Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Pat Flynn on Lockdown Shenanigans, Cultivating Virtue, and the Nature of Evil

Episode Date: August 4, 2021

Life is full of surprises and things don’t always go as planned. This episode of the podcast is the perfect example of that. ;) That’s because I’m once again chatting with repeat guest Pat Flynn, and what was supposed to be a discussion about liberalism, morphed into a twisting and turning maze of philosophical ponderings. While you may mostly listen to my podcast for the health and fitness content, our musings aren’t completely unrelated. Life is more than just physical fitness. Ideally, we want to live well beyond fitness, and “flourish” as Pat likes to say. Pat is a repeat guest not only because I enjoy our conversations, but I’ve gotten great feedback from listeners who like hearing about these deeper, philosophical topics we wade through. In case you’re not familiar with Pat, not only is he a fitness expert who is known for his kettlebell prowess, but he’s also a podcaster, philosopher, and author. In this episode, our conversation runs the gamut, with several topics, including . . . Masks and lockdown efficacy and social pressures in science Recognizing credible authorities Conspiracy theories Virtues like prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude Pornography and consent Whether people get what they “deserve” The subjective elements of evil And more . . . So, if you enjoy philosophical tangents and want to listen to something a bit different for a fitness podcast, listen to this episode and let me know your thoughts! Timestamps: 40:51 - What are your thoughts on meta-cognition? 50:41 - What are your thoughts on developing yourself and virtues? 1:30:00 - If life had no evil would it still be interesting? Mentioned on the Show: Shop Legion Supplements Here: https://buylegion.com/mike

Hey, I'm Mike Matthews. This is Muscle for Life. Thanks for joining me today. And hey, real quick, if you like what I'm doing here on the show and you want to help me and never miss an episode, subscribe to the podcast in whatever app you're listening on because it helps boost the rankings of the show and helps other people find it. And it makes sure that you get notified when I publish a new episode. And so what are we getting into today? Well, this is one of my infamous, maybe at this point, rambling philosophical discussions with the one and only Pat Flynn, who hasn't been on the show in some time. And we had an outline that we promptly diverged from, and we ended up talking about social

pressure in science, conspiracies, consent, the nature of evil, and more. And as always, I lean heavily on Pat and like to hear his thoughts because of his background in philosophy and theology and his formal training. But I do always try to add a little bit of my own flavor and flair to the discussion and try to help us wade through some of these ideas as best I can. And sometimes that is just asking a good question or two. And if you're not familiar with Pat, by the way, this is Pat Flynn from Chronicles of Strength. And he's someone who is known for his kettlebell prowess, at least in the fitness space. But he's also a podcaster, the Pat Flynn Show, an author of several books. And although he probably

wouldn't like the term because he would think it sounds pretentious. A philosopher in his own right, again, considering his formal training and a lot of his writing, as well as some of his academically published stuff. So as always, I hope you enjoy the conversation. It is a complete digression from the stuff I normally talk about, which some people find refreshing and other people find off-putting. So if this is not your thing, don't worry. I'm not changing muscle for life into metaphysics for life. This is just some dabbling I like to engage in now and then. Also, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company, Legion, which thanks to the support of many people

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may not be the best for your health. So while you don't need pills, powders, and potions to get into great shape, and frankly, most of them are virtually useless, there are natural ingredients that can help you lose fat, build muscle, and get healthy faster, and you will find the best of them in Legion's products. To check out everything we have to offer, including protein powders and bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more, head over to buylegion.com slash Mike. That's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N dot com slash Mike. And just to show you how much I appreciate my podcast peeps use

the coupon code M F L at checkout, and you will save 20% on your entire first order. So, Hey man, good to be back on the Mike Matthew show. Cheers. Yes, sir. We haven't done it in a bit. This is going to be fun as it always is. Yeah. So we were just talking about, we have our little outline that we know we want to get into, but something top. So we were just talking about, we have our little outline that we know we want to get into, but something topical is we were just talking about masking and I'm moving, for anybody listening, they probably know I'm moving to Florida, to the middle of the state, a place called Ocala. So I'm moving from the DC Beltway where I'm surrounded by double maskers. And that's my joke. It's like, I just don't want to see a double masker anymore. That's one of my

primary reasons for leaving this area. And then on Instagram, I've said that. And some people have asked like, well, what about single mask? What are you saying exactly? What are you insinuating? All right. Well, I don't think very highly of the double maskers and the single maskers. There's a bit more nuance there. I'll accept that. Anyway, so you were mentioning that there's a new paper that came out on masks and it's going to be interesting to see the tenor of the research going forward now that the guidelines are loosening. And it seems like, I mean, COVID is just, it has less political capital now than it did, you know, particularly before the election. Right. Yeah. So this paper, real quick, its conclusion is that mask mandates and use are

not associated with lower state level COVID-19 spread during the COVID-19 growth surges, which is exactly consistent with what we see in the charts, right? It's like, if you just line up all the charts of different countries, and you can even break it down into counties, like try and get the very, you know, most comparative regions. I've done this on my website. And if you remove any information of like when mandates went into place or which place even had mandates, nobody would be able to get it right. Right. To say like this one had a mandate and it went in here versus there. And, you know, that's not insignificant, right? Because when we're doing scientific thinking and we have a hypothesis, right. And just kind of basic

scientific reasoning, we always want to think, well, what should we expect on this hypothesis? What does this hypothesis predict? And we were told again and again, how necessary and how useful and effective masks were yet again and again, what we expected did not seem to emerge in the data, or at least not as obviously as we expected, right? So there was definitely a warranted skepticism there, even if it wasn't an outright disproof. But if a hypothesis predicts X and you consistently see not X, it starts to count against the hypothesis, right? Especially in a cumulative way. And we kept kind of seeing not X, even in places where there's very high compliance in places of- And that's, of course, where I was going to go is because I know that is the first

refutation- Objection, is people aren't wearing it. Well, that's because not real masking, you know what I mean? Right. And that's just false, right? Because you have, I mean, you have as high a compliance as you could reasonably expect in certain areas, in very strong areas where you have certain- I was in LA a month ago, unfortunately, and I was basically the only person not wearing a mask outside. And I was out walking around. I saw a lot of people. There was the occasional person who dared show their face, but an inside of, I mean, of course, everybody,

but even outside, just walking around by themselves, even masked up. Yeah, and let me just say up front that I have nothing against a mask mandate in principle. If this were shown to be effective and to some degree, right. And like, it really made a significant difference. I would happily wear the thing, right. The problem. I've been saying that since the beginning, it's obnoxious. Sure. Do I like it? No, I don't think anybody likes it. Well, actually,

there are some people we could talk about that, but most normal people who are mentally stable do not like wearing a mask. But if it was very effective, then sure. Right. Yeah. If it's very effective, like I actually, and I guess we'll get about, begin to this with political philosophy, but I'm like, I'm not like a hardcore anarcho capitalist, right? Like I actually think like the state does have a role to play in emergencies and it needs to sometimes be able to organize things quickly, direct people quickly, make snap decisions. It doesn't have to prove every single premise to have that authority or power. But if it's going to, and this is more related to lockdowns and mask mandates, I don't want to switch gears too much. But if you're going to start especially suppressing people's other very fundamental rights, which lockdowns certainly did,

rights to provide for yourself, provide for your family, rights to congregation, religious worship whatsoever, right? If you're going to suppress or completely override very other fundamental rights, which are necessary to human flourishing, you have the burden of proof, right? Like the burden of proof is on those who impose burdens. That's a baseline moral principle. And severe measures require a very high level of proof too. Not just speculation. So you need to show that not only is this absolutely necessary, but it is highly effective. And that of course is just none of those burdens were ever met or even came close to being met. And that's a little different with mass because it's not as much of a burden. But over time, again, as the data started to come in and we weren't seeing what we would expect if this hypothesis were true. And I have a whole post

of the papers that were published against mask efficacy. And one of them, unfortunately, was retracted. I don't think for any good reasons, but I think social and political pressures, which is another point we want to talk about. But I line up all the charts. I can send you the thing where you can see where certain health experts are making predictions about what masks will do or what will happen when people remove the mask mandates. And they're consistently wrong, consistently wrong. So the charts are helpful because it shows when the predictions were made by a lot of these policy experts. And then not only are the predictions not accurate, you almost see almost completely the opposite. Texas is a great example of this, right? We had prediction after prediction that when Texas had these large gatherings or remove

the mask mandates. Yeah. What did Biden say that he said it was Neanderthal thinking? Neanderthal thinking. But the Neanderthals in Texas wound up doing far better than the, I guess, I believe in science crowd who kept the very stringent restrictions in other places. Now there are differences, relevant differences in geography and population density to be accounted for but again even when you try to constrain those things to reasonable you know as much as you can reasonably expect

and trying to make these types of comparisons what we see is not what we would expect if this hypothesis were true right and at some point you can say that's a failure of the government officials. And those are the people who really, if we look at it from a business, if a business tries to pursue various growth strategies that fail, ultimately it's the CEO's fault. That's his job. So it doesn't matter how great the hypothesis seemed in the beginning. The fact that it didn't work, it should be now just abandoned if we're talking about mask wearing. And if the weight of the evidence is, okay, this really just doesn't do much of anything, it should be abandoned and go looking for something else. And you could also say that then officials and public health experts, politicians, they

should have done better as the whiners like to say, like, do better, do better. Go tell your do better politicians. You're bad at this. And it's certainly not enough to say, well, just listen to the experts, because what often doesn't get aired are all the experts that disagree with this stuff. Right. Right. And there's tons like you have Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford. And you had this whole movement that was just absolutely drawn through the mud, the Great Barrington Declaration, if you remember that, right? And you had some of the top, most relevant experts in the world from Stanford, Harvard, you name it, infectious disease experts. I mean, they have all the credentials you could get.

And they were relentlessly attacked. One of the doctors, I forget her name right now. I think she's either from Oxford or Cambridge or somewhere like that. One of these mainstream magazines, Huffington Post or Politico, went after her and called her a right-wing libertarian. And she finally defended herself. She's like, I'm on the left. What are you guys talking about?

So you have all these ad hominins and attacks against these people who were just coming from very different political perspectives, but questioning all the different policies, especially the lockdowns, especially the lockdowns. They were arguing for something called focus protection and saying the lockdowns are absolutely ridiculous. There's no reason we should be imposing this. There's no reason to think that these would work. There's lots of reasons to think that they're actively harmful in many ways. And we should do this measure that they called focus protection. I remember six months ago when I would mention that position, right? That what are the costs of these lockdowns? Not just economic

costs in abstract numbers, but what are the human costs? And you could run through the five to 10 different rather alarming statistics of things that have skyrocketed through the lockdown, suicide, alcoholism, abuse of spouses, abuse of children, and then everything else that comes with not being able to work or have your business open and financial hardship and blah, blah, blah. And it was funny. I just call them ditto heads. There are people out there who are obsessively obedient. It's strange. And then they take it further and they view their obedience and their blind obedience as virtue rather than cowardice. There's some sort of wacky psychology at play there. But those people,

I remember they would attack me merely for bringing up that maybe we should also look at what these lockdowns are costing in terms of harming people. Right. And here's the thing with that that often gets overlooked. First off, there have been a number of studies published against lockdowns. Like the Lancet has a study where it found, and I'll quote here, government actions, such as border closures, full lockdowns, and a high rate of COVID-19 testing were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality. Another good study, one of the best ones I think done on this from Frontiers in Public Health, quoting stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown,

did not appear to be linked with death rate. You have one from Tel Aviv University, quote, we would have expected to see fewer COVID-19 fatalities in countries with a tighter lockdown, but the data reveals that this is not the case, right? So again, we have a hypothesis, it predicts X, we see not X. You don't have to be a specialist in say virology to understand basic hypothesis testing. That's something I've tried to get across to the general public. It's not enough to just punt to areas of technical ambiguity. You're not a specialist here to understand what a hypothesis leads you to expect or what a hypothesis predicts and what the data actually shows. Or the models. Remember the models that were used to justify?

The ridiculous models, man. It's a farce. Anybody can do some Bayesian voodoo. Anybody can... What's the quote from Mark Twain, right? There's lies, damn lies, and statistics, right? There's a lot of truth to that, right? And there's a lot of... This brings us to another point that we're talking about backstage. There was a paper that was published last year. It was a good paper, and it was on the idea of a Castro consensus, right? And the idea of a Castro consensus is this phenomena that affects a lot of areas of life, but it affects academia, it affects the sciences. And the idea of the Castro consensus is that if a consensus is there, but it hasn't really been reached by independent

free inquiry, then we have every right to be suspicious of it, especially if the consensus is on a topic that bears in significantly to areas of significant social or political consequence. And this makes obvious sense, right? And they make that case mathematically rigorous in the paper. I'll send any papers I mentioned here, I'll send you, Mike, if you want to link it in the show notes for people afterwards. But I mean, that's just basic common sense, right? If there's opportunities for social agenda pushing reform, if people want to call it that, political opportunities, and you can get public sway by having influence in various intellectual spheres. If it leads to power.

Yeah. Social pressures. That's another big one. I mean, you talk to people who are in the field. So I'm in philosophy, right? And like, I'll tell you that like there are social pressures everywhere in philosophy. There are just certain subjects that people know, like, I'll tell you that, like, there are social pressures everywhere in philosophy. Like there are just certain subjects that people know, like, I better not publish on this because I'm never going to get tenure if I do, I'll even lose my job. Right. So there's just

What's an example of that? Oh, well, I mean, gender ideology is a huge one, right? And you have example after example, people who have tried to publish on this, there was a one related with Villanova University, not too many years ago, where somebody who's actually kind of like pro that type of ideology published a paper. And the paper was essentially a reductio without trying to be because it was saying, well, in general, the paper was saying it seems like any arguments that you could use for somebody to be able to switch their gender might also apply to somebody being able to switch their race. Right. So why would it trans? And of course, the narrative wasn't ready for that, right? So the mob descended, came after not just the paper itself, but the editor of the journal.

And the editor was, if I have my facts straight, still was the lady at Villanova. They tried to get the paper retracted. They may have succeeded. They tried to get her resignation. I'm pretty sure they did succeed with that. So whoever thinks that what goes on in academia. How does that lead to resignation? I wonder that sometimes. Well, I mean, part of it. I mean, what prevents these people from just being like, no, yeah, I don't care. I'm not stepping down. Well, I mean, part of it, I mean, think of it in kind of the online world, Mike, where mobs ascend on Twitter, Twitter mobs.

You ignore them, though. Yeah, we know that. But most people are supremely intimidated by this. It stresses them the hell out. And they're like, I never want to go through that mob again. Well, it's not that different, right, in academia, right? Like you have all these people coming in, accusing you of these horrible things things of being a bigot or whatever else, slandering you more or less.

You know, maybe they might actually get your resignation. Sometimes institutions stand up for you. I'm pretty sure Villanova actually put the foot down and stood up for this lady. This was a couple of years ago. So some of the details are foggy. But then I think she ended up just resigning that position with the journal. I think she stole Villanova just because she never wanted to deal with that again. She didn't want to deal with that.

And that's how social pressures work. And it's very frightening. It's very scary because just certain viewpoints are just completely off the table in terms of being able to question them because of the social or career consequences that people will face. I'm kind of an outlier because I do my own thing like you do, right? So I'm not trying to go for tenure, so I don't care what I talk about. But I mean, I'll tell you, all my friends that are working professors trying to

publish, there's just certain things that they won't touch, even though they might want to, or they think it's important because the social or career consequences that will come with it, right? Which I mean, I understand. I understand to a point you have to weigh what's going to come of this, right. Versus maybe getting tenure and then you have more options now too. Well, not everybody's a Jordan Peterson. He's kind of been an anomaly because he's somebody who the mob did come for when he was a professor. I don't know if he's still a professor or not, but fortunately for him, he kind of like brought him to fame.

Yeah. But most people that happens to, they just, they lose their position or, or whatever. And then you just fade into obscurity, right? Like not everyone's going to have that Jordan Peterson effect.

Yeah. Yeah, of course. Well, I think what we should do is hard segue here into just hard, hard. What we're going to talk about is not exactly, I don't think they're exactly popular ideas these days. We threw a bunch of stuff out there. I know this

is a highly sensitive topic for people. So if anybody wants to just read through, I, like I say, I have a post on my website, Chronicles of Strength, and it's called lockdowns are not the solution and gyms are not the problem. And I include the papers that I've talked about here. I include all the different data. Some of it was assembled by a medical statistician, Matt Briggs, to just help people see where the predictions were made and what the data actually is. And you'll see whether it aligns with the predictions or not. And then you can decide for yourself whether you think that it's a successful hypothesis, right? So we could link that for people, but then yeah, we'll just do the hard segue into the primary.

Yeah. I mean, it's just, it can be hard. I understand. I've thought about this. A lot of this stuff comes down to, I guess you could say one's worldview because it can be hard. So I could say, well, yeah, sure. You can find people who don't agree with the orthodoxy, but if they were right, why wouldn't that be the mainstream position? And usually these people, they think that science and the communities are free of politics, basically. And by politics now, I just mean jockeying for position and status and power. And they think that science and the scientific machine is a lot more objective than it really is. And that people don't have their own personal agendas generally. And they really are just following the data.

And they're willing to quickly reject their hypotheses if they're proven false. And unfortunately, that's not how humans work. That's not how anything that involves humans works. And it probably will never be like that. That's right. That's right. We have that human tendency. Typically when somebody comes up with a hypothesis, look, I do it all the time, right? In my own writings, like you get attached to it, right? You like it. You kind of want it to be true. It becomes your little pet, right? Now, you know, in terms of intellectual virtue, everybody should have a threshold, right? Some way of measuring how you would know if you're wrong, right?

And we've talked about this in previous episodes. Like you should have that for your entire worldview in general. Like how would I know that I'm wrong? Like what type of data arguments could convince me that I'm off base here? But for, yeah, certainly for things like this, you should in good scientific mode of thinking, philosophical mode of thinking, before you scrutinize other people's positions, make sure that you have some measure, some threshold that you could say, yeah, if this gets crossed, I'd be willing to abandon this. I'd be willing to give this up or at least seriously reconsider it. Right. Yep. And one other comment I'll add, and this has been at least useful to make a point.

And in some cases, the point is taken by the other side where somebody will say something like masks are absolutely effective, right? All the research shows are effective. I've had people say that to me. All the research. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I know. What that means is they Googled study mask and they like found it. And you will find papers out there supporting masks. And I want to say that's where you got to weigh, you got to weigh it out. Right. I mean, I've seen some meta-analyses where you also, you can't just read abstracts if you're going to take the time. And if you're going to use that to underlie a hard position, then you have to at least read the paper and understand there's often a lot of terminology. But among all the jargon, usually, I mean, you can spend the time to actually understand the jargon. But there's also usually in the case of research reviews and meta-analyses, they're usually written a little bit more colloquially.

And there are things that lay people can understand fairly easily. a little bit more colloquially. And there are things that lay people can understand fairly easily. And what you'll find often with, and this is not just masking, but in a lot of cases, I've seen a lot in exercise research and nutrition research where the abstract doesn't exactly match up with the data where it's not as black and white, or the effect isn't as significant. Like the word you might see, oh, it had a significant effect. But then you go look at the effect size, for example, and you're like, well, that's not really significant, like the word you might see, oh, it had a significant effect, but then you go look at the effect size, for example, and you're like, well, that's not really significant, actually. Yes, it's statistically significant, but it doesn't mean anything. It's not going to do anything, right? But anyway, so when somebody says something, it says a position, right?

And then I've had this kind of discussion with people about climate change, right? Where somebody will say like, climate change, man-made climate change is absolutely a problem, right? Okay. So explain to me a few points that support your position. Okay, good. Now explain to me at least as many points, let's say they give me three to five that are the strongest counter arguments to your position, like steel man, your opposition, not strong, but give me the best counter arguments to your position. Like steel man, your opposition, not strong, but give me the best counter points and why those are wrong. That's where it ends every time. I've yet to have one. I've done it so many times with people. So I'm like, okay, so what we've just concluded is you don't know what you're talking about. Do you understand

that? Like that you found a few things that I guess made sense to you. And again, this is where it really, I think comes down to, you found some stuff that appeals to something deep in your character now, and you latched onto that and you like that, but you never even took the time to refute it or to look at what the other side is saying. And most of the time when I've done that with people regarding COVID, again, controversial things, I mean, gender stuff, race stuff, whatever, they have nothing. And that's kind of the end of the conversation. Or they scramble and they come up with some cartoonish stuff. Those would be like, no, no, I didn't ask for three to five really dumb arguments that nobody makes. I want good ones that sound just as good, but I want to know why. And I want you to explain in detail why those are wrong and what you just said is right. Right. That's a really good, I think, not just conversational move, but I mean, everybody should be doing that. You know, as in philosophy, we say arguments are a love language, right? Why? Because arguments and it's specifically objections are argument

testers, right? We kind of build this bridge of reason with an argument. We string together a bunch of premises. We try to get a conclusion from it. And objections are what are coming and they try to test that bridge and try and knock the bridge down to see if it's strong, right? Because we only want to try and cross a bridge that is strong, that actually is leading us to hopefully, hopefully the truth. So, you know, everybody should be seeking out what are the best objections to the position that I have, wherever anybody else is coming from, I think we could all at least agree that whatever the truth is, that's a good thing. And we should want that. Now that's an easy thing to say, but that's not an easy thing to live by,

right? Because most of the time people don't actually set the truth as their primary target, right? They set conforming. Yeah. That's the primary or whatever my preexisting beliefs were or what the way my emotions are leaning. So, you know, I just want to acknowledge that's difficult for all of us. Right. That's difficult for all of us. And the best thing I can say is just like you have to make the most deliberate effort to say it's got to be the truth of the matter that I'm after. Right. If I see an argument that seems decent, then I at least have to spend as much time trying to ferret out the best objections to this. Or not, but just acknowledge that this is some stuff that I did take the time to inform myself about. And here's what makes sense to me. And I like, but I may be wrong. Right. But I haven't taken the time to really look at the other side. And it doesn't mean enough to me to take the time to do that. But this, I like this. And this does make sense to me for what it's worth. Right.

And it's okay to be tentative on positions. But I kind of think this right now, but I'll admit I haven't looked too deeply, like climate change, like for me, like I don't have much of an opinion on that because I just haven't really studied it. I haven't looked into it. Right. Whereas other areas like that I have specialized in, like metaphysics is like, yeah, I can tell you what my positions are and I can tell you the very best objections. And I can guarantee you, I can state those objections better than

most people who would hold the opposite positions of me. Right. Because I've read it, I've studied it. I've tried to get my stuff right. And I've formally responded to a lot of this stuff like in print. So I feel pretty confident in those positions because I've spent so much time working through the often very difficult and clever objections. Right. And then there's other positions I have that, okay, I've kind of taken like a somewhat superficial study and kind of looked at a host of objections, but I'm not like super confident. Like I'm not going to go to the mat on that. Right. Like I might issue like opinion, like, I think this is probably true, but it could be wrong. Something like that. And that's okay. We only have so much

time. You can't figure out every answer to every issue in life. I think that there's some issues that are important enough that you should try and grind all the way down and come to intellectual satisfaction on. But there's just going to be many things where you're just not going to be able to do that. So that's okay. And heuristics and razors can help with those types of situations. At least take like, like we were talking about when you have social and political power involved, right? I think the never ascribe to something to malevolence when incompetence will do. I think it's actually the other way around when we're talking about like,'s honestly where I start. The worst... I do not give... When again, when we're talking about... And also money, but that's tied up into it,

right? Financial matters, political matters, social matters. I see it the other way around. That's where I start from. I'm going to assume malevolence here. And if incompetence ends up explaining things, fine. But if you are somebody who is conscientious about learning and observing life, you also just naturally kind of come to some of those conclusions that it doesn't mean that that's you just, oh, that's it. That's all I need to know. I don't even have to look into it further, but you automatically can often be a little bit more right out of the gate. Right. Another thing is that if there can be certain authorities, certain experts that you automatically can often be a little bit more right out of the gate. Right. Another thing is that if there can be certain authorities, certain experts that gain your confidence, you can say, okay, I've vetted this. He or she has been right about this. He or

she has been right about the other thing. I trust that this person is a generally competent and consistent thinker that if they're declaring a strong opinion, that is evidential weight for me. It might not absolve me completely of investigating it myself, but that can be something of a legitimate shortcut or heuristic as well. Right? Yep. Yep. I would say right where I think about that. So if somebody has proven to be right several times, it can't just be with one thing I would say, and this is also something that I- And in relevantly related categories, I would add that qualification too. Right. I think about this in terms of advice when I'm looking for advice, whether it's in business or anything, really. If somebody has done something I want to do,

if they've done it once successfully, that's a good sign. I'm open to advice. I mean, I'm generally open to advice from anyone, actually. I'll weigh people's ideas on their own merits. But if I'm going to seek out advice, ideally, I'm seeking out somebody who has done what I want to do. And this could be business related or literally anything has done what I want to do, ideally, at least two or three times. And so they're like a repeat offender and they can explain the cause and effect relationships that produce the results that they got and that they think that way. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a point here. And the point is that authority and testimony, you know, it's not sometimes like appeals to authority. People think that that's just an obvious fallacy.

It's not always right. It depends on the context. Right. Like authority can be a legitimate evidential weight. However, if the authority is under question in the argument, then just then just reappealing to the authority, that's a fallacy. Right. Right. Because then you're just reasserting or assuming the thing that is under question, that is being argued about. But in general, we all rely on authorities and testimony all the time. On like really big things too, like I wasn't there. Well, I was there, but I don't have it consciously recorded when I was born, right? But I think I was born in Delaware County,

when I was born, right? But I think I was born in Delaware County, October 24th, 1989. And I take that on pure authority, right? On pure testimony. But it seems like I'm justified in that belief because the people who told me that- How many things do we really know? Have we seen the SARS-CoV-2 virus with our own eyes? Do I really know concretely that the virus even exists? No, but I'm willing to accept authority on that one. Right. So authority, you know, because the people who told me that about my birthday, they've been consistently right and trustworthy on other relevant matters that I'm like, yeah, okay, mom, dad, I'm going to trust you, right. That I was born at this place at that date, whatever. And I feel very confident in that belief. So the point is,

is that authority and testimony, like it factors into our epistemology all the time. It has to, there's no way to escape that, right? I mean, none of us, we can't like pull the pull like Cartesian project, go back to the Cogito and then just like try and work everything out systematically from like a blank starting point. It's just never going to work, right? Even the idea of doing that is itself a tradition that's been handed on to us from Descartes, right? So I don't know how that connects with everything else that we've just said, but I guess it connects in the sense that in some sense, we've been questioning certain authorities, but then hopefully we're balancing that out by saying that doesn't mean that all authorities or all testimony is questionable,

because that's obviously not the case, right? And I think we should just keep going with this, because I have a few more questions for you. I'd like to hear your thoughts on just because choosing authorities and recognizing credible authorities is such an important skill. It's in some ways, you could probably even call it a meta skill for living well in the same sense that critical thinking, that communicating, being able to communicate well, whether it's spoken or the written word, just makes life easier. And not being able to vet information and latching onto the wrong authorities makes life so much harder. I mean, if we're talking politics and just culture, that goes both ways.

I mean, I've tried to tell my mom so many times to stop watching random internet assholes. I don't care if they say they're a doctor and they say that there is no virus and it's actually the 5G. That's literally what that David Icke guy was saying, I don't know, six to eight months ago, that there is no virus and it's 5G that's making everybody sick. I haven't heard that one. That's out there. And there are a lot of people people who believe i don't know if my mom believed that but i don't think she knew about q but if she did she would have absolutely she would have loved it she bought right in eating that shit up right so that to me is just as dumb as just staring at cnn being like okay cnn says that now i need to wear five masks putting on the fifth mask

now it's you know this and you know but there's a psychology there. Like I'm not that familiar with Q, what I've seen. It was almost certainly, there's good circumstantial evidence that the FBI, likely the CIA was involved. It was a very smart, if I had to put money, I don't know how much money I'd be willing to bet a bit, but at half the amount, I don't care to lose because I haven't looked into it that much. But from what I've seen, what made sense to me, and also just given the narrative and the timeline of how it played out, is that it was a very smart psyop to convince a bunch of right-wing people to do nothing, actually. Just sit back. This is all part of the plan. Don't worry. I mean, there are still my mother-in-law, another Q boomer, who she was absolutely certain

that Trump was going to remain in the White House, regardless of the outcome of the election, like in terms of tallying all the votes and that the military was going to step in again, just all Q stuff. And she still actually just a week or two ago, it got brought up because she was, we had a little bet, right? And I was like, no, it's not going to happen. Trump's done. He's gone. Watch. And I think we had like a two week and then she accepted it. And now she's back at it. Actually, Trump is he is he's running things behind the scenes. And I'm just like, well, I can't understand. It's this hypothesis testing again. Right. Like it's the hypothesis made predictions. Those predictions failed. Right. That's where I ditched Q is it was kind of interesting in the

beginning. There may have been an insider. And then where I ditched q is it was kind of interesting in the beginning there may have been an insider and then where i ditched it is when i saw like oh wait a minute this q person people whatever they predicted this didn't happen predicted this didn't happen like five times and i was like next i don't care now like why would i listen to any of this is this is where again before people commit to something, it's so important to try and establish some threshold to be like, how would I know that I'm wrong? Right. Because then you could just fall into this cultish mentality, right?

Where it just becomes an utterly unfalsifiable belief where the goalposts and the standards can constantly be shifted around. And then you're just kind of, you know, led around haphazardly. But the other point I wanted to make is that, you know, there's, there is to me something of an interesting psychology there, because I imagine a lot of people kind of look out into the world and they feel a little jaded and they're like, yeah, there's a lot of this stuff just seems really fishy and weird. But then the problem is they just like, there's a right intuition there.

Like there is a lot of stuff that's fishy and weird out there, but then they like jump to something that is in many ways equally dubious, right? Rather than trying to just roll up your sleeves and figure out what the case actually is. So even though I, again, never really looked into it. So this is one of those positions where I want to say anything I say is very tentative on this because I don't know that the whole Q phenomena well. It seems to me that even though I, it just seems like a failed, whatever it is, hypothesis, right? There's an understandability there of why people would be attracted to it.

I would say it succeeded, but that's my cynical take on what it actually was. For the nefarious reason. What it actually was. Yeah, I see that. Yeah, sure. Yeah. And again, the FBI-CIA connection, certainly FBI, that was reported, that was mainstream-ish. I mean, you didn't have to go far to find, I forget which outlet reported on it, but there was a rather long piece that was good journalism. And anyway, but go ahead. Yeah. I just don't have much more to comment on it because I just don't know it at all. But to the idea that certain branches of government can do very nefarious

things, I mean, where do you want to start? Right. Right. That's certainly true. Right. Does that mean that that's always the case or we should immediately jump to that conclusion? But conspiracy theories. Right. Is that right? I can't take anybody seriously who uses that term unironically. Well, I mean, like conspiracies happen all the time in a general sense, like people conspire to murder, people conspire to rob a bank. Right. I would say that conspiracy is the dominant theme of history, especially if we're talking about, again, power. Rich and powerful people since the beginning of time have been conspiring, working behind the scenes, doing things that they

shouldn't be doing or that people wouldn't really like to get more powerful and to do away with their enemies. And often if we're talking politics to control their populaces so they can maintain power. I mean, that's such a- You see it at the high school lunch table, right? But I've commented on this before. I mean, people who denounce conspiracy theories, they don't actually believe that there are no conspiracies. They like, they like the conspiracies that they like and they believe in. These are usually more left-leaning people, right? So they love their Trump conspiracies and right-wing conspiracies and Koch brother conspiracies. They love all those conspiracies.

They just don't like any conspiracies that run afoul of their political or cultural ideas. They don't, oh, Soros? No, that's just a conspiracy theory. He's just a good guy. What are you talking about? But Koch? Oh, yeah. Let me break it all down for you here. You pull up my chart, look at it. It's like, how do you not realize that this is a really dumb way to live? Yeah. Yeah. The whole idea of, especially the more like extravagant, like there's a degree, right. Where I'll be like, okay, that does seem implausible. And certainly those types of

conspiracy theories are by no means the right has nothing of anything close to monopoly on that, right? Like, yeah, I see so many of those on the left. You see them on the right too, don't get me wrong, right? But it's not something that is exclusive to people who lean right. I mean, where do you want to start? And that's the thing, right? Like, so granted, like people conspire all the time. This is a basic historical fact. For me, again, there's a threshold where plausibility just becomes – it just isn't plausible anymore, right? Where you would need – I don't even have an example off the top of my head, but you would need multiple levels. Hollow Earth. I mean, this isn't –

Right, multiple levels of incredible coordination. There is a conspiracy element because I think the hollow earth is that it's not just that the earth is hollow it's that there are aliens or other people living in the center of the earth i saw the latest godzilla movie i'm hip to this yeah like you know godzilla's down there and i think that's where hitler went as well and he's still alive he found the fountain of youth on the way but no i think it's like there's an alien civilization down there. And the conspiracy element is that governments around the world, they know about this and are hiding it. Right. And then you go, okay, that's interesting. What's the evidence for it? And then you go, that's not very good evidence. And what are the counter arguments?

And you just start thinking, you're like, well, I could think of like 10 right away. Same thing with flat earth. Right. Yeah. Flat., you're like, well, I could think of like 10 right away. Same thing with flat earth. Right. Yeah. Flat. I've had like, when I first heard it, I was like, okay, I don't know. Well, let me hear the argument. What's the argument.

Right. That's not a very good argument. And then let me hear the counter arguments to the most obvious stuff. Like, okay, what about all the space footage that we have? Like, what about SpaceX with the little car and the guy and, oh, that's all fate. Okay. So everyone, all government agencies around the world, private people, corporate, they're all in on all the astronauts.

Right, it's that massive coordination element where it really starts to strain a lot of these. And I'm done with this now. I don't even need to know anything else. Right. The other thing, Aristotle had arguments against Flat Earth, too. So it's not just modern science that helps to debunk that. So if anybody's interested, you could go back and see Aristotle's thoughts on some of that. If you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my

sports nutrition company Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the world. What are your thoughts on being, I mean, I guess the term might be metacognition of being aware of how you think. And again, I come back to this idea that I've thought about, and this is not me being a snoot and thinking that I'm so much better. Like I've actually thought about it for myself and try to, cause we all, like you said, we all have these tendencies and I try to root them out or at least be aware of them and pull myself back from ledges if I'm going too fast. And so what are your thoughts on being aware of, again, I think where a lot of this comes from is just for example, is if somebody is

generally a fearful person, they're just a worrisome person, and they have a lot of anxieties about the world and their life, and they don't feel very strong individually, right? Then that person, I would think, is going to be psychologically prone to wanting to just fit in. They just want to be part of the herd. They want to feel like they have that protection. The mere thought of breaking with orthodoxy or officialdom makes them uncomfortable. You know what I mean? Because again, and this is just a random hypothesis of mine. I'm just making an example that there could be a connection there. You know what I mean? Where you do, for example, do seem to have certain types of people who tend to be more independent thinkers. And then you have

the wacky independent. I understand that. And then you do have types of people who tend to be more independent thinkers. And then you have the wacky independent, I understand that. And then you do have types of people who are more herd type mentality, just they just want to fit in. And then that you take that to the extreme. And again, that's just like the quadruple maskers. Right? Yeah, I have a lot to say on this. I'll try and keep it somewhat brief, or we'll see where the conversation goes. I mean, first off, yeah, you should be aware of the phenomena, which is known as motivated reasoning, right? Motivated reasoning is just, we want to believe something, right? And we go out and we engage in confirmation bias and try to gather anything that will support that belief and kind of like look away from anything that won't like that's something that's well-documented. The ironic thing, however, about this is that

the studies have been done on this actually show that being more educated does not help. And in fact, it makes it worse. Like, so it's just a funny thing, like people who are more educated and think that, well, I'm educated, so I'm not going to engage in motivated reasoning or sometimes the ones who do it the most. Right. And why, why would they do that? Well, they think, well, I'm intelligent, right? Of course, my positions are correct. This is kind of like, I have a PhD. What do you mean? I've got a PhD. I couldn't be wrong about something. So it's just, it's just very ironic finding, but also ironic, but not entirely surprising. Right. Again, you know, I mean, that's, that's, there's a danger

zone there of probably, I would guess it's middling IQ and essentially somebody who is overeducated for their level of intelligence. And again, I don't say that implying anything about myself. I've not even taken an IQ test. I don't know. I'm probably okay. I'm probably like not great, not bad, whatever. So that's not what I'm trying to imply. But it's certainly, I've seen that what you're talking about. I didn't know that there's research on it, but I've seen that where I almost expect it from people who are really not that bright. They think they're geniuses or they think they are smarter than they are. And they have a lot of formal education.

Like I already know what I'm getting into. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, that's what we find, right? Is that education doesn't necessarily help to reduce motivated reasoning. And in many instances it can increase it. So, you know, there's different cognitive mechanisms that people engage in confirmation bias, like selective memory usage, stuff like that, that like helps to fuel motivated reasoning. So I think it's important to understand that motivated reasoning is a thing and that people who are aware of motivated reasoning still engage motivated reasoning, right? So you have to be like aware of that higher level issue, right? And then you have to do your best because here's the other interesting thing is like the people who do research on this don't

conclude they're actually kind of research on this don't conclude. They're actually kind of optimistic. They don't conclude, well, that's it. We're all just kind of doomed to this actually conclude. No, like, you know, you can do things. You can really do things to hedge against this and you can really find the truth. But you just have to realize that this is a factor that's at play. And as long as you're, you know, attuned to that, you know, and like really attuned to

it, not just being like arrogant about it, but really attuned to it. And it affects everybody and it will affect us as much as it affects the next guy, then you're going to be better off. Right. So that's one thing I would say, be aware of that, that it's a thing we all engage in and education doesn't seem to make a difference there. Right. And there's another point, you know, like intellectuals, they do get kind of snobby. And in a sense that like, there's almost something of an air of prestige of like not believing what the common person believes. Right. So, I mean, take any just strange voodoo that's out there in academia today is of this nonsense beliefs that very highly educated people ascribe to that, you know, your common, you know, man or woman on the street would say that just sounds

like nonsense to me. And I would argue it is nonsense. Right. But there's just this kind of arrogance, right. That comes with higher levels of education if you're not aware of it. And in fact, Jonathan Haidt, he's an interesting kind of psychologist and he's done some research into stuff like this. Like what he's found, especially on like moral beliefs, right? Is that if you like ask somebody, I might get some of the details wrong, but this is generally it, right? This is going to be a weird example, but go with me, right? If you ask somebody who like has not been college educated, like, do you think it's wrong to have sex with a chicken? Like most people are like, yeah, that's messed up, right? You shouldn't do that. But if you ask like people who are more

like liberally educated, they'd be more likely to say, oh, you know, it depends. Yeah, it depends, right? And like, no, it's the person who's less educated who's right there, friends. Like it is wrong to have sex with a chicken. We could go in all the reasons why. So that's where like a little education can be dangerous, right? Yeah, the wrong education. The wrong type of education can be dangerous. So that's just another interesting phenomenon. The other thing in terms of thinking is like people just aren't trained in logic anymore, right?

One of my first philosophy professors, she had a PhD. She had to have me kind of formalize different arguments because she didn't know how to do it. She didn't know how to analyze propositions. And most people don't because they're not taught that, right? They're not taught the canons of logic. They're not taught the differences between material and formal fallacies. And they just don't know how to think because that's what logic is. Logic is really the study of the structure of thought. Thought actually has a structure and we can analyze that. And the idea of logic is not to, of studying logic is really, the way I think

about it is not to just be like some snotty brat on the internet who says, well, you're committing this or that fallacy, right? Like that's a person who reads like one post on logic and then thinks that they find like the one fallacy they learned in like every Facebook thread. Don't ever be that person, right? It's really annoying. What's the fallacy of composition? No, the point of logic is just to make sure you don't fall for bullshit, right? It's developed a more shockproof bullshit detector. So that way you can say, okay, your premises here, they seem plausible, but your conclusion still doesn't follow, right? And you can really analyze and dissect what's being put out there. Even if you don't have technical expertise in an area, you can still analyze the formal structure of an argument

somebody's making. And so like, yeah, even if I grant the steps in their argument, this inference is still invalid, for example. So nobody should buy this conclusion off the steps they gave. Or you could come to another position where it's like, actually, this inference is valid, and I'm not sure about the premises. So now I need to like roll up my sleeves and try and figure out if these steps, if these premises are actually true, right? And so it's this sort of massive failure of people to learn just basic logic, to learn proposition types, to do their Euler circles. This should just be like elementary school stuff, right? But most people don't even learn it in college. This was, at one point, I mean, this was the beginning along with grammar and rhetoric, right? This was the beginning. The trivium, it used to be called. Yeah. Of education before you moved on to the, what was it? Quadrivium, quadrivium, quadrivium. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where you started to learn at that time. I forget exactly

what it was. You probably know, but it was, you know, that's where you get more specialized, but at first you learned how to think, you learned how to communicate. You learned, I believe it was Latin at the time. Right. But like the structure of language. Right. So, I mean, that's the other thing. The fact that that fell out, you would think that that would not be removed from education, that we would have expanded on that and that we would have taken that original trivium and turned it into something. And we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of years. It should be a very well-oiled machine. It's foundational. It's foundational. Logic is foundational and

it's absolutely absent. It should be something probably at this point that we figured out how to start teaching at the earliest possible age. And of course, then it would progress in complexity as you get older. But instead of that, no, it's just gone. Right. And there are so many things where I'm just like, and really, am I supposed to believe incompetence? Really?

Am I supposed to believe that's just a coincidence that just happened? And like, the problem is blackpilled, you know, cynical. Look, you have people who are highly specialized and competent experts and have done good work in their area of expertise. But then they just make very basic logical mistakes often when they venture out of that area of expertise. I don't know if we want to throw it just like any, you know, people who are notorious for this would be like your kind of science popularizers, right? Who like have maybe some even impressive level of expertise in one particular area, but then they venture out into all different areas, right? I mean, like I'll just, Neil deGrasse Tyson is a prime example of this, right? Of somebody who obviously, you know, has this formal education, but when he ventures into

areas that I actually know something about, particularly like philosophy and stuff like that, I mean, he's worse than most any college freshmen out there, right? I mean, he's no more a relevant expert in these areas, despite his assumptions to the contrary. But because of our sort of inclination towards like credentialism, well, this guy's an astrophysicist, right? He must know what he's talking about. No, necessarily, right? Like, just because you have relevant expertise in one area does not mean that you're going to be at all competent when commenting in another area. Now, it doesn't mean you're incompetent either. Right. I want to be fair. Like he could have studied and he could have learned. So I don't want to say just because you don't have a Ph.D. in something doesn't mean you can't speak on it. That's absolutely not true. I'm just saying just because somebody does have a Ph.D. in one thing doesn't mean they're going to be competent to comment on all things. And you just have to find ways of trying to analyze that. And the best starting place for that is just to have a basic command of logic, right? Because that's going to help you sniff out bad arguments from otherwise impressive, well-credentialed people, which they're ventured

all the time, right? What are your thoughts on developing something else I've thought about? Because a lot of what we're talking about is tricky. And these are all human inclinations that we all have. And we all engage in undesirable activities along these lines to some degree, even if we're pretty good at catching ourselves, we still have to catch ourselves. And practically speaking, I feel like something that everyone can do to improve everything that we're talking about is to improve themselves as individuals. You could probably express that in different ways. You go back to the virtues and take this example where if you have somebody who is generally fearful, kind of just generally cowardly, right? Well, there are so many different ramifications now from that lack of virtue. Well, there are so many different ramifications now from that lack of virtue. But if that person were to develop courage, then naturally there are certain ideas now that just wouldn't appeal to them. Or maybe they wouldn't be so deferential to authority. Maybe they would be a little bit more willing to think for themselves. And even if that meant that they are not in agreement with a lot of the people that are around, you know what I mean? But they can learn to live with these things. Does that make sense to you?

Yeah, no, it does. So courage, I mean, it's a virtue. What's a virtue? A virtue is a perfection of our power to go back to Aristotle, right? It's something that perfects us or completes us according to the type of being we are, being rational animals, right? So it's really good for us to be courageous because this is a courage is going to help facilitate our flourishing as a type of animal that we are. And for Aristotle, a virtue is always a golden mean, right? It's that sort of moral sweet spot between an excess and a deficiency. So if we just take courage, what's the excess? Something like recklessness is the excess, right? Just like rushing into any dangerous situation because it's exciting or something like that, but it's really

stupid to do it, right? So that's a vice, right? That's not courageous. The deficiency, the obvious one is cowardice. And for Aristotle, there can be an asymmetry, right? Like it can be more likely that somebody in relation to a virtue will fall into a deficiency than an excess, which is obviously true, I think, for cowardice, right? Like you're probably more likely to see cowardice than recklessness more often than that. So, you know, courage is kind of contingent upon the cardinal virtue, which is prudence. And prudence is just practical wisdom. It's kind of like moral street sparts. You know, you think of like prudence as having three faces. One face is like looking to your experience and your education and your learning,

looking backwards. One face is facing forward to the here and now, what's the situation? What are the contingent facts about it? Sort of considering all the relevant factors that should go into your moral decision-making. And then one face is looking forward to, you know, what is the outcome that I'm intending? What kind of future do I want from this? And that will determine, you know, you need prudence to determine whether a particular action would be courageous or stupid in a particular situation. I don't know if this is answering your question, but we can keep talking about it if we want. I mean, so for example, like if I'm in a situation, right? And I'm like, you know, outside of a movie theater and I see some kind of skinny dude, like beaten up an old woman, taking her purse. And like, it's clear that this man's just assaulting this woman. He doesn't seem to be armed.

I'm kind of strong. I'm trained in martial arts. I know that no police are probably going to get here in time. And this dude might kill this woman. Right. It might be the courageous thing for me to go and and refrain this man. Right. I put him in a in a chokehold or something and try and save this woman's life. However, flip some situations around because that's what prudence would demand of me in that situation. Like I seem to have the requisite skills. It doesn't seem like this woman's life is in serious danger. And I think I have a really good chance that I could actually take this guy and doesn't seem to have like a gun or a knife or anything like that. Right. Maybe that's not prudent. Let's just suggest that it is. However, if I see that this dude is armed, he's much bigger than me. I'm not trained in martial arts. And, you know, it's not unreasonable to think that I could turn the corner and call the police or something like that. That might actually be the more prudent thing to do in a particular situation. So the point of like a sort of virtue ethics, which I'm very attracted to, is that there's both an objectivity and a relativism to it. Like there is an objective

fact of the matter of like what the right or wrong thing to do is, but it's contingent upon the circumstances you find yourself in and kind of your current development at the time as well. So, you know, for Aristotle, like the good life is just a life in pursuit of perfection of virtues, right? And the kind of core ones, cardinal virtues, we call them the hinge virtues, are prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. So prudence, as we said, is that's a chariot virtue. It's kind of developing the moral street smarts. Justice is giving others their due, and that can be kind of horizontally, but also vertically. So a lot of traditional thinkers And that can be kind of horizontally, but also vertically. So a lot of traditional thinkers think religion is a matter of justice. For example, they don't

think religion is like just some personal thing you should feel good about. They think that religion is a matter of giving God his due, right? Is it sort of vertical obligation and the relation of justice we have to God, but also we have commutative and distributive justice. So there's things that I owe other people. I owe my children education. I owe them moral development. If I'm a deadbeat dad, I'm failing morally. I'm a vicious person. And that's also kind of where rights come in. Rights are claims you can make on other people to either leave you alone or do something. And positive and negative rights, this kind of ties into the liberalism thing that we wanted to talk about eventually. A positive right is an active claim you have on somebody. Like my children have a positive right to demand services of me,

that I feed them, that I teach them, that I help in their moral development, right? And if I don't do that, I am violating a right of my child, right? So this is part of why I've moved away from libertarianism because I actually think positive rights are a thing. So that's justice. What are we talking about? Prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude are going to be appealing to your exercise audience, right? Because? Prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude are going to be appealing to your exercise audience, right? Because temperance is kind of like, you know, using reason to kind of rein in the appetites, right?

We have appetites that are pulling us in many directions, and sometimes they can pull us in directions we know are really not good for us, like becoming gluttonous and stuff like that, right? So temperance is that sort of that virtue that's in application with prudence reigns in the appetites in a sense. And fortitude, so like think of temperance as fasting, right? Fortitude then is pushing through a hard workout. That's engaging in the stuff that you know is tough, that you know is difficult, that you know is arduous, and maybe even long lasting because it's really good for you. I

sometimes think of like fortitude is kind of like grit, right? And so that's the kind of the suite of the virtues and you have kind of sub-virtues under all of those. And how does this connect to what we were saying? Well, very traditionally, especially even at the founding of our country, part of what education was about was not to make-governance, we needed a virtuous population that freedom, and this is all over the Federalist Papers, right? Freedom is contingent upon a virtuous population. If you have vicious people, you will get tyranny sooner or later. And that's nothing new. That goes all the way back to Plato. Plato was really big about that, right? That's how democracy turns into chaos. Right. Well, for Plato, democracy is a bad thing, right? Democracy is kind of like, you know, he's got, you know, kind of your philosopher king set up, right?

And aristocracy and timocracy and oligarchy. And then for him, democracy is like right next door to tyranny, right? Because it's in democracy. What is an anarchy follows, I think, in his model. And then it recycles a new, you know, this better than I do. I just may be remembering wrong. Yeah. So for him, at least when he talks about democracy, obviously there's category shifts between how Plato was thinking about that way back then and how we think about democracy. Now he's thinking of democracy as kind of like a population where

people are really just run by their appetites and reason has completely left the scene, right? So he kind of thinks of the state analogous to the human person in certain ways. So for Plato, there's kind of like three aspects of the human psyche. There's reason, spirit, and appetite, right? So reason is our highest power, and this should be kind of governing our appetites, right? To direct us towards what is really good for us so we're not just pulled around by carnal pleasures and being sick hedonists all the time, right? And spirit is kind of like that middle influencer. There's no like great word for it in English,

but it's kind of like a righteous anger that you might feel to get something done, even though it's tough because reason demands it's right. It kind of gives you that impetus or push to get you to do something that's right, that you know, by reason, but it needs some kind of like a vigorous fuel,

right? That's spirit. I got like a catalyst or something. Yeah. Like, yeah. So that's, that's kind of like maybe the fuel, right? That's spirit. Like a catalyst or something. Yeah, like, yeah. So that's kind of like maybe the best, that might not be the best translation, but that's as well as I can describe it for our purposes, right?

So he's got reason, spirit, and appetite. And these can become disorder in a person. I think Plato is right about this. Like sometimes spirit can overtake reason and people can be too caught up with like wanting honor and battle and stuff like that for the sake of it. But then worse for Plato was when appetites rule. And I mean, this would be like things like pornography,

addiction, limbic capitalism, right? Where people are just, it's just all about just this sort of consumerism, consumer gluttony. Don't, don't, yes. Don't think just reasons checked out. Right. And he thinks that there's an analogs there of how a person can become disordered. Right. So, because reason should be ruling, right? Reason should be guiding, organizing. That's how you're going to flourish as a human person. When reason kind of directs the appetites and spirit provides the appropriate fuel to get the hard stuff done, right? That for Plato is how a person should be ordered to live a good life. Well, if you have a bunch of people that are disordered and like severely disordered, where reason's completely checked out and appetites are running amok that's going to spill over and like society is going to look like that at some

point for play is comprised of people so yeah i mean this is this is getting no it's not it's not implausible at all right i'm very i'm very attracted to this and i think we're seeing we're seeing this play out right i've i've i've tried to explain this to people and again this is something that i don't feel because this is not an area that I've read too much about. Maybe I know more than the average person, but there are some commonsensical things that I just don't know what the good counter argument would be where I would go, yeah, okay, so if we want to have a highly functioning society and we want it to operate in very logical and positive ways to the benefit of the many, I mean, we're never going to be able to do everything for everyone, but that's fine. It's never going to be perfect, right? Yeah. But if minimally we can serve the interests of the people who are net positives in society, who give more than they take, for example,

I think we're doing fairly well if we start there. And then you have the criminal types, both the criminally minded and the actual criminals. Those are the people who are less important serving their interests. It's just less important. But how are we supposed to get there if we have a bunch of dysfunctional people? I can't figure this out. And if those dysfunctional people come into democracy, okay, so does it make sense just logically, fundamentally that the man and the woman who they have a family of, you know, they have multiple kids and their kids are doing well. I mean, you know, kids are different, but they're working hard raising a good family

and they have a family business together and they employ 50 people and they produce good products and services. And maybe those products and services even directly impact other people's lives in very positive ways. Maybe it's not just trinkets for people to buy. And how does that make sense that their vote counts just as much as the deadbeat crackhead dad, or let's just take one of their vote. How does it make sense that the man's or the woman's vote counts just as much as the deadbeat crackhead dad who has nine different kids with nine different women who has never worked a day in his life and who has done nothing but take from the government or even or even just take a criminal right because people

don't believe the right to but i'm just I'm just painting the extreme because it just makes the point of, you can have some of that and still make it work. But what happens again, when you have too many dysfunctional people who have a say, these people, they can't even make the right decisions in their own lives when it's their oxes that can be gored, when everything of theirs is at stake and they still can't figure out how to make a rational, well-ordered life. How are these people supposed to collectively make a rational, well-ordered society? And I've heard people say, for example, well, they try to use the wisdom of the masses as if it's so simple as if we're like, oh, we're guessing the number of gumballs, right?

Again, that just quickly gets dismissed. I'm like, that's so dumb. I could respond to it, but it almost is not worth the response. It's just such a stupid counterpoint. You know what I mean? But yeah, well, I have probably more questions than answers on this because that's a deep practical problem, but I'll say a few things. One is, yeah, about the right to vote, right? And in traditional ethics, and I think this is right, is rights are very often counterbalanced by duties, right? So my kids- Starship Troopers. You ever read that book? My kids, no, I haven't. In that book, to vote, if I remember correctly, you had to serve in the military, if I remember.

Okay. So that's an example, right? Where, okay, yes, there's a right, but there's also a duty to serve society, right? To balance that out or to fulfill, right? That obligation that you have, because just as this is important, right? And just as some people have certain rights claims on you, again, in traditional ethics, society has rights claims on you, right? So it's not just what do I get from society, but what do I owe to society as well? And if I'm not fulfilling my obligations, then there's a legitimate basis that the certain things that are owed to me could be limited or curtailed, or maybe even cut off altogether. Now we believe this all the time, right? We believe if somebody commits a certain crime or a certain degree and they're put in jail, again, for a very long time, we thought that

they've lost their right to vote, right? So we don't think that the right to vote is just some absolute universal thing. The question, which I don't- The reason being, of course, if they're the type of person who's willing to commit that crime and willing to impose that cost and harm another individual in that way, we probably don't want them to have a say in how society is run. Yeah, especially if they want the destruction of it, right? It makes very good sense, at least there. Now, where is that obligation that you have to society to get the right to vote? I don't have a hard and fast answer to that. I mean, there's things out there like, should you have to complete high school first? And if so-

What if it were tied to, and really, again, this is something that I don't feel too strongly about. It's just kind of, these are for me, just kind of fun thinking exercises. But what if it were tied to taxes? What if you had to pay taxes in three of the last five years? That's not an impossible- And of course, there would be exceptions for people who now they paid taxes their entire life, they're retired, whatever, blah, blah. That's not the point. There would be exceptions for people who now they paid taxes their entire life. They're retired, whatever, blah, blah. That's not the point.

We're talking about the rule being three out of the last five years, you have to have paid at least a dollar in taxes. And well, you paid, maybe you got a refund. That's fine. But that means that you're working, for example. It really is what it means, right? And hopefully that means that, again, that you are giving more than you're taking. At least there's a chance now because somebody who is not working, who just takes,

well, yeah. Well, I mean, this goes to the health of a society in general. And one thing that's obvious, I think you're getting at this, Mike, and this is kind of what you're thinking about, is like, how do we reduce perverse incentives? And that's certainly like economics is a study of incentives, excuse me, but certainly public policy has much to do with incentives as well, right? So there's many incentives that are perverse that can come from bad policy. I mean, we're seeing that- That appeal to the appetites primarily. Right, that appeal to the appetites, but there's other... So I mean, like, how do we get a healthy society? I mean, it's a great question, right? Some traditional answers are what we've already

talked about, like whatever else education involves, it has to have training in the virtues, right? Other people would argue that it has to go further than that. It has to have an element of religion in there. Now, that's going to be highly contentious to people today, but it was in the minds of our founding fathers, right? If you read how they thought about education and the virtuous citizenry, they saw it as being something that is concomitant with at least a broad theism or Christianity, right? And I would encourage people to go back and read the significant thinkers at the founding of our

country and see how they thought about things. If nothing else, you'd be surprised at how different it is than today in many respects. Teaching in the basic virtues, teaching in the basic skills of thinking, these are all going to help. And then curtailing these perverse incentives that would cause people to check out the reason and be run by appetites. Mike, we talked about this before, like pornography to me is an easy one. Like get that the hell out of here, right? Just ban it. Just ban it. Let's follow Israel's lead on that one. people psychologically. It ruins relationships. It ruins families. It promotes sex slavery and sex. Like there is every reason to ban this hellish thing from the face of the earth entirely.

Right. Like that's just an easy one for me. And I'll be, but it's a, it's liberating that shut up. It's not liberating. Right. It's actually slavery. A little bit further than maybe should child porn be allowed then. Hey, I mean, if just regular old porn is okay, then why is child porn be allowed then? Hey, I mean, if just regular old porn is okay, then why is child porn not okay? Oh, well, children are different. They don't consent or yeah. Trust me. If we want to play games. Well, consent isn't a magic moral wand. I want to talk about that. We can find some ways around that one. That's not a very strong reason. No, no, but, but also in child porn, but allow. Yeah. Let's do two things here, right? The first is that true freedom. I think I'm going to go back to Plato here, right?

Like if you're addicted to pornography, you're not free. You're a slave. You're a slave to your appetites. That is not. Freedom in the tradition, right? When I say the tradition, I mean like the perennial philosophy of like a broad tent Platonism, which to me is like it doesn't even start with Plato, but obviously includes him. I'm lumping Aristotle into that. Yes, I know they had many differences, but they're still under the same big tent as far as I'm concerned. Kind of like the Acme of that would be like a

Thomas Aquinas or something. So like in the perennial philosophy, freedom is really disciplining the desires to make the good at first accessible and then effortless, right? The real good, the true good, true freedom is disciplining your desires to make the good at first accessible and then effortless. If you're addicted to porn and fast food, you're not a liberated person. You're a slave in all effective purposes. And that's kind of echoed by people like Jocko Willink. He's just got this book that's called Discipline Equals Freedom.

That's the tradition. That's what they saw, that humans can flourish by perfecting virtues, perfecting powers. But that requires discipline. That requires negating options, saying no to things, right? Both individually and as a society to promote human flourishing. So I would just deny that this at all promotes a liberation, or if it is a liberation, that it's a redefinition of it, and it's a kind I want nothing to do with, right? Or that anybody should want anything to do with. As for consent, yeah, I mean, consent isn't a magic moral wand. You can't reduce ethics. Like, Mike, I can't consent for you to go drive my neighbor's car because I don't have that moral power to begin with, right? So consent is often

question begging in these types of conversations because you can't just say that you can consent to do something wrong. Or if you did consent, just because you can consent to something doesn't mean you should consent to do something is another way to put it. So, yeah, consent based arguments to me are always exceedingly weak because whatever power consent has, it's always riding atop of deeper moral considerations. Right. Just because I consent to cutting off my own arm doesn't mean that I did a morally right thing. In fact, I would say as long as I'm healthy and I had no reason to cut off my arm like it was gangrenous and I did a morally thing. And consent doesn't change the fact of that matter. Right. What if it's your penis? Like, that's the thing, man. Like even with like a bunch of these surgeries, right. People will consent to it, but I would argue they're still doing a seriously morally wrong thing, a seriously more. And we could do a whole episode on that at some point, I'd be glad to do it. But consent,

I mean, this is where a bad philosophy, a bad moral philosophy, this type of sort of consent-based ethics has really corrupted people's minds. You know, something I have, you may have something, this would be, if you don't, this is something you'd probably like. You probably do, maybe you just haven't put it down to paper. But I recently did an episode, just a monologue on somebody had asked, how do you increase urgency and necessity? And they just want to hear my thoughts for me, like what works for me. And this is not something that I've read much about. For example, I don't know if what I shared, it's going to be interesting to some people and maybe it doesn't work at all for others. But the answer I gave is I kind of laid out what I call my personal constitution. I got this from the book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. That's

where I first came across it. Yeah. And I was like, oh, this is a good idea. Actually, I like this where I think he calls it a personal mission statement in the book, but it's using the framework of be, do, have, like who you want to be and what you want to do. And then I think he used achievements, which he lumped like principles and purposes into. I didn't quite understand. I was like, that's a weird, that doesn't quite, like it didn't even include actually things that including experiences you may want to have, but I still liked the idea. And so over the years of working to improve myself, I've picked up, I think, principles that ring true to me and also produce good results that help me live better and help me produce better results in various areas of my life. And so I've kind of clung to those things or maybe not clung is the wrong connotation, but I've certainly taken those

and kind of put them in their own special little bucket of, okay, we're talking about values or precepts maybe would be the words, right? And so one of them that is just relevant to this, that's on my list is be worthy of freedom. And with a lot of these, I've included a quote or two that I've come across that is relevant, right? And so this is, I think it's a Charlie Munger quote. And he said, to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet crazy enough, not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day, if you live long enough, most people get what they deserve.

And a lot of people, they don't want to believe that, but I think there's a lot of truth there. And if nothing else, I try to live in accordance with that. I try to live in a way where that is true. And I think that's productive, even if ultimately it's not exactly true. It drives me to be a better person, to be worthy of exactly what you're saying, right? To be worthy of freedom. And we can look at that politically, to be worthy of the right, quote unquote, to just generally do what I want to do, as long as I'm not committing explicit crimes. And so take something like porn, right? I think if we had enough virtuous people, there actually would be a much smaller demand for this.

And it wouldn't require necessarily, maybe it always would, but it wouldn't necessarily require a top-down ban of it. It would just go the way of the Dodo. But it can work both ways. So I'm not a political determinist. People will say politics is all downstream of culture. No, I think it works both ways, right? Culture pushes on politics, but politics can certainly push back. Yeah, we're seeing a lot of that right now. That's exactly what we're seeing, right? And we know that a lot of cultural changes start from minority groups that get political control and they start changing laws around. And sooner or later, we do get cultural changes, right? So to me, it's just one force working against another

in both directions. But I know that was a side point to your other thing about Munger. Yeah. I mean, and that brings up a question of like cosmic justice, right? Do people get what they deserve at the end of the day? That's a very deep metaphysical question, right? Because some people certainly seem to like live a completely horrible life, a morally horrible life, and they don't seem to get their just desserts, at least in this life. And other people seem to... We see villains at the head of every industry, right? Right. I mean, like... So it can be hard. It can be hard, I understand, to reconcile those ideas. It makes me think of, and you've spoken about this, it makes me think of the objection to Christianity that, well,

there's so much bad in the world. How could an all-loving God create this? I believe it was Voltaire,ire i think and was it liebness is it my pronounce that correctly i had a back and light light yeah i never checked the pronunciation but i remember the back and forth of voltaire saying that there's so much bad right and then and then also saying it really this is the best the omniscient omnipresent right yeah now omnipotent god can do like this motherfucker needs some imagination. Right. This is a, let's talk about this, right? Cause I actually have a paper under review right now on, on the problem of evil.

So it's, it's relevant on my mind and I'm arguing against it, right. That it's not a good argument against God. And maybe it will tie back into, to what we're talking about before, but yeah, it traces back. I mean, at least to like traditionally the Epicurean paradox, right? If God is all powerful, he can create any world he wants. If God is all good, then he would, he would create a world without any suffering or evil that we see,

but take a look around, right? What's going on here. Right. And obviously there's been fighting over both of those premises for centuries. Right. Right. I don't find that very funnier to me as the thought of like, okay, if well, let's, let's take the guy, if he, if he, then, then he must have a good sense of humor because well we live in a we live in a fucking clown world well let's let's get the context of

voltaire and leibniz right because leibniz has an interesting response to the problem of evil i think it's wrong because what leibniz want to say is he had this sort of perfect world theodicy right where he's like yeah god would create the best of all possible worlds but this is it and you know he had his reasons, God would create the best of all possible worlds, but this is it. And, you know, he had his reasons for thinking this was the best of all possible worlds. And you could see that. And Voltaire is like, really? Come on. Right. Really? Come on now. Now, look, I think Leibniz is wrong there because I don't think I think you can have a perfect being, which is God. But I don't think that makes sense to say you have a perfect world because you could always have a world with like one more pepperoni pizza, right? Or one more tree or something like that. Like the whole concept of a of a perfect world because you could always have a world with like one more pepperoni pizza, right? Or one more tree or something like that. Like the whole concept of a, of a perfect

world, I think doesn't make sense. And, and people before Leibniz actually argued specifically against that idea. What they would say moreover, is that any world God creates will be on the whole at the end of the day, good, both in this part of it. And it's an entirety, which would include the afterlife and stuff like that. So on the the whole god will never create an overall bad world and over overall that's the key because one part like on any painting might seem very bleak but when you how does that accounting work though i mean that that well it's inscrutable right it's so so you need you need prior independent reasons so if you have independent reasons to think that god exists and is all good and you think that that's compatible with evil and suffering then that's something you you accept. Then you import those reasons and say, this has to be the case, even if I don't

see how it's the case, right? And that's called like a skeptical theism, right? And there's force there because because it's inscrutable, it's hard for the skeptic to argue against that because you would kind of have to see the whole picture, you would have to have the mind of God and nobody has access to that, right? So at least it kind of brings it to a stalemate there. But I mean, there's other ways. Now, if you want to steel man it, right, you want to steel man the opposite position, because we talk about doing that, right? Most skeptics, most atheists in the philosophy of religion have actually given up what's called the logical problem of evil, which is like a very strong form trying to say that there's a contradiction between God and an imperfect

world. You just can't get a contradiction out of that. So what they push is what's called an evidential or probabilistic problem of evil, right? And the idea there is like, okay, maybe it was not a contradiction, but this world just seems so clownish to use Mike Matthews' word. It just seems so ridiculous. The stuff that goes on in this world and so, and so horrible that just seems to make it very improbable. It's like we are the insane asylum of the galaxy, basically.

Right. And that's called the evidential problem of evil or the probabilistic problem of evil. And you tell me how long you want to talk about this, because this is something I've been writing on extensively. Maybe we should, if it's, I mean, I'm interested in hearing about it. Right. So I'll say two quick things. Maybe we drop a teaser and it might be a fun, we never got to our liberalism either, which

is okay. Yeah, let me drop a teaser. I did a longer episode on this on my podcast with my buddy, Dr. Jim Madden, who's a, well, he was on this show. So the thing I say is this, okay, let's go back to hypothesis testing, right? What's the chances or what's the probability or what would you expect our world to be if God exists? Well, think about it this way, right? If God exists and he's kind of omni-attributed, he's the subsistent good itself, how much would you expect a world that looks like us? Maybe you think it's very low.

Maybe you think it's like 1%. There's like a 1% chance that I think that if God exists and is all good, that we would get a world like this. However, if God didn't exist and atheism were true, what do you think it would be that we would get a world like this? And what I want to argue is that it's impossible. It's impossible, right? Or if it's not impossible, it's far lower than theism. And it's the ratio between those probabilities that matters. Now, why is

that? Let me just give some quick justification. If people want the details, they can go to my other episode is that evil itself is contingent. It's contingent on other factors of reality, right? So while it's kind of superficially in our face, a deeper analysis makes other things more clear that we need to make sense of evil. For one thing, to make sense of evil, to say that something is really and truly bad, that it objectively fails in some sense, we need the idea of a moral standard. Does a skeptical worldview give us a moral standard? Not really. I mean, most versions of atheism and naturalism and physicalism out there, they don't give you anything that could give you a moral standard, right? Not all. There's a few out there. I want to be charitable,

but they're just kind of wildly implausible, like an atheistic moral Platonism or something like that. So what I want to say is if you have theism, then you have a moral standard locked in because the traditional view of God is just a subsistent good itself. Like God is the perfect being, just his nature is because being and goodness are convertible and traditional theism, right? So God is the fully actual good, right? So just by logic and definition, a moral standard follows on theism. So it's guaranteed on theism. So even if you don't think it's impossible in atheism, it's at least far, far less probable, but there's more than that, right? We also need to make sense of evil, rational beings, conscious, rational beings living in moral communities that can reflect

upon moral standards and make moral judgments about things being evil. What worldview better predicts that contingent fact that goes into evil? And I would say, again, it's night and day, right? Like God could very obviously plausibly have reasons to bring about rational agents like us. And it's hard to make sense of how rational conscious agents could at all emerge on physicalism or atheism or something like that. Even if you don't think it's impossible, which I think it is impossible, but even if you don't think it's impossible, it's at least far less probable. And then you also need to make sense if you're a moral realist of moral obligations. Why am I bound to follow the moral standard? Why am I bound to follow the moral law? And why am I penalized if I don't?

Right. Or am I penalized, right? I would say, I mean, I would argue that we are, I mean, even going back to human flourishing and what goes into that, we can receive no penalties from society. We can make a lot of money. We can objectively outside looking in. It looks like, again, like we're getting away with everything, but we're dead inside. Right. There seems to be a natural punishment to be evil.

And I'll grant to some extent, I think that that's true. But certainly just on a more basic level, we feel that the moral law, because most of us are intuitively more realist. Like we feel that there really is a binding moral structure to this world. We're not really nihilists, not in how we live and act anyways. Like, and most of us feel that there's certain things that we really should do, that there's a binding force in obligatory force behind that. So you're not just need to explain how you get a moral standard. You don't just need to explain how you get rational conscious agents living in moral communities. What the connection is between those, how we ever come to reflect about the moral standard, how we ever come to know it, right? That's a huge problem. But then how there's a binding force on that between us. And my general argument is that

all of that is far better explained and predicted on theism than it is any type of skeptical, naturalistic, atheistic worldview that maybe even if you think that the amount of evil and suffering you have in this world is an initially low probability on God's existence, it's so much lower on atheism and naturalism that evil itself actually better confirms the theistic hypothesis on a deeper analysis than it does the atheistic one. It's only on a superficial analysis is what my argument is, that you think evil counts against God. But when you analyze evil and you analyze all the things that evil is contingent

upon and what worldview better makes sense of all the data, the total understanding, it actually flips it. And I argue that evil is better explained by and therefore confirmatory of the theistic hypothesis. So that's my general sketch of a much more extended argument of how to begin to work through even the more advanced problems of evil. As far as morality goes, again, this may be a completely sophomoric idea, but I'm just going to say it. Could you not argue or do people argue that, well, this is merely a matter of survival, of group survival, and we learn that certain things, they just don't really work out that well. And we do these things and, you know, where there is no connection to a divine order, it's just like, do these things and your tribe withers away and dies and you're all gone. Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, there's two ways you can take this. This is just the evolutionary objection.

And the first thing you say is, well, so what? Like, presumably we evolved to discover and discern real aspects of reality. I evolved to be able to detect Mike Matthews and Mike Matthews is really there. So what's wrong with saying that I evolved to discern a moral aspect of reality and that it also just happens to have great function, useful function, right? There's nothing incompatible with that claim. And in fact, I think that's true. I think that's how God did it, right? No, you need the divine to secure everything else is what I'm saying. So what you're asking there is a question of moral epistemology.

How do we come to know of this moral realm? Well, I think it's a combination of things, right? I think it's a combination of evolution, but I also think it's, of course, at the end of the day, God's grand design, right? So there's just different levels of explanation the way I think about it. Could there be hard wiring in it? Right. of explanation, the way I think about it. However, hardwiring in, right. Or you could take the evolution plus naturalism, which then says that we didn't evolve to discover a moral structure. We evolved to invent a moral structure. And that's what you're hinting at. And that last one,

I think it's just completely false. I just think it's absolutely false. Right. And there's no reason to prefer that explanation over the other one, unless you have independent reasons to think that atheism is true instead of theism. You see what I'm saying? But the other one, unless you have independent reasons to think that atheism is true instead of theism. You see what I'm saying? But the other one has other issues too, because if biology tricked us into thinking that there's a moral standard when there isn't, then maybe biology also tricked us into tricking us into thinking that there's a moral standard when there isn't, right? So it kind of starts to invent, invite a more radical skepticism. And if this cognitive faculty, if this power could be wrong, that I'm completely deluded morally, why should I think that any of my other kind of

cognitive powers are reliable? My sense perceptions, my reasoning powers, any of this stuff, right? So there's another argument that I've written on before, which is kind of like this, I call it the kind of the package deal of cognitive powers, that if somebody wants to take a sort of evolutionary stab at morality, they want to try and undermine an objective morality with calls to evolution, there's two things they're going to have to do that I think are going to be problematic. One is they're going to have to independently establish atheism, which evolution is neutral on, right? Both of those worldviews can accommodate evolution easily, right? I actually think theism accommodates

a lot better because evolution is contingent on things, right? It's contingent on a finely tuned universe. It's contingent on a finely tuned universe. It's contingent on anything existing rather than nothing. So we can put that aside. But they'll also have to try and then establish how by breaking the reliability of one of our cognitive powers, our moral power, how this doesn't cast doubt on the reliability of our other cognitive powers that presumably evolve as well. And I don't think there's any principled reason to do that.

And that's going to include reason. And as soon as you cast out on the reliability of reason, you're going to lose any basis you have for making arguments at all, right? So then you can kind of have this self-defeat problem where you start to saw the branch off that you're sitting on. So it's a subtle distinction what you brought up. And the first thing I want to say is that the question is, did we evolve to discover? Did we evolve to invent? And I'm going to say the former, and there's no reason to prefer the latter over the former, independent of other worldview considerations or arguments. And I think the latter actually invites a host of just irredeemable difficulties and it should be rejected. Yep. Yep. Interesting. Yeah. And to the point of discovery, I mean, this would be another

discussion, but you go from people listening to me wondering, okay, so how do you go from there though, to, well, this is the one explanation of why we discover these things where there could be many other possible explanations that are not naturalistic in nature. You know what I mean? But I know that this is something you've gone through in detail as well. Yeah. Well, I mean, clarify what you mean, because I'm not sure I. Okay. That you have the Christian or could just be kind of the Semitic of this idea that you have a soul and here's what happens when you die. It goes over here, it goes over here. And these are the rules and this is the game. But of course, there are many other ideas that are, what would be the word? I guess that there are various terms, but that would acknowledge a

spiritual realm of some kind, something beyond- It's called supernaturalism. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. But it's a different game. It's a different system. And that could also accommodate this idea of discovering the morality, for example. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, this is good, right? Because you have different hypotheses and they both seem to explain at least one data point equally well, but could they explain all the data points equally well? So that's where, so I mean, take the moral experience we have and say you want to take something that isn't Christian, say it's some form of Hinduism that believes in reincarnation and karma, right? Because presumably karma is something that might explain the problem of evil. Well, why do people suffer? Well, it's

because they misbehaved in a past life, right right and so they've come back and now they are getting their just desserts right so it's just this appeal in that sense it's almost like evil serves a useful function well yeah but here's one issue with that right is it seems to rebel against other moral intuitions like it seems like if a child is suffering i don't want to walk away from that child and be like well you're just getting what you deserve. Seems like that's morally completely unacceptable. But if the karma proposal were true, then that's exactly what I should do. Right. Right.

Yeah. Like, so it's like, oh, this is the experience this being needs to get to the next higher level of being. Right. So I think that why should I, in fact, it would be evil to interrupt this. Right, right. So it doesn't solve the problem. In fact, it makes it worse. So I think there's internal inconsistencies with the karmic worldview, just from a moral perspective alone. And I think that there's other metaphysical considerations of why you have to kind of like pick which one you want to evaluate, right? Because Hinduism itself is a plurality of many

different beliefs. It's not just like one thing, right? Like some Hindus are monotheists and they actually would share many of the same like metaphysical commitments I do. Others are legitimately polytheists and stuff like that. But the karma one is just an example where even though it seems to at first explain a moral data point, I think at the end of the day, it actually doesn't successfully explain our moral experience and invites deeper moral issues that we actually don't want to accept. Right. Last question for you. And then we'll wrap this one up, but we already know I'm looking forward to this has been one heck of a conversation and we've been all over the place. Yeah. It's fun though. It's fun. I like it. Yeah. I like to, I think

this has happened at least half of the times we've done this, right. Where we think we'll start and we'll go on in one thing. And then we, and then we, we find ourselves talking about other things, but so as far as evil goes, this is something I've thought about that there are things that most people would immediately agree, yes, that's evil. And we can all think of those obvious examples. But I think that there's a bit of a subjective element to evil in that there are things that it depends on evil according to whose viewpoint. So if you are trying to build your business and I'm doing things to impede are trying to build your business and I'm doing things to impede your ability to build your business, you would say that maybe you'd say that's

evil. Maybe I'm using that term not in a technically correct manner, but my point is just that evil according to who, right? And then that for me leads to, well, okay. So if we're looking at our existence in terms of games, right? There's a book, what is it? The Infinite Game that Simon, I think Simon Sinek. Anyway, so you have components of a game and these are the things that make life interesting, like random things that happen, for example. If in life, we just decided we wanted something and let's just say we got it immediately. That might sound cool at first, but how boring would that actually be? After about a week of it, we would be like, okay, this is completely not fun at all.

Like I'm not having any fun. I need an opponent. I need, I need. We kind of need a hero's journey. There also needs to be an element of chance here, right? There need to be things that are unforeseen that give me some experience, right? Yeah. There need to be things that are unforeseen that give me some experience, right?

Yeah. And so I've never been able to really reconcile myself to a world or even an existence without quote unquote evil. I know there's something that just doesn't process for me again, because of this point of if we were to have no evil, and again, this becomes very subjective. How do we also have experience and have games to play when something quote unquote bad happens to me or when something happens that gets in my way, let's say in some way, right? A framework that I use is, okay, is this just part of the game, right? Because random things happen. And is this just an obstacle for me to resolve, even if it's an unlucky thing? Or is this something that where I feel like, all right, this is a bit too unlucky. Like, for example, if I have all the things that I do, and if in my business, I'm trying to grow the business, and we launch a product, and it doesn't go that well, right? Okay. I would have liked for it to

have gone well, but I would view that as part of the game, right? Regardless of why it didn't do well and is an obstacle to overcome. But if I go get in a car accident driving to the gym, how does that serve my... That's where I look at it as something that I don't have even a correct term. I don't know what the term is, but just how I work in the latter case, and this is to be a different discussion. At least I live with the assumption that if I live my life in a virtuous way, and particularly if I try to make decisions that are good, not just for my own interests, but I try to take other people's interests and I try to have the greatest possible good effects. And not everything is, you can't all have all construction and good and no destruction and bad. But if I try to take into account my family, I try to take into account maybe even the society, if it's depending on the decision, I really try to live that way, then I won't receive as many harmful, just kind of random occurrences. And again, I don't want

to go off on a totally, this might be an interesting, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. Then if I were to live very differently and, and I think there's, I've seen this with many people, people who live immoral, ignoble lives and who harm many people. And they certainly seem to have a lot more bad things happen to them than people who don't. Right. Yeah. And so, so with all of that, with all of that, when I'm faced with something that maybe somebody would say, well, it's evil for that person to try to do what they're doing too. And I could give some examples just in my life, but where their intention is to just harm

me, I don't necessarily even get upset about it. There are things where I can look at it as it's kind of just part of the game. And if I didn't have any of that, the game might not even be that fun. Well, it sounds like you have a great trust in God's providence, Mike. Yeah. So a number of things to say. Yeah. I'm just kind of bouncing around. No, this is good because you're getting at some very perennial themes and issues and I'll try and take a step by step. So you're kind of getting at hinting or dancing around what's sometimes called a theodicy. And a theodicy is more than a defense in relation to the problem of evil. So when it comes to like the problem of evil, how people wrestle with this idea of evil and suffering, especially in relationship to an all good God, a defense is what I gave previously.

And a defense is just trying to block or undercut the argument of evil against God. And that's it, right? That's what a defense is. A theodicy tries to go further and it tries to actually give a story or an explanation of, well, why might God allow this evil and stuff like that? So you see the difference, right? A defense is just showing this argument doesn't work and here's why. A theodicy actually tries to give more of a narrative or a story or something like that.

And the Bible is full of them. Like, look at Job, right? Job is like, people interpret it in many different ways, but there's a reason that it's been so perennially interesting. Now, real quick about evil, right? Because again, in the tradition, I know I keep throwing that out there very ambiguously, but certainly this is a big theme of Augustine. It goes on up through Aquinas is that evil isn't like something that you can like actively grab onto. It's not something that we would say has positive ontological status. Evil is a do good gone missing. So evil is kind of like a hole in a sock, if you will, or it's blindness. It's

something that should have been there, but is absent, right? And when you think about this evil, there's at least an asymmetry between good and evil, because you can't make sense of evil unless you already have something good that evil is attacking or decaying or pulling away from. So whatever else is more fundamental about reality, it's got to be goodness, right? They're not on the same metaphysical par. And this is one of the issues of certain Eastern religions where they just think that there's this dualism between a good God and an evil God. And it doesn't really make sense metaphysically, like whatever else is most fundamentally bedrocked reality, the fundamental layer, if you will, is going to be good because evil is always kind of a parasitic notion, if you will.

Now there's obvious counterexamples, right? I mean, like, well, you can't even make sense of it. It'd be a very different existence. You can't even make sense of it. Right. And I would just ask people to meditate on that. There's a profound insight there, but people will be like, well, look, when somebody stabs somebody, like, it seems like there's a lot of positive elements there.

And I'll be like, yeah, granted, like everything positive there, the muscle contractions, the knife, like that's all, that's all being. And that's all good. Like a knife by itself, isn't bad. Muscle contractions by themselves aren't bad, but in the final analysis, something's missing. And what's missing is a moral consideration to somebody made a judgment, but in that judgment, they failed to apprehend and apply the moral fact that you shouldn't stab an innocent person in the neck. So it's the thing that's missing that should have been there that really makes that action evil. It's a disordering. It's something that fell away.

I mean, they had an urge, and they just went with it. There's a do-good, do-missing. Whereas many other people have such urges, and they don't just go with it. Yeah, and so evil, I use evil in a very broad sense, like in a sense of like a lion eating a gazelle, that's evil for the gazelle because the gazelle was being active. That's a good example of what I was trying to say, where it depends according to who, but it's good for the lion.

It's good for the lion. Right now, how do you make sense of that? Well, you make sense of it, my kind of moral framework. And I think that this is to build out some of the details. Like I don't just punt to God for morality by any means. I'm going to, I'm what's called an essentialist, right? I think like what is good for something depends on the kind of thing that it is, right? Like it's good for a lion to eat a gazelle because that's just what it means to be a lion. You're a meat eater, you're a carnivore, right? And in a sense that we're rational agents.

So morality only applies to us. Like it isn't like the lion isn't a moral agent because it's not a rational agent. Like you need rationality online because it's only rational creatures that can kind of deliberate and go through reasoning and then either decide rightly or wrongly to pursue a good or bad course of action. Right. So moral agency is concomitant with rationality. If you don't have rationality, you don't have moral agents. That's one thing I think it's important to realize. But we're rational beings. Right. So what's good for us will depend on our nature. And I think God is the one who ultimately grants and gives nature.

So God is kind of undergirding all of this, but we can reflect on what the good life is as Aristotle did just by reflecting what human nature is. And, you know, the kind of traditional definition is we're rational animals, right? So we are animals, but we're animals with a distinct power, a distinct power of rationality, that goes above the sort of sensory appetites that the other animals have, right? And it would be argued that this is a power that's different, not just in degree, but different in kind, right? Even the smartest primates, they can't engage in mathematical reasoning. They don't know syntactically the difference between man bites dog and dog bites man. Like there's a whole new power about us

that is different in degree and not just kind of any of the other animals, right? It's truly distinctive. The higher order ability to form concepts, to reason via the canons of logic, modus pollens, modus tonens, all these things like to do wick rotations or whatever, like nobody else is doing that. Then we know like maybe aliens are doing it, but it seems pretty distinctive of us. So, okay, we're rational being. So then, you know what, what's good for us will be what, well, what perfects our nature? Well, certainly because we're rational, we're rational being. So then, you know what, what's good for us will be what, well, what perfects our nature? Well, certainly because we're rational, we're naturally oriented towards truth. Well, shunning ignorance and discovery of truth about things is really good for us,

right? So the good in traditional ethics is a very functional concept, right? It's what perfects you as the kind of thing that you are. You actualize a certain potential that you are at a ready disposition to achieve, right? And if you fulfill that potential, you become more intelligent. You learn the truth about things. People naturally and secretly say, that's good, right? And it's bad to stay ignorant because then you're kind of intentionally malfunctioning. You're failing to flourish as the type of thing you are. Now, even before Christianity or apart from Christianity, pagan thinkers, they linked

this to God and religion in a sense that, well, if we think that God is kind of like the source and summit, right? He's the kind of foundation of all reality. He's the reason why anything exists rather than not. Then it seems like, at the very least, like our ultimate perfection would be to know God, right? So like, you know, heaven was kind of for the philosophers in a sense, right? Certainly, Plato has his form and realm of the forms and stuff like that, but that's kind of a more philosophical link between morality, perfection, and God. Like we're oriented towards truth. And if you have reasons to think that the kind of foundation of all of that is the divine,

then that's kind of like what we're hunting out at the end of the day. Like that's where we're ultimately meant to get to. And, you know, we have modern philosophers like Bernard Lonergan, who says, whatever else God is, God is the complete set of answers is the complete set of questions that can be coherently asked about reality. Whether we'll ever be able to fully wrap our mind around that, of course, is of great contention, but that's certainly the highest like achievement that we could try to ever get to. Right. But we're not just rationality and isolation. We're also, we're also animals, right? So there's other animal aspects about us that are good for us. Like it's good for us to eat nutrition, right?

It's good for us to take care of our bodies, right? It's good for us to be healthy. It's good for us to engage actually in exercise and keep our bodies healthy because whatever else our flourishing depends on, it's going to be frustrated if we're severely unhealthy, right? So we could even say that there's at least a general moral obligation to probably exercise and eat right and take care of yourself because that relates strongly to our embodied animal nature, right? And if you don't, you also end up imposing costs on others inevitably and on society. And as not just a rational animal, but a rational social animal, that's another aspect of our nature. It is good for me to get along with others,

right? So this is where you can actually see what is really good for us actually does tend to also be useful. It also tends to be pragmatically useful. It is good for me to treat others with respect and not kill them, but that also is useful because then they probably won't try and kill me, right? So it perfects me. It's really good for me, but it's also conducive to flourishing of society as well. So it's a big both and, there's not an either or here. Now I forget what originally said. Oh, it was about the theodicy. Yeah, just on evil. And I was kind of bumbling around trying to find some words. So suffering and evil, why does it happen? Well, I mean, there's various kind of called soul building theodicies out there. I'm not a specialist in them, but the idea is that

it seems like maybe there's certain goods that would only be possible if God created a world where people could fail, they could mess up. What would that be? Goods like empathy, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, maybe even the incarnation and atonement if you're a Christian. And it's not wrong of God to make, he wouldn't will it directly, but he might set up an arena where that sort of stuff is possible, where we can kind of have a hero's journey, if you will, and really kind of form and mold our moral character with trials and stuff like that. So that's a whole class of theodicies. People can take it or leave it if they want, but it seems to kind of be what you were sort of dancing around or hinting at. There's other aspects of it too, as well as that suffering can be medicinal. This would be a theodicy of a great lady philosopher named Eleanor Stump. She's got a beautiful book called Wandering

in Darkness. And she wants to argue that God will only allow suffering and evil to us to the extent that it delivers some outweighing benefit primarily to the sufferer, whatever that will be, or at least the possibility of an outweighing benefit primarily to the sufferer. Now, you have to link that to a certain conception of what a benefit is to a human being. And of course, she's thinking of it from a Christian perspective, which ultimately would be justification and salvation and other things like that. So God may allow suffering and evil to bring you to a point of justification,

to bring you to a point of maybe even seeking God or something like that. But even more than that, Mike, to your point, it goes further because the way kind of Stump thinks about it in Christian theology is like, once you have faith, it's almost kind of like enlisting in the army. Like now you're like, all right, let's go.

And now it's about moral perfection. And that might actually invite even more suffering and evil in the sense that it really shapes you and really forms you. And this is interesting in the Catholic tradition, because if you read the lives of the saints, they're often lives of tremendous, tremendous suffering, like agonizing type of stuff. But they take like almost a sick glee in it, right? Now, why would that be? Well, because there's some type of outweighing benefit that they have in these afflictions that increases them in terms of like whole person flourishing,

like how to flourish as a whole person, not just any part of a person. So I don't know if that's consistent with what you said, but it wouldn't be surprising that even if you're pursuing the good life, as you think about it, again, from certain traditions and certainly from Christianity that, or just because you're pursuing the good life doesn't mean that you might not encounter serious suffering and serious hardship still. And there might actually even be reasons that you would still encounter it, but you can trust that if you deal with that and you continue to pursue the morally good life and pursue virtues that some outweighing and some greater goods will be brought out because of that in this game that might cause it. So to your kind of question that threw a bunch of things out there, I just wanted to throw a

bunch of things back. So there you go. Yeah. That's an interesting response for sure. And ultimately maybe one just consoling factor is we will experience something that will help answer some of these questions, hopefully later rather than sooner, where when we die, maybe it's just going to, that's it. That's the end of Pat. That's the end of Mike. It all just goes black. And okay.

There's no cosmic justice. Yeah, whatever. Fine. I guess we don't have to worry about it, right? We're not going to be around to worry about that. Or if something else happens, then something else is going to happen. But I always enjoy the discussions. And to that point of just that you were making regarding the evil, maybe there's a purpose for it, the things happening personally. Again,

it's one of those things that whether it's ultimately true or not, to me, doesn't matter so much. Again, this is just my pragmatic bent, right? That it's useful to live as if that were true, or at least as if some part of that is true, at least that you can take something that is traumatic or take something that is evil that is done to you and use it to further perfect yourself or use it maybe as an impetus to double down on your efforts and flourish more because of it. And of course that, I mean, that's an idea that spans the set, spans the millennia and spans different philosophies. What's the other option, right? Well, there is another option. You could just become a victim, for example.

Yeah, just be resentful and hateful and vindictive. And like, do you really want to live that way? Right. And I was doing a podcast. Maybe I should have given, I know I've been on your show a number of times, so I don't want to repeat the whole backstory, but you know, like I was an atheist for many years, right? I'm somebody who by engaging in this sort of the whole, mostly the philosophy of religion world and evaluating the arguments like came out on the other side, if you will. So like, I have a deep appreciation of a lot of the stuff of this topic from both perspectives, because I've lived it on both sides. And to you, Mike, regarding theodicies, I haven't spent a whole lot of time there. I've spent a lot of time on defenses. In fact, like I said, I have a serious article under review right now offering

one of those. What was the point? Oh, yeah, the point was this. I was doing a podcast the other day, and somebody kind of came in on the live stream and said, hey, I'm like, I'm kind of an atheist or an agnostic, but like, I'm convinced that like the Christian ethic generally is true. So like, I'm just going to live my life that way. And me and Jim were like, dude, like, I don't know what more somebody could really ask you at that point. Right. And this is kind of where the classic like Pascal's wager turns in where it's like, okay, maybe you're like 50, 50. Like maybe you've looked at all the arguments, right? And you've narrowed it down.

You're like, okay, it's either Christianity or atheism, right? Say you've got yourself there intellectually, but you just can't break the stalemate. Then what Pascal would say, if you read them right, is that if you're just completely at a stalemate, then you weigh the pros and cons of living one way rather than the other. And of course, he's going to argue that it's completely asymmetric, right? That you should just, you should live this way, but you shouldn't fake it, right? You don't fake belief. What you do is you just live a life of sincere seeking. So you could, you know, live the Christian ethic.

You could go to philosophy or scripture studies and, you know, try and vet it as best as you can. You could pray conditionally, right? You can say like, God, if there is a God, save my soul if I have a soul, right? So you don't lie to yourself. But if you're just stuck and it seems like there's only everything to gain

from living one way and almost nothing to lose compared to the other, it then becomes rational to become a sincere seeker and to conform yourself in that direction. That's Pascal's wager properly understood. It's after you've done the arguments and you're still at a stalemate, then you do the weighing of pros and cons. And I mean, this isn't just like in terms of the moral life, which I think is hugely important and a potential afterlife,

which is good too. But there's, I mean, there's tons of sociological research on this too, that people who live a religious spiritual life tend to be happier, less depressed, less anxious, less health problems. So even just in the here and now life, you're going to probably be a lot better off. You could make an evidence-based argument that you should probably find something. I don't think that that research is- It wasn't Christian specific. It was just generally religious and spiritual, right? Yeah. It's an evidence-based tip to find something beyond atheism or just materialism. Well, I think we should probably just wrap up here before we go on for another hour. We didn't even touch the main topic.

We'll do it on the next one. We will. We went all over the place. This has been a blast, man. These are always fun. I hope people enjoy it. And again, apologies if I got anything wrong or caricatured anybody. I'm always happy to be corrected on any particular positions.

We covered a lot of stuff. So I always fear that these conversations are always the most fun because they're off the cuff. Like we don't prepare anything, but the nature of these conversations is it's off the cuff. So you can, you can be a little sloppy at times, right? I feel like the next one, I'm going to spend a little bit of time, at least preparing. Well, I actually did. I did think about, I thought we were going to be talking about liberalism and then we went, but Hey, it was fun. So on the next one, this would be good groundwork because we talked about different moral theories and what the good is. And liberalism is a sort of political philosophy that claims to be, as we'll talk about

next time, we won't get into it now, generally impartial to kind of competing ethical theories. It tends to have a sort of neutrality about it. And one of the biggest critiques I have of liberalism is it's just a pseudo neutrality. It's not neutral at all, right? It's completely superficial. It ends up being bogus at the end of the day. So doing kind of, I guess, the moral stage setting of like these deeper discussions of morality and what human flourishing is, and if there is an objective good for us, like all that will bear in to political philosophy. And it's interesting because it was, I actually started in political philosophy. I was super interested in political philosophy in high school. And I realized like

you try and form a coherent system of political thought, but it always bumps up against us with ethical questions, right? Always. And then you got to be like, well, I need to do moral philosophy to make sense of political philosophy, but then moral philosophy pushes you up against questions of philosophical anthropology and metaphysics. And it's like, well, I need to know what and who I am and kind of like what reality is as a whole. So then you just get sucked down those rabbit holes. And that's where I've spent most of my time is in mostly metaphysics and sort of ethics. And then I like now I just kind of like peek into political philosophy. So it's not by no means a specialist in it, but we'll have enough

that we can we could probably have a good jam session. I look forward to it. And let's just quickly let people know where they can find you, your podcast, your work along philosophical lines. If they want to read like your book, for example, how to think about God, or if they would also like to know about fitness stuff. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So my podcast is the Pat Flynn show. It's on iTunes and fairly recently on YouTube. So we started putting like the video episodes up and stuff like that. So you'll see, yeah, a lot of fitness stuff there, but also some more philosophy. Some of it pretty accessible. Other times we go fairly deep.

Like recently I actually read like one of my papers. So if you need help curing your insomnia, you can tune into that. And then chroniclesofstrength.com is my website. So you can get on my email list and check out the kettlebell workouts there. And it's very generalist and probably very confusing to somebody who's never been there before, but that's the

place to go. Awesome. Well, thanks again, Pat. Look forward to the next one. Thank you, brother. All right. Well, that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don't mind doing me a favor, please do leave a quick review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to me from in whichever app you're listening to me in, because that not only convinces people that they should check out the show, it also increases search visibility. And thus it helps more people find their way to me and learn how to get fitter, leaner, stronger, healthier, and happier as well. And of course, if you want to be notified

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or if you have questions really relating to anything that you think I could help you with, definitely send me an email. That is the best way to get a hold of me, mikeatmusclefullife.com. And that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.