Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - The Definition of Left vs Right! Twitter/X Space

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Aug. 9, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:58:36

The Definition of Left vs Right! Twitter/X Space

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	Welcome to your Friday Night Live this year of Our Brain, 8th of August, 2025.
	I hope you're doing well.
	I hope you are having a beautiful evening, a wonderful week.
	I hope you're having a great weekend set up and ready to roll.
	Now, of course, it is your show, your show, to show me up, my friends.
	So I certainly have my topics, but let's dive straight into not Jack Black, but John Black, John Black.
	What is on your mind, my friend?
	What is on your mind, my friend?
	All right.
	Can't hear you.
	I have the right headset on.
	Oh, dear.
	All right.
	Hopefully I've got this all set up.
	Herxing, we chatted once before.
	What's on your mind, my friend?
	Oh, I just heard something, so I know my earphones are working.
	Can't hear you.
	Thanks for bringing me up as speaker, Stefan.
	Really appreciate getting a chance to follow up on our chat last time.
	So I misspoke.
	I thought when I discovered you a few weeks ago that that was your first show back.
	And I had remembered that I wasn't really paying that close attention at first.
	But then when you said there is no real center, it got my attention.
	And then when you said fascism attracts men and socialism attracts women, I was really interested.
	And that concept has stayed with me a lot.
	Sorry, that's not, I mean, I hate to be a nag, and there's no reason why you'd get this formulation exactly correct.
	This came out of a show that is available for my premium listeners at freedomain.locals.com.
	And it wasn't that socialism attracts or fascism attracts, it's that socialism or communism is female nature plus totalitarianism, whereas fascism tends to be male nature plus totalitarianism.
	So it's not so much an attraction thing, although that certainly is part of it, but that's sort of my general formulation.
	So I just wanted to give a minor nudge in that direction, but go ahead.
	Well, I had come to the realization that I missed something really key because when I had spent a lot of time with the Greens and some time with the socialists, I had noticed that there was a lot of feminine men and it was mostly women.
	And I thought, oh, well, it wasn't like that when I first started.
	And this is a generational thing.
	And maybe this has an influence from the colleges, inspiring youthful, naive political activists.
	But you really kind of captured my attention that there has to be some kind of party or independent platform that caters both to the traditional female and male ideas of governance.
	And that's kind of where I was going last time when I was asking you about the center, because I feel like there's no real left of center, moderate representation.
	And you kind of alluded how there's more polarized differences between leftists and right-wingers now.
	And so this is part of the reason why I encourage people to run as independents and to represent for the people that don't have.
	Okay, sorry.
	I don't really want to turn this into a political ad.
	So what is it that you mean when you say the left and the right?
	Yes, that's a good question because I was trying to say that the Democrats really don't represent the left anymore.
	Yes, you mentioned Bernie Sanders and I could point to Dennis Kucinich as a real progressive, but they don't really run that party.
	And so for people like me, I'm stuck with either dealing with far left.
	Okay, hang on.
	Hang on.
	Hang on.
	What was my question?
	How does this fit?
	No.
	What was my question?
	It was like 20 seconds ago.
	I'm sorry.
	You need to repeat it.
	Okay, so bro, if you want to get into politics, if you want to get into human communication, what's one skill you might need to work on a little?
	I'm not a great listener.
	Okay, so you need to fix that if you're going to have conversations with people because quality people don't like being ignored and don't like having their input ignored.
	And then you just go on a speech like I didn't say anything.
	My question was, what do you mean by left and right?
	Yes.
	So for me, the far left is the green part of the left.
	No, I didn't say far left, just left and right.
	Well, there's economic left and right, and there's cultural left and right.
	And then there's also the authoritarian scale if you do the political compass up and down.
	You know, you haven't answered it.
	Are you aware you haven't answered the question at all?
	You've just created categories called economic and authoritarian.
	So what is left and what is right?
	It's not just economic.
	There's cultural left and right.
	Okay, but creating categories doesn't tell me the content of those categories.
	Well, I can give you an example.
	No, I want definitions.
	I mean, okay, let me ask you this.
	Sorry, let me interrupt you and let me just ask you this.
	How old are you?
	57.
	You're 57.
	Okay, so you've been interested in politics for how long?
	I first started in 1988 with Jesse Jackson.
	Okay.
	Couple of decades, right?
	Yeah, I took the 90s off.
	Okay, so 20, 30 years you've been interested in politics and you've been concerned about left-right distinctions.
	Yes.
	So what is the difference between left and right?
	If you've been into something for 20 or 30 years, you should know.
	Isn't that fair?
	I'm not being unreasonable, am I?
	No, you're absolutely right.
	I mean, if you were a doctor with 20 or 30 years of experience and I said, what's the difference between sickness and health?
	You'd have an answer, wouldn't you?
	What's the difference?
	If you're a businessman and I said, what's the difference between profit and loss?
	You'd have an answer, right?
	What's the difference with what is left and what is right?
	So, economics, the structures of, you know, the policies, So what's the difference between the left and the right?
	Well, I was going to supply-side economics is more right-wing.
	Well, that's an example of policy, but what's the philosophical differences or differences in worldviews between the left and the right?
	It used to be anti-war was a big thing.
	That line is kind of blurred, of course.
	No, it was anti-war when the West was fighting communism because the left is largely communist, or at least was significantly, and I think still is.
	So they weren't anti-war.
	They were anti-war against communists.
	So when they were fighting the communists in Korea and Vietnam, then the left was very anti-war, right?
	So they're not anti-war when you're not fighting communists in that the left has not really condemned much of the Ukraine-Russia conflict because there's no clear socialist-communist category.
	But anyway, go on.
	Yeah, that's a good point.
	The Democrats have veered to more of a war-mongering state.
	No, that's not.
	Hang on, hang on.
	That's not my argument.
	And again, you don't have to agree with my argument, but it would be polite to at least reference it, right?
	So what was my argument about whether the left is anti-war?
	It faded because the left machinery, which you call the Democrat Party here in America, didn't have the boogeyman of communism.
	So no, no.
	Okay.
	If there are a lot of socialists and communists in the left in America, do they like it when America is fighting against socialists and communists?
	Oh, that's a great point.
	Yes.
	I just made that point.
	My God, man, do you have absolute cotton in your ears?
	Is it even a combo?
	I'm a little bit nervous, so that's part of the problem.
	Oh, come on.
	At 57, you're not a kid, right?
	And you've been in the public life off and on for a long time.
	I actually took some acting, but I had a real bad stuttering problem, and it comes out when I'm nervous.
	So I'm trying to argue.
	Okay, but this is not a stuttering issue.
	This is just a remembering what I said 30 seconds ago issue.
	So, no, so it's not, it's not that they're anti-war.
	Again, I don't want to nag you too much, right?
	So, it's not that the left is anti-war.
	They just don't like it when their friends in North Korea and North Vietnam are being attacked because they like communism and therefore they like communists and therefore they oppose wars against communism.
	But they're not anti-war on principle, of course.
	I would have a different experience having spent time with the Greens.
	They're anti-war across the board.
	But again, I position them as far-left.
	Okay, but there isn't actually a war being fought against direct communists at the moment, so it's a little hard to tell.
	Yes, that's a good point.
	Okay, but let me ask you this.
	Let me ask you this: are the Greens, the far-left Greens, are they most hostile towards China and India?
	No.
	Why not?
	Because those are the biggest polluters on the planet by far.
	So they don't give a shit about pollution.
	There's a lot of hypocrisy in the Green Party.
	When I started, they were focused on pollution and practical matters.
	Now it's climate change.
	Okay, but even if they're into climate change, China is horrendous with regards to CO2 emissions.
	So they should be organizing massive protests against China.
	But they don't.
	Why?
	Ideological similarities might have some.
	Yeah, because China's already communist.
	So they don't give a shit about the planet or it's all just haranguing capitalists to try and get more government control over the economy to turn it into a socialist or a communist.
	It's nothing to do with cleaning the planet.
	I mean, what is it?
	80% of the crap in the ocean flows out of a couple of rivers in India.
	And I've never seen one goddamn far leftist go over to India, organize a massive protest against the pollution there.
	They don't care.
	It's not a real issue.
	It's just communism.
	They don't care about the planet.
	They don't care about pollution.
	They don't care about global warming.
	They don't care about any of this stuff.
	They care about control.
	And China will tell them to go fuck off if they go to China, as will India.
	So they don't go there.
	They don't care about the pollution.
	They care about browbeating and haranguing people into giving up property rights.
	There's a lot of truth to what she said.
	There is a group called the Ocean Saver.
	They are cutting off the pollution in the main rivers.
	So that's a good start.
	Sorry, where?
	In the main rivers that are causing the pollution.
	There's one here.
	You mean in India?
	It's all over the globe.
	They targeted a thousand rivers, and they started with the first few dozen that are major contributors to...
	Do the greens...
	I wish they did.
	No, but do they?
	I wish there was a leftist center party that had those kind of values you've been espousing.
	I mean, because the simple movement of people and taking them from low-carbon emission environments in poorer countries and putting them into massive higher emission, higher carbon emissions in developed countries is horrendous for the environment.
	Also, do you know any leftists who oppose the national debt?
	Because the national debt, of course, as you know, is stripping the future of resources by stimulating massive overconsumption in the here and now.
	You know, like if somebody has a $100,000 line of credit and orders all this crap off Amazon, then he's kind of wrecking the planet right now because he's stimulating through debt overconsumption in the present.
	So do you know any leftists who are really, really interested, if they're on the environmental side, which a lot of leftists came to claim to be, is total bullshit.
	Are they saying, well, we've got to pass a balanced budget amendment because this debt and these unfunded liabilities are destroying nature's scarce resources through borrowing?
	I don't know many that fit that description.
	Come on, you don't know any.
	You don't know any.
	It's not even part of the movement.
	I've never heard any green leftist talk about getting rid of fiat currency, fiat currency.
	Government control over currency, government control over the interest rates massively stimulates the overconsumption of nature's scarce resources because the government can just print money, hand it out, and that causes people to buy stuff, which burns up nature's scarce resources.
	So I've never seen a single goddamn leftist talk about national debts, unfunded liabilities, or fiat currency.
	They don't care.
	They don't care, even though those are the biggest destroyers of nature's scarce resources on the planet because that's communism and socialism, all of those things.
	And so they want that stuff, so they don't care about it.
	It's not true that I don't know anybody that has that mentality.
	You yourself admitted you didn't know what a left libertarian is.
	No, no, no.
	Let's be friendly.
	Let's be friendly.
	I said left libertarianism is an oxymoron.
	And I tried to explain to you that there are left libertarians that don't adhere to the libertarian party or the green party, that they are somewhere in between those two parties.
	And those are the type of people that talk about what you're saying and the Fed have sound money, gold-backed or multi-commodity-backed currencies.
	There are people like that out there, but they usually have to run as independents.
	Okay.
	Then I apologize.
	You do know some people like that.
	I've never really come across them.
	But if you say they exist, I'm not going to oppose you.
	But they're extremely rare when it comes to, say, the Democrat Party or the Green Movement as a whole, right?
	I can't speak for the Democrat Party.
	I haven't been attached to them since 1992 with Jerry Brown, but I can say that the younger generation of Greens are not thinking along the lines that you and I are.
	They're not thinking in practical matters.
	They're talking about things like cow farts, which is totally debunked.
	And that's an example of how far gone some of them are.
	Okay.
	All right.
	So what's the difference between left and right?
	There are economic factors.
	No, no.
	Oh, my God.
	Why do we have to keep doing this over and over again?
	Giving me categories, like, well, they differ in economics.
	They differ in policy.
	It's like, I know, I know.
	Everybody knows that.
	You need to tell me what is the difference between left and right rather than saying they have different opinions.
	So there's a lot of commonality between far left and far right because they're both authoritarian.
	If you want to go to what's left of center versus what's right of center, that's easier to explain because we, I feel like those of us left of center have more in common with people center and right of center than people that are far.
	Okay, fine, fine.
	So, okay, you can slice and dice the categories.
	The extremes should be easier to explain than the moderates.
	Like if you have two slightly different shades of mauve or purple, that's harder to differentiate than black and white, right?
	So the extremes should be easier to differentiate.
	But if you want to go with the moderate, okay, what's the difference between, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	What's the difference between the moderate left and the moderate right?
	And honestly, I'm going to give you one more chance, but if you can't come up with anything that makes any sense, I'll have to explain it to the audience and move on.
	And I don't mean to, but, you know, we've been talking for 10 or 15 minutes and I still don't have any idea what the difference is between the left and the right for your way of thinking.
	The moderate left want social programs that are actually accountable and functional.
	That's one of the main tenets.
	They want demilitarization and decentralization, but not on the level of the libertarians, not whole-scale baby steps.
	So they want social programs and demilitarization.
	Right of center libertarians, they're Okay, no, libertarians are not right of center.
	They would be considered far right.
	Oh, well, that's a point of disagreement.
	Yeah, I know, because you said that far right, I mean, this is the sort of left-right spectrum has particularly limited characteristics because anything that wraps around in the back and far left and far right are kind of indistinguishable is obviously a bad metric.
	But I don't think that if you say that moderate rightists would be the Republican Party, the libertarians would not fit into that category, right?
	Except for Thomas Massey, Ron Paul.
	But I see them more as pure libertarians in the center.
	The right of center libertarians are the Mises caucus.
	Okay, so what is the difference?
	Okay, sorry, that's fine.
	So what is the difference between moderate left and moderate my the moderate left want accountable social programs and and uh demilitarization uh obviously not around the world but only one country uh although they may want these other things that could only affect it in their own country so if the if the moderate leftist got into power in the u.s they would expand social programs but try to make them accountable in some manner and they would strip the military of its budget and its equipment right yes uh it would it would definitely the budget would definitely
	go down.
	Okay, so what is the moderate right?
	What is it that defines them or is their characteristic?
	They are preoccupied with taxes.
	So many people are...
	Okay, so hang on, hang on, hang on.
	See, I can't trust your objectivity.
	If you simply describe the moderate left and then with the moderate right you say they're preoccupied, which is a negative statement.
	So...
	I'm sorry.
	You just describe it to me like you were a space alien.
	Like, don't put all this bias in because when you put bias in, people don't really want to listen too much, right?
	Because you're just beating your drum.
	Fair enough.
	One of their main tenets is taxes for working class people especially have to be only at local or state levels.
	There's too much federal taxes on the regular everyday Joe, like income tax.
	That's one.
	There's also the cultural differences like abortion.
	and gun rights.
	That's very important to right of center, libertarian types.
	And there's a mindset that government has to be shrunk in size, not just what left of center is tackling is the power of government, but they want not just the power of government, but the actual entities like the agencies created by the executive branch to be shrunk noticeably, conservative.
	So the left of center wants bigger government in some areas, like social programs, smaller government in other areas like military, and on the left they want smaller taxes, less abortion, and the same or more military.
	Is that right?
	Fair enough.
	No, no, no.
	I'm asking you.
	I'm not trying to give you mine.
	I'm trying to synthesize what you're saying.
	Yes, that's a fair enough assessment of what I said.
	Okay, so what is the difference in philosophy between the moderate left and the moderate right?
	Because you've given me an example of policy differences, but where do these policy differences stem from philosophically?
	How we spend our tax dollars.
	No, no, philosophically.
	What is the mindset of the worldview on the moderate left versus the moderate right?
	There's a safety net mindset with left of center that's very much in the form of social programs for the poor, the elderly, the handicapped, so on and so forth.
	So they view people on the moderate left, they view people as unable or incompetent to manage their own life affairs, and they need government to provide them with resources.
	Is that right?
	Unfortunately, we are in that state.
	54% of Americans read below 6th grade level.
	level for instance well no but that would be the result of another socialist program called government education so saying that we need socialism because people are uneducated when their education is run by socialism it's a little bit circular isn't it yes there's also the idea of social programs have to actually work and there has to be some accountability which the far left doesn't really uh talk about.
	So what does accountability mean to the moderate left?
	Like what happens if a social program doesn't work?
	That really hasn't been explored in my So it's just a magic world called accountability that has no actual programming.
	Well, I mean, how do we how do we actually get multi-parties first and foremost?
	It's it's that that's what people dream right now.
	Sorry, what do you mean multi-parties?
	I don't know about that term.
	Oh, well, we have two parties in America that basically don't allow the other parties to have an even-level playing field.
	it's very difficult, even in the areas like downtown Los Angeles, close to where I live, uh, where the Republicans don't run a serious campaign, uh, to get a debate.
	So, uh, there's a lack of, uh, media access, a lack of, It's a shame because it's not.
	I mean, I actually interviewed the Los Angeles.
	I stood up and confronted the Los Angeles City Council when I was doing my documentary on California and asked them where the hell they were going to find the money to pay for all of these pipe dreams.
	And I got unceremoniously shuffled out of the room, so to speak.
	And so, yeah, I mean, the Republicans don't really have any power in Los Angeles, so it's a Democrat-run city.
	Well, and especially in the district I'm talking about, there's a high concentration of homeless people, and it's not really workable with the current plans they have.
	They ask for a lot of money.
	Sorry, it's not workable with what?
	Well, they only find several hundred people homes when there's 56,000 plus people that are homeless.
	Okay, so for how long?
	Sorry, sorry to interrupt.
	For how long has California been trying to solve or Los Angeles to solve the problem of homelessness?
	Ever since I got here in the early 70s, but at the same time, it's grown exponentially since the lockdowns.
	Okay.
	So why have they spent hundreds of millions or billions or billions, probably tens of billions of dollars by now?
	Why do you think they spent all this money on the homeless and there are more homeless?
	Well, there's a lot of factors there.
	The cost of living is really high in Los Angeles.
	The wages have stayed almost constant.
	And then there's the inflation aspects.
	I've met people that had three jobs and were still homeless, believe it or not.
	It's really crazy how expensive it is just to have a small single apartment in a nice area in Los Angeles.
	So it's crushing for a lot of people.
	They pay a lot of taxes.
	They have to deal with mentally ill and even violent homeless people or people that are drug addicts.
	And so there's a disconnect on top of everything.
	And of course, the people in charge are known for getting high salaries and not actually finding people places to live.
	And what percentage, sorry, just on average, what percentage of government welfare makes it to the poor?
	Like every dollar that is taken in taxes for the purpose of helping the poor, what percentage of that dollar or how many pennies of that dollar actually ends up in the pockets of the poor?
	I don't know, but they say that about half of discretionary spending goes to social programs.
	Yeah, it's about 10 to 20% of the money ends up in the bank accounts or the hands of the poor.
	So you've got a 80 to 90 percent overhead, which is, of course, completely ridiculous, right?
	So, I mean, I did the interviews.
	I went out with a social worker when I did my documentary on California.
	We went and interviewed the homeless and so on and talked to them.
	So I have some sort of on-the-ground experience with this.
	So, of course, it's not much.
	But, I mean, one of the reasons why California or LA has so many homeless people is they spend a lot of money.
	Therefore, a lot of people want to come.
	The weather's good.
	There are A lot of social programs.
	So, the more money you spend, the more homeless people you will attract.
	And the more money you spend, the more it becomes advantageous for people to claim that they're homeless rather than have jobs.
	So, it's never going to solve the problem.
	It's humanly, fiscally, emotionally, politically, and practically impossible for the government to solve the problem of homelessness because the more money it spends, the more you create an incentive for people to claim that they're homeless and take that particular path.
	So, it's not possible.
	Okay.
	So, let me just, I'll move on to another caller and I appreciate people's patience here.
	So, the difference between the left and the right as a whole, let me just give a little speech here.
	And then this is the kind of stuff that I was looking for.
	And I think this is the level of conceptual development that is really worthwhile getting involved in.
	So, the left, the reason I say it is feminine or maternal is it views people as incompetent as children and as unable to make their own decisions.
	Now, that is great if you're a mother with a toddler or a baby, right?
	That you have to make their decisions for them because they're toddlers and babies, right?
	So, you don't let them drive, you don't let them sign contracts, they're not really responsible for what they're doing.
	And in a family, you take from the most competent and you give to the least competent, from each according to their ability to each according to their need.
	The reason that resonates with people is because that's how families work.
	And that's totally fine.
	There's nothing wrong with it.
	It's perfectly fine and perfectly moral, as long as it's voluntary, which a family is.
	So, you don't ask toddlers to go to work or pay taxes or lift heavy machinery or anything like that.
	That is all left to the stronger adults.
	So, the left is the maternal view of babies and toddlers transferred to the political arena.
	The right, on the other hand, rather than being egalitarian, right?
	So, let me give you another example from the left, right?
	So, the left says, well, if you make more, you should give to those who have less.
	Well, this, of course, translates perfectly into a woman who's got five kids, right?
	Yeah, say two, five, seven, nine, eleven, or whatever, right?
	And she's got five kids.
	If she just lays out a whole buffet of food, the 11-year-old is going to get a lot more than the two-year-old.
	So, she has to forcefully sometimes intervene and say to the 11-year-old, you can't take all that food because the younger kids also need their food.
	And she has to sometimes maybe even take the food from the complaining 11-year-old and redistribute it to the two-year-old.
	Because if she doesn't do that, if it's a raw meritocracy, the 11-year-old's going to get all the food and the two-year-old is not going to get much.
	And the two-year-old is not going to do very well from a basic survival standpoint.
	So, taking from the more active, the more competent, the more successful, even by force, if need be, and giving to the less competent, the less able, and the less successful is female nature.
	And it's perfectly right, fine, appropriate, and healthy in a family.
	It's just fucking tyrannical when it comes to giving them the awesome power of the state.
	So, a woman's urge to take from the most competent and give to the least competent and to forcefully redistribute resources from the bigger, the older, the stronger to the smaller, the younger, the weaker makes perfect sense.
	It's why we're all here.
	I'm a younger brother myself, so it's why we're all here.
	And it's perfectly healthy in a family.
	But what is perfectly healthy in a family is not at all healthy when it comes to a government.
	So, that is on the left.
	So, the left is a maternal view of incompetent people and mysteriously strong and capable people, and then mysteriously weak and incapable people.
	It's resentment to an anger, right?
	So, if you've got an 11-year-old kid who keeps grabbing all the food from the two-year-old, you're going to get angry at that.
	Give the food to your brother.
	You don't need it all.
	He's hungry.
	And you get angry and impatient.
	And this is the left's anger towards the wealthy and the successful.
	This is their anger, like just be nice, share your stuff, right?
	Because they call it redistribution.
	Redistribution is a lie.
	Wealth is not distributed.
	It is created, right?
	Which is why almost all human history was horribly poor.
	So they say it's redistribution, and that's true in a family, right?
	So the dad makes the money, the mom goes and gets the groceries, the mom makes A bunch of food and then the kids swarm it.
	And so the parents are already distributing the food and then they have to redistribute the food because the various siblings are taking more than perhaps they should, but it's delicate.
	The teenage boy needs a lot more food than the five-year-old girl, right?
	So it's a balance.
	And so there's resentment towards the more successful, this bottomless sympathy towards the less successful.
	Again, in a family, when you're dealing with kids, perfectly sensible and healthy, when it comes to society as a whole, you then have to keep inventing people who are incompetent to fulfill and manifest and justify your urge to use the power of the state to redistribute income, which is not redistributed, but in fact, create it, right?
	So you're basically just stealing at that point.
	So the left is from each according to their ability to each according to their need, which is parents to children, older siblings to younger siblings.
	It is a forcible redistribution of income, which again is fine when it comes to children, but it's bad when it comes to adults.
	And so that is the left.
	It's a feminine worldview where equality of outcome is absolutely necessary for survival.
	It's just, it's right and it's good and it's healthy.
	But the only way that that mindset survives is to pretend that there are people who are adults and there are people who are children.
	And the way that they do it is they say that the wealthy and successful are the adults and the poor, the sick, the sad, the blah, blah, blah are the children.
	And then all of those mechanisms for redistribution and aggression and hostility kick in, but at a societal, political level.
	So that's on the left.
	On the right, that is treating everyone as an adult who is an adult.
	It's a raw meritocracy.
	And charity is good, but dangerous.
	And, you know, I mean, the only people who think that the government can help poor people or disadvantaged people, the only people who think that are people who've never actually put time, effort, and energy into helping the disadvantaged or the poor in their own lives.
	Because if you've really tried to help somebody who's disadvantaged or poor, you know it's a really, really difficult situation.
	If you've ever tried to help an addict, it's a really difficult situation.
	If you've ever tried to help somebody who's really overweight, it's a really difficult situation and it fails more often, much more often than it succeeds.
	If you've ever had somebody in your family member who you want them to quit drugs or quit smoking or quit overeating or quit gambling or quit sleeping around or, you know, whatever it is, quit drinking, it's really, really tough.
	And these are people who care about you, who've known you probably your whole life or you've known them their whole lives.
	And it's really, really tough.
	So charity is good, but charity is really, really tricky.
	Charity is like incredibly complex surgery.
	You don't just turn it over to anyone and just throw money at people and think you've solved the problem.
	And so it's good to help people, but the problem is by trying to help people, there's this thing called enabling, right?
	Where the woman who's got a husband who's an alcoholic, she goes and buys his alcohol because otherwise he'll get the DTs and he'll scream and stomp.
	And then she'll call in sick for him when he is too hungover to go to work.
	And then she'll work for him if he gets fired.
	And, right?
	And that's enabling.
	And it's really, really, really destructive to provide additional resources to people who are addicts or who have problems.
	So the way that the women work is equality of outcome because the inequalities of opportunity are unjust, right?
	The older kid shouldn't get more food just because he's older, because he didn't earn that.
	It's just an accident, right?
	And this is why when you look at birth order, people say, well, it's unfair.
	It's like, well, yeah, but I mean, that's why they look at the economy and say, when people have more money, well, that's unfair.
	It's like, no, they work for it.
	They took risks.
	They slept on the couch.
	They worked their 80-hour weeks and succeeded and failed a lot and so on.
	So they provide value and they've earned it.
	So the feminine is equality of outcome, and that is great in the family.
	On the right, it's more of a raw meritocracy and it is unsentimental.
	It is unsentimental.
	So on the left in the home, for women, every child should have the opportunity to go and gather wood.
	Every child should have the opportunity to pick berries.
	Every child should have the opportunity to learn how to throw and catch a ball.
	Every child should have that opportunity because you're trying to teach kids and find out who's really good at stuff.
	For men, though, when you're out hunting and let's say you've got 10 guys and two spears that really work, well, Who should throw the spears?
	Well, it shouldn't just cycle through.
	It shouldn't be like, well, well, Bob, you threw the spear last time.
	So let's let Squinty Jackson with, you know, one eye that's roomy throw the spear because he's going to miss.
	So for men, a raw meritocracy is really, really important.
	And subsidies are bad, right?
	You want the best engineer to build the bridge, not the bad engineer, because the bridge is going to fall down and get people killed.
	You want the best guy with the most green thumb to run the agriculture because he's going to produce the most food.
	So a raw meritocracy is how you survive.
	And that's perfectly fine and healthy even among adults, but it's really unhealthy among children.
	So on the left, it's a feminine energy that treats society as accidentally strong and weak children.
	And on the right, they treat everyone as an adult who is an adult, and it's a raw meritocracy.
	And yes, helping people is fine, but people can get really dependent on your help and can exploit you.
	And therefore, you need private charity because private charity has to be effective and government charity doesn't.
	So that's just sorry, very brief overview of it, but I hope that makes sense.
	So you really want to start thinking of things at that level.
	And that's kind of what it is that I was talking about.
	All right.
	Happy to take more callers.
	Unstoppable method.
	Unstoppable method actor.
	Unstoppable birth control method.
	Method man.
	I can keep going, but I probably shouldn't.
	What's on your mind?
	If you want to unmute, I'm happy to hear.
	Going once.
	Come on, baby.
	Don't make me vamp.
	I won't have it.
	I just won't have it.
	I might have it.
	All right.
	So see if anybody else wants to jump in.
	See if anybody else wants to jump in.
	I'm happy to hear.
	All right.
	Going once.
	Going twice.
	All right.
	Unstoppable method.
	Wait, did he can now speak?
	Wait, no.
	Oh, he vanished.
	All right.
	All right.
	So back to this.
	I know it's a little bit.
	Oh, unstoppable method.
	Don't fast with me grow.
	I'll give you one last chance.
	What's on your mind?
	Just don't forget to unmute.
	Hi there.
	Can you hear me now?
	Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
	Oh, okay.
	I couldn't hear you before.
	So I wanted to ask you about consciousness and a little bit of, there was a little bit of a back and forth previously.
	Can you hear me well?
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	So it was about consciousness being reducible to what you can see in an MRI scan, for example, and it being something that is.
	I'm sorry, what do you mean by reducible to?
	I remember the interchange.
	Yeah.
	You were saying that there's no scientific way to determine consciousness.
	And I said, well, if you scan a live brain that's thinking and active, there was the singer and songwriter Sting actually submitted to this.
	He was composing music while strapped into an MRI and you could see all parts of his brain lighting up and so on.
	So you can detect the operations of consciousness with a live brain, especially one that's really active and thinking versus somebody who died three days ago.
	You're not going to get any electrical activity at all in their brain.
	So I was saying that I'm not sure what reducible to means, but certainly consciousness shows up on a brain scan because if somebody's dead and has no consciousness, they don't show up in a brain scan, if that makes sense.
	No, that definitely makes sense.
	I don't think the argument is wasn't supposed to be that there's no material basis for consciousness.
	But the question is that some philosophers have seemed to have a difficulty with, okay, I can see in the MRI scan, there are ion fluxes going back and forth.
	I can see blood flow.
	I can see oxygen concentrations.
	But nowhere in there, I can really, just from that, I can see, oh, there's a conscious being right here.
	So, for instance, there may be who agree with like this position.
	Francis Crick is also the guy who invented, I'm sorry, who discovered the double helix for the DNA, has a book that He talks about how when we see the color red, it's all reducible to chemical reactions within the brain.
	But some philosophers disagree with that and they say, oh, just because you can see all those chemical reactions, that's very fine.
	You can describe them in terms of chemical laws, but nowhere there is the color red.
	And I think that, I mean, there has some importance to this question in terms of free will and our capacity to determine ideal proposed actions to ideal standards, which is a definition of free will.
	I think it's somewhat important.
	Like this discussion of the nature of consciousness is more important than that.
	Because if consciousness is just chemical reactions defined by chemical laws, then to talk about what your consciousness should or should not do is becomes a bit challenging, right?
	Because it's just a practical thing.
	So, sorry.
	Do you mean that if we reduce consciousness to atoms and energy, that we lose free will?
	Is that right?
	I think we lose some meaning of free will.
	Hang on, hold on.
	I don't know what does it mean.
	We lose some meaning of free will.
	I don't know what that is.
	I think it's fair to say we lose free will in general.
	Like we become just.
	Is it fair to say?
	I mean, I want to argue with you, not Grick, or other debate.
	So is it your contention, and I'm not criticizing, I just want to make sure I understand your point of view.
	Is it your contention that if we reduce consciousness to atoms and energy, that we lose free will?
	I think this is an important part of it.
	Yes, this is true.
	I think we don't lose the capacity to compare ideal actions to proposed standards.
	So we don't lose or we do lose.
	We don't lose that.
	We still have that capacity.
	But when we do, when you make that comparison of ideal standards to proposed actions, it's going to be something that is determined by physical law.
	So there's nothing that you should or shouldn't do within that comparison.
	It's just another action of your brain, which is just determined by chemical laws.
	So I think it moves...
	Yes.
	Just give me a yes or no.
	Do we lose free will if consciousness is atoms and energy?
	Yes, yes.
	Okay, got it.
	So is any individual carbon atom alive?
	No.
	Okay.
	Is there such a thing as life?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So emergent properties, I'm sure you're aware of the term.
	An emergent property is a characteristic of an entity that is possessed by none of its component parts, but in aggregation, you get the property.
	I mean, there's one, one wheel is not a car.
	One carburetor is not a car.
	One steering wheel is not a car.
	One ignition is not a car.
	But if you put all of these things together, you get a car, and none of those things can propel themselves, but you put all of them together, then you get this thing called the car that can propel itself with the gas and all of that, right?
	So there is such a thing as emergent properties that is not part of, it's not an aspect of any of the component part.
	But when you put enough things together, you get something new that arises, and that would be consciousness.
	Like, for example, a word, I think you used this example, right?
	A word is composed of letters.
	None of those letters is the word alone.
	So the word reducible came in the beginning because if you just pick all those letters and put them together, then you'll have the word, right?
	It makes sense.
	But if you put all of those chemical reactions together in the brain, somebody can come and say, oh, that's just chemical reactions, right?
	You just have a very fancy sequence of chemical reactions that's going on.
	And you can describe how certain cells are going to contract.
	And I can describe how some, like how I'm speaking right now, you could describe that just in physical terms.
	And you can say, oh, that's somebody speaking.
	That's them speaking.
	That's it.
	You don't need to appeal to somebody who feels anything, who thinks anything.
	You don't really need that.
	You can just say that.
	I'm not following the argument.
	The argument is that if you have all of the physical material that needs to be in a body, in a human body to operate, you can have that alone.
	You don't need to say, oh, thinking, you need to talk about feelings.
	You don't need to talk about anything like that.
	Any of that.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Why would you not need to do any of that?
	I mean, that's what.
	You can describe that from an external perspective.
	describe that without appealing to subjective experience.
	You can describe every single thing.
	You can't describe it without appealing to subjective experience because you and I can't share a brain.
	We can't share eyeballs.
	So you and I have built our knowledge up from subjective experiences, interacting with objective reality, which is where we get sort of universal principles and a language we can hopefully both reasonably understand.
	So you can't describe anything to do with humanity without, at least to some degree, relying on subjective experiences, right?
	I think some people say no.
	Please, please.
	Some people, they're not part of this argument.
	Hearsay is not a debate.
	So I just want to know what you think.
	I think you can't.
	You can't reduce it to, you can't just say there's no subjective experience.
	But at the same time.
	Hang on.
	I'm not saying there's no, hang on.
	I'm not saying there's no subjective experience.
	Who's saying that?
	Is that you?
	No.
	So why are you arguing things that neither of us are arguing?
	I don't understand.
	I think the question is, I cannot explain just by what I observe from physical evidence.
	I cannot explain subjective experience just by that.
	If I just look at that, you can't, what do you mean you can't explain?
	Oh, so the color red is not anywhere in the atoms, neurons, cells, and blood vessels of the brain.
	Is that right?
	Yes, but you can still describe like somebody is seeing the color red and is telling you, and you have a bunch of MRI, you have the MRI machines in there, you have the electrodes in their heads, and you can see that.
	Sorry, I don't, I mean, when this podcast gets released, it's just a bunch of ones and zeros, right?
	Correct.
	On a computer hard drive.
	So you look at those ones and zeros, you can't see language, yet still our debate is composed of language.
	So looking at the atoms, the neurons, the cells, and so on, and expecting to see the color red is like looking at the ones and zeros and saying, well, there's no debate in this podcast because there's no debate in the ones and zeros.
	I mean, this is an emergent property of the ones and zeros and our consciousness and our subjective and objective experiences and our capacity to use language and exchange information.
	So I don't understand why you would need to see the color red or the little neurons spelling out R-E-D or something like that when we all have the experience of subjective experiences.
	I mean, I had lots of vivid dreams last night.
	Those are subjective experiences.
	And then shared experiences like the conversation that we're having back and forth at the moment and all of the objective technology we need to achieve that conversation.
	So I'm not sure what you mean when you say, well, I look at the brain and I don't see subjected experience.
	I mean, your experience of looking at the brain is to some degree at least a subjective experience because you're having your own thoughts and feelings about it.
	Yes, but the part of the cast can exist once it's like interpreted by our head.
	I'm sorry, the what?
	The podcast.
	And then once it's interpreted by the computer and it's going to turn the sound waves back to us and then we can listen to it and listen to the conversation and it makes sense.
	Right.
	So somebody who's looking at the color red, somebody who's looking at their brain doesn't see it, but we still experience and see the color red.
	Yep, but you need to be the person seeing the color red to experience that.
	I need to see that from a first person perspective.
	And I don't, and it's not really explained from a third person perspective.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	So I cannot see the world through your eyes.
	And you can't see the world through my eyes, right?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So what's the problem with that?
	The problem is that I cannot prove to you that I am conscious.
	I cannot prove that, like scientifically speaking.
	Yet I know undeniably that I am conscious.
	You make these statements like they're just, well, two and two make four.
	Moving on, it's like, what do you mean you can't prove to me that you're conscious?
	If you weren't conscious, I wouldn't be having this conversation.
	Like I wouldn't have a conversation with a television set or the weather or any other complex phenomenon that either are too complex for me to predict in the short or long run or simulate what it is to be human beings.
	In other words, if I found out, I don't think you are, but if I found out that you were an AI, right, then I would not have the conversation with you other than sort of out of interest or curiosity and so on.
	But I wouldn't imagine that I'm dealing with a human consciousness.
	So the fact that you're communicating to me is evidence that you are conscious and want to debate these topics or these ideas.
	I think this makes sense from if you don't try to say, oh, it's scientifically provable.
	But I can't see it how to scientifically prove this in a story.
	I'm not sure what you mean by scientifically provable.
	Yeah, because consciousness, when you talk about it, it's a subjective experience.
	But you cannot demonstrate.
	Is science a product of consciousness?
	Yes.
	The scientific method.
	Is the scientific method a product of consciousness?
	Yes.
	So if the scientific method is a product of consciousness, then the fact that the scientific method exists is proof of consciousness because it wouldn't exist without consciousness.
	It doesn't exist like a tree or a rock, right?
	Yes.
	So you can't say that which is only producible by consciousness can't prove the existence of consciousness.
	That would be like saying, well, there's a shadow here, but that doesn't prove that there's anything blocking the light.
	It's like, yeah, it kind of does.
	I think I see what you mean there.
	You're saying that you couldn't deny consciousness materially because the very ability that we have to observe material reality is based on consciousness.
	Well, I mean, no, that's a complicated way of saying what I said.
	You said science can't prove consciousness.
	And I said the existence of the scientific method is itself proof of consciousness because only consciousness produces the scientific method.
	Yes, but then you're saying the scientific, you're putting consciousness before the scientific method.
	So it's a prerequisite.
	So the fact that the scientific method exists.
	No, no, no.
	You did that.
	Or to put it more fairly, we did that together.
	I said, does the scientific method exist without consciousness?
	And you said no.
	So we both agree and accept that the scientific method only exists because of consciousness.
	So saying, well, the scientific method can't prove consciousness doesn't make any sense because the scientific method is itself a product of consciousness.
	Okay, I can see that.
	Okay.
	The thing that is that, hang on, I think it's fairly.
	No, no, no, no, hang on, hang on.
	We need to establish things in order to have a debate.
	So is it acceptable to you that science is not required to prove consciousness because the scientific method is itself a product of consciousness?
	That science, yeah, science is not required to prove consciousness.
	Yes, consciousness is in a way even self-evident, but yeah, I agree with that.
	No, no, it's not self-evident necessarily.
	I mean, I would certainly say so, but I mean, as would Descartes.
	But you said that you can't prove consciousness with science, and we have now agreed that the scientific method itself is proof of consciousness because it wouldn't exist without conscious effort.
	Yes, yes.
	Okay, good.
	So we've solved that problem.
	Good, good.
	Okay.
	Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about?
	I think this is a way to solve the problem.
	No, no, no, no.
	Don't get subjective on me, bro.
	Don't get subjective.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	It's not a way to solve the problem.
	It's the solution to the problem.
	It's not just one way of getting to it.
	It has solved the problem.
	Now, you do not need science because this is what you talked about on X, and this is what you talked about at the beginning of the debate.
	And the reason I'm saying this is if you go back to, if I prove something to you and you agree with it, and then you go back to pretending it's not proven or accepted, I won't have a conversation with you again because it's pointless.
	It's not a threat.
	I'm just saying I won't do it.
	Because if we've made progress, if we've made progress and established that you don't need science to prove consciousness, because science, the scientific method is a product of consciousness, if you go back to, well, that's one way to put it, or it seems kind of true, it's like, no, no, no.
	Two and two make four.
	Well, that's one way to say it.
	It's like, no, no, no, two and two make four.
	Well, you know, and you're, it could be put.
	No, no.
	Does two and two make four?
	So have we solved the problem of science needing to prove consciousness?
	Yeah, we solved.
	We solved it.
	Okay, fantastic.
	Is there anything else I wanted to mention?
	What is the nature then of consciousness?
	Because what's some solutions to this will come and say that, oh, well, and I think I adhere to this solution that you don't need the scientific method to prove consciousness.
	And if you wanted to, You couldn't prove it materially for it to exist materially.
	So, the idea is that consciousness.
	I'm sorry, sorry, you're going too fast.
	I'm not sure what you're saying now.
	So, consciously, you had three different thoughts there, and you can't just race through this stuff.
	You've got to give me a little bit of processes.
	Let's do like premises and no, no.
	What is it?
	You said, What is the nature of consciousness?
	Is that your consciousness seems to be immaterial then?
	Because it's not something that you can identify with the scientific method, which is the methodology.
	Oh my gosh, we just went through this.
	Are you a broken record here?
	We just went through this that you don't need to identify with the scientific math.
	You don't need to.
	That's correct.
	Okay.
	So, what is your thought?
	So, it exists beyond what we need to prove materially.
	It exists beyond what we need to prove materially.
	I don't know what that means.
	Like a ghost in the machine, like a soul in the body?
	Yes, someone.
	Yeah, yes, exactly.
	Okay, so is your solution to the nature of consciousness to invent an anti-scientific, immaterial essence and think that you've answered the question?
	Well, I don't answer the question by that, but I say that undeniably this thing exists undeniably.
	This thing is even the basis of the scientific method.
	Okay.
	So, it exists, it exists, and it's measurable by science, and science doesn't need to prove it.
	So, I'm not sure what the issue is remaining.
	That's the basis for the measurement of science.
	It's not measured by science.
	No, it is measured by science because you can have people think again, I'm not sure if you can hold all of this reasoning, but we've already talked about how you can see people thinking on an MRI.
	And if somebody is dead, then you don't get anything on the MRI.
	So, we could see brain activity using brain scans.
	And of course, we can also measure brain activity.
	If somebody's thinking really hard, it actually consumes more calories than if they're not thinking really hard.
	So, we can see material effects.
	We can see books and words pouring out of people.
	We can see the consciousness in an MRI.
	We know if somebody's alive or dead based upon the MRI and whether they're talking or breathing.
	And so, we see the products of consciousness.
	We see the source of consciousness.
	We see the electrical and other biochemical activity of consciousness.
	We see the product of consciousness.
	So, I'm not sure what remains unknown.
	I mean, we don't exactly know, of course, how consciousness works, but that doesn't have anything to do with whether it's material or not.
	There's lots of things we don't know how they work.
	It doesn't mean that they don't exist.
	You know, when people didn't know how volcanoes worked and they thought it was angry volcano gods, that still didn't change whether they were volcanoes and what they did, right?
	Yeah, that's true.
	The exact mechanics of something doesn't change its operations.
	And you don't want to go and say, Well, I don't know why a volcano is rumbling, so I'm going to create an invisible god ghost in the volcano who's angry, because that doesn't answer anything.
	That's a fantasy answer, right?
	So, one of the disciplines in life is to say, when we don't know something, I don't know.
	And not to say, well, this must mean that there's a ghost in the machine.
	That doesn't say anything.
	It would be like if I hand a radio to really primitive tribes and they say, ah, there's a ghost.
	There's a ghost trapped in the radio.
	It's like, no, that's not.
	It's just electricity.
	They don't know how it works.
	But for them to say it's just a ghost in a box doesn't answer anything, right?
	Yeah, that's correct.
	But the ghost in the box here is subjective experience.
	Like you can show all, again, the chemical reactions.
	You can show everything that is associated with the color red, but nowhere in there is the subjective experience red.
	But that's a big material.
	That's not true.
	That's like saying no beings.
	No, no, no, that's not true.
	That's like saying there's no carbon atom that's alive, and therefore an animal is not alive.
	There's an emergent property called life, which is a particular combination of matter and energy in a biological carbon-based form.
	And there's an emergent property called consciousness.
	That's the operations of, I mean, not just the human brain, I think that other animals are conscious too, although, of course, not to the level of abstraction and language that we're capable of.
	So saying that you can't see the subjective experience in a brain scan is false Because the person who's looking at the brain scan is themselves, himself or herself, having a direct subjective experience.
	The person who they're scanning can talk about their subjective experience.
	So the subjective experience is occurring on a continual basis, particularly for people who are awake, although it happens in another way while we sleep, although we're not really in control of that process as much.
	So saying, well, when we look at a brain, we don't see the subjective experience is like, by looking at the brain, you're seeing the subjective experience.
	Like, if I'm looking at the brain of, like, let's go for Hamlet, right?
	So, so, in Hamlet, there's a scene between Hamlet and the gravedigger, right?
	When he comes back from England after doing his nastiness with Rosenkrantz and Guildenstring.
	And so, there's a bunch of skulls around, right?
	And Hamlet has a back and forth with a graves digger.
	And he says, Well, who's this?
	Who's this?
	And he says, Oh, that was a funny guy, man.
	That guy was hilarious.
	That guy.
	You know what?
	I'm going to bring it up.
	Let's do a little Shakespeare because this actually really does work well.
	Hamlet, alas, poor Yorick.
	And then hopefully this will make sense, will make sense to you.
	All right.
	I'm sorry.
	And when I say make sense to you, it means it's my job to have it make sense to you, right?
	So let's see here.
	Thank you very much for taking the time.
	No, no, it's a consciousness is the thing, right?
	Consciousness is the thing.
	All right, let me find the grave, digger.
	Come on, gravedigger.
	You can do it.
	Of course, it's a four-hour play.
	Oh, yes, here we go.
	Here we go.
	Whose grave is this, Sira?
	says Hamlet.
	Mine, sir.
	I think it be thine indeed, for thou liest in it.
	You lie out on it, sir, and therefore it is not yours.
	For my part, I do not lie in it, and yet it is mine.
	Thou dost lie in it.
	To be in it and say it is thine, this for the dead, not for the quick, therefore thou liest, right?
	The dead, not for the quick, because he's quick-witted, the gravedigger, right?
	So Hamlet says, What man dost thou dig it for?
	For no man, sir.
	What woman then?
	For none neither.
	Who is to be buried in it?
	One that was a woman, sir.
	But rest her soul, she's dead.
	How absolute the knave is.
	We must speak by the card, or equivocation will not do us.
	By the Lord, Horatio, these three years I've taken a note of it.
	The age is grown so picked that the foe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he gaffs his kybe.
	How long hast thou been a gravedigger?
	Of all the days in the year, I came to that day that our last King Hamlet overcame Fortenbras.
	How long is that since?
	Cannot you tell that?
	Every fool can tell it.
	It was the very day that young Hamlet was born, he that is mad and sent to England.
	I marry, why was he sent to England?
	Why?
	Because he was mad.
	He shall recover his wits there, or if he do not, it is no great matter there.
	Why?
	Twill not be seen in him there, for there the men are as mad as he.
	How came he mad, says Hamlet.
	Of course, they're talking about him, right?
	Very strangely, they say.
	How strangely?
	Faith even when losing his wits.
	Upon what ground?
	Why, here in Denmark, I've been a Saxonier man and boy 30 years.
	How long will a man lie in the earth ere he rot?
	If faith, if he not be rotten before he die, as we have many pocky courses nowadays, that will scarce hold the laying in, he will last you some eight year or nine year.
	A channel will last you nine years.
	Why he more than another?
	Why, sir, his eye is so tanned with his trade that he will keep out water a great while, and your water is a sword decayer of your son's dead body.
	Ah, he has a skull now.
	This skull has lain in the earth three and twenty years.
	Whose was it?
	Or son, mad fellow it was.
	Who do you think it was?
	Nay, I know not.
	A pestilence on him for a mad rogue.
	He poured a flagon of relish on my head once.
	The same skull, sir, was Yorus.
	Sorry, this same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's gesture.
	This?
	Ain't that?
	Let me see.
	Poor Yorick.
	I knew him, Horatio.
	A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.
	He hath borne me on his back a thousand times.
	And now, how aboard in my imagination it is.
	My gorge rises at it.
	Here are hunger's lips that I have kissed, I know not how often.
	Where be your jibes now?
	Your gambles, your songs, your flashes of merriment that will want to set the table on a roar.
	Not one now to mock your own grinning.
	Quite chap-fallen.
	Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick to this favor she must come.
	Make her laugh at that.
	Prithe, Horatio, tell me one thing.
	What's that, my lord?
	Just think Alexander looked of this fashion in the earth, even so, and smelt so.
	Een so, my lord.
	To what base uses we may return, Horatio?
	Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he finds it stopping a bunghole?
	Twere to consider it too curiously to consider so.
	No, faith, not a jot, but to follow him thither with modesty enough and likelihood to lead it as thus Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust.
	The dust is earth.
	Of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted?
	Might they not stop a beer barrel?
	Imperius Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
	Oh, that that earth which kept the world in awe should patch a wall to expel the winter floor.
	Anyway, so the reason I'm saying that is subjective experience.
	So if I was riding through Denmark in the Middle Ages and I saw a skull and somebody said, oh, that skull is Yorick, I would say, I don't know who that is, right?
	But this was Yorick was like the Robin Williams of the court, like looking at Robin Williams' skull and saying, you made everyone laugh for like 40 years.
	You got a kind of weird grin now, but this is where we all get.
	So because Hamlet has a powerful memory of Yorick, who carried him on his back and he kissed the lips and made him laugh and had great songs and made everyone roar with laughter.
	He was a great comedian of his time.
	He has a subjective relationship to the skull that you and I wouldn't have because we don't have that history.
	If I were looking at the brain scan of someone I didn't particularly know or care about, I wouldn't particularly know or care about it.
	However, if I'm looking at the brain scan and I'm a doctor of my wife who I love and I see a tumor, well, then I have a whole different quote subjective experience, which is, you know, horror and sadness and so on, right?
	So the fact that we have subjective experiences, even when we're looking at something objective, is that there's no need to prove subjective experiences because we have them all the time.
	And you have a subjective experience or thought with regards to consciousness.
	I have different ones.
	Hopefully we can close the gap and come to some kind of resolution.
	But you're only talking to me because I have my subjective thoughts and experience, which hopefully I try to make as objective as possible.
	The purpose of philosophy is to turn the subjective into the objective, just as the purpose of science is to turn the personal into the universal.
	So the idea that we, well, we look at a brain scan and we don't see subjective experiences.
	Well, again, the person looking at the brain scan is having subjective experiences.
	It's like saying there's no such thing as language.
	Language is meaningless.
	It's like, but I'm using language to communicate that.
	So you're using your subjective experience to communicate to my subjective experience to tell me you doubt subjective experience.
	I don't see how that works logically.
	I think that that's a very good argument, and I'll have to think about that and to consider that, to let that sort of sink in and mold my own consciousness.
	Yeah, listen.
	I appreciate the questions, and they're really, really good questions.
	And I appreciate your patience as I sort of try and hack my way through this rather thick undergrowth.
	In general, I mean, I think one of my major contributions to philosophy as a whole is to say what assumptions are embedded in the act of reasoning, debating, and communicating.
	Well, you've got the thoughts, you've got language Is valid.
	You've got sense data is valid, at least to some degree.
	You've got language has the capacity for meaning.
	You've got reason is infinitely preferable to anti-rationality, that truth is infinitely preferable to falsehood, and that there are objective ways of getting to the truth.
	All of that is embedded in the art of trying to change someone's mind, as is free will.
	You're talking to me, not a television set or your tablet or a stick of mud or a Haitian dirt cookie.
	You're talking only to me.
	So there must be something singular about human consciousness because we don't argue free will with just the microphone or the headset or the hat, right?
	We only do it with human consciousness.
	So by debating only people using language, there's so much that's embedded in that that solves the major problems of philosophy that to try and solve them without reference to that, I think, is to enter into a hole with no bottom.
	But listen, I really do appreciate you dropping by tonight.
	And I'm not going to say that this is all, you know, the absolute final statement and saying, but I will say that it's a good way towards it.
	I love these lines.
	Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick to this favor.
	She must come.
	Make her laugh at that, right?
	No matter how much we pretend to be younger, no matter how many filters we put on, we all gonna die.
	We can put on the illusion of youth, we can exercise, we can stretch, we can eat well.
	To this favor, to this skull, we must come.
	And it's funny, you know, because I thought of this, you know, one of the voted the worst tweet in history, which I was actually quite proud of.
	My tweet about Taylor Swift, right?
	My tweet about Taylor Swift, my tweet about Taylor Swift, which was, you know, she's a fun mom.
	She's 35.
	You know, 90% of her eggs are, or 30%, 30%, 90% of her eggs are gone.
	It doesn't matter how good you look.
	There's no Botox for eggs.
	And you can extend your life, perhaps, by sacrificing some pleasures in the here and now.
	I was talking to a friend of mine who's just turned 80.
	And he was like, yeah, you know, I could probably eek out another couple of years, perhaps if I give up this, this, this, and this, but maybe it doesn't, maybe I don't actually end up living longer.
	It just feels longer, you know, because you don't know if you're going to get hit by a bus or have some genetic thing that's going to make your heart explode.
	But being around old people really gives you some good perspective.
	And shielding the old people from the general consciousness, I think has given us a sense of immortality.
	Like it's kind of funny.
	Like on the internet, like I'm in September, I'd be 59 years old, right?
	I'm very happy about that.
	I wasn't sure I was going to live long when I was younger because my life, early life, was so disastrous.
	And, you know, bringing tales back from aging is really important to younger people because it helps put the problems that you have in real perspective.
	If you have problems and those problems aren't dying, they're not that serious.
	I think back, and I was talking about this the other day, Nichelle, and I'll take questions.
	If people have more questions or comments, I'm happy to take them.
	But, you know, when you're young, everything is super critical, super important, kind of hysterical.
	And that's not an insult.
	I mean, it really feels that way at the time.
	But I remember in my high school, I went to Dal Mills High School in Dal Mills, obviously.
	And we had photo day for the yearbook.
	And of course, we didn't get to see her photos.
	This is long before digital.
	We didn't get to see her photos.
	And then when the yearbook came out, everyone was like pouring through, how do I look?
	How do I look?
	And I remember it was a friend of mine.
	She had closed one eye and had turned her head to one side and was like just trying to say, hey, can we take this again?
	But they were just shuffling her through.
	And she had like, I mean, legit, really, probably the worst yearbook photo I've ever seen.
	And she was crushed.
	And she was crushed.
	You know, when you're 90 and you get into that bed, you know, the one, the one you're never getting back out of.
	The doctor says, you know, I mean, all we can do is make you comfortable.
	Sorry.
	Like that said, there's no turning back.
	you're on a Niagara waterfall barrel over into death.
	What would you give at 90 to go back to being 17 and upset about a photo in a yearbook that nobody's looked at in 40 fucking years when I'm old and dying, decrepit, a skull, like the guy at the end of 2001, when I'm dying?
	What would I go back to have the problems that I have now?
	What would I give to go back?
	Well, that's part of appreciation, appreciation for what you have now is recognizing that every day is worth infinity money.
	Every day is worth infinity money.
	Because if somebody said to you, I will give you a zillion dollars, but you won't wake up tomorrow, you wouldn't take it, probably.
	Every day is worth more than a zillion dollars.
	Just being conscious, reasoning, debating, loving, being hungry, eating, lovemaking, laughter, tears, all of the complex, rich, infinite spice of life.
	None of your worries will seem very important when you get old.
	And I'm not saying don't worry.
	I'm actually a big fan of anxiety and worrying because it helps us avoid problems.
	But a lot of the stuff that you worry about won't come to pass.
	And having that perspective of having concern about your life is infinitely better than facing the end of it.
	And I do think that there are people who should worry more for sure.
	I mean, the younger people are just pissing their life away on video games and media and Netflix and chill and porn or whatever it is.
	Yeah, y'all should freak out a little bit because it's a long life if you don't prepare for it.
	It's a long, kind of miserable life if you don't prepare for it.
	But at the same time, to taste deeply and richly of the incredibly beautiful and complex experience of being alive and to recognize what you would give to go back and get a do-over even of six months or a year or a day.
	I just very much want to try and encourage everyone to love their life, to take the risks, because the fear of failure, the fear of rejection, the fear of catastrophe is not worth not really living over it.
	You know, there's some girl you want to talk to, just go talk to her.
	I mean, I've succeeded, I've failed, I've been on top, I've been on the bottom.
	The world has been at my feet, the world has been at my throat.
	Problems have seemed like ants, problems have towered over me, like mountains about to fall on my balls.
	All of it's been great.
	Being lonely was great because it really taught me to appreciate connection and love.
	Being solitary was great.
	My Nietzschean walks from here to eternity was great because it taught me to appreciate companionship.
	My bad childhood was great because it taught me how to truly and lovingly and richly connect to family, friends, and my child.
	The people on X, for the last few months, I've sort of reintroduced myself to that.
	The people on X are beautiful with such potential.
	And the only thing that stands between most people and their potential is complacency.
	Complacency is when you think you know things you don't.
	I've never taken an IQ test.
	I did have an IQ researcher with many decades experience who'd given thousands of tests tell me that they thought 160 to 170.
	I don't know what that means.
	And I'm never going to take an IQ test because I don't want that to be an argument.
	But let's just say, forget the IQ stuff.
	40 plus years of experience and education in philosophy.
	And people wander in and they think that they can just do it.
	And I appreciate that.
	I'm really doing my absolute level best to translate the most abstract and complicated thoughts into something that's digestible and understandable to the non-expert.
	I mean, you can make a computer of ones and zeros and crazy complicated typewriters, or you can make a touchscreen that people can actually use.
	I'm trying to turn philosophy into an actual touchscreen that people can use.
	And why I'm on X, I may not stay forever because I do need to see people actually learn and change, right?
	And it was great that this guy, who was talking about consciousness, we had a back and forth on X. It was great that he called in and great that we actually established some reasonable answers.
	And obviously that's a springboard to future thought.
	But it's the things that you think you know that just aren't so.
	That's what is between you and your potential.
	You know, it's funny because people think that I'm arrogant and I get all of that.
	Well, I mean, certainty looks like arrogant to the insecure.
	But the only reason that I gained any kind of certainty is because of the immense amount of truly humble work that I've done.
	Like I was in philosophy for 20 years.
	I didn't even know what virtue was.
	I defined philosophy as moral philosophy.
	That's the foundation of philosophy.
	I didn't even know what virtue was.
	This is where my work on ethics, universally preferable behavior, came from.
	So after 20 years of studying something, I didn't even know what that something actually was.
	It's not easy.
	Not easy to say, I don't know.
	It's not easy to say, I don't have an answer.
	It's not easy to say to someone, you're right.
	Thank you.
	Thank you for putting all the work in and saving me from error.
	And unfortunately, we do have a culture or a society now where everyone gets a participation trophy.
	This is part of the female encouragement.
	Female encouragement is fantastic for babies and toddlers.
	Yay, good job.
	Wow, fantastic.
	Yay.
	You know, I was playing pickleball with my wife today.
	We played for about an hour.
	And she's really good.
	Anyway, so as we were walking back, there was a family out there, husband and wife and two kids.
	And every time the little kid, boy, if you ever want a true patience test, it's teaching little kids to play racket sports because it's pretty brutal on the soul when it comes to the level of patience you need.
	And the kid was, you know, just swinging wildly and blah, blah, blah.
	And, you know, the dad was like, you know, try this, try that, or hold the racket this way.
	And the mom was like, great shot, good job.
	And she was just like mindlessly encouraging it again.
	I love women for their mindless encouragement, so to speak, because it's supposed to be for babies and toddlers.
	But at some point, the men have to take over and say, it's not very good.
	You know, it's not very good.
	You know, like when your kid does the little lollipop figures and drawings, you know, hey, great job.
	I love the picture.
	You know, it's a beautiful picture of the family because, you know, they're three or whatever, right?
	But at some point, you have to say, you know, no, this is like, this doesn't look like a person and so on, right?
	When your kids first learn how to sing and they bellow through happy birthday or something, it's like, yeah, good job.
	And then if they actually want to sing more seriously, then you have to get more critical and quote them and get them singing lessons and all that kind of stuff.
	And people, it's funny.
	And I don't blame people as a whole.
	I really blame prior philosophers for not being assertive enough about this.
	And philosophy is a really complicated discipline.
	It's a really challenging discipline.
	It's challenging to come up with answers and it's really challenging to communicate those answers to the general population.
	Because the purpose of philosophy is to help people make better moral decisions in their actual lives.
	And so, if you look at the abstract work that I did just in this live stream tonight, right?
	What is left, what is right?
	Well, it's not just policy difference.
	It's not, you can't just give me examples, right?
	What is the definition of something isn't just giving examples.
	They can illustrate the definition, but they're not the definition.
	I mean, it's like saying, what's the definition of a rock?
	Well, this is a rock and this is a rock.
	Examples are not definitions.
	Definitions are universal abstractions.
	So, I did the left and right, I think, fairly well.
	I did the problem of the nature of consciousness really well and established some very important things about free will and life and the nature of consciousness and the proof of consciousness and so on.
	I mean, that's a lot of work for one.
	How long have we been talking here?
	Well, a while, right?
	Yeah, hour 25.
	That's a lot of work.
	And it comes out of a lot of reading and thought and research and skill and ability.
	So the fact that philosophers have not been assertive enough in saying you're wrong is how to think of it, or here's a better approach, or you don't have the answers.
	Because Socrates was annoying because he kept asking questions but wouldn't provide any answers.
	Now, of course, with all due respect to Socrates, for which there should be a massive amount of respect, it is not the case that Socrates provided any particularly good answers.
	So he was annoying because he began to unravel society as it stood without providing a better alternative, which is why I've never ever tried to unravel people's certainty without providing some other kind of certainty.
	I consider that an attack upon people to take away their certainty without providing better certainty.
	Saying that someone is wrong is fine, but imagine if you just had a GPS that said, you're driving the wrong way.
	And then you had to sort of figure it out from there.
	No, it's like recalculating, give you a better map, right?
	So telling people that they're wrong is important, but giving people something that is right is more important, which is why when I was talking to the last fellow, I said, Lum, we have established something here.
	We have accepted something.
	It's not subjective.
	And that's why when people brush past a proof of mine, I sort of have to circle back and say, no, no, no, we've established something here.
	And if we haven't, we need to go back and revisit it.
	But we need to start building with some foundations of certainty.
	So, all right, let us return back to the joyful brains of the outfit, aka aka, aka, kaka, aka.
	Defined listeners, schmoig.
	Shmoig.
	You're like my daughter's initial pronunciation of smorg from the hobbit.
	Shmoig.
	What's on your mind?
	He said with vague, sinister intent.
	That's what you might.
	Hello.
	Yeah, I love your shows, Stefan.
	Kind of a semi-new listener.
	Love the stuff you say.
	It resonates greatly.
	I had a big point on one of your recent shows about good and evil.
	Do you mind if I bring that up again?
	Please.
	Awesome.
	So I've got this hypothesis in my mind.
	It's kind of a theory.
	I've been working it and I haven't been able to disprove it.
	I'm wondering if you can poke some holes in it.
	I think that good is basically structure and that evil is basically entropy.
	And based on my understanding of chemistry and biology, this is the case at micro scales up to grand scales of like current events and what goes on in societies.
	And basically, for those who don't know, entropy is the second law of thermodynamics.
	And it says that wherever energy is not invested into a structure, that structure will spontaneously turn into chaos.
	It will become destructured.
	Entropy is basically chaos and thermodynamics where atoms and matter just combine to become this amorphous glob of Everything.
	And it doesn't really distinguish between itself in any way.
	And then the first law of thermodynamics is that energy cannot be created or destroyed.
	It can only be moved around.
	So my hypothesis is that good is the investment of energy into structure, and evil is the investment of energy into chaos.
	What do you think?
	Do you want me to elaborate on that some more?
	I'm not.
	Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
	I always have a tough time taking terms of physics and applying them to morality.
	That would be like saying that a pulsar is virtuous, just physical properties.
	Nonetheless, let's dig in.
	So, what do you mean by structure?
	Structure.
	Well, for instance, building a society.
	Actually, let's make it easier because I'm more biologically inclined.
	Building a human.
	Pregnancy takes lots of energy, investment, pulls a lot of nutrients from the mom.
	The mom is a little bit more insulin-resistant because she needs to eat more to fuel the baby and invests her energy into creating another human.
	And then once that human is born, it seems to be very chaotic.
	And basically, childhood development is the channeling of all that energy into structure.
	And I think that's a lot of what child development is.
	As we grow and learn more, we're taking in the world and it's all chaotic naturally.
	But our job as humans as we grow is to make sense of it and turn this information and this material into something structured, into something orderly.
	And even down to like disciplining the child, it's, you know, this suffering that you inflict onto the child when you discipline them, that suffering is good.
	And we know this, according to me, because that suffering is causing that child more structure.
	It's giving that child the ability to maintain more structure, kind of how to control their thoughts and how to act and behave.
	And what are our social orders and rules?
	Those are the structures that we live in.
	You're going to succeed if you can do this.
	Does that make sense?
	Still going to have to definitely.
	You're giving me some examples, but what's the definition of structure?
	The definition of structure.
	Oh, you're right.
	The definition of structure would be a meaningful arrangement of matter.
	I guess that's a loosey-goosey definition.
	Yeah, I'm not sure what meaningful means there.
	Yeah.
	Okay, let's back up for a sec.
	So if you're talking about good and evil, would you say that that applies to people or to people and animals?
	I think it applies to people and animals.
	I think it applies to all of life.
	So there's good and evil for a single-celled organism.
	Yes, there would be.
	That single-celled organism has to survive and maintain itself.
	Hang on.
	Hang on.
	Survival and morality are not the same thing.
	So there's the word good, right?
	So you can, in Darwinian evolution, you would say that which furthers an animal's ability to survive and reproduce is good for its genes or it's positive for its reproduction of those particular genetic traits.
	But good for an animal is not the same as morally good.
	So for instance, dolphins and ducks are rapey, right?
	The males rape, or we would call it rape.
	Obviously, for me, it's kind of tough to take these concepts and apply them to animals.
	But for ducks, the most efficient way to transfer their genetics is to hold the female down and have sex with her whether she likes it or not.
	And dolphins do the same thing, and there are other animals that do the same thing.
	So it's good for their genetics to do that.
	And we could even say that to some degree for a rapist among monkeys or whatever, that it is, it's an effective way to spread their genes.
	This is the Genghis Khan example, right?
	He's not a monkey, of course, but he was a rapey guy and raped a lot of women and his followers raped a lot of women.
	So that would be good for their genes, but that would be an evil action, right?
	So we have to differentiate what is good for someone's survival and what is morally good.
	So to that, I would say, first of all, animals, humans do have the prefrontal cortex to be able to reason that rape could possibly be bad because it makes this woman feel this way and it basically steals her soul.
	Humans can fathom that.
	Animals might not have the cerebral capacity to fathom that.
	And from an objective standpoint.
	Well, no, you don't.
	So, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you, but that's why I was asking when you're talking about good and evil, is it human or is it human plus animals?
	Oh, that's a good point.
	But you know, it's really interesting because, you know, some animals have this drive to just predate on other animals as an extension of the dilemma you're pointing out.
	You know, they're not necessarily killing things because they're hungry, more so because they enjoy it, like cats and dogs do.
	And then some animals are just really nice, like dragonflies and bees.
	And so.
	Well, I don't know that they're nice.
	Well, helpful to the ecology, I suppose.
	I mean, all animals are to some degree helpful to the ecology.
	So the reason that I'm asking about whether good and evil applies to animals is you were talking about pregnancy and the development of offspring, but that, of course, is shared with countless animals as well.
	So if you're going to say that good and evil, and one of the examples you give is pregnancy and building offspring, I mean, animals do asking whether or not morality applies to animals or if it is a specifically human trait.
	If it's a specifically human trait, then it cannot be bound into things which we also share with the animals, right?
	So if you were to say, well, it's morally good to have fur, it's like, well, but lots of animals have fur.
	So if morality doesn't apply to animals, then you can't tie your definition of good and evil into things that animals do.
	And having pregnancy and childbirth, at least for mammals, you know, except for the duck-billed platypus.
	So if virtue is specific to humans, then it can't be bound up in things that we share with the animals.
	That's a really interesting way to put it.
	You know, whenever I thought about this type of thing, I was more so thinking about different cultures of humans and how one culture's good might be another culture's evil.
	Where the only objective axis to that would be, does their culture promote structure or does their culture promote chaos and entropy?
	Well, hang on.
	So when the Victorian explorers first brought photography to the cameras to primitive tribes, the primitive tribes were absolutely certain that the camera was stealing their soul because the image would then show up on the photographic plate and so on, right?
	After the photograph was processed.
	And so they had a true belief that their soul was being stolen by the photographer, by the photograph.
	Was that a true or a false belief?
	That was a false belief.
	That was a false belief.
	Now, so there was a difference of opinion between the two cultures, right?
	So the Victorian culture said, no, it's just science.
	It's just the chemicals reacting to the light coming through the aperture of the camera lens and we process it and it's not stealing your soul or anything like that.
	So the fact that different cultures have different definitions of things, the Victorian one being that the photograph is a light and chemical process and the primitive tribes being like, you've stolen my soul, you evil tidy whitey.
	Well, the fact that different cultures have different views of morality doesn't mean that morality is subjective any more than we say, well, you know, the Victorians have one view of photography, the primitive tribes have another, so it's really hard to know what is right.
	It's like, well, one of them is right and one of them is wrong.
	So, I'm kind of confused where this is tying in with like ethically moral good and good and evil.
	Well, so you're talking about structure, and I'm trying to figure out what structure is.
	And you said, well, it's to do with building a baby.
	And it's like, well, lots of animals do that too.
	So it can't be that in specific, right?
	So I'm still trying to figure out, and I'm not disagreeing with you.
	And I hugely appreciate and respect the time and energy that you're putting into developing this idea.
	I think it's great.
	But I'm still trying to figure out what structure means in this context.
	I would say that structure is higher and higher, increasingly higher complexities of substance.
	So, the more complex tribe that you described was they created a structure, the camera, and the tribe with a lot less structure and more entropy interpreted that as being evil.
	I'm saying perhaps because they had more entropy than structure.
	So, that would kind of invert, I guess, that sense of good and evil for them.
	Yeah, so the problem, I mean, one of the challenges, of course, is that structure is a word that has-I mean, just off the top of my head, I mean, it has chemical, chemical structures, atomic structures, building structures.
	You could say structures of thought, and even a story is structured in a certain manner.
	There's a structure to particular stories: boy needs girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, man versus man, man versus nature, man versus himself.
	There are structures to these stories.
	So, the problem is, I think you're trying to repurpose a word that has no particular moral history or moral content and trying to use it for morality.
	I think that's a challenge.
	I'm not saying you have to invent new words, but taking a word that is many, many different meanings and has no particular history of being associated with morality and saying, I now want to hijack this word and start using it for a moral theory, is tricky, if that makes sense.
	Well, I suppose that I use that word because it's the opposite of entropy.
	I just thought of a way to define it, I think, to define structure.
	I think that that would be anything that requires an input of energy to sustain.
	Since if you don't input energy into a structure, it will succumb to entropy and chaos.
	I think that the inverse would be the definition of structure: that anything that requires energy input in order to maintain.
	Okay, so I mean, sorry to use such a brutal example, but a rapist inserts energy into his victim.
	I say it's male on female, and then she grows a baby.
	How is that?
	I mean, obviously, we both agree that's evil.
	How is that evil in your, how is that proven to be evil in your approach to virtue?
	Because the amount of chaos that the woman suffers from it is incredibly high.
	And as a result of that chaos that she suffered from it internally, the baby will end up having a chaotic life because A, either hates it or B, she hates it so much that she aborts it.
	Or, yeah, she's just going to resent that baby for the rest of her life once she gives birth to it, most likely.
	Now, there is the small possibility that she has some type of psychological revelation and forgives him and has the baby and loves the baby and grows up to be a beautiful person, nothing like his father, right?
	But I think that that would just be her reestablishing the structure that she had before, despite the chaos he inflicted.
	But otherwise, I think that the evil is demonstrated through the psychological turmoil she goes through, and that can turn into physiological turmoil as well, because that's how bodies work.
	Okay, so I appreciate that, and I'll come back to that in a sec.
	Let's go to theft, right?
	So, Bob steals something from Doug.
	Let's say a lawnmower, steals a lawnmower.
	Okay.
	So Bob steals a lawnmower from Doug.
	So Doug is down minus one lawnmower.
	Bob is up one lawnmower.
	The energy has not been destroyed, but only transferred.
	The utility has been transferred from Doug to Bob.
	How is that immoral in your formulation?
	Well, that's immoral because Bob knows better and he chose to do something disorderly.
	Hang on, hang on.
	How is it just how?
	Hang on, hang on.
	How is it disorderly?
	This is disorderly because it creates a betrayal between them.
	No, no, no.
	You can't use moral.
	You can't.
	If you're trying to establish why something is immoral, you can't say because it's betrayal, because betrayal is just another word for immoral, right?
	So you have to have a way of saying that something is immoral without there being pre-existing moral judgments, if that makes sense.
	Well, that's the only thing that makes it wrong, is the human aspect of it is the fact that he created chaos in the structure of trust that they had.
	So they built this trust through their friendship.
	They invested.
	No, I never said that.
	I never said they were friends.
	Maybe he's just passing through.
	Maybe he's just passing through and sees that there's a lawnmower out front.
	He really needs a lawnmower.
	He lives three towns over.
	I don't know, grabs the lawnmower and runs off with it.
	So how is that wrong?
	Well, then he ensures that his neighbor will never trust him again if he finds out.
	Well, he's three towns over.
	I mean, we can make him 10 towns over or three states over.
	It doesn't really matter, right?
	So let's say that the trust is not an issue because that'll, I mean, from a sort of local tribal standpoint, I can understand where you're coming from.
	But what if the trust is not a requirement or a preference for Bob with regards to Doug?
	I would say that trust is an inherent part of society, and that's the reason they have lawnmowers.
	So it's the argument that it's impractical because if everyone steals lawnmowers, nobody will make any lawnmowers.
	It's because we live in a world that we have invested energy into creating this world around us where we live in, where theft is wrong.
	No, no, no.
	Again, you're begging the question is when you assume the conclusion.
	My question is: why is theft wrong?
	Because if everybody stole from everybody, society would be unsustainable and it would dissolve into entropy and chaos.
	Yes, but the thief knows that not everyone is going to steal.
	The thief knows that ahead of time.
	The thief knows that not everyone is going to steal.
	In fact, very few people do steal.
	So it's productive for him.
	So that thief is making a conscious decision to be a drop of chaos in what would otherwise be an orderly environment.
	No, but it's orderly for him because he gets a free lawnmower without having to work for it.
	So it's beneficial to him, right?
	I mean, that's why people steal because they want something that they don't have to earn.
	He did it in a chaotic way.
	He could have built one himself and invested his energy into building one himself.
	Yeah, but it's easier.
	It's entropy for him.
	Like if you want to use the entropy example, it is much more efficient for him to steal the lawnmower than to make one or work for 10 hours to buy one.
	Well, of course it's efficient, but that doesn't mean it promotes structure.
	He invested.
	So but we're asking in your moral theory, what's wrong with it?
	Now, if you say, well, it doesn't promote structure, it's like that's sort of circular.
	You're saying, well, what's moral is what promotes structure.
	Well, this is wrong because it doesn't promote structure, but you still haven't said why.
	Because it makes the neighborhood a little more chaotic.
	Someone goes.
	Not his neighborhood.
	He's two states over.
	It's not his neighborhood.
	He's two states over.
	He goes over to two states to steal a lawnmower.
	No, he's just, he's just driving.
	He's on a road trip.
	I mean, we can set up the scenario, right?
	He's just on the, he's on a road trip.
	He sees a lawnmower.
	Oh, man, I need a lawnmower.
	This, this, you know, I'm going to take it.
	Or maybe he's a poor guy and he sees a lawnmower on the Lawn of a rich guy.
	And he's like, ah, you know, I'm broke.
	He's got tons of money.
	He can get a new lawnmower way easier than I can.
	So I'm just going to take his lawnmower.
	And then he goes two states over and finishes his road trip and has a lawnmower.
	Well, he just added chaos to the world by making someone's lawnmower vanish.
	Well, his world is better off by having the lawnmower that he doesn't have to work 10 hours to get.
	Well, of course it is.
	Of course it is.
	That's why he did it.
	But his impact onto the world is that he invested energy into giving someone else chaos.
	Okay.
	But again, we're sort of back to why is it bad for him?
	Because if he would have spent that energy investing into structure and finding out how to get his own lawnmower in an acceptable way to the structures around him, then he would have had a lot other benefits ancillary to that that don't necessarily relate to the lawnmower itself.
	So if it is beneficial for him not to take the lawnmower, why do we have so many thieves in society if it's beneficial?
	Because they are evil.
	And instead of investing their energy into doing things the long way, they invest their energy into doing things the short way at the expense of everything that others have built around them.
	Okay, so it's a bit circular, though, if you say, why, if, if I say, why is stealing evil?
	And you say, because it's evil.
	Stealing is evil because the society we built says it's evil.
	We decided to say that it's evil.
	And the reason why decision arbitrary or not?
	Well, and the reason we decided to say that it's evil is because it's unsustainable.
	Like I said, if everybody stole, it would be very chaotic.
	You wouldn't be able to establish a structure.
	You would just have entropy.
	Well, but it's sort of like saying, if every animal acted in a particular way, it wouldn't work.
	Like if every animal went to the watering hole at the same time, nobody would be able to get a drink or almost nobody would be able to get a drink, right?
	But that's not how animals behave.
	Not every animal goes to get a drink at the same time.
	In fact, if they go into the water hole and they see there's a lot of people there, sorry, a lot of animals there, they'll probably come back later because they don't want to hang around too long because, you know, it's a vulnerable spot, particularly for the prey.
	So saying, well, it's unsustainable if everyone does the same thing.
	Well, everything in nature is unsustainable if everything does the same thing.
	If all the lions in Africa were to congregate and chase one zebra, they'd all starve to death, right?
	If all the animals did the same thing, nothing in nature would work.
	So nature works on the very fact that animals don't all do the same thing at the same time.
	And thieves, very reasonably and rationally, work on the premise that not everyone is going to steal.
	Now, I know this is a Kantian argument.
	I'm not trying to diminish yours, which is to say, Kant said, act as if the principle of your action becomes a general rule for everyone, but it never does.
	That's not how it works.
	I mean, that's not how things work.
	Most people don't want to steal.
	Most people are not rapists.
	Most people are not murderers.
	Most people don't want to assault others.
	And the people who are that way, who are fine with rape, theft, assault, and murder, or some combination thereof, they know that other people aren't like them.
	They know that other people don't want to steal, don't want to assault, don't want to kill, don't want to rape.
	And so saying, well, if everyone does it, that would be a bad idea.
	I mean, if everyone became an accountant, nobody would be a farmer and we'd all die because you can't eat paper and ink, right?
	If everyone became a doctor, then we'd all die because nobody would be a farmer, right?
	So this sort of saying, well, if everyone did it, it wouldn't work.
	That's true of just about everything in life.
	Like if you and I were both talking at the same time, it wouldn't work.
	We have to have the back and forth, right?
	So am I to say, well, I can't say anything because if everyone was saying everything at the same time, we wouldn't have a conversation.
	We know you and I are having this conversation knowing that it's not going to be universalized.
	So, saying, well, if everyone did it, it wouldn't work is true for just about everything.
	And I'm not sure why it works any better in the realm of morality, if that makes sense.
	I guess you do make a really good point.
	You know, you can make the argument like, you know, if every human were a rapist, if it were just, if everyone were a rapist, like what would be wrong with that?
	It's somehow society occurred and rape was just normal.
	And that's just what happened, like ducks, right?
	I suppose then that would select your behavioral traits, those exact ones that make them so evil and selfish and mean to women.
	Like I can't.
	We can see that around the world, right?
	There are cultures that treat women appallingly.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And those traits, I suppose, I feel like those types of traits would also be inconducive to a complex price-eating society.
	I feel like in the end, that type of culture where everyone's a rapist, I feel like that acceptance of chaos would reflect in other acceptances of chaos and probably be a more chaotic type of culture.
	Well, more chaotic can be better.
	I mean, if you look at the relationship between, and I talk about this in my documentary on Hong Kong, you should check out the documentaries freedomain.com/slash documentaries.
	So I do talk about this that in a highly organized and structured society like China, you know, with 6,000 years of relative stagnation.
	In fact, they hated change so much that when someone came up with an ocean-going vessel, they killed him and burned all the blueprints because they didn't want their economy to be overturned by traveling across oceans or having significant sea voyages.
	So if you look at a highly structured and organized society like the Chinese society, when it came across or was visited by the much more chaotic and individualistic and creative destruction of the relative free market, I mean, they lost.
	They lost badly.
	They lost horribly.
	And it was a real shock for like 100 years.
	The leadership of China was just in deep shock that they had discovered gunpowder thousands of years before the Europeans, but their asses handed to them on a platter because of the chaos of the Europeans.
	Or if you look at the conflict between, say, America and the sort of locally sourced guerrilla fighters in, say, Iraq and Afghanistan, or in particular, yeah, in particular in Afghanistan, this has sort of been characterized as, you know, guys in the back of a pickup truck in flip-flops.
	Well, the United States was a very organized, very structured military and so on, but arguably they didn't do particularly well against the much more chaotic and self-generated resistance without any moral judgment, right?
	I mean, just the resistance of that.
	Or if you look at the German army in Vichy France in the 1940s, the Vichy France was that the resistance fighters were doing a pretty good job of that.
	So saying that sort of structure and order are always better.
	Of course, as you know, you obviously said you come from things from a biological standpoint.
	Evolution is only possible if there are elements of chaos in structure.
	So the mutations that are necessary for evolutionary advancement are a form of chaos.
	And of course, you need a significant amount of structure.
	You need a vast majority of structure because you can't have everything mutate at once.
	So you end up with a puddle of DNA goo.
	But you do need some levels of chaos.
	Capitalism is called the creative destruction of capitalism.
	In evolution, of course, it's mutations, only a small, a tiny percentage of which, or a fraction of a percentage of which are actually beneficial to the organism.
	Most mutations are just terrible.
	But so saying that structure is the highest ideal, order is the biggest ideal, I think it has problems with ethics.
	And I think it doesn't take into account the value of chaos In both human and evolutionary systems.
	Well, you can also, you can say that chaos is necessary for mutations to propagate evolution.
	Assuming that all mutations are random, which I don't think it is, I think there's a lot of nuance about the theory of evolution that I don't think it's necessarily one single common ancestor, but that's kind of not germane to this argument.
	I will say, though, that most mutations are neutral.
	Most mutations don't actually have any effect.
	And cancer propagation is a result of mutations as well.
	One reason I started thinking this is because basically cancer occurs when the DNA gets too chaotic, when it gets too nonsensical.
	You know, you've got DNA repair mechanisms, for instance, like to protect against like.
	Yeah, the immune system doesn't recognize the cancer cells as particularly dangerous, as far as I understand it, which is obviously completely amateur.
	But, you know, we develop cancer quite a bit, but the immune system nails it.
	But sometimes.
	Exactly.
	Yep.
	And then once those mechanisms that invest energy into upholding structure fail more and more as you age and become the wrath of entropy, eventually one of those cancer cells will find the key that sticks and then override.
	And then your immune system has to try and find it if it ever does.
	But yeah, chaos is chaos at the molecular level leads to cancer.
	Yeah.
	I would say that, yes, chaos might be the cause of random mutations, but only those mutations that made some sense will survive.
	Right.
	So those are the only ones that get to stay on Earth are the ones that work, the ones that are.
	Right.
	But if there is none of that chaos, evolution doesn't happen.
	True, but the only ones left behind are the structured ones that make sense.
	Sure.
	But again, the constant tinkering of random mutations is how evolution advances.
	So I mean, look, I love the theory.
	I do detect, of course, a certain feminine aspect to your mindset, which is delightful and beautiful, but it's also a little bit feelings-based.
	Well, it's wrong because she's going to dislike the baby of the rapists.
	And yeah, of course she will, but it's kind of feelings-based.
	So I love the approach you're taking.
	I think it's very, very interesting.
	I keep working on it.
	I just would say that for myself, the reason why I would say theft is immoral is that theft cannot be universally preferable behavior.
	So if we were to say stealing is universally preferable behavior, then we would say everyone must want to steal and be stolen from at the same time all the time because it's universal at all times.
	And if we were to say, heaven help us, a terrible system thing to say, but if we were to put forward the mind experiment that rape is universally preferable behavior, then we would say, well, everyone must want to rape and be raped at the same time.
	But wanting to rape and be raped is a logical contradiction.
	It can't work.
	Because if you want to be raped, if you want the sexual activity, then it's not rape.
	If you want to be stolen from, it's not theft.
	You want someone to take your property away.
	They're not stealing from you.
	And so it's the same thing with assault and murder.
	And so the proposition rape, theft, assault, and murder are universally preferable behaviors create immediate contradictions in definitions and therefore they cannot be sustained.
	It would be like having a mathematical equation based upon two and two make both four and the opposite of four or five at the same time.
	And that's not logically possible.
	Or it would be like having a scientific conjecture that say gases both expand and contract when heated under the same circumstances or situations.
	That would be a logical contradiction.
	You wouldn't need to go and test that.
	You just know that that would be a false proposition.
	So my answer to what is moral and immoral is universally preferable behavior.
	If an action cannot be universalized, not, well, if everyone did it, but can it even theoretically be universalized?
	Well, it is possible for everyone at all times To not rape.
	Now, I'm not saying everybody will.
	I mean, there'll always be the evil rapists around, but from a theory standpoint, it is impossible for rape, theft, assault, and murder to be universally preferable behavior.
	However, the opposite, which is respecting persons and property, is possible from a universal standpoint.
	Again, that doesn't mean everyone will, but it means that logically the theory is sound.
	And that's why fundamentally rape, theft, assault, and murder are banned because they're self-contradictory if they try to be universalized and they are consistent if the opposite approach to respecting a person's and property is taken.
	I'm sorry, that's a real brief sprint.
	If people want more on that, you can go to freedomain.com slash books.
	You can go to essentialphilosophy.com or freedomain.com slash books.
	Look at essential philosophy.
	The last third is about ethics.
	And UPB, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics is the book to cook your way through.
	I've also got presentations all over the place.
	You can find them at fdrurl.com.
	Love the conversations tonight, guys.
	I really, really do appreciate it.
	Thank you so much for the calls.
	And, you know, everybody who calls in is absolutely, completely, and totally welcome to call back.
	And I will do a Sunday show, 11 a.m. for donors.
	You can join that conversation at fdrurl.com slash locals.
	Fdrurl.com slash locals.
	And lots of love from up here to wherever you are, unless you're further up, in which case it's down here to up there.
	Take care, everyone.
	Lots of love, my friends.
	And I'll just let it cook for a minute or two so it finishes up there on X and freedomain.com slash Donate to help out the show.

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