March 16, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:47:02
Why War Has Come! X Space
Stefan Molyneux critiques the Iran war as a suicidal conflict driven by fundamentalist Christian eschatology, noting 75-85% Republican support versus 80-90% Democratic opposition. He argues Iran's decentralized command and decoy tactics will exhaust Western defenses, creating security gaps for Russia or China while dragging on until November midterms. Molyneux rejects nuclear options due to dollar collapse risks and pivots to philosophy, asserting values are empirical preferences revealed by actions rather than intentions. He challenges the non-aggression principle as a fragile moral rule requiring willpower, contrasting it with immutable physical laws like gravity before recommending a caller's book on secular ethics. [Automatically generated summary]
I wanted to say a quick thank you to the Scott Adams School.
I was on there this morning, got some very good questions.
Slightly out of left field, right for you, left for me, slightly out of left field, which was good, good questions, though.
I had posted something about Erika Kirk, and I was asked about it, which was good.
So I got to talk about that.
We had very interesting discussions.
I hope that you'll check it out, a Scott Adams show.
For donors, you can get the audio and at least the video of me on the show at freedomain.com slash locals or freedomain.locals.com or freedomain.com slash donate.
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I've opened up the call-in shows to more hours.
People are finding it a bit restrictive, so I'm opening it up to more hours to serve you, the listener and the watcher and the thinker and the viewer.
So you can go to freedomain.com slash call if you would like to schedule a call-in show.
And you tell me, do you want to rant?
You want to submit questions?
Of course, on X, you are more than welcome to request a conversation.
Whatever is on your mind, I am thrilled and happy to accommodate.
But I certainly have some thoughts about the war.
The war.
Rant always.
Do not instigate.
Okay, instigate.
Instigate away.
Why not?
Okay.
This war to me, the war in Iran, has a special kind of agony.
I've had a kind of bounce around relationship with Christianity, as you know, over the past five or six years, been to a lot of churches, met a lot of very nice Christians, had lots of great conversations.
But this shit is bad.
this is bad.
In the movie, The Shining, Stanley Kubrick's movie, there's a scene where an elevator opens and gushes of blood come out, like gallons and gallons, hundreds of gallons of blood come out.
And this is like the portal of superstition through which human beings are ground into a warlike hamburger.
Children are fried alive, buildings collapse, people choke on endless blowing tsunamis of concrete dust, and there is no rising up of the Iranian people.
There was apparently before, when we were told tens of thousands of Iranian protesters have been killed by their own government.
I don't know whether that's true or not.
I don't know if anything's true.
I doubt anything is true.
The first casualty of war, of course, is the truth.
But I said before the war started, I said, Christians, you know, for all the good that you've done in the world, you own this war.
It's yours.
You own it.
You have made it.
It is your war.
Because it comes entirely about because of superstition.
Fuck superstition.
Fuck superstition.
It is eschatological end times bullshit that has started this war.
And it's on the Christians.
It's on the Christians.
I posted this on X Today.
If you subtract this homicidal end times Christian superstition, subtract that.
What is the support for war in America?
Honestly, the left doesn't want it.
The atheist right doesn't want it.
It is the religious right that wants it.
It's all about no borders.
No borders in America and other countries when the left is in power.
No borders for Iran and other countries when the right is in power, the religious right.
And I'm sick of it.
I am absolutely repulsed, revolted, disgusted, and feel endless heights of enlightenment revulsion for this superstition that is driving this war.
There was a Trump administrator who said sort of very clearly today that Iran never posed a threat to America.
Never!
never posed a threat to America.
Horrendous.
Horrendous.
I mean, I suppose now they have their war, they don't need their fig leaf of pretend legitimacy anymore, right?
They don't need it.
They don't need it at all.
Oh, we in the West are in such grave danger.
They have weapons of mass destruction, rockets capable of reaching across the oceans, which somehow we can't see ahead of time or figure out that they're coming or anything like that.
And it's almost like they lie to you to get you to support the war, and then they kind of giggle when that is taken away.
Now that we have you where we want you, we don't need to lie to you anymore.
It was Caroline Levitt.
Leave it, Levitt.
Leave it.
Yes, style.
Press Secretary.
She's complaining about some ABC News story.
She says, this post and story should be immediately retracted by ABC News for providing false information to intentionally alarm the American people.
They wrote this based on one email that was sent to local law enforcement in California about a single unverified tip.
The email even states the tip was based on unverified intelligence, yet ABC News left out this critical fact in their story.
Why?
To be clear, no such threat from Iran to our homeland exists and it never did.
And this is because ABC News reported, was it yesterday?
No, two days ago.
The FBI has warned police departments in California that Iran wants to retaliate for American attacks by launching offensive drones against the West Coast, according to an alert reviewed by ABC News.
Now, they say no drones.
But of course, if you are attacked and you're being bombed, of course, what you will do is you will stripe, you will strike the country that is attacking you.
Why are no attacks occurring?
Because, as we know, no attacks were imminent.
Do you realize how ridiculous you sound?
says someone claiming religious nut jobs are trying to get rid of actual religious nut jobs.
I have no idea what that means.
What does that even mean?
Do you realize how ridiculous you sound?
How about you make a fucking argument, you bloodthirsty warmonger?
Yeah, I can see the YouTube chat if you want to ask questions.
All right.
Yeah, soad says, it's sad that they thought a basic chant of death to America was an actual threat.
People don't understand that Persians make chants of this kind to signify their hate, not their threat.
Yeah, maybe lost in translation.
Thank you for your patience.
Maximilian, while we're gathering questions from the audience, you had comments or questions that you wanted to get across.
Don't forget to unmute.
Ah, thanks, man.
Actually, awesome to speak to.
Been a long time listener, all the way back learning about objectivist philosophy over 14 years ago.
Been a huge ride.
So thank you very much for everything that you've ever done.
This Iran war is pretty crazy.
Clearly, in my opinion, it doesn't seem to benefit Trump in any way, shape, or form.
It seems very odd that he would choose to go down this road.
And he doesn't seem to be very keen on the war.
He does seem to have been pressured into this war, to say the least.
Even Pete Hegseth and everyone else said, yeah, we have to attack because Israel attacked, and then Israel would get attacked.
So we have to preemptively attack Iran, which of course is bullshit.
But in my opinion, like clearly, this is not, they're not in control here.
Trump is not actually in control.
There are people behind the scenes.
So I, yeah, we can call it Zionists in America, Christians in America who have superstitions, but the American people is against it.
So I don't really see how the Christians are the reason for this war, so to speak.
I think it's a different kind of superstition about a third temple and stuff like that.
What do you think about that?
Like, isn't that more the cause of the war?
Things happening in the high-end state.
I appreciate the comments and thank you for your kind comments.
So have you looked it up?
Like, what percentage of fundamentalist Christians in America are for the war?
I actually am not aware of the number, to be honest.
All right.
What percentage of Christians in America are for the Iran war?
I mean, in general, the right wing in America is pro-violence overseas, and the left wing in America is pro-violence at home.
Yeah, but Trump, he won on a peace platform.
Like, he won by saying, I'm ending the wars.
So that's wouldn't you say that's the case?
Yeah, in general, the right wing in America might be a little bit more go-gung-ho with the war.
A little bit.
Okay, let me hit you with some numbers, all right?
Yeah, sure.
Okay.
Support is heavily partisan.
Republicans largely back the war, 75% to 85% in various polls, while Democrats overwhelmingly oppose the war, 80 to 90%.
That is pretty damning.
If the number is 75, that's way, way too high, man.
That's crazy.
75 to 85% in various polls.
So Republicans like you violence outside the borders.
Democrats like violence inside the borders.
You know, the Republicans are the dysfunctional speakers.
Hang on.
The Republicans are the dysfunctional spouse who gets into bar fights outside of the home.
The Democrats are the dysfunctional spouse who beats up people inside the home or use violence against people inside the home.
I'm sorry, I overtalked you.
Go ahead.
That's a fair point.
I was just saying that Trump, when he went towards the election, he went on a peace platform.
And he won.
That was a very, very popular platform.
Now, maybe for this specific Iran war, people have been whipped up into a frenzy about it.
It just seems so insane to me.
Like, I don't watch Fox News or anything like that.
It just seems so blatantly idiotic.
I don't understand how someone, how normal people can believe that this is a good idea.
So let's look at the denominations here.
Evangelical Protestants, especially white evangelicals, highest relative support among Christian groups, driven by overlap with Republican voters, and perceptions of Iran as a biblical/slash prophetic threat.
Yeah.
And figures like John Hagee, H-A-G-E-E, or Haji, framing the conflict in end times terms.
So the evangelical Protestants, the fundamentalist Protestants, have the highest support.
Mainline Protestants, Presbyterian Church, United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, appear largely opposed based upon official denominational statements condemning the strikes, calling for diplomacy, rejecting war without congressional authorization, and so on.
But these groups often lean more liberal or democratic, aligning with broad opposition, which is again about 86% among Democrats.
Catholics likely lean towards opposition or mixed with criticism from U.S. Catholic bishops, Pope Leo XIV, calling for de-escalation and diplomacy and so on.
End Times Prophecies and Conflict00:16:03
Black Protestants and other non-white Christian groups, no specific data.
They tend to align more with Democratic opposition, 80 to 90% against.
And so, yeah, the more fundamentalist and Protestant you are, which of course is pretty foundational to American Christianity, and America is uniquely fundamentalist and Protestant, the more likely you are to support this war for largely religious reasons.
And so if the fundamentalist Christians were against the war, I consider it highly unlikely that the war would have occurred.
So Trump knew that he would get the support, or whoever is behind the war, knew that they would get the support of the fundamentalist American Protestant Christians significantly, and they're right.
It is true.
He has been saying that the war is very popular in the polls.
So he does think that it is a popular thing in the country, but it's just so blatantly suicidal.
Like you're attacking a country that has been preparing for this forever.
Yeah, I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but tell me what you mean by suicidal.
I don't see it the same way.
That doesn't mean that I'm right.
I'm just telling you that I'm not quite sure I understand it.
So if you could tell me what do you mean by suicidal well, first of all, in the Arab Gulf, where they are, in the Persian Gulf, if you sit there with your warships, the modern warfare where you can send a drone for 20, 25, up to 50K, and to take it down, you need to send a couple of missiles worth 4 million.
And Iran has been preparing for this for two decades, easily.
And they have a decentralized command structure in their army where, yeah, you killed Ayatollah, but that means that you have no one that you can call or have a ceasefire negotiation with.
you are going to run out of missiles.
You're going to run out of...
Sorry, when you say your, do you mean the US and its allies or Iran?
No, the U.S. and its allies, of course.
Yeah, yeah.
So it was obvious after the attacks in June that the Iron Dome would collapse if there was sustained fire by Iran, right?
And what we saw immediately was within five days of this war breaking out, the radar systems and the Iron Dome and the counter-attack systems from America and from Israel and the Gulf countries, the GCC countries, they tapped out and they don't have as many missiles left anymore.
I mean, it's very hard to know exactly what's going on down on the ground.
The way I see it is there are two different sides here.
One side is saying, now we destroyed all of their missile launchers and they can't fire any missiles anymore.
And the other side is saying, no, we still have missile launchers, Iran, that is, and we keep bombing you.
And looking at what happened in Tel Aviv over the last couple of days, it does look like Iran is probably still having launchers.
And therefore, attacking Iran is suicidal.
But this belief that they're creating the end times is a suicidal belief from Israel, right?
They want everyone to turn against them.
So yeah, I think it's suicidal for America to do it because when they attack Iran now and people see that they lose their TAD systems, they lose all of their countermeasures.
Now they're pulling back the TAD systems from South Korea and putting it in Israel.
It means North Korea could attack South Korea right now.
It means China could take Taiwan and nobody could do anything about it.
Russia could go and take Ukraine now and nobody could do anything about it because, well, everyone has moved their arms into the Middle East and they've blown up all their countermeasures.
So yeah, I think it's pretty suicidal for America.
And now they close down on.
I'm not sure what you mean by suicidal.
You mean you think that they'll lose?
Yeah.
Okay.
That's not the same as suicidal.
I mean, America lost Vietnam.
That doesn't mean that America ceased to exist.
So you could say that strategy.
Go ahead.
No, go ahead.
Yeah, I think it's suicidal for Trump's election chances.
If he loses in midterm, he's probably going to get impeached, probably successfully.
And when it comes to America as a global power, I think it's very difficult for them to keep the role of the world police after if they lose a battle like this.
Because this is like the what's it called?
The naked emperor.
The emperor is naked type of moment, you know, the way I see it at least.
And yeah, I think we're looking at going from a monopolar world politics to a multipolar system.
I mean, why would this be any different?
Because the colon world doesn't have a full control of everything anymore.
Well, I mean, why would this be any different than America's failures in, say, Afghanistan, right?
20 years, trillions of dollars to replace the Taliban with the Taliban is not British Empire levels of conquest.
And they left a whole bunch of weaponry behind, billions of dollars worth of weaponry behind.
And they're still paying, I think, the Taliban.
I mean, how is that complete humiliation, as far as I can see?
I mean, equivalent to Jimmy Carter losing a bunch of helicopters in the desert to try and rescue American hostages.
How is it different?
I mean, the idea that you can achieve regime change with bombing, I mean, more bombs were dropped on Cambodia around the time of Vietnam, the Vietnamese war, more bombs were dropped on Cambodia than were dropped in the entirety of World War II.
And the idea that you can bomb a country into regime change, regime change, if it's going to happen, has to happen with ground troops, as far as I can tell.
And you cannot invade a country three times the Europe, three times the size of Europe that is massively mountainous.
I mean, the mountains were the big stumbling block in Afghanistan for the Americans, as it was for the Soviets, as it was for the British, as it was for everyone who tries.
It's called the graveyard of empires for a reason.
Now, with regards to the missiles, and I'm not talking about any morals, we're just talking about sort of theory of war stuff.
Yeah.
So for, you know, the last couple of weeks, it's been, oh, they have only 100 and 200 missile launch sites left.
But of course, a lot of the launch sites are mobile, right?
I mean, of course, Iran, the leadership in Iran knows very well that America has satellites, that America has very precision-guided bunker-busting bombs and so on.
So even putting them underground doesn't help that much.
So they have everything that you develop as strength in the military must be accounted for by your enemy.
Strength equals weakness.
Right?
So if you have nuclear weapons, war then shifts to information, to trying to lower the birth rate, to lots of other things that countries do to mess you up.
So everybody knows that the West has satellites and precision-guided bombs.
So they simply have adapted their military strategies to take that into account.
So what that means, of course, as you know, among many things, is you put your rockets on trucks and you just keep them moving.
And then, of course, what they've also done, and you can see these videos as well, is that they've got the outlines of helicopters and airplanes and missile launch sites, which appear real to satellites, and then they basically just blow up nothing.
This happened in the Second World War.
The Germans created pretend airports, military airports with pretend hangars and pretend airplanes just made of balsa wood and nothing like that.
And the British figured this out and found this so funny that they dropped on the inert wooden planes inert wooden bombs, like because it's like we're not going to waste ordnance on this kind of stuff.
Oh, that's so good.
And this deception is very key.
And, you know, one of the problems that the media has, and it's very common in a time of war, is that pointing out the strengths of the enemy and the challenges of the operation is considered to be traitorous.
And I think that we should have no loyalty higher than that of the truth.
And if a very high IQ, like Iran has one of the highest IQs in the world, a very high IQ population has had almost a half century to prepare for an inevitable war, they know their shite, man.
They know their stuff.
They know what they're doing.
So of course, what they're going to do is they're going to launch some missiles while keeping the best missiles for later, right?
So they want to exhaust the defensive capabilities.
And then when the defensive capabilities are diminished, then they launch the heavy stuff.
So the fact that there hasn't been any, well, there hasn't been a plethora of major strikes is entirely in line with generic war theory, which is you probe defenses, right?
Before you probe the defenses, you probe the defenses.
So you send your cheap shitty stuff there to figure out the defenses, then how to work around them.
And then after defenses are mapped and perhaps even exhausted, then you launch your heavy stuff and so on.
So this is all not being discussed in the media because, of course, nobody wants to say, well, Iran is quite strong and Iran is quite militarily skilled and they've had a long time to prepare and so on.
And they have, what did they lose, 400,000 people in the previous war, and that's when they were one-third the population.
So that's 1.2 million people that they could expend at what ratio of U.S. and other casualties.
Because the U.S., and like most of the people in the West, do not have the stomach for much on-the-ground stuff.
They do not have the stomach for body bags and coffins with flags on them.
Whereas, of course, this is one of the problems that relatively free societies face when attacking dictatorships is that dictatorships can control the flow of information completely and hide losses and hide defeats and hide disasters, whereas they're all exposed in the more free countries or those with more freedom of speech.
And then it's hard to match that information asymmetry, because if the Western population is seeing the body bags and the Iranian population is not, and of course, in Iran as well, since it is a dictatorship, if the soldiers of the regime are getting killed, a lot of the people will feel good about that.
You know, if you were in Soviet Russia and the Soviet troops that oppressed you were getting killed, you probably felt okay about that, if not downright positive.
And so They can spend lives on the Iranian side in a way that doesn't match the blowback from the American side.
So look, I'm no military expert, obviously.
I'm just a philosopher guy.
I did take some courses on military conflicts in graduate school.
So, you know, I'm far from a military expert, but you can't bomb them into regime change.
They have, of course, decentralized.
And, you know, there's a certain, this is a love of death, right?
I mean, it leads you straight to paradise, which is different for the West.
The West loves life, and a lot of the dictatorships around the world have a sort of a Thanatos, a sort of a death wish, which makes it pretty tough to fight them.
And as you rightly point out, and this is the same thing that brought down the economy of the Soviet Union, was the war in Afghanistan, where you have a $25 million plane that's taken down by a $20,000 Stinger missile.
And those asymmetries of expenses is wild.
And of course, you have also a fifth column of there are hundreds of thousands of Iranians in America.
And of course, a lot of them fled the regime.
They're not fans of the regime, but not all.
This invade everyone, invite everyone, invade everyone, invite everyone.
It doesn't really make any particular sense from a rational standpoint.
So then the question is, of course, why?
Why is there the push for war?
And there is, of course, there are key biblical end times prophecies.
The Bible mentions Persia, Iran, and Elam, an ancient region overlapping modern Iran, in several prophetic contexts.
This is from Brock.
These are seen by many as pointing to Iran's role in the latter days or end times.
So the prophecy in Ezekiel 38 to 39, Gog and Magog invasion, a coalition by Gog of the land of Magog, often identified as a northern power like Russia, allies with Persia or Iran, Kush, Sudan, Ethiopia, Put, Libya, Gomer, Turkey, and Beth Togorma, parts of Turkey and Armenia, to invade a peaceful Israel.
God intervenes with earthquakes, fires, and confusion, destroying the invaders to reveal his glory.
This is viewed as a future war during or before the tribulation.
Iran or Persia is explicitly named as a key ally.
Russia's growing ties with Iran, military alliances, drone supplies are seen as aligning with this.
And the fact that the West, which is, you know, Christian and Caucasian, has as its endless enemy, the post-communist Russia, which is conservative and Christian and Caucasian, is just a, well, it's not even madness.
It's just it's beyond derangement.
So the invasion ends in supernatural defeat, leading to Israel's recognition of God.
The judgment on Elam, God breaks Elam's bow or military might scatters its people to the four winds, destroys its kings and princes, but restores its fortunes in the latter days.
This interpreted as Iran's regime collapse, the 2026 death of the Ayatollah and strikes on nuclear sites as, quote, breaking the bow.
A restoration could mean mass conversion to Christianity, noted growth in Iranian house churches, or regime change leading to peace.
And there are more in Daniel 7, 8, 10, Esser Acts 2, 9, Persia as beast slash empire envisioned spiritual battles with the Prince of Persia, Elamites at Pentecost, symbolic of ongoing spiritual warfare between good and evil with Iran as a persistent antagonist.
Nuclear Risks and Escalation00:12:46
So it is really quite tragic.
And it is rank and false superstition.
And superstition has its price and its cost.
And superstition exhausts the personality, renders hostile the fading capacity for reason.
And there are genuine and deep sadists in the world who love war.
They love the despair.
They love the confusion.
They love the destruction.
They love the profits, of course.
There are massive profits in war, at least in a status society.
And what was Trump elected on?
Basically, three things, right?
Number one, deportations and a border war.
Number two, tariffs in the hope of restoring American manufacturing and polishing back up the rust belt.
And of course, number three, no more useless international conflicts.
And it's not that hard to see how it's all going.
And as I said before the war, I think this is a real slam on the social contract as a whole, because people are desperate for this kind of stuff.
And again, except for the fundamentalist Protestant Christians and the Republicans as a whole, who are very keen on the war.
And this is why I got out of politics in 2020, because it was pretty clear at that point, it was pretty clear that the people weren't going to get what they want.
And I found Trump in 2016 to be quite fascinating and very interesting, but they weren't going to let him get to 2020.
And yeah, it's very rough.
It's very rough.
All right.
Sorry, is there more that you wanted to add or more that you wanted?
I'm happy to hear more of your thoughts.
We have another request, but go ahead.
I want to ask, how do you think this war is going to end?
How long do you think it's going to take?
Because honestly, I can't see it's a very difficult situation because on the one hand, I think Trump actually desperately wants to get out of it.
And also, maybe Netanyahu isn't here anymore.
There is their most recent press conference.
It was an AI video and so on.
But Iran is not going to stop bombing because their last two negotiation teams got killed, which is unbelievable that they've done this.
So they're going to keep on going.
And the only thing that they are going to accept is that America completely backs out of the Arab area and leave the army bases from the GCC countries.
Seems very unlikely.
So it's hard to see for me how this conflict is going to end.
Second question that I would have that is on a very different thing is the evangelical Christians in America, they have a very different point of view than European Christians, especially Orthodox Christians, right?
It has a lot to do with the Schofield Bible and so on.
Why is it that they are so bloodthirsty?
And why is the doomsday end of time prophecy so strong in America versus Europe, Orthodox belief or Catholic belief?
I mean, I grew up as a Latter-day Saint, which is pretty hilarious to me, like LDS Mormon.
So I grew up with all of those ideas in the family and in the community.
So I'm interested to hear how long you think this war is going to take, how long and how you think it's going to end.
And then also did the disparity and end time belief in Europe versus USA.
Right.
I say this with all the caveats of just being some idiot on the internet.
So obviously it goes without saying that I don't know.
If I had to guess, though, it's going to be tough to get out.
It's going to be tough to withdraw because that's politically pretty bad, right?
So if you withdraw from, let's say, tomorrow Trump says, or if he even can, we are withdrawing from attack forces in Iran.
Can he declare victory?
Nope.
And so what will then happen is the left will call him both warlike and weak.
And warlike and weak is like the worst combo.
This is the Jimmy Carter situation with the Iranian hostages way back in the 70s.
He sent a rescue mission, they crashed, and it just was a complete disaster and really in some ways cost him the election in 1980 to Reagan.
So to be warlike and weak, if you're warlike and perceived as strong, that's annoying to the left, but at least there's some grudging respect and you retain the votes on the right.
If you're seen as warlike and weak, then the left attacks you for being warlike and the right abandons you for being weak.
And so if he were to withdraw, then there is that question of what was the point of all of that.
There was no regime change.
There was no invasion.
Not that there should be.
I'm just saying, like, what was the point of that?
So the battle cannot be won and the battle cannot be abandoned, which is really one of the worst situations.
I don't imagine, if I had to put my little prognostication hat on, I don't imagine that the war, it may taper a little bit, it may be reduced a little bit or even quite a bit.
I don't imagine it will be declared over before the midterms in November.
The midterms in November, of course, the left has gone so far left and is so sort of aggressive and hostile to anything on the right that you're never going to convert any of them.
You're never going to win any of them over.
And so as the Republicans, what is the only way to retain your voter base?
And that is to continue with a war that is very popular among the fundamentalists.
Now, if they say, well, we can negotiate something, then people will say, well, if you could negotiate something, why didn't you?
And even if they do negotiate something, they'll have to leave a big force in the region because otherwise people will say, well, if you trusted them before, why didn't you just negotiate with them before?
And so on, right?
So it is, you know, it's this old sort of ferocious analogy that one of the founding fathers had about, you know, we've got a we've got a wolf by the ears.
He can't bite us.
We can't let him go.
And I think that kind of paralysis is really difficult in politics.
You know, it's a whole lot easier to get into a fight than it is to get out of a fight.
Like it's a whole lot easier, hatfield and McCoy's, right?
It's a whole lot easier to just go beat up someone than it is to get out of the sort of endless tidal wave blowback and so on.
I mean, it seems to me quite likely that there will be an attack somewhere in the West that will be directly traceable, which will cause an escalation.
And the worse that attack, the harder it's going to be to withdraw because now there's that punishment thing and so on.
No, they're not going to nuke Iran.
No.
This, you know, turned the Middle East into a parking lot.
That's all just silly fantasies.
It's not a thing.
So I think it's going to go on in this sort of bumpy, uneven, not particularly engaged way through the midterms.
You know, you don't change a horse midstream and so on.
So I imagine that it's going to be at least, what was it, till the midterm, like eight months, seven, eight months.
So it's going to go on along with that.
I wouldn't be surprised.
If the Republicans manage to hang on through the midterms, then I think the world will diminish.
Of course, if the Democrats get in, they will betray everyone in the region.
That's what they do with their power is they use it to betray everyone who's formerly an ally.
So I think it will be a while.
No, they're not.
They're not going to nuke Iran.
They're not going to nuke Iran.
They're not.
I don't know where people would get that idea from.
I mean, for just about any number of reasons.
I mean, they're not.
I mean, they might use depleted uranium shells as they did in Iraq, but they're not going to nuke Iran.
The fallout, the drifting, the moral horror, the boycotts, the end of the U.S. dollar, they're not going to nuke Iran because everybody will simply boycott all American businesses and the dollar will collapse.
And the fallout will drift and affect hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
They're not going to do that.
So I don't know why people come up with these kinds of ideas.
But does that help?
I mean, again, this is just my, you know, a doctor with a flashlight shows you where the projections come from, but that's my sort of thoughts.
Okay.
Well, I think if they back out, if he would retreat, he would have to leave the army bases from the GCC.
And that would be very perilous for the petrodollar.
And because right now they have massive influence in the Middle East because they have army bases everywhere and they have huge weapon deals and probably some Epstein stuff going on with all the people in the Middle East.
And if Iran is able to drive them out, a lot of these countries will probably turn against America.
So it's a very tough situation.
And I mean, Iran still has, what, 80,000, 120,000 missiles to send towards the GCC countries.
How would they estimate that?
I don't know where that number.
I'm sure you're right.
I just don't know where the number would come from.
I don't know 100%, but I've seen it everywhere, that it's between 80 and 120,000.
I don't know for sure, of course.
I think nobody can know for sure.
But I've seen that number on both sides reported.
So we can't know for sure, but if both American media and Eastern media is saying it, then it's a higher probability of being true.
But then there is also just a unit economics of they can produce these missiles and drones very, very cheaply.
And it costs 100 times more to produce the counter efforts.
And also, the counter efforts are kind of depleted.
They were already depleted from the Ukraine war and then the barrage in June.
So I think America and Israel, they simply don't have that many missiles left.
So I don't think they can sustain protection for that long.
And then they can't sit with their aircraft hangers in the Persian Gulf.
And so I don't see how they can sustain this warfare for until the midterms.
I understand the logical reason for why it would drag out like that, but this is not an Afghanistan.
Like Iran is way too strong.
Well, sorry, sorry.
I've been posted this before.
Yeah, sorry to interrupt.
But they don't actually have to sustain it.
They just have to not quit, right?
They could just lower the amount of rockets they could say they're doing other things and so on.
And I just looked up Iran's.
So they wouldn't just, they would just do less, right, over time and still claim, right?
Iran entered the war, according to Grock, with 2,000 to 3,000 usable ballistic missiles focused on short and medium range.
Ongoing strikes have depleted this significantly likely to under 50% effective capacity by mid-March.
Launches, not just missiles, remain the primary bottleneck, limiting sustained barrages despite any remaining inventory.
So, of course, nobody knows for sure.
I'm not sure where this 100,000 or whatever might come from, but the estimates are quite low.
But again, it's the fog of war.
Who knows?
Who knows for sure?
It is the fog of war.
Truth vs. Preferred Behavior00:10:55
And I have to say something.
I've never seen censorship to the level that I've seen right now with this conflict.
So normally we have some kind of idea of what's going on, but the fog of war has never been this dense as with this conflict as far as I've seen it, especially Amix.
Maybe it's because I live in France, but I'm not seeing anything on the timeline except just a few Twitter anals posting some stuff.
But in the first days, it was non-stop and then it kind of died out.
So it seems like they've done crazy censorship on this one, especially Grok.
There are many things that have been verified to be true and then afterwards seen to be true.
And Grok is just saying, nope, nope, nope.
Following the narrative from the department in America.
I mean, they do have some pretty significant deals between SpaceX and the government and then XAI and the government.
So I wouldn't expect that to be an unbiased observer.
Yeah.
I don't know.
And we may never know.
We may never know the truth of what happened, right?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I appreciate your questions and comments.
And thank you for being such a long-term listener.
That is much appreciated.
Jeff, I think you were in first.
If you wanted to tell me what is.
Oh, did he go?
Did he go?
I think he may have went.
All right.
So, Sir Cheddar, let us give it a shot.
If you want to unmute, I'm happy to hear your thoughts about this or whatever is on your mind.
Hello, can you hear me?
Yes, sir.
Hi.
I have a different kind of question.
I believe it's philosophical.
It's about values as a category.
Sounds good.
I have, let's see.
I'm having a tough time understanding values with certainty.
I'm starting to really know and identify it.
Someone claims they value, let's say, truth, and truth can be, I believe it can be a value as well.
Then if in a moment of obvious falsehood, and maybe let's say in this example, it's an easy thing to correct me, to correct me on.
If they don't correct me, then they probably don't value truth as much as they're as much as they say.
Is that fair to say?
Well, you are starting off sideways.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Well, don't apologize.
I could be wrong.
What's the first thing, if we want to talk about values, what's the first thing we need to do?
Definitions.
What do you mean by value?
Right.
Yeah, I don't mean it in the economic sense.
That for me makes, yeah, I understand that clearly.
That's the thing.
I'm not really sure.
It's just, I've heard in many podcasts of yours, you'd be like, for example, when it comes to relationships, you're like, what are her values?
And that meaning of value is what I'm trying to understand.
I understand monetary value and how, for example, if I want to be paid more, I need to justify or convince, let's say, my employer to pay me more and kind of demonstrate or convince him of that value, of my value.
So I don't know if I'm starting.
Anyways.
I'm sorry.
I'm still not sure what the definition of value is.
Well, that's the thing.
There's this particular definition of value that I don't really know well enough even to like I'm having a hard time describe it.
But the example I gave earlier is in like in Collins shows, you'll emphasize its importance when you're dating that the woman you're dating has compatible values.
That's the definition I'm trying to figure out.
So for me, values are an empirical preference.
Empirical is important because anyone can claim anything they want.
I value helping the homeless.
It's like, okay, are you taking any of them in?
Are you giving any of your own money to solve the problem?
Are you tracking whether it's working?
So there are claimed values, which are mostly value-signaling, pompous nonsense.
And there are revealed values.
So there are what women say they want or men, and it's what they actually respond to.
So the survey just came out recently.
What is it you're looking for the most in a romantic relationship?
And people have all of this nonsense, you know, compatibility, a sense of humor, you know, blah, But it turns out that the actual preference is that they're good at sex.
Which, you know, I get that being good at sex is also value-based in that you're not selfish and you want the other person to have a good time and you're willing to take your time and so on.
And so there are some moral values or at least empathy or kindness values involved in being a good sexual partner.
So values to me are empirical preferences.
So when I say, you know, go on a date, make sure your values match, then you at least have a stated goal that is necessary but not sufficient for the relationship to progress.
So if you say to a woman on a date, I value honesty, and she says, oh, yes, so do I, that's great.
You know, then at least she's saying, now, of course, most people are going to say all the right things.
You know, I value kindness and I value charity and I value taking care of people and I value honesty and directness and openness and blah, blah, blah.
So they'll say all of this stuff.
And then what do you do if the woman says that she shares values that you admire?
What's the next step?
Well, that's where you focus your conversation.
Talk about it.
Like if she values honesty, actually, that's a bit more difficult to think of an example.
But I get what you mean.
It's if someone's, if they're going to, they're going to tell you they value something that's honesty.
Woman says, I value honesty.
What's the next thing you do?
I'm not sure.
I'm sorry.
I'm a bit stumped.
Well, you find out if it's true.
And it's only true if it's empirically manifested in her life.
So for instance, a woman says, I value honesty.
And then you say, how's your relationship with your mother?
And you say, and she says, oh, my mother drives me crazy, blah, Then what do you say?
And what do you ask?
I would ask, I would ask, like, how come what does she do?
Okay, let's say she says she comes with a list of five things that drive her crazy about her mother and she values honesty.
What do you say?
And what do you ask next?
I would say, Dere, have you, why haven't you talked to her about it?
You don't know if she's talked to her or not.
What do you ask?
Right, right.
Have you talked to her about this?
Have you been honest?
Well, she's telling me.
Yeah, have you been honest with her about what you just told me?
I value honesty.
Have you been honest?
And if she says, yes, I have been perfectly upfront with my mother, then has your mother promised to change?
If her mother says, no, I haven't promised to change, or if she says, oh, my mother will never change for me, then clearly she's in a relationship where her mother doesn't love her too much to at least try and accommodate reasonable requests.
So, you know, what does it mean?
Because you have to be honest with yourself as well as with others.
So if she says, oh, my mother drives me crazy, say, have you told her?
Yes, I've told her.
Has she promised to change?
No.
Okay, well, why are you in a relationship with someone who can't even be bothered to try and change to accommodate reasonable requests?
Are you honest with yourself about the deficiencies in your relationship with your mother?
She says, no, no, no.
It's fine.
She's my mother, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, okay, well, then you're not honest.
You don't value honesty that much.
Or, you know, she was in some relationship with some guy and it went on for two years.
And for the last, you know, six months, she wasn't happy.
Say, well, did you talk to him about it?
No.
Well, then you don't value honesty.
Or did you talk about it, your unhappiness with your boyfriend when you were still together?
She says, yes.
Okay.
Well, did he promise to change or did he want to change?
Did you guys go to therapy or whatever it is that you could do to improve the relationship?
Did you read books?
Did you, right?
And if she says, yes, he promised to change, they say, well, did he change?
Because if he did change for the better, she'd still be with him.
So he says, yes, we were unhappy for six months.
Yes, I told him what the problems were.
Yes, he promised to change.
Then did he change?
Right.
So then, if he spent six months promising to change but didn't change, she doesn't value honesty that much because he was able to lie to her and continue to have sex with her for some reasonable portion of six months.
So she doesn't value honesty that much.
And also, she was with a guy who wasn't honest because a guy who promises to change and doesn't change is not an honest guy.
So she can't say, I valued honesty and I was two years banging away on a guy who lied a lot and lied about really, really important things, like who kept to be around with promises of change that he never aimed to fulfill.
So values are empirical preferences.
It kind of sounds like another way of putting it is saying values are from UPB preferred behavior.
Would that be fair to make that comparison?
Preferred, well, sure.
Yeah, preferred behavior.
Yeah, that would be the same as empirical values.
So a preferred behavior could be, I want to learn the guitar, so I'm going to practice a lot.
That's sort of not a moral issue.
But with regards to moral values, anyone can say anything, right?
Anyone can say anything.
Anyone on a first date can say, I have $10 million.
Values Are Empirical Preferences00:11:32
I just kind of dressed down because I don't want people choosing me for my money, right?
Now, I guess you could ask the person to whip out their, fire up their banking app and show you the $10 million or something like that, right?
Right.
But if somebody makes a claim, then at some point it has to be verified because anyone can say anything, right?
And I was actually talking with someone the other day about this issue that comes up on these Kansas Collins where somebody says that they're being sort of manipulative.
And they say, well, I didn't mean to.
I didn't mean to be.
I didn't mean to.
Which again, it's very female-coded.
Women have to read.
I've never seen that.
Yeah.
Women have to read intentions.
men read actions, right?
So if you're on a...
Right.
Have you ever been on a team sport?
Yes.
What have you played?
I played soccer.
I wasn't good at it, but I played it for a long time.
So were you the worst player on the team?
Almost.
Yeah, I guess I was.
I mean, either I was the worst or the second worst.
I wasn't too good.
I would get too nervous and I would stare and not like engage in the, you know, like the ball is moving.
You need to move with it.
I was pretty bad at that.
I just stared at the ball.
Okay.
So you would occasionally.
Sorry, you would occasionally get the ball, you'd kick it at the net and you'd miss or it would be easily caught by the goalie, right?
Or I would fail to pass it and then you lose control of the ball and that's a big deal.
Yeah, so you try to pass it to, I played a lot of soccer, so you try to pass it to a teammate, it gets easily intercepted by the opposing team, right?
Exactly.
Okay.
Now, if you try to pass a ball to Bob and then Jack from the opposing team easily intercepts it and scores on you, and you say, but my intention was to pass well, does that mean anything to your teammates?
No, it means it's actually, frankly, worse.
Well, I mean, but they assume everybody assumes that you meant to pass well.
You weren't passing to the other team.
You weren't passing to Jack.
So if you go hunting, like you and I go hunting and let's say I've got one bad eye and I say, give me the spear.
I can do it, man.
I can do it.
And then I throw the spear and I hit the tree right in front of me because I'm half blind, right?
They say, well, no, I meant to hit the deer.
It's like, well, of course you meant to hit the deer.
The question is not whether you mean to.
The question is, can you and do you?
So women have to read intentions because a man can say to a woman, hey, baby, let's get it on.
Let's make the greasy beast with two backs and trust me, I'll marry you next week.
And then he has sex with her, maybe knocks her up and then vanishes into the ether.
So she has to be able to read intentions very, very much because men will lie to get access to sex and so on.
So women have to read intentions, but men only read results.
We only care really fundamentally, foundationally about results.
Intentions are accepted and they don't really matter, right?
Everybody who plays basketball wants to get the three-point nothing but net, but whether you can actually do it.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Oh, I was going to add to with like women's capacity to read intentions.
I just thought to add that I would imagine the pressure of men's preferences to have a woman who's a virgin further requires women to be more accurate about reading men's intentions in particular.
Yeah.
I mean, as I mentioned in my presentation on the Wild West, a third of marriages in America in the 18th and 19th century, like a third of marriages, the woman was already pregnant.
And you know that because you've got the marriage date and then you have the birth date.
And if it's six or seven months, then the woman was so a third, like people, oh, 98% of women were virgins on their wedding night.
It's like, no, they weren't, but they were with the man that they married.
So a woman is willing to have sex with a man if she's absolutely sure that he's going to marry her.
And so she has to accurately read intentions because you have sex.
If she doesn't give up sex to a guy and he goes to someone else who will give up sex, then she's lost a husband.
So that's bad.
If she does give up sex to a guy who then doesn't marry her, she's lost her virginity and that's bad.
So women have to really accurately read intentions, which is why when women say, well, I just didn't know he was a bad guy, it's like, come on, this is everything you've evolved for.
So that's ridiculous.
That's like a man looking at a woman and saying, I have no idea how attractive she is.
It's like, no, no, that's exactly what we're tuned for.
That's men are visual creatures, as you know.
So values are empirical preferences.
So somebody says, I value honesty.
Then there's a few simple tests to ask if they have manifested empirically the value called honesty.
If somebody says, I value a good listener, say, oh, what's your father like?
Oh, he doesn't listen.
It's like, well, have you like, so you look for empirical verifications, which is why if you have bad relationships in your life based upon abuse, exploitation, manipulation, whatever it is, and then you say, I value integrity and honesty and virtue and blah, Then a woman of quality, to take the male example, a woman of quality will just look at that and say, no, you don't.
Like, I have a lot of sympathy, but like, empirically, you don't.
It's like some guy saying, I value being a healthy weight and I value being strong and muscular, and he's 300 pounds a LARD, right?
Like, you know, you just have to look at the guy, right?
And say, no, you don't.
Empirically, you don't.
It's kind of silly.
You know, if somebody's smoking away saying, I'm an expert at quitting smoking, it's really important to quit smoking and they just keep smoking, right?
There was an old movie, Billy Joel did the soundtrack.
And, oh, gosh, what was his name?
The short actor from Goodfellas.
Oh, nothing's coming to mind.
Anyway, he was like, hey, I can quit smoking anytime.
And he quits, he puts a cigarette out and then just immediately picks up another one, right?
Says it's easy, right?
I think Danny DeVito, but it's not that guy.
Joe Pesci.
That's the guy, Joe Pesci.
Everyone's going nuts on the chat here.
Joe Pesci.
So, you know, you, you.
So, so, yeah, values are empirical, consistent preferences.
And if somebody values honesty and they say, oh, I really value honesty, like I remember 16, no, it was 17 years ago.
I was honest.
I remember that.
I remember as clear as day.
Well, then they don't really value honesty because there has to be some kind of consistency.
So values are empirical preferences and they're easily testable in conversation.
Right.
No, that's actually super clear.
No, no, I have it in my mind now.
It's very clear, and I appreciate that.
I wanted to ask if there is time.
I wanted to ask a question about virtue.
Is that of course?
Yeah.
I mean, I'm the virtue guy, so let's do it.
It's kind of similar, like I said, with values, like, you know, this kind of like the basic definition, like, like you said earlier with values, it's empirical preferences.
And it seems to me that values can be, I mean, not values, I'm sorry.
To go back now, to go to virtue, virtues seem to they from what Anderson with virtue with virtues, they are empirical.
But like it seems as though virtues is within the category of values.
And I'm trying to see if that's correct or if I'm miscategorizing virtues.
Yeah.
So virtues are in the category of values.
They're a subcategory of values because you can have a value like eat well and exercise and be a serial killer.
Right.
So you can have values that are entirely co-joined with decidedly evil actions.
So.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you can value expertise in hunting humans or something, right?
So values are simply empirical preferences.
They could be good or evil or neutral.
Sorry, go ahead.
So it's almost like virtues are values that cannot contradict each other.
Like if you're going to be this virtue, you can't contradict, you can't do the opposite of that virtue.
Yeah, so virtues are universally preferable behavior.
And I'll give you sort of an example, which would be a con man.
Now, a con man, does he want you to tell him the truth?
No.
Try again.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yes.
Yes.
The con man wants his.
His mark, his victims.
Yeah, his victim to, thank you.
His victim to be as honest as possible and give him as much information as possible.
So that he has an effective strategy.
Yeah.
So the con man values honesty in his victim.
Does the con man provide honesty to the victim?
No.
Right.
Or at least very little.
Well, just enough to rope you in and so on, right?
So, I mean, if you look at the classic Ponzi scheme, if somebody who's the victim says, I'm going to give you $5,000, then the con man wants the victim to be honest about that and give them the $5,000 and so on.
But then the con man takes money from the next people who give him $5,000, uses it to pay off a dividend to the previous people without telling them that.
He says, no, no, no, I invested the company.
He doesn't say, oh, I invested your money.
He doesn't say, no, I'm just getting new people and flowing the money to the old people and keeping a portion to myself.
And so that is where the immorality comes in.
If the thief steals from you, is he respecting your property rights?
No.
No.
Does the thief want to keep what he has stolen?
In other words, would the thief be upset if someone stole from him that which he had stolen from others?
Yeah, he would be quite upset.
Right.
So morality is when you pretend to have a virtue that is universal, but you do not actually have a virtue that is universal.
In fact, it's quite opposite.
So there are some con men, and I guess an even more obvious example is a woman is in some lonely country road and her car is halfway in the ditch or is sagging.
Maybe there's one flat tire and she's trying.
And so the man stops, tries to help her out.
She hits him over the head with a tire iron and steals his kidneys.
So she is pretending to be in need.
She's pretending that she's going to be grateful.
Maybe he's got a sexual fantasy.
I don't know, whatever.
And so people will, and homeless people do this all the time.
They pretend that they're hungry.
They pretend that they're, and maybe they are, but they're probably going to use the money for drink or drugs.
So they pretend that they're going to do right with your money, that they're going to do the good thing with your money.
And of course, most people have tried this at one time or another.
I certainly have with a homeless person and they say, can you give me 10 bucks?
I'm like, hey, I'm going to eat.
Come with me.
And they don't want to.
And we'll stay on the corner to get the 10 bucks so they can get their drug.
Political Accountability and Greed00:15:27
Right.
So there's the women who say, I need bus fare home.
I've been abandoned.
I need 50 bucks to get on the bus back to Baltimore or whatever.
And then John Sussell did one of these where he followed the woman back.
She had a nice apartment and just baked all day.
So that is lying and getting people to pity you based upon made-up circumstances that really are not your fault or maybe not your fault.
And so that is opposing or undermining universality, if that makes sense.
Right.
Yeah.
Virtues, they have a goal.
They have a moral goal.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
All right.
Yeah, that's it for me.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, man.
Great questions.
Nice to chat with you again.
And you are certainly welcome.
Anytime you like.
All right.
We have Echo.
Speak to me in fading sounds.
What is on your mind, my friend?
Don't forget to unmute.
Or not.
Yes, no.
You might need to get just a little closer to the mic, if you don't mind.
Okay.
Is this better?
It is not, but we can fix it in post.
Go for it.
Um, hopefully.
There we go.
Okay.
What am I on your mind?
It's about politics.
Is there...
I just had this really simple idea pop in my head.
And it's like, why don't political parties have a contractual based relation with their members?
Like, has this ever been done?
Obviously, like, it's naive to think that it be done, but I've never heard any arguments for it or against it.
So what I'm describing is a political party where the representatives are in a legal contract with the sort of regular members.
So the regular members can vote out the representatives if they have, let's say, a 70% threshold vote to vote now.
They're not representing them in the way that most of the people would want to.
Okay, sorry, it's very abstract.
Do you mind giving me a more particular example?
Yeah, sure.
So let's say you have a political party that's sort of supposed to be right-wing, but then the party grows and they actually get into political power and the representatives don't quite fulfill their tasks.
For example, they don't propose the things that they're supposed to be proposing in the middle of the year.
Sorry to interrupt.
We can just look at the woman Mirodi or whatever her name is in Italy who got in to deport and stop mass migration or mass immigration and then just completely reversed herself when she was in power.
Do you mean something like that?
Right, exactly.
It's like, because they can say the things and then do like, I don't know, 20% of what they're supposed to do and sort of get away with it.
But what if, why not just have a legal contract between the members of the party and the leaders so that it's more like an actual job that they could get kicked out at any point, not every four years of an election cycle.
Okay.
Have you ever used an accountant?
No.
Okay.
I assume it can be quite complicated to do your taxes, though, right?
Sure, yeah.
Okay.
So accountants make hundreds of billions of dollars a year around the world helping people to comply with incredibly burdensome tax codes.
Is that a fair statement?
Yeah.
Okay.
Would you expect accountants and organizations of accountants, the sort of regulatory bodies, the governing bodies of accountants, would you expect them to spend a lot of time, effort, energy, and money to simplify the tax code, to put in a flat tax, thus rendering their services Unimportant or irrelevant.
No, and I don't suppose they would be for it.
No.
No.
In fact, they would fight against it with everything they had because if there was a magical flat tax, like whatever you got, you just paid 10%, right?
And by the by, the cost of the Iraq war would eliminate the income tax in America for anyone making $150,000 or less.
But anyway, the Iran war, sorry.
So accountants profit from the complexity of the tax code, just as lawyers profit from the complexity of the legal code.
And so the people who profit from complexity and need complexity to justify their money.
Most businesses pay a lot to accountants.
And if you've ever been involved in legal action, you can see, read about it.
I mean, look at people like Alex Jones or Roger Stone or people like that.
I mean, the legal bills can be, or General Flynn, the legal bills can be in the millions of dollars, right?
The legal bills can be completely eye-watering.
And that's because the legal system is complex and opaque and amateurs.
You know, as the old saying goes, if you represent yourself, then you have a fool for a client.
So systems don't do that which removes their own profit and power, if that makes sense.
So why would the government want direct and immediate accountability to the voters, to their customers?
Because if they wanted direct accountability to their customers, they'd open up a restaurant or a warehouse or, I don't know, a power washing business or a landscaping business or something where you would get that kind of immediate feedback.
You do a bad job, you get fired.
So people run to the government because they don't want that relationship.
They specifically do not want that relationship.
If you are a private tutor, you can be fired.
If you are a government teacher, it's almost impossible to fire you.
So people who become government teachers do that because they don't want to be fired.
And the entire system is set up to prevent accountability.
I mean, if you vote for a politician, you have no contract with that politician, of course, right?
And so if the politician doesn't do what you want, you can't even call him up and get mad at him because he's going to say, well, I don't even know if you voted for me because the voting is anonymous to me, right?
So you have no contract with politicians, and that's by design.
There was a woman in Canada, Sheila Copps, I think she was MPP from Hamilton and way back in the day when they were putting in the GST or rather shifting the GST from manufacturing to the customer, which bumped up the, added another 8% to your purchase price.
She said, I'll quit if this goes through.
And then it went through.
And she ended up quitting and then being re-elected right away.
So that was sort of unusual.
But people go into the government because they don't want accountability.
And so the idea that people in the government are going to work towards providing or creating accountability to me is kind of like saying, well, I want, I'm expecting all of the accountants and lawyers in the world tomorrow to start feverishly working towards simplifying the tax code and the legal code so that their services aren't required and they don't get to make their quarter mil to half mil a year.
Yeah, I hear that.
I guess this would only work in a supposedly right-wing party because the members would at least want this type of thing.
And like a lefty party, they sort of wouldn't, they would want more government anyways, right?
Well, no, but you can't just go into government and get rid of government.
I mean, Trump tried.
I mean, the whole Department of Government Efficiency, the Doge thing, right?
You can't just go into government and get rid of government.
I mean, a lot of government spending is mandated, like it's illegal to cut it, in particular, Medicare, Medicaid, Most of uh social security and elect so like two-thirds of the budget or whatever is completely untouchable.
And then anytime you try to touch anybody's budget, they go completely ape shit and they get their allies in the media to say things are going to be completely disastrous if this budget gets cut.
Even one dollar children are going to starve.
And you know, you remember this when they cut some government spending and they say this is responsible for 200,000 deaths and everybody freaks out and panics and so on.
So you are up against severely entrenched, legally protected budgets and all the panic in the known universe.
And, you know, all they have to do is find one person who's crying.
Unfortunately, we live in a very hyper-feminized, hyper-emotional cultural environment.
So if you're going to cut some department, all you need to do is get some woman who's crying because she just bought a house and now she's been fired and who's where her kid's going to live and she's crying.
And then, you know, all of the wombs in the known universe implode and screech and demand that you restore the funding.
And it's all very silly and emotional.
And so, you know, the idea that you just vote your way into this, I mean, Trump wants smaller government.
Ron Paul was in there forever and they really weren't able to even slow the growth.
In fact, spending went up enormously under Trump.
That's kind of my point, though.
It's like you circumvent the voting process by going straight into tapping into the power of the actual party, which the party is only like.
So because I'm in a smaller European country, this party that I'm talking about is currently, you know, less than 10,000 members, let's say.
So that's like a small amount of people.
And there is no like, it's not the government.
Like, they're going to get into power, but it's not the government.
I don't know what you mean when you say it's not the government.
Oh, you mean your party is not the government?
Yeah, because they're not actually in power right now, but they're going to be in power in like a couple of years.
So when you do these contracts, that seems more private than government to me.
Well, and I agree with you.
It'd be nice to have the people who had power and authority over you subject to the free market, but you're just never going to get that from the government.
I mean, things may come and go.
And Trump was, of course, the last pitch to keep the American empire from collapsing, or at least America.
And if you want, and I agree with you that we want accountability from those who have power over us, but the only way to do that is to have voluntary free market transactions, which is why I'm an anarcho-capitalist or an NCAP or a voluntaryist or whatever you want to call it.
So yeah, I agree with you.
I don't think there's any way to replicate the free market in a government agency.
That's like saying, well, I'm going to kidnap a girl and lock her in the basement, but I want to replicate a good marriage.
It's like, you know, you can't.
You have to do one or the other.
Yeah.
The way I imagine it would be just because the pay is also so tempting, you get way above average paid for it.
So it's like I think they would be pressured into doing things that people actually want more.
Because I don't know, like, I don't know why they would even want to do certain things.
Like, they obviously, like, they go along with all the EU stuff, right?
The EU sort of socialist and kind of immigration stuff.
But there's like no actual reason for them to do it other than just going along with the flow, I think.
Because they get their money anyways.
But what about Argentina, where it seems like voting actually seems to work there?
That's like things like that give me some hope.
And like, obviously, Trump was, you know, about a billion times better than the alternative.
Yeah, listen, I mean, I appreciate what you're saying.
I don't believe it's going to work.
And so I focus, I think political analysis is interesting, but I focus on the peaceful parenting stuff, on the personal relationship stuff.
That's where you can actually achieve some good in the world.
But, you know, saying, well, I wish, why doesn't the government do the opposite of everything the government is designed for?
And why don't the people in the government do the opposite of every reason they got into the government for?
I think it's just a waste of time.
I mean, no disrespect.
I like the idea.
I think it's kind of cool and interesting.
But it's like, you know, wouldn't tennis be fun to play if gravity were the opposite of it.
It's like, well, I guess, but, you know, we only have the gravity that we have.
So if I were in your shoes, and this is certainly what I've done is to focus more on people's personal freedoms, having a wish list for reforming government is probably not going to achieve much in the world.
And of course, also the other thing, too, is that when people get into power, the sort of secret powers that be whoever they are, they go through everyone's search history and they go through everyone's emails and they go through everyone's family and look up old girlfriends.
And there was that the guy who was going to be on the Supreme Court.
They went back to some teenage thing where he was supposed to have attacked some girl, but fortunately he had a calendar, said he wasn't there.
Incredibly lucky for him.
But yeah, they'll just make up stuff.
They'll just say, you play ball or we found some ex-girlfriend who is going to accuse you of something terrible.
And so it just, whatever you come up with, that, you know, you have completely unscrupulous people with virtually infinite power and obviously no morals.
And they'll just make you do whatever they want you to do.
I assume.
I mean, that's the only reason really to explain why politics goes the way it does, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I'm just halfway thinking if I should propose this thing or not, just to see what their counter arguments are.
Well, you know, I'll tell you this.
I've got one more caller, so I'm going to get to that.
But I will tell you this, my friend, that, and I appreciate the question.
It's very interesting.
If you believe something can work, you should do it.
You know, I'll make the case.
I don't think it's going to work.
But, you know, you've got to follow your own conscience.
And Lord knows I'm not right about everything.
So if I make the case that I don't think something will work and I give you the reasons why and you still want to try it, don't, you know, I'm not a replacement for your empirical experience.
Invariant Principles of Morality00:15:16
Go, but don't just try it half-hearted.
Like go all in to make this happen and see if it works.
All right.
Peter.
You have some pumpkins, steady diet of pumpkins.
What is on your mind, my friend?
Don't forget to unmute.
Thank you so much.
Can you hear me now?
Yes, sir.
All right.
Thank you.
I have quite, you know, I've been working on what I think it is an objective argument for objective morality argument that a different slightly different framing than you have.
But if you would like, if I could share with you.
Sure.
Essentially, you want to make the case that in terms of a system, morality is sort of what you can call a cross-instance invariant.
All right.
Hang on.
I need definitions before you launch into the argument.
Okay.
What do you mean by morality?
So by morality is, I mean, Those things that you ought to do, things like the universe, those, those, there are, you know, behaviors such as the non-aggression principle.
I mean, I can come up with examples.
Examples aren't necessarily definitions.
Okay.
If I say, what is a whale?
And I say, well, there's a humpback whale, there's a sperm whale, there's a blue whale, that doesn't necessarily explain what a whale is.
Okay.
So characteristically, morality, so moral preferences, moral behaviors are those that are, this is difficult, those that you would say transcend any of our particular historical behaviors,
but or instances, I would say, but more so that the that you're putting me in a corner here in terms of it.
No, no, no, don't, don't, no, hang on, don't, don't be mean.
I'm not putting you in a corner.
Hang on, hang on.
I'm getting you in a corner.
You said, I have a proof of morality, which is great.
But you understand a lot of people use morality to mean very different things, right?
Sure.
So if you say, I have a proof of X, I need to know what X means.
So you use the word morality.
I use the word morality.
Some people think morality means equality of opportunity.
Some people think it means equality of outcome.
Some people think morality means the non-aggression principle.
Other people think that morality is government programs to benefit the poor or whatever, right?
So as far as morality goes, it is a very, it's a very different word.
It's a very, it's like a disco ball.
Like it has so many different fragments and everybody interprets it in a different way.
So I'm not putting you in a corner.
If you're going to, and I'm trying to help the audience and help you understand.
And the last thing we want to do, if you say the number two, I'm not going to ask you to define it because that's sort of an objective term.
If you say a circle or a square or opposite angle theorem or the law of gravity, I'm not going to ask you to define those things because they're objective terms, but morality means many different things to many different religions and secularists and government agents and voluntarists.
Morality all means different things.
For atheists, morality usually means in-group preferences of mutual help brought about by evolutionary forces or the principle of minimizing harm, whatever that means.
For religious people, it means commandments of God.
But of course, there are 10,000 different gods which have 10,000 different commandments.
And so that's given that it is an incredibly subjective term, I am not putting you in a corner when I say I need to know what you're talking about.
Like if you were to say the word truth, truth means different things to religious people.
It might mean revelation or faith than it would be to a scientist or something like that.
So you kind of rolled over like I was aggressing against you when I actually tried to make our language clear because we can't have a conversation if we're using different words for the same thing.
My apologies.
I shouldn't have said you.
I'm getting myself in the corner.
But in any case, what I meant better is we can use a fairly standard definition that I would agree with is something like a principle that is just, you can distinguish between what is right or wrong or good and bad that is, yeah.
So those principles are so that's maybe 20% of a definition.
So right and wrong, good and bad, what is right and wrong and what is good and bad?
How do you differentiate?
Because if you say morality is a principle by which you tell this from its opposite, you understand that good, what is meant by morality generally means that which is good, that which is virtuous, that the good is vastly different from person to person, culture to culture, and religion to religion.
So if you say, well, it helps you differentiate good from evil, it doesn't get us very far in terms of understanding, because for some people, what they define as good, I know as evil.
For some people, what they define as evil, I know is good.
And everybody has a different methodology for good and evil.
Again, atheists would have it different from each of the religions, and each atheist would have it.
There are communist atheists, there are an anarcho-capitalist atheist, atheists that accept property rights, atheists that reject property rights, atheists that accept the non-aggression principle, atheists that reject the non-aggression principle as good and evil.
So if you say, well, it differentiates what's good and what's evil, I still don't know what good and evil means because you've just said, well, morality is that which differentiates X from the opposite of X.
So I still need to know what X is.
Right.
So those which are good or bad, that I would say is invariant to many realizations of what we experience in this world.
So we're human beings.
We have certain conditions of how we live in this world.
We have certain constraints.
And morality is those things that are good and bad, invariant or across any sort of realization that we might experience in this particular world, in this particular world.
Think of other scenarios we might have experienced.
It is those principles that would transcend or we would be able to see emerge or transcend be realized under any different rules.
A good example would be, for example, an eye.
Eyes or wings evolved over multiple iterations of our evolutionary history, where, you know, for example, like different bats and birds and butterflies, they've all sort of emerged very different similar structures of wings.
And in the same way, for example, things like the I has been evolved in multiple ways, in a very similar way, across the rules and how we experience.
It could be sort of a game theoretic way that we experience all you relate to our evolution and us being humans and our condition or constraints.
This is something that would be invariant or emergent behavior.
They transcend it would probably be better.
It'd be a sort of a transcendence of our in that in that sense.
So good is that which is emergent?
No, that is which is so no.
The moral principles are those good things that transcend and invariantly emerge out of multiple realizations of our world and our existence.
Okay, if you could give me an example.
So the example of one that's not moral, because it's easier that way, are, for example, if I play the game of Monopoly, you know, hundreds of times, there emerges probabilities of getting Park's place will it's not obvious from just rolling the dice many times what that emerging probability will be that that this will occur.
An emergent property, something that would be emergent, like it's mathematically it's called an eigenvector.
If you think about like how baby, like we were born and have parents, there are principal components, which is the same thing as I'm describing of you have Caucasians, you have Asians, you have different types of races that you can objectively split into different types of classes based on the complex web that we see.
And for morality, this would be through different multiple iterations of how we would experience the world's different cultures, different timelines.
It would be those which we things that turn out to be good for us and good for our survival over those different types of instances.
So in that way, it's objective.
Okay.
And I'm sorry, I wasn't particularly clear.
When I said an example, you just gave me another way that the description of their iteration or emergent properties.
What is an example of a moral rule that conforms to this framework?
I would say the non-aggression principle would be an example.
Do you believe that the non-aggression principle is shared across human societies and cultures?
It certainly doesn't.
It certainly doesn't.
It certainly does not for those who are capable of surviving, which do survive, I would say that it would.
So obviously people try to, people would.
Okay, sorry, I hate to, because I know you've got this verbal tick, and I'm not trying to make you self-conscious of it, but the ah makes it very hard to sort of follow.
So, you know, we're just having a convo here.
Just, you know, it's not like we've got a billion people watching.
So, you know, just take a deep breath.
And, you know, I hate to sort of say, well, just calm down, right?
But it's hard to follow with the verbal ticks.
So would you say that you said that morality is that which emerges as good and useful for human society, AIDS, and survival and so on?
And then the example you gave was the non-aggression principle.
And so my question then was, if you say morality is that which is spontaneously emerges from society based upon what's good for the society and the non-aggression principle is one of those, then we would expect that societies would respect the non-aggression principle, right?
I would say those societies that end up persisting and surviving would obey the non-aggression principle.
Okay, and which societies would those be?
Well, many we see, for example, that when certainly not the United States, Rome, for example, because that one rose and fall, it was stable for some time in the United States, I would say, to a degree, which we had free market capitalism, we had respect for property rights.
So for some time periods, the non-aggression principle, when it was obeyed, allowed for flourishing and survival and stability in the country.
Well, but if it spontaneously, well, first of all, it didn't spontaneously merge.
It was actually engineered by Enlightenment thinkers against great resistance, and then it decays, right?
It decayed in Rome, it decayed in the British Empire, decayed in the American experiment, and so on.
So if you're going to say things spontaneously emerge, then you also have to explain why they seem to decay quite rapidly, like 250 years at best.
Yeah, that is a fair point.
And I don't mean spontaneous is perhaps not the best word.
I had said it's invariant over, you know, those which.
But you can't say it's invariant and it decays.
And it takes willpower to cause it to emerge.
Sorry, I don't know.
Can you please explain why that would be the case?
Well, if you say something is invariant, like the law of gravity is invariant, right?
Yes.
Does it require willpower to bring into existence and does it decay over time through entropy?
Possibly.
No.
No, it does not take willpower to entropy.
Entropy, possibly, I would say.
No, the law of gravity is not subject to entropy.
In other words, the law of gravity doesn't decay over time.
The law of gravity is an absolute constant.
I meant in terms of should the our world be such that the parameters of our universe are changing over long time periods.
It's very well possible that they may be decaying.
Sorry, do you think that gravity has changed over the past billion years, say?
It's over minute tiny changes.
It's a very, I'm open to that possibility.
I mean, I'm a physicist, by the way, but yes, the local G factor for gravity or global g vectors might very well be different.
We have rules like this in physics all the time where those parameters might very well be evolving.
Sorry, what do you mean may very well be?
I mean, anything's possible.
I mean, we don't have ways to directly measure gravity from a billion years ago.
I understand that the world, the gravity of the world changes because stuff escapes into the atmosphere.
You know, stuff comes into the atmosphere.
So there's a sort of coming and going of matter and energy, and in particular, the matter, which is what gravity is based on.
So I don't know what it would mean to say it's possible that at some point in the past, gravity was a different strength.
It doesn't dial up and down, and certainly not over 250 years, right?
And it's not an emergent property in that it was willed into existence like the property rights in America.
I would say those gravity, for example, would emerge in the sense that we have a principle of just a G factor that is intrinsic to mass.
And physically, it emerges as a respect, as the one over R squared law emerges as a result of it being the principles of mass and the principles of constants that persist.
And it is an emergence of those certain basic rules.
I'm not sure what you mean by emergent.
Sorry, I'm not a physicist, so just be patient if you can.
Gravity as an Emergent Constant00:07:44
No, fair enough.
And this is somewhat abstract than I would say.
But something that is emergent are those things that based on certain principles.
So, for example, you have two interacting particles, and the rule might be that they interact.
Any sort of interaction with them sort of is confined to one and the other.
You have another principle.
You have some sort of geometry that your world is constrained to.
You're in a three-dimensional world, one dimension of time, and you have some interaction strength, which is G.
And what comes from those basic properties, if you do the derivation, what would come out of that, and I would say that would be emerge, would be the one over R squared law with G M1 M2 over R squared.
That's what I mean by emergence.
You mean the mathematical formulas are derived from the observations of matter and energy?
Yes, and G factor, geometry, I would say.
But yes, broadly speaking, that's accurate.
And that's emergent.
Okay, but I'm not talking about the concepts.
I'm talking about the actual force.
Like gravity had to exist for us to exist, right?
Because we wouldn't have planets or a solar system or The atmosphere wouldn't stick to the planet, neither would we.
So gravity had to exist for the 14 plus billion years that the universe apparently has been around.
And that gravitational force has been constant because if it wasn't constant, if it varied, then solar system formation and maintenance would be not possible.
If gravity became less strong, we'd fly away from the sun.
If it became more strong, we'd fall into the sun.
So it has to be stable, right?
Well, only for a short period of time have we had solar systems throughout our history.
In the earlier instances of our universe, it's quite very possible that we had different G factor forces between particles, which is why we could not have things like gravity between particles.
And that's very much what we observe when we think about the Big Bang.
We didn't have solar systems for many iterations and then things stable down.
No, no, I understand that solar systems require the aggregation of mass and that that doesn't happen for billions of years after the universe comes into being or whatever.
But gravity has to be a constant.
Otherwise, you can't get solar systems at all.
It's very, it's, no, you could have, there's our theories in their scenarios where you have a G factor, that gravitational factor, in the beginning of time, you have a slightly higher g factor in which the things would not fall into.
But due to, for example, how space has evolved in terms of how it was expanded and its expansion rate and how energy became particles and you've developed mass over time, these things became more massive, like individual particles.
They were not just, you didn't have just light.
You started having real particles, real hydrogen particles.
That G factor then became a reality once things settled down.
Once that G factor, that force.
Well, no, hang on.
Because the only way, sorry to interrupt, but the only way that I could understand that things would get larger is because of gravity.
And even if we say, well, I guess you have to have stars in order to have light, because light is also, as Einstein sort of famously proved, was affected by gravity.
But you could only get, you know, hydrogen atoms colliding together.
You know, when two stick, then there's slightly higher chance that a third comes along, which means slightly higher chance that a fourth comes along.
And so you get these aggregations of matter in, you know, eventually becomes a solar system or a comet or an asteroid or something like that.
But again, you know, forgive my rudimentary knowledge of these things, but I kind of, there's no God with a dial for gravity dialing it up or down.
Gravity would have to remain a constant factor.
Now, we could say prior to the Big Bang, I mean, that's a box of imagination, right?
We don't know anything in particular about that.
But with regards to once matter was out there in the universe, there's no, obviously, I don't think you believe that there's a God dialing up and down gravity.
So there would be it would be a constant.
And certainly for the length of life on Earth, gravity has been constant because otherwise creatures couldn't develop the ability to fly or wouldn't know how strong their legs should have to be and the atmosphere would be crushing them down or releasing them.
If somebody was dialing up and down gravity or some factor was dialing up and down gravity, it has to be constant for life to develop because life adapts, life adapts to a particular level of gravity.
And if that changes, then life has a very tough time surviving and certainly wouldn't have done so if gravity was changing over the last four billion years, say.
Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but that would be my understanding.
I would say that you're slightly wrong in the sense that it is certainly it is, for all intents and purposes, stable over our period of time.
But imagine, for example, an exponential decay as an example, where you are plus some sort of constant, where the g-force is very high or very low to begin with.
And then it, and you don't have stable particles and stable molecules sticking together gravitationally.
And then over time, it starts to decay, goes to a quote-unquote stable state.
It's still changing maybe up to the hundredth decimal point of the G-factor.
It's still coming to a stable point.
But prior to that, it was not stable.
But for the first time, is there any evidence that gravity as a force changes strength?
There are evidence for other coefficients that are similar to gravity.
We have evidence for.
So we're talking about gravity, though.
To be honest, I'm not a cosmologist.
Neither of us are, of course, what is it called?
Gravitation, general relativist, general relativity specialists.
But I can ask Grock.
I'm kind of curious, and I'm afraid my battery is down to 4%.
I'm sorry, I forgot to charge my phone before this, but I'm sure we can finish up this part.
Okay.
Is there any evidence?
And this is not, you know, like consulting the Oracle at Delphi, right?
Is there any evidence that the strength of gravity has changed over time?
Not theories, because anything could be possible, right?
Over time.
I'm just curious, because this may or may not be an answer that I understand or don't understand.
No, there is no convincing evidence that the strength of gravity, specifically the gravitational constant G in Newton's law of universal gravitation or Einstein's general relativity, has changed over time.
Extensive observations and experiments across multiple scales from laboratory to cosmological strongly support that G is constant.
Yes, within the time period that we've experienced in this period of time, in this finite time that we've experienced from the time, do you mean my lifetime?
No, I mean the time of the solar system.
Well, we haven't experienced the time of the solar system.
No, I mean, okay, within the time.
Appreciating the Ethics Discussion00:02:11
You've got to be got to be precise with your language.
When you say the time that we've experienced, you're talking about mortal experience.
I haven't experienced what, my ancestors or mudfish or salamanders or anything.
So it's a little confusing to follow what you're saying when you say don't yell in my ear.
That's kind of rude.
So it's just a little confusing when you say our experience.
So listen, you can, I'd love to chat more about the theory of ethics again.
My phone's down to 2%.
Sorry.
So here's what we can do.
I do shows Wednesday nights and Friday nights.
Really enjoyed the conversation.
I love science and physics and I love, obviously, morality.
Theories where things are different is like saying, well, if human beings were immortal and invulnerable, what would the moral theories be?
And it's like, well, we need theories because we moral theories because we can take damage and we're not immortal.
Neither are we invulnerable.
And so it's interesting to have alternate ideas or theories as a sort of mind exercise or science fiction or something like that.
So I would strongly recommend it's I've got a book called Essential Philosophy, essentialphilosophy.com.
You could just read the last third of it for a theory of ethics.
You can also go, there's a longer version on my website, freedomain.com slash books.
The book is Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
And I really applaud your desire to create a rational system of ethics.
It is an absolutely necessary project.
I've done my own little bits of work on it, which might help speed yours along.
And I hope that we can talk again.
And I really do appreciate your time today.
Yeah, thank you so much.
And I've read the UPB, and I'll look into your other book.
And thank you so much.
Apologies for raising my voice.
That's fine.
I appreciate the passion.
I just find it a little loud in my ear, but I appreciate the passion.
All right.
Thanks, everyone, so much.
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