive moral obligation becomes the evil.
	And so it's like a weirdly different moral category, because one is very specific.
	Thou shalt not go to Kansas, right?
	And the other is...
	Thou shalt not go to Wichita is different from thou shalt go to Wichita.
	Thou shalt not go to Wichita gives you everything else to do.
	Thou shalt not rape gives you everything else to do.
	But thou shalt rape or thou shalt tell the truth, well, that's the only thing you could be doing to be the good and everything else, including being in a coma, is kind of like the opposite.
	Now, we understand intuitively, I think, that the opposite is Of a prohibition must be the evil.
	Thou shalt not steal. Okay, stealing is evil because it's a very specific action.
	If we say, thou shalt steal, then everything that's not stealing would be the evil, but it's everything else in the known universe, including being in a coma.
	So then it's like, unless you're right in that moment of stealing, you're evil, and then you're good in that moment of stealing, and then you're evil again, right after you've stolen, and so on.
	So that's why the prohibition on positive moral obligations in the UPB is very firm.
	Now, there are aesthetically preferable actions, telling the truth, being on time, being respectful, having some dignity, and being nice to people and all that.
	Now, these are positive moral obligations, but the opposite of that would be something like rudeness or lack of consideration or selfishness.
	It wouldn't be evil. Yeah, yeah.
	Well, I mean, you mentioned on a show not too long ago that if...
	Spanking kids is evil because it's a form of assault.
	And it's particularly bad because it's in the situation of a very great power disparity.
	It's probably the biggest that there is.
	In a show not too long ago, you mentioned that the opposite of spanking is not...
	You didn't say exactly this, but you said something a little close to it where you said the opposite of spanking is not spanking.
	It's kind of removing spanking from the world.
	Like, for example, you said a while ago – I forget what it was.
	I think you estimated something like it's possible that there's been a billion separate times where parents did not hit their kids because of the effects of the show.
	So to me, that's anti-spanking.
	It's not just not spanking.
	It's anti-spanking.
	And to me, that's the true negative.
	Well, okay.
	No, and I hear what you're saying.
	I hear what you're saying, and this is the whole question of the good, which I have not explored very much, to be honest.
	I'm so busy fighting the evil, which is growing.
	So I think the difference is not – Not stabbing people versus being a doctor.
	So if you don't stab people, at least you're not injuring people.
	At least you're not causing them grievous bodily harm or maybe even murdering them.
	However, being a doctor, you're fixing up people.
	It's the difference between being a mugger and a stabber and a doctor and a surgeon.
	Both are using knives, but one is healing and one is hurting.
	So, I can't say that everybody must be an anti-spanker because the guy in a coma, it doesn't pass the UPB test.
	Now, is it aesthetically preferable to oppose spanking?
	Yes. And oppose is part of the word opposite.
	So, the opposite of spanking is...
	The opposite, like, it's a question of the opposite of evil is the good.
	Now, if you have a child and you don't verbally abuse, you don't neglect, you don't physically abuse, you don't obviously sexually abuse, these kinds of things, okay.
	Then you still have to have interactions.
	Those interactions can't involve any threats or punishment or anything like that.
	And therefore, how are you going to interact?
	The question is, how does the world look when people are UPB compliant?
	Now, of course, the whole point of my novel, The Future, is to try to answer that question.
	How does the world look? You have to have some way of interacting with and dealing with your children.
	You and I are both dads, we know that, right?
	So if you say, okay, threats, abuse, punishments, confinements are all violations of the non-aggression principle and are banned, well then, what does the thief do if he can't steal?
	He gets a job, right?
	I guess he could beg a little, but at some point he's going to get a job.
	If evil is barred, good flourishes, right?
	And so for me, I've focused less, and this is maybe a complete weakness or failure on my part, so I'm perfectly open to that.
	But I am of the belief that if you get rid of, let's say you get rid of coercive government education, then people are free to experiment, to practice.
	Try and find the best way to educate children, if that even means anything in sort of the new world.
	They're perfectly free to try all these wonderful things.
	Like when you get rid of slavery, you get the Industrial Revolution in the modern world.
	And to me, if people aren't Stealing, right?
	If you have no theft, then we have a stateless society, right?
	Now, in a stateless society, people have to find ways to interact with each other that aren't violent, right?
	That aren't destructive, that aren't evil and murderous and assaulty and thefty and all that, and rapey.
	And so since people do have to interact with each other, what happens when force is banned?
	People need to be nagged to be good when evil is banned, when this evil is recognized and identifiable, when evildoers are punished and good people are rewarded.
	And so the people in the future, like my novel in the future, this is not much of a spoiler, but so 500 years in the future, people don't need to be taught to be good.
	Because they're raised really well, they're reasoned with, and the entire society goes into convulsions when two kids are bullied on a mountain.
	And so they don't need to have...
	Well, you know what? We had to send Alice to 12 years of ethics school because she's raised in an ethical manner.
	In the same way, if you grow up speaking English, you don't need to go to English school.
	In the same way that if you're someone coming in from Japan who never learned it as a kid.
	So for me, the elimination of evil...
	Is the fertility for virtue.
	In other words, if children are raised well and raised reasonably and negotiated with and not yelled at or beaten or punished or raped or whatever, if children are raised well, if parenting complies with the non-aggression principle, you get virtue.
	And I mean, I'm sure you have this with your kids.
	I have this with my daughter.
	She's a genuinely decent, good, nice person and tough, which is kind of what you want because otherwise it's like lambs to slaughter sometimes.
	So my perception is, end slavery.
	You say, well, yes, but you need to promote the alternative to slavery.
	It's like, I'm not sure that I do.
	This is why I haven't focused on it that much.
	I'm not sure that I need to promote the alternative to slavery.
	Well, we've got to end the forced marriages of children.
	Well, then you also need to promote romance and movies with Ryan Gosling, and you need to make sure that there are flowers and cards and poems and dates, and it's like, no, no, no.
	Because if we get rid of the forced marriage of children, Voluntary romance will bloom of its own accord.
	If we get rid of slavery, the market system will bloom of its own accord.
	If we get rid of government coerced education, positive educational choices will bloom of their own accord.
	All we have to do to get the plants to grow, we've just got to give them exposure to the sun.
	And to water.
	We don't need to pull at them and prune them and move them.
	And so if we create the conditions for virtue, which is eliminating evil as much as possible, if we create all the conditions of virtue, virtue will flower.
	I don't need to, in a sense, have a whole bunch of positive moral instructions.
	Now, in the Christian worldview, it's a little different because you can never eliminate evil.
	Satan runs the world in many ways, and you've got to walk the steady and narrow path to get to heaven.
	So positive moral obligations in the Christian framework make perfect sense to me.
	And for me, though, just from the UPB standpoint, if we can get rape, theft, assault, and murder out of the way, the amount of virtues that will flower from there will be incalculable.
	And I don't need to – I can provide a vision of what that looks like through a novel like the future, but I'm not so much interested in promoting virtue as I am in removing the obstacles to it, because I think if – and we know this statistically from the Bomb and the Brain series – bombinthebrain.com if you haven't watched it – That if children are raised peacefully and reasonably, they turn into good people who are not tempted to do evil.
	At least, you know, if they are tempted, it's a pretty easy temptation to overcome.
	So I don't really promote too many positive virtues because I think they will flower inevitably when the evils are reduced significantly, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
	One thing I thought was...
	So I... A lot of times I think that you...
	It's just what I'm hearing.
	So I'm not sure that I could be wrong.
	But what I think I hear is that there's only...
	It sounds kind of like there's only two possibilities.
	There's immoral behavior and then there's moral behavior.
	And those are the only...
	You're either in one of those...
	You're either immoral or you're moral.
	No, no, no. I've got two other categories in the book.
	APA, right? Yeah.
	There's evil, aesthetically negative behavior, neutral, aesthetically positive actions, and UPB compliant.
	Yeah. So, for example...
	I'm sorry.
	Yeah. Maybe I need to reread that section then.
	Yeah, because I was going to focus on the neutral part of it.
	When a person in a coma doesn't...
	you know, do evil things, then I would call them neutral, not moral.
	I wouldn't say they were moral or immoral.
	I would just say that they're neutral.
	Well, which is exactly what I say in the book.
	And what I'm saying, then, if you have positive moral obligations, the opposite of that, which is not achieving those positive moral obligations, must be negative, because the opposite of the positive is not doing that, right?
	In the same way that the opposite of not stealing is stealing, the opposite of stealing must be not stealing.
	The man in the coma doesn't steal, but he can't be evil.
	So that's why positive moral obligations don't make sense, at least according to the coma test.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	You know, it's funny.
	It's funny.
	It's I have to say you have a lot of brilliant ideas and everything, and when you're on the show, I have to re-listen to it afterwards and stuff.
	Yeah. This is blindingly tough stuff because of our prior exposure to what I would consider to be not super philosophical or super consistent moral ideals.
	It is very tough stuff.
	I think we completely understand that the opposite of not murdering is murdering and not murdering is good and murdering is bad and murdering is evil.
	But the opposite of positive moral obligations is like everything else in the known universe.
	And so then we have to start putting in, well, they have to have the capacity to do it.
	Means, motive, opportunity, and so not stealing is the good.
	But in order for it to be good, you have to be tempted to steal.
	You have to have profit in stealing.
	You have to have the opportunity to steal and still say no and all of that.
	And so, yeah, I mean, the positive moral obligation stuff is tough.
	And it doesn't mean that I don't have...
	I mean, if you have plants and you don't water them, they will die.
	And so you've kind of killed the plant.
	Now, you haven't done anything, you've just not, right?
	You've not watered the plant.
	That's a non-action, right?
	But it's an action where, so if you have a child and you don't feed that child and you just sit around and, you know, your child slowly starves to death in the basement or something, well, then you've killed the child.
	Now, you haven't done anything, right?
	Somebody else just sitting around not feeding a kid isn't responsible for the murder, but you have imprisoned that kid, so to speak, just by biology and so on.
	So you have a positive moral obligation, in a sense, to feed the child, because otherwise that's murder.
	Or rather, you have an obligation to not kill the child, which requires feeding the child or giving the child to someone who will feed it.
	So yeah, I think that they're instinctually, we kind of understand that they're obvious, but working it out logically is a crab and a half.
	Yeah, and I think that maybe part of my issue is that, you know, Christianity, you know, people have differences of opinion, there's a million different opinions and everything, but to my understanding, the Bible,
	you know, the New Testament presents the situation as if we are in some sort of super gigantic galactic spiritual war, like of It presents it like we're in a giant war between good and evil,
	and that there's a sort of kingdom of light and a kingdom of darkness, and then a lot of it is conceptual.
	From another Christian perspective, Right, and sorry, just to back up of what you're saying, so how do you get parents to not hit their children?
	That's it. Because they are strongly – the Satan of history urges them, whispers into their ears to hit their children.
	Because they were hit and they've bonded, like the Stockholm Syndrome bonding with the people who hit you or the people who neglect you or the people who abuse you.
	It's a very real phenomenon.
	It's a very real phenomenon.
	It's well documented. This isn't even controversial in any way, shape or form in the sort of field of psychology.
	And so how do you get people to not hit their children when their history demands and compels them, in a sense, to hit their children?
	In other words, hitting their children has them avoid the agony of processing the grief and fear and terror and rage of having been hit as children.
	And the only way to get them to not hit their children is to have them process the actual feelings they had as a child as opposed to normalize it and pretend it was great so that they don't have to feel those things.
	And look, I mean, Jesus has to go to hell in order to be part of his sort of spiritual journey to moral perfection.
	And this process of going to the underworld, this process of really being tempted by and immersed in darkness as a way of getting to the light is, I mean, obviously, as you know, as a Christian, it's very, very common.
	And psychologically, the mirror would be that In order for your children to not suffer, you have to suffer in a truly unholy manner.
	In order for my child to not suffer, the amount of suffering I had to go through is incalculable.
	And this was the process of going through therapy.
	This was the process of journaling.
	This was me sobbing on the couch in a ball.
	This was me pouring my heart out to my therapist and re-experiencing all the grief and terror of my early years.
	It's only through the fire of suffering that the future can be eased.
	This is why politics became kind of boring for me because one of the reasons I think why this whole Great Reset thing is cooking around is that governments can't pay the bills.
	And why can't the government pay the bills?
	Because people won't listen to reason.
	Because if you have a politician, and again I talk about this in my novel The Future, if you have a politician Who says, okay guys, you've been voting for things we can't possibly pay for and the older voters are the ones who've done it for the longest.
	So we're going to have to seriously cut social security benefits because the whole system is unsustainable and it's unfair to punish the children and to punish the youth who are just starting out with crushingly high taxes because you guys voted for things without being able to sustain them.
	And you can't say that because if you say that, You know, you're a starving grandma and you'll never have a political career and you'll be deplatformed.
	And people will just get hysterical.
	And so people, they won't listen to math.
	They won't listen to facts.
	They won't listen to that which is unsustainable.
	And so because they won't listen to reason, and I mean, part of that's their own thing.
	Part of that's indoctrination. Part of that's the media.
	I mean, it gets a complicated thing.
	But people won't listen to reason.
	They know it's unsustainable, and Social Security is just one of the things that's unsustainable.
	So they know it's unsustainable, but they won't listen to it.
	Reason. In the same way that somebody who's a drug addict knows that their drug addiction is unsustainable, but won't go to rehab.
	They don't want to go through the little suffering that will save them from the big suffering.
	And this is straight up.
	Christian theology, right? That the devil's going to promise you all this free stuff, and then by God the bill's going to come due, right?
	And then by God that bill's going to come due.
	And now the bill is coming due.
	And of course I spent close to 40 years trying to get people to listen to reason.
	And with some success, for sure, but certainly not enough to change things fundamentally.
	So now the bill is coming due, but the bill is coming due because people didn't listen to reason, because they thought that they could get stuff for free.
	In the same way, the devil offers you things for free.
	He offers you fame without all of the accommodate work.
	He'll offer you free money. He'll offer you, I don't know, beauty or talent or whatever it is that you don't have to work hard to earn.
	And you get all this free stuff, and then you lose your soul, right?
	So we have a society which has preyed upon people on the delusion that you can get something from nothing, and it's lost its soul.
	And the bill is really coming due, and I didn't want to have anything to do with that, because I'm not going to pretend that people who didn't listen to reason, I'm not going to continue to reason with people who not only didn't listen to reason, but attacked people.
	As evil, the people who tried to tell them the truth, which, of course, is back to Jesus, right?
	Tried to tell the truth about the path to heaven and universal morality and, you know, got in some pretty significant trouble therein.
	So I tried to learn from these sorts of situations, from the Socrateses and the Galileos and all of that sort of stuff.
	So... I think that there are definitely positive moral obligations that people should have, but exhorting them to be good won't do much good.
	You have to tell them that in order for...
	And suffering in this world is redemption in the next, right?
	So suffering... And the way I would analogize that from a philosophical standpoint is that suffering in this generation is redemption from the next.
	The heaven of the next generation is only achieved by the hell of this generation.
	And... There's no other way to do it.
	I mean, the amount that you have to reject easy things to get to heaven is prodigious.
	It's enormous. It's virtually endless.
	And the amount of suffering you have to take on to save your children.
	Well, it's something that the boomers who vaulted out of Christianity and therefore don't have the most powerful story that the suffering of the future can only be alleviated by the sacrifices of the present.
	Isn't that the whole story of Jesus who died to save us all and to redeem us from a certain path to hell and give us the opportunity for heaven?
	That he had to suffer so that we could be good.
	We had the chance for goodness.
	And, you know, I'm not obviously putting myself in any supernatural categories here or theological categories here, but the sort of local secular analogy is that you have to go through the hell of processing your own childhood abuse in order to not reinflict it on your children.
	And we don't have, right?
	This is one of the things about the boomers to some degree is that there's this whole shallowness, this whole, we can get stuff for free and there'll never be a price.
	Right? But if I wanted to avoid suffering, my child will suffer.
	If I had wanted to, I mean, of course, I did want to avoid suffering.
	If I had wanted to avoid suffering in terms of the lies that are told about me, I never could have told the truth.
	And telling the truth is the only way that the future can be redeemed, just as thou shalt not bear false witness is one of the key ways to avoid hell and to get to heaven.
	So I think we're fairly close in terms of the morals of The only way that I could avoid violating the non-aggression principle with my own child is by not bearing false witness to my own childhood.
	To tell the truth.
	And not just to myself, but in terms of spreading it to others.
	The only way that I could not be evil to my child is to be honest with myself.
	And that means accurately identifying the evils in my life, right?
	This is what Lewis says.
	I wasn't beating my child.
	I was beating my parents because that's who I was really angry at.
	But my parents are powerful.
	My child is helpless. I took out my anger on my child.
	This is a fundamental cycle, right?
	Sorry, that was a fairly long ramble, but I hope that means – I think we're very close in terms of, yeah, there are shoulds.
	There are shoulds, but not oughts.
	I think you should tell the truth about your childhood.
	And if you don't tell the truth about your childhood, you're much more likely to re-inflict abuse on your children.
	So the non-aggression principle, the actual enactment of the non-aggression principle requires a whole bunch of shoulds.
	It's like saying that you ought to run a marathon.
	Okay, well, you ought to run a marathon and finish it is a whole bunch of training ahead of time.
	So maybe what I'm saying is that implicit in don't assault, in particular, don't assault your children, don't hit, don't yell, don't verbally abuse.
	Okay, how do you achieve that?
	How do you achieve that?
	Well, there's a lot of shoulds to get to the ought not hit your children.
	And the should is, yeah, you've got to tell the truth.
	You've got to accurately identify the evils.
	You've got to process the suffering.
	You've got to stop blaming yourself.
	And you've got to vow to be different.
	And being different is a revolution in the mind and in the heart.
	So I think where we can come together is, I say, no theft, no rape, no assault, no murder.
	Look at the assault, particularly the assault on children, which is by far the most common assault in the world.
	You say, okay, well, how do we actually achieve that?
	Well, there's a whole bunch of positive...
	Obligations you have to go through in order to not hit your children and not abuse your children and not neglect your children.
	I mean, I know this.
	You know this. Everybody who's gone through this process knows this very deeply.
	Like that Spider-Man meme of him stopping the freight train and it's like, this is how I stop trauma that's gone on for approximately three billion years from hitting the next generation.
	You know, this strain.
	If you were molested as a child, and we know that being molested as a child is a significant predictor, not absolute, obviously, but a significant predictor for molesting children in the future.
	Okay, so how do you end up not molesting children in the future if you were molested as a child?
	Well, you have to denormalize it.
	You have to recognize it for the bottomless evil that it was, and you have to go through the whole shock and pain and horror and...
	deepest violation possible in order to overcome that.
	And so say, well, I obviously don't want to have these actions in my life.
	And so there's a whole bunch of positive obligations that you have to go through in order to not be evil.
	In order to not be evil, there's a whole bunch of stuff you have to do if you were subjected to great evil.
	In order to learn Japanese, if you were taught English as a child, is a lot of work.
	In order to learn nonviolence when you were aggressed against as a child, as most of us were, is a lot of work.
	And maybe that's where the positive obligations, where we can join together on that.
	Now, they're implicit, not explicit.
	They're implicit in UPB, in that I've talked about them, and of course, not being violent for people who are raised in violence is a lot of work.
	But does that help explicate where some of the positive obligations can be wrapped into the prohibitions?
	Yeah, yeah, totally.
	I loved everything you just said.
	And I think that, like, you know, from the Christian's point of view, it's You know, from my perspective, this battle between light and dark has been going on for thousands of years.
	And then along the way, there's all sorts of people who have contributed in that fight, in that war.
	And it's a war.
	Yeah. You know, and then, because you asked the question, and you answered it also, but you asked the question, like, how do you affect, like, how do you fight in this war?
	Like, how do you prevent spanking?
	And, you know, you're one of the people who could answer that question better than anybody.
	And then for me, you know, I'm not a...
	I don't have the, you know, the...
	Sort of skill at talking to large groups of people like you do.
	But, like, I think, you know, you just get, you know, you do what you can in your local community, and then you, especially in your family.
	But then also when you see somebody, you know, doing, having some success, you know, you get behind them and support them and And encourage them.
	You've heard it a million times.
	You don't need to hear it. But you are so loved.
	And the future loves you.
	And appreciates you.
	I also think it's kind of like Bitcoin.
	I like doing Bitcoin analogies.
	They were trying to make digital currencies since the 1970s.
	And they did a million different iterations of it that failed.
	But every iteration kind of developed some new technology that, you know, eventually when Bitcoin came, you know, it was just putting together a bunch of things that was developed over that time.
	So it's kind of like you have to do all of these great inventions, and then the last invention is the one that gets all the credit.
	But it took all those other ones along the way.
	And... I kind of see it that way with the spiritual warfare, or you could say conceptual warfare.
	And then I think you have advanced the cause.
	And even though it may not look like it, you're not getting the results that you were kind of hoping for.
	But just getting every little step forward is meaningful.
	It seems way more meaningful when you get that last step.
	And I think there will be a last step in some sense, you know, where there's a large cultural shift.
	And then so even if you just push it, you know, one inch forward down this long field, you know, that still deserves a lot of credit.
	And I appreciate that.
	It's very kind what you say, and this is just in general for people out there.
	Please don't look upon me as robbed.
	I saw someone the other day, oh, Steph is just talking about abstract topics and his call-in shows.
	He's a broken man, this kind of stuff, right?
	This is not any kind of false bravado.
	This is how I genuinely feel.
	I love what I'm doing right now.
	These conversations are the ones that last.
	When you talk about current events, you get a lot more interest in the present and nobody cares in the future.
	When you talk about eternal themes, such as we're talking about tonight, people care less in the present and much more in the future.
	And I was not robbed of anything other than the vanity of trying to move the needle in the here and now as opposed to move the world in the future.
	And it is not a punishment.
	It is not a negative.
	It is not a robbery.
	It is a liberation to serve the future, which is exactly what I should be doing.
	There are lots of people who can discuss contemporaneous events, maybe even move the needle on some of them from time to time.
	But how many people can have eternal discussions of truth and virtue and value?
	Well, very, very few.
	So, I was nudged back to the best use of my talents for the betterment of the world.
	And yes, I get, you know, you can move things in the here and now.
	Like, you know, Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, right?
	He had a newspaper column and, you know, how many novels did he give up writing because of newspaper columns?
	Nobody reads those anymore.
	Nobody reads those anymore. Bertrand Russell wrote on just about everything under the sun.
	Everything. He had a newspaper column for everything.
	And he got people writing him letters and saying, oh, I agree with this, and I don't agree with that, and he had a little bit of influence, but who cares about that stuff now?
	I mean, if he'd worked on something like UPB, which he certainly had the chops to, how different could the world have been?
	I mean, he got arrested for nuclear protests and things like that, and when you're in the hurly-burly and having an effect in the here and now, it really feels like you're doing something.
	But when the smoke clears and time marches on and people look back, what did you achieve of lasting value, of eternal value, let's say?
	Was it more important for me to analyze Biden's speech from hell last night, or is it more important for me to talk about the rough and rocky path to virtue?
	With you and the future.
	Lots of people talk about Biden's speech from last night.
	Lots of very competent people talk about that.
	I may be good at that, but I'm great at this.
	It is not something to be pitied.
	I was not robbed. I was turned to the right direction.
	I was not deplatformed from the future.
	Deplatforming in the present means influence in the future because I turn my gaze and attention and intellect towards more universal and powerful and long-lasting themes, facts and truths.
	Turning my light off now Makes my light much brighter in the future.
	And not about me, right?
	About philosophy, right? So it is not something to be sorry about.
	It is not something where I was robbed.
	And I appreciate your kindness, and I'm not trying to over-arc the very thoughtful things that you have to say about this.
	And it's beautiful, and I appreciate that.
	Love you for it. But it was not a negative.
	It was a huge positive.
	And the liberation that I had when people didn't follow me to new platforms and so on, some people were like, okay, I had a little bit of frustration here and there.
	But honestly, this is part of my Christian upbringing.
	I literally would say to myself, okay, if I was a Christian, what would I think?
	What would I think? And I would think God was saying, for heaven's sakes, my son, turn from the things of the moment to things of eternity.
	I gave you a soul and an immortal reason.
	A reason and an argument and a depth and a clarity that will vastly outlive you.
	Turn away from the things of the moment to the things that are eternal.
	Forget about your graying hair.
	Focus on the quality of your soul.
	Forget about that which is passing the detritus of the moment and talk about the eternal truths that mankind needs to hear to elevate itself to a moral state.
	If I hadn't been deplatformed, I would never have written my novel.
	I wouldn't be doing The History of Philosophers, which is some of my greatest work, which clarifies the path of humanity in a way that I've always wanted to get and have never seen and hopefully can provide.
	The robbery of the present gives me the gift of the future.
	And as a philosopher, where would you rather be?
	Moving tiny levers in the present or changing the course of everything in the future.
	Not too tough a choice.
	All right. Thanks, everyone, so much for a wonderful conversation this evening.
	I love you guys for your fantastic questions and conversations.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Oh, come on.
	You listen to this stuff.
	you know there's nothing else out there and never will be again because this is where it is thank you so for your support freedom.com forward slash donate to help out the show freedom.locals.com to join the community which you can do for free i gave you the promo code already i'm not doing it That's it. I'm done. Done with promo codes, at least for today.
	I will talk to you on the weekend.
	And at freedomand.locals.com, please, please check out.
	The releases this weekend of the new History of Philosophers shows they are mind-blowingly great.
	And again, I wouldn't be doing them if God or the universe or society as a whole hadn't told me to look to the future and look for eternity rather than scrub my skin into cheese-grating nothingness in the detritus of the present.
	Thanks, everyone. Have a great night.

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