Within Reason - #75 Destiny on Jordan Peterson, Voting, and Political Principles

Episode Date: July 7, 2024

Steven Bonnell II is a popular American political streamer known online as Destiny. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everyone. I just started a substack. So if you're interested in reading my writings, then you can do that right now. There's already stuff to read at Alex O'Connor.com. You were recently, well, you were banned on Twitch last year, a couple of years ago. And your appeal just got denied. I get rejected every six months, you know. Oh, you try again every few months. I saw like online somewhere that it was like last week or something, your appeal got denied. You don't know why you were banned, right? Um, not officially, but I've got like friends that I think I'd know why I was banned. Oh yeah. And what do they tell you? I think it was because I was fighting with, it was a time on Twitch when there was the big debate over trans athletes, not just for Twitch, obviously, it's for the entire United States. And my position has been that like if you've gone through puberty, and then you transition afterwards, you probably shouldn't be competing at NCAA level or higher. sure and then I obviously would get into lots of fights for lots of people over this and I think I uttered something along the lines of like don't waste your time arguing with trans activists on Twitter they're subhuman it's not worth it and I think that apparently that comment got interpreted as me saying like all trans people are subhuman or something and then they stretch

that in like a hate speech ban I was like oh yeah but they didn't tell you why they just well when the email comes it just says you've been permanently suspended for hate speech or hateful conduct but you do get to appeal once every six months is the idea do you think they'll ever reverse that I mean it just seems not unless the culture there significantly changes sure which which could happen at some point you know we sort of see this Twitter shift take over and suddenly I will say that when Elon must have took over Twitter and everybody was saying it's going to become this like right wing cesspit I did think to myself come on like you're not even going to notice it's like it's like a change of ownership

like who the hell cares but I must say that Twitter has recently become they're only like 50% right it's like yeah yeah right it's it's a totally different beast now like I like opening Twitter I can feel like something shifted in the air. Something like that could happen at Twitch, I don't know, but don't you think it's a bit outrageous that they can take away someone's livelihood without even needing to tell them why? I mean, I would obviously say that. Yeah, of course.

But like, because, you know, a lot of people like to debate the whole sort of private company publisher thing, like should social media have sort of, should it be legally bound to protecting free speech and this kind of stuff? But this kind of question really, really brings. it out because in a sense, you think, well, there's no real way that everybody who ever gets banned for anything, we don't have the resources to put a full sort of investigation inquiry and human checking of everything they've ever said and done. But it does seem like for people of a certain size on the platform, people who are significantly depending upon it for their

livelihood, like these companies hold so much power that it does feel like they should maybe begin to occupy a different legal category. I don't know what you think social media companies are in this debate about sort of, you know, publishers, private companies, sort of pseudo-new public squares? Like, what do you think social media platforms actually are? I mean, I think they're private companies. I think they have the right to do as they wish. Now, obviously, there's a difference between what do you have the right to do versus what ought you do. Everyone is the right to lie and cheat on partners, but I mean, should you do it? Probably not. Private companies probably should have the right to ban who they want and not ban who they don't want to. I do agree that,

It's a little bit scary that, like, the public square has obviously moved on to social media companies. And there are certain political strains of thought that at least, especially over COVID, was probably when it was the worst that seemed to be getting, like, deleted from a lot of public spaces. And there's a legitimate question to ask about, you know, what does your right to speech mean if you have no platforms on which to speak? I think it's a legitimate question to be asked there. But I think the reason why we don't hear about this too much is because, one, I think these companies do largely try to stay within the realm of appeasing, like, 90, 8% of people. Like, for as much as I, you know, don't like being banned and all that, most people that get banned from these platforms probably need to be banned, right? Like, 99%

of people that get banned. Yeah, yeah. If you go through for every like one, like, oh my God, that was so unfair. It's like people spamming the N-word or whatever stuff. And then it seems like when there's enough blowback, I do like that social media has kind of like tended more towards the community note or like the little or like the little YouTube note at the bottom as opposed to just like straight banning content or de-listing it. So hopefully it continues to tend in that direction. Are you signed up to be one of the reviewers of community notes? I remember when community notes first came out, I clicked some button or something, which they were looking for the people who actually come up with them, right? And I've never contributed, so they should

probably get rid of me from it at some point. But it means that I see about 10 or 15 times more posts that are community noted. I see suggested community notes. Are you signed up for this as well? Do you have this? No, but a lot of people my fan base are, so I see the, yeah, and you It's so fascinating, man, because you're seeing people argue in real time about sort of what a sort of fair bit of context is. And they're often just sort of calling each other like slurs. So they're just like you're just being the stupidest person I've heard. This is obviously not necessary for a note or something. It's really fascinating to see what people actually are debating as relevant there.

But it is always just going to be some arbitrary decision that people make as to whether something is needs noting, whether it should be banned, whether it shouldn't. And I think to myself like, yeah, I'm thinking about like the development of governments over. time and how there was a time when there was basically just rich people and poor people, landed people and surfs. And at some point, people just decided there's this thing, there's this sort of institution, this thing that we're sort of calling government, the people who govern. And we just think there's something so significant about the fact that they sort of own this public square. They own the land that we all live on, they own the spaces in which we interact, that we should just come up with these special rules about this particular organization and

institution that say things like they're not allowed to tell us, you know, what we can and can't say. They're not allowed to tell us what our, you know, beliefs are going to be about religion and this kind of stuff. And people just agree that because these, this institution is so powerful, it needs certain rules. And this develops over a very long time. And eventually we sort of come to a rough agreement that there are certain things that governments can't do because of just the nature of what a government is. It's a very particular kind of organization. I'm thinking social media has been around for like a decade, a couple of decades. And it's already proving itself to be so significant that in this debate about, you know, is it a private company or is it not? I feel like

there's maybe space for beginning to treat it as its own unique, sui generis, like, uh, type of organization. It is a bit like something that does own the new public square. And because of that, it seems too straightforward to just say, it's a private company, it can do what it want, especially because social media is not, people often call it the public square. It's not the public square. Because the public square, you don't get to control who comes in and out. You sort of show up and there you are. It's like a public square that you, without even realizing that you're doing it, sort of only allow in a certain kind of person who'll interact with you in a certain kind of way. I mean, these algorithms are infinitely more intelligent than we're possibly capable of understanding.

And so as much as you think you're sort of, oh, I'm trying to follow people from every side, I'm trying to engage in the debates, it knows how many milliseconds you spend looking at this and this. It knows how you sort of interact. with it. It knows what you like. And so it's not so much a public square. It's like this self-reinforcing walled garden that keeps out everything, not that you don't like, but that you don't sort of engage with and interact with and want to interact with in some way. This is like a unique beast, surely. And I feel like just saying like, look, man, it's a private company, they should be able to sort of ban who they like. It feels like it doesn't take into

account how serious of a shift this is in the history of our species, really. I think that when the United States was being created, I think that you had a unique opportunity in time where you had incredibly intelligent people coming together to basically build what they thought was like the best type of government possible. This wasn't done strictly by democracy. You didn't have a ton of peasants and ordinary people just voting on every single provision in the Constitution. You didn't have a ton of people that didn't really know why they were there giving opinions on what should be or what shouldn't be. you know, included in, you know, the federal government and the Constitution, you had, like, a very intentional process by people that were working from first principles to try to draft what they saw as a government that would execute on the things that they all collectively felt were the most important things to execute on. And I agree with you that I think that social media companies, I think the internet in general is kind of like a paradigm shift to where we're accelerating and moving in ways that are a little bit outside of what's happened over the past, like, 150, 200 years. And that as part of that paradigm shift, I think it's pretty easy to argue that our current

like structure of government and the way that we approach legislation doesn't really encapsulate well how to deal with these things, right? Like, well, you know, should a private company be forced to host a certain type of speech? Well, you know, we probably shouldn't be able to force them to host a certain type of speech. That makes sense when the private company, you know, is like two offices and a couple cities. But it's interesting when that, when like, if you get delisted, if like four companies don't like you, you essentially have no voice, right? Like if YouTube decides that you're banned,

if Twitter decides that you're banned, and if Facebook decides that you're banned, that's probably like 80% of like your reach, or depending on what field you're in, it could be like 95% of your reach. It's just completely gone. I think that the issue, though, is that when we go to,

there's like two things. We can either kind of like try to squeeze it into our current legislative framework, which is essentially what we have to do because we're not going to go back to the drawing board. So we either squeeze it into our currently existing framework or two, we try to kind of like redesign the framework

a little bit to make it more adaptable. But the issue is that now we can't work with a group of learned people from first principles. Now we have a democracy that I don't know of 80% of the people in the United States even know why we have the things that we do have. So how can you possibly argue for anything relating to what a company ought to look like when this country is torn in half over what free speech ought to look like or what a private company ought to look like or what a collectivized, you know, a set of rights ought to be, you know, how they ought to be protected or doled out to people. So yeah, I think that because we've spent so much time not really defending the foundations of our country, like is liberalism good? Do we need to go to more

like a populist government? Is capitalism evil? Should we be more collective? Like, because we don't have answers to that, how are we possibly going to come together to create a framework from one of those first principles to deal with the social media companies? Government's quite different because, of course, it has this monopoly on power. This is the thing that makes it like totally different to any other kind of organization. It can like hold a gun to your head. and force you to do things in a way that companies can't. They sort of exert a different kind of power, and maybe an equally important kind of power,

but it's different for that reason. But, like, this always comes about as, like, a long series of historical struggle. Everything about, I mean, not so much the United States, because this is more recent and is, like you say, founded intentionally by intelligent people. But if you look at, like, Britain and the British Constitution, it literally isn't written down anywhere.

The British Constitution is, in part, made up, of traditions. I don't mean it, like, relies upon tradition, I mean, like, literally speaking, it is made up partly of traditions alone, right? Which is like the most bizarre thing in the world. But of course, it's like this ancient country that just sort of has a bunch of wars and has a bunch of conflicts and has a bunch of protests and people want representation and all this kind of stuff battling with the king. And eventually you just sort of develop these ideas, you know, the Magna Carta and you get

like free speech and you get all this kind of stuff. And I feel like any way that social media is going to evolve into a very unique company with a very, an organization with a very unique set of regulations, it's also going to necessarily have to happen through a sort of historically contingent series of struggles. But like, there are certain companies that have very specific rules that don't really apply elsewhere, financial regulations on big banks, for example. They're very specific laws, which kind of seem a little, they're sort of tailor-made because of the kind of industry that it is, laws around like insider trading and stuff like this.

It's very specific. laws about what newspapers are allowed to publish, this kind of stuff. Like, I mean, what do you make, for example, of this argument that the moment social media platform starts saying, we're not going to allow this person on because we don't want this kind of speech on our platform, as long as all the speech on social media is publicly accessible to everybody and is promoted in, you know, like algorithmically, they essentially become a publisher like a newspaper, and therefore if a newspaper were to tweet out of a falsity, they could get sued for libel, whereas if somebody does that on Twitter, Twitter can't be sued

for that. What do you think about that sort of friction? It's a nonsense argument made by people that have never read Section 230 in their entire life. I think the Section 230 protections are good and essential for platforms to be able to function. Just because somebody decides what type of speech they do or don't want on a particular platform doesn't mean they magically have come to the status of being a publisher. I think that platforms that host content from other people should be liable if they fail to act against stuff that is infringing on certain laws. So like the hosting of like obviously, you know, like copyright violations or offensive material that people report like child pornography, stuff like that. I think that this type of stuff obviously should be

acted upon. Well, as long as they, in good faith, enforce the laws of the United States and so far as they're requested to, then I think they should enjoy those protections. I mean, we can think about getting rid of them for the worst things that we can imagine, and we can say, like, oh, good, yeah, now they won't be able to be biased. But if you're engaging in anything, like, with any amount of intellectual honesty, you should always think of like, well, okay, let's say I enact this thing. What's the worst application of this particular thing? And we can imagine a million different ways that removing Section 230 protections, because you ban certain users just doesn't work. Like, if I create a social media platform where every single day, I want everybody to post, like,

the cutest cat pictures they have, and then a bunch of assholes show up on my site, start posting dog pictures and I say I'm banning every single user that posts a dog picture, have I lost my Section 230 protections and now if some guy posts like a video of him like hurting a cat, am I like criminally liable now for creating this kind? Like it just doesn't, none of it makes sense. Like the Section 230 protections are essential just because you ban certain types of speech on platform doesn't magically make you a publisher. We'll get back to Stephen in just a second. But first, trust in our news media is at an all time low and people often make up their minds about important and subtle issues based on headlines alone. And that's not to mention the

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pressure. I can see a percentage breakdown of the political leaning of the sources and the ownership information, but also look at the different headlines. The right-wing Brightbart says Stanford's internet observatory censorship machine crumbles under its own weight, whereas the left-leaning NPR says a major disinformation research team's future is uncertain after political attacks. By comparing these directly in the same place, you can see right in front of you how political bias can shape reporting on the same story. Ground News is a brilliant tool for becoming a more savvy consumer of news. Go to ground.com. You can use my link for 40% off their unlimited access vantage plan. And with that said, back to Stephen. I do agree that intuitively, it feels like there's something wrong about a large social media platform selectively enforcing certain political points of view. But the idea, of using the hammer of like removing section 230 privileges is pretending that that fix anything I think is ridiculous yeah I mean the part of the problem of this is that there's just so much content on social media like a newspaper is is publishing a handful of writers

like hand selected in a way that social media companies hand select who aren't on the platform rather than hand selecting who is that seems to be the difference and maybe that's the principal distinction between what really makes you a publisher is is it's like what your handpicking, whether it's who writes or who doesn't write. Handpicking and approving, right? It's not like anybody can submit, I mean, you can write comments in New York Times, but they don't just have, like, random articles posted by random users. Like, they commission people to write these, and then an editor reviews it,

and then they publish it under their name. Yeah, to approve a certain set of content in a newspaper, it doesn't mean you disapprove of everything that you didn't put in there. Similarly, to disapprove of a certain kind of content on social media, doesn't mean you approve of everything that is on there. That seems fair enough to me. but it's obviously a big and more complicated question like I say than just sort of well social media is just like any other kind of private company it's obviously got something

special about it so what do you think in terms of the encroachment of government regulations on social media what's sort of your broad picture of how legally we should treat social media companies and what they should be legally like bound to do um I think the questions of law are pretty simple I don't think about them much I think the harder thing is figuring out like what do we want it to look like, like before we even hit the legal level. And I think that's where most of the disagreement is because the problem is you've got fundamental disagreements in the United States over what a lot of this country should look like. And I think sometimes people are a bit too keen to blame the system.

When the problem isn't the system, the system is actually working quite well. The reason why nothing is working in the system right now is because the people that it's representing are historically and genuinely divided against each other in terms of what they want. So, I mean, like I've got thoughts personally for what I think social media company should or shouldn't look like. but I mean there's going to be a lot of people that don't have any idea like where they would even begin to have those discussions like again like a lot of people will say things like oh yeah like we should ban everything you know everything hateful and you know well what counts as hateful I think generally social media platforms are kind of revolving around this um like what the protected categories are in the United States so like don't make fun of somebody like race gender sexuality stuff like that but then even that gets a little bit weird around the edges because we see certain groups of people for instance could be like racist towards white people and nobody really cares about that and that doesn't get banned or you're not supposed to be like discriminatory against nationalities, but obviously Ukrainians saying things about Russians or Israelis and Palestinians. Yeah, it's really complicated. I think that fundamentally

I think the issue is democracies and everything worked when it was very educated people voting or when you're voting by issues that can be resolved very simply by like eyes and nays. But when things are so unbelievably complicated these days. And you have to vote for like, who do I think is going to, you know, regulate or nominate a good like securities at exchange commissions head in order to crack down on market rigging in cryptocurrency environments that span like global market. Like, does an average person even have the slightest idea about how to vote on that? I don't know. I think it's a, we're stretching the limitations of how our government can work. And from first principles, not obviously even agree on what anything should look like.

so yeah. Are you glad to live in a democracy that's governed by popular vote? Um, I think so. I like the United States more than any other country, so sure. Every system has the, every system has big problems, but I like what we have right now. Well, there's that, there's that famous Churchill quote that gets spoken to death. I, I tend to think that maybe democracy is the worst form of government, including all of the ones that we've tried. I mean, I had a guy on a podcast called Jason Brennan, who's written a book called Against Democracy, and he, he advocates for so-called epistocracy, that as sort of rule of the knowledgeable, which instantly runs into a lot of problems. But I don't know, I think a lot of people see democracy and voting as a sort of unhappy

compromise. It's the best we got. Are you more optimistic about voting, or is that how you view it too? I think that's kind of how we view it. I mean, I think that having a government that was only ran by like the most educated people, your like technocracy or whatever, I think in theory sounds like probably one of the best ideas. But, I mean, in practice, obviously, you've got the, the first.

that just because somebody is educated in a particular field doesn't mean they might make the best policy decisions. People are obviously going to be motivated to represent, you know, people who are like them and their own kind, and I'm sure you're going to have different representations of people across different educated categories. And, yeah, so obviously that runs into a whole bunch of different issues. I think the system we have right now has a good level of checks and balances and compromises built into it. I just wish that the culture was a bit better. What do you think is the principal justification for having a vote, right? Because some people, I mean, when voting originally sort of becomes a thing, there's this idea that it's like practically beneficial. If you allow

lots of people who know a lot to vote, then the best sort of answer will come about. Then there's a sort of transformation that happens where it's no longer sort of like, well, I think that government runs best if you allow me to vote as well. It's sort of, well, no, I know, I have a right to vote. You know, because because you're making rules about me, because you're taxing me, I have a right to have my say, which is a different thing to sort of, this will sort of help us hear a varied group of voices or whatever. And so some people think that voting is a good thing because it's efficient. Some people say that voting is the best way to get the best kind of government. Some people say that it's because people know best what they

want for themselves and therefore everybody should essentially just act like egoists and eventually you get this happy compromise. And some people just say it's like there's this thing called the right to vote that's just like a moral principle. I deserve to have a say in the rules that govern me. I mean, which of those approaches do you take to voting? I think there's a few things that are important. One is it affects all of us and we pay into it generally. So I mean, like as long as you're living under a thing that you kind of didn't consent to, you're born into the government and you more or less are bound by its laws unless you decide to leave, since we're all impacted by it. And generally we all, or we pay tax.

engage with it, we all should have some kind of saying how it's run. I think that's one important thing is, like a second important thing is it forces people that are in charge to make their arguments to an average person. If the way that you run the government and the thing you want to do is so important, then you should be able to justify that to a citizen that has to pay taxes in order to fund your ideas. And then the, um, oh shit, I had a third one. That's all I got running out. Well, about this sort of you should be able to explain yourself and justify yourself to people. I mean, some people make the argument, especially these anti-democracy types. Oh, Oh, shit, real quick.

Go ahead. The third one was buy-in. The fact that every single person has a vote, unfortunately, is we're not doing that in terms of executing on that vote right now because not everybody exercises their vote. I think the buy-in is important as well. Like, every single person should feel like they are somewhat bought into the project of the United States that I have a vote.

So what do you think about the, I think, like, Australia, like, forces people to vote, right? Do you think that's a good idea? No. Because I feel like... I feel like not voting is as much expressing your right to vote as a vote. I think, as far as I'm aware, like, you're allowed to go and, like, spoil the ballot, right? You're allowed to go and sort of vote for nobody, but you have to show up and register that. Because I agree with you that, I mean, the right to vote needs the right not to vote.

It's like saying you have a right to free speech, but you must say something. A right to free speech means a right to silence as well. And so a right to vote must mean a right not to vote. But you said a moment ago this buy-in, this fact that, you know, we're not doing it very well because not everybody's voting. I think that's always going to be the case. People feel very pessimistic about their vote. But even people who do vote don't really think that their vote is going to make a difference, right? Like, people say, your vote matters.

Like, they're essentially lying to you. Like, it actually doesn't, but we just sort of live in a better society if people act as though it does, right? It's one of, I mean, that's weird. I mean, it kind of does, right? Like, there's one, like, a neuron in your brain doesn't matter, but all of them do. And if enough of them stop working, I mean, you have a huge problem, right? That's the thing. I mean, if you're in a decision where, like, if you've got like this really tired neuron that sort of doesn't want to do its job anymore and it says, I'm going to retire.

and it doing so just has no effect on my brain, then I wouldn't sort of, I wouldn't judge it for going like, yeah, sure, I mean, what's the point to me even bothering? Now, if all of my neurons did that, that would be disastrous. Well, you'd have to then, right? It's a universal principle. You would have to make sure that that particular thing knows that it has to act in such a way, because if you allow it for one, you must allow it for others,

and then when that thought becomes pervasive, now you've destroyed the... An argument that I've heard in a different context, This is about sort of your purchasing power, so things like buying animal products or contributing to companies that you think you should be boycotting. And they were trying to make a point about how tiny or impact is. And they imagined some ludicrous scenario where like it was something like there's this like child tied up to a torture device or something. And the amount of torture that they receive is tied to a decibel meter that's on the table. right so there's it's recording the level of sound in the room and the louder the sound the more the torture and in front of the speaker is a television which is playing live footage

of like a football game and the the sort of crowd is the one making the noise which determines how much that that child is going to suffer now you're a person in the crowd at the football game and you know the scenarios going on your decision to like yell in a yell in a cheer along with like hundred thousand other people who are doing the same thing doesn't make a difference like it's not going to change the decibel meter it's not going to increase the amount of torture and yet still some people might want to say that you'd be morally culpable for doing so and obviously if everybody would to stop cheering it would be better but I think it's can't be this way it seems like a paradox it can't be it's not a paradox it can't be this way like that you mean it can't

be the case that it makes no difference it can't be the case that people are allowed to think that way. Right, but that's interesting. It's not, it's not, it can't, like, it's not, it can't be the case. It's it can't be the case that people should be allowed to think that that's the case. It can't be because if it is, then government fails. And then we have nothing. We go back to, I read this book recently called, I think it was culture and conflict in the Middle East. Sure. And it talks a lot about, um, about these concepts of how tribes were organized throughout the Arab world in the Middle East and how they managed to function without states. and it's very, very, very interesting to see how another total society can be organized.

The fascinating part about the way that the tribal stuff was organized in Middle East was you had a wholly decentralized way of approaching decision-making, but the decision-making was always consistent throughout how all of these tribes function. A lot of it rests on this concept called balanced opposition, that the way that you would fight with other people and the way that you would defend your tribe or your land or your area had to do with like distance from uh nearest kin so like if i'm fighting with you um and and your uh we both have like the same grand grandparent right the two branches of us might uh let's say you come and you steal something of mine well my branch might come and and

get vengeance on you or take it back or find a way for you to make uh reparations to me to make things right but even if we're in that struggle if if somebody five grandfathers from us another tribe were to mess with us, we would instantly forget our differences and we would come together with other people as part of that lineage. And then we would all go and we would get into conflict with that. Sure. And this way of having it so that, you know, brothers would always fight with brothers. Cousins would fight with cousins against other, like you would always follow this line. What it ensured was this like decentralized process of decision making that actually balanced the opposition on both sides such that it allowed for some level of stability without any government,

without any top-down leadership because every single individual knew that they had to satisfy their function because, for instance, if you did get into a fight and I was your cousin and we were fighting somebody with a patronage that was far enough away,

if I don't stand up to protect you, you wouldn't stand up to protect me. And I knew that. So I had to. Everybody was looking at each other knowing that that's how it had to act. Now, we've replaced that form of society with more evolved state structures.

Okay. But the state structure relies on things like a constitution that we all believe in that's in substitution of familial lines. I don't have to be related to you to fight for your right, but we have to be willing to participate in that form of government.

Because if we don't, and if we all stand around and look at each other, that's arguably one of the weaker forms of our system that you have like free rider problems. You don't have free rider problems in tribal societies. If you don't stand up and protect

and defend your family or your tribe or kinship when you're supposed to, then you're left in the wilderness and you die. You get eaten because you have nobody to protect you. So when I say it can't, be this way. It cannot be that people are unwilling to stand up and vote or have the participation in democracy that they need to in order to ensure that the system functions because if enough

people stop because they think, oh, well, my one vote doesn't matter. Then, okay, well, if that's the case, then what happens is we have to switch to another society where your one decision does matter. And that's because if you don't step up and are willing to fight and die for your particular family, you're going to get killed by somebody else. I don't want to go back to that society. So we have to tell people that it is correct that if you walk into a free, stand and you steal one orange, the guy's not going to starve to death. But if everybody looks, if everybody looks around and they see you steal an orange, you don't get in trouble for it, well, tomorrow, the guy's not going to have any oranges because everybody's going to steal

one. So that's, yeah. Well, no, this is the attraction of the sort of categorical imperative. Yes, yeah. Just sort of just act in the way that you would like everybody else to act in similar circumstances, right? And I totally understand that, but it does seem, I mean, I used the term paradox for a few different reasons, but it does seem to me that, while I understand that's the case, like suppose you knew for a fact how many people were voting for a particular candidate, and you literally knew for a fact that if you get out of bed and go to the ballot box, you're going to be adding on another vote that doesn't make a difference. It doesn't seem sort of, you know, morally inexcusable for me. Even if I support the system of democracy

that I live in, to be like, well, then I'm going to stay at home because I know that this is the case. The problem is that that's paradoxical, because that's like always the situation you're in, basically. And yet if everybody acted like that, it would be a total disaster. So I think it's, I don't think it's paradoxical. I think that what you're describing is a very real free writer problem where somebody can essentially like join a system and have fun and not really do anything to participate possibly in it. So in a vacuum where it's an individual actor, I think that you're right, right? This is almost like a like a rule versus act utilitarian says it. Like in a singular event that if you do this particular thing, yeah,

there's no harm, no foul. But then if we understand that that is the case, that if one person could act that way, then on a more abstract level, when all of us are involved, well, now we have a responsibility to make sure that people don't act that way. So if we think that a friend is going to stay home and not vote because they know that their vote doesn't matter, well, we need to bully the fuck out of that person, make sure, hey, you need to get the fuck out and we need to go vote. Like, we have to do this. It's part of our civic duty, our civic responsibility. You can't think that you can get away with not voting because other people are going to think they're going to go out the street and kick your ass. We want everybody to know

that you have to participate in your democracy. It's so weird. It's almost like it's, it doesn't make a difference if you don't vote. But if we like recognize that. that fact and act in accordance with it, then it suddenly starts mattering that you don't vote. It's weird. It's so weird to me. I mean, like, your vote doesn't matter, but the idea of you voting is everything. That's the issue. And the idea is what carries from person to person, even if an individual might not. If you're sick and you're staying or whatever, that's fine. But if you don't think that you have that obligation, then that's because society's allowing you to think you don't have that obligation. If there's nothing special about you,

that means other people think that they don't have the obligation, which means it doesn't work anymore. This is what morality does so well as like a human concept of sort of like, you know, oh, well, why can't I do this one tiny little thing? Oh, because it's wrong. And that's it. It's just like, it's wrong. And as long as you embody that, as long as you internalize that, it's like, okay, society functions well, because even though if you fully rationalized it, you might be like, well, there's no reason. There's no societal harm in me doing this one particular act. But if everybody acted like that, it would be a disaster. So we just have this, like, rule that develops. Like, just don't do it. Just don't. It does matter. Even if you can't quite

figure out why. Like, here's a question. Suppose that there's an election and there's like an objectively immoral candidate to vote for, like an actual just super authoritarian fascist or like whatever kind of thing you don't like, you know, whatever it may be, just evil, personified. And there's an election for that candidate and another good candidate. And again, you know that the evil candidate is going to win. You know infallibly that they're going to get thousands more votes than the good candidate. You go to the ballot box anyway, because you're in the mood for it,

and you vote for the evil candidate. Knowing that if you didn't vote, he'd still win, whatever. Have you done something wrong? Whether or not you've done something wrong, truly you're just asking me like a question about my normative ethics at that point. I don't know.

I mean, you're at like, sneak it in there. Yeah, like if I think that you should live a virtuous life where you embody certain principles and you always act in accordance with those, even if you might not achieve some particular end, or even if you don't know some ideological imperative to do that. I hate normative ethics, so fuck that. I don't have an answer. I would probably, I would probably cuck out to somewhere of the

virtuous point to where, like, even if you are, even if you know that there might not necessarily be a positive end, you should embody a particular virtue. I think that's sensible. Yeah, in repeated circumstances, you are going to want to be able to rise. And every single time you perform a certain action, if you decide not to vote or vote evenly in one sense, you're probably making a mark, you're sculpting a block that's starting to look slightly different. And with every negative action, it takes you further and further away from whatever virtue wish to embody. So, I mean, like, you can always do the right thing. It's so complicated. And I don't want to, I mean, we did a sort of ethical chat the last time we spoke. I actually want to talk about other

things, but it becomes really interesting. I will say something that you, something that you had said right before this, though, oh, fuck, what was it? Right before you, you mentioned the voting, if you knew that a particular candidate was going to lose, what did you say right before that? Oh, one thing that's very difficult is our society has gotten very complicated. And I say that, this because the more abstract things become, the less your intuitions work. So for ethical principles, yeah, I would say less than 1% of society would be comfortable like watching a child like crying in the corner as he's forced to sew, you know, a particular piece of clothing for you.

But if you put enough distance between me and that person or enough like layers of abstraction, yeah, exactly. Well, then all of a sudden, well, you know, I don't know the kid over there. Let's make up my shirt or whatever. The more abstracted everything becomes, whether it's through time, meaning like it's It's a penalty way down the road, or whether it's through space, it's somebody away, you know, away from us. Those intuitions begin to fail us because oftentimes those particular bads are very abstract, but the goods are very concrete. I have nice clothes right now.

I feel that. There may be some bad, like, further down the road, but I can't intuitively sense that out. So cognitively, we have to commit to way more, like, abstract, intellectual philosophy, you know, ethics, whatever thought, to get there. And the same is true of like epistemic practice, too, or whatever, that like if we want to argue about, if we want to argue about whether or not it can fly, that's a belief that can be very quickly weeded out of society. We can jump out the window right now and afterwards, at least two people in this room will know whether or not humans can fly. And then we never have that belief again. But if we want to argue about the realities of like COVID or a vaccine or public health or anything like that, well, you can afford to be wrong for much longer because the penalties for making an incorrect decision there are so much further. removed from the actual decision, that your intuitions don't actually carry you to what's good

there. So when I talk about like the voting thing, is why I said it's so important to focus on it. We have to like cognitively approach us on an intellectual level to force people to do it because the harms and everything are so abstract. Who cares of one person just doesn't vote, you know? The second thing you said about democracy, the second point like sort of in its favor was that, look, if somebody is making a rule that affects you, they should have to be answerable to that. They should have to explain it to you. And you should have to, sort of assent or consent to what they're doing. Criticism people raised to this, to talk about your other point,

is they say this is kind of a little bit like somebody flying a plane and trying to figure out like, you know, what the pilot should be doing. And the pilot needs to decide whether to press, you know, the bloody A-120 button or the AW-30 button that's on the console somewhere, right? and they say, all right, well, you know, let's go and ask the passengers, what do they think? And even if you could sit them down, and ideally you'd say, well, ideally they'd be educated in how a plane works. And we'd educate our sort of passengers in how plane works, and so they'd be able to make informed decisions. Two things are the case. Firstly, not everybody's going to pay

attention. Not everybody's going to be good at that. But secondly, the plane is already in the air and flying. And if you've got a bunch of people who obviously don't know the difference, but somehow start still having sort of debates about it and start debating about, you know, they think that the person who wants to press one button is evil and immoral and they actually want to crash the plane and they hate the plane and they wish it turned around and this kind of stuff. You'd be like, this is ridiculous. You don't ask passengers to fly the plane. You ask the pilots to it because they know what they're talking about. People see this, people use this as an analogy for democracy too. What do you think of that, given your earlier statement that, you know, governments and elected

officials should have to be answerable to people? democratic societies that built planes. So we can look at it at the metaphorical sense, which we will, but if we look at it at the very real practical sense, democracies today have built planes, and they already decide who fly planes. So it's funny that somebody might pose that as a hypothetical, like, well, how do we decide what sense? We actually already have. That's already been solved for. So it's funny that on a hypothetical, the test the limits of democracy, it plays out in real life, and we actually already have. We've an incredibly safe culture of air travel in the United States. Metaphorically,

I mean, like, I would agree that this would be bad to leave up to direct democracy. But I feel like the challenges to this are that that challenge is a little bit juvenile and that like, okay, sure, from like a very basic sense, you know, if George Bush tomorrow needed to decide whether or not to nuke Iraq, I don't know if I would want the average American to vote yes or no, you know, on their phones to figure out if we're actually going to fire the nukes or not. I think that part of what a democracy does is you don't need to have people. that know how to do every single thing.

You just need to have people that are informed enough to vote on people that will do those things. So we have a representative democracy, right? So the goal wouldn't be that every single person in the plane is voting on what button to press. The goal might be like, okay, well, we're going to sit around and listen and these two or three people want to get up and they want to make the against why they think

they're the best to make that decision. And then you would sit there and you'd say, okay, well, I trust this guy or I trust that guy. And then at the end of the day, you have to go with what your citizens vote for. sometimes the plane might have turbulence sometimes the plane will fly smoothly it might be the case that the plane crashes but for the societies that haven't done it democratically they haven't even built planes yet they haven't gotten off the ground and then they're sitting and some people

are like well look like these guys don't have these same problems they don't have the same opportunities um to stretch the limits of the metaphor yeah yeah no i like that they don't have the same problems but they also don't have the same opportunities that's quite a great rejoinder I think they could probably be used in a in a number of different uh circumstances i mean i've heard responses to this thought that are like, okay, yeah, you shouldn't, the people shouldn't, like, fly the plane, they shouldn't sit in the cockpit, but they should, it should be the passengers who are deciding where the plane's going, right? It probably shouldn't be the pilots who are sort of hired to serve the passengers. The passengers should get final say in the direction of

the plane. Yeah, and most importantly, a lot of philosophy problems, a lot of hypotheticals are actually only challenging because of the way that they're phrased. And if you think for like a slight moment, or if you wheel it back a little bit before the hypothetical, the solution can actually come before the problem. So the thing about the plane too is that, like, part of the reason why the plane works and because the people are there is because the people are all somewhat consenting already that when we take off, this is how the decision-making process is going to go. So if you've agreed to it before the plane is off, well, then once you're in the air, whatever process you've agreed to is kind of as you continue to go along is what you are consenting

to. People say things like, well, how could it possibly be okay that you're doing a thing democratically that 49% of the population might be opposed to. And that's because the 49% are consenting to be ruled by the 51% because they know that on the next vote, they might be part of the 51%. Like a democracy isn't just that we're voting for things that we want. And then when we get what we want, we follow through on them. Democracy means that sometimes we're not going to get what we want, sometimes in excruciating ways, sometimes in a horrible way, but we make those compromises because the only way society works is if we can move along without needing 100% conformity in society for things to move forward.

But the problem famously with political consent is that, for example, being in a democracy, You could say, look, you're in the system. You are consenting to being ruled by the majority by virtue of being in a democracy. But how would I not consent to that? I mean, I guess I could move, but maybe I'm too young or don't have enough money or something like that. And it's like, maybe I don't like democracy. But if I have a chance to vote for how I think the world should, the country should be organized, I'm going to do that because it's like my only recourse.

But I'd actually rather not be, I don't think it's moral that this is the system that we live in. I mean, is there a meaningful way in which you can rescind that consent? No, but that type of, I think, again, that's like a juvenile understanding of like positive and negative freedoms. Like if you want, like let's say that we created the perfect libertarian escape, okay? You're born, you turn 18, you're like, you know what? I didn't consent to being in the society at all. I actually would like to enjoy ultimate freedom and I don't consent to any of this. Okay.

And then you push a button. You could be teleported into the middle of an island and you're all alone and now you starve to death. And I'm like, okay, well, this is bullshit. I don't want to be alone and starve to death. Obviously, this is what I meant. Okay, well, then we'll drop you off. on an island with a tribe of people who might capture you and eat you. Okay, well, this is bullshit.

I don't like this. Okay, well, like, eventually I think that in all these hypotheticals, depending on when the libertarian catches what you're doing, you're going to basically end up reconstructing some form of like non-consenting government. Because like I said before, even with the tribal stuff from that book about culture and conflict in the Middle East, like every single, even on a decentralized absolute freedom, like everybody's able to do exactly what they want kind of structure, every individual person knows that they have an obligation, a decentralized, democratically arrived at obligation

to defend their family, their honor, their kinsmen, because if they don't, they're not going to be protected or they're going to be tossed. So there's an illusion sometimes that, well, I don't consent to this government. That's fine, but you have to consent to some form of organization. Human beings aren't islands. We need other people to survive and thrive. Since we last spoke, we've both had interactions with a number of the same people, actually. We've both since debated or discussed with Ben Shapiro, with Jordan Peterson, I think a couple of others. It's kind of interesting that we've both had those experiences. Jordan Peterson, I think most recently of those two, how was that?

You had a quite jousty debate with him, and I was wondering first about your experience sort of going in. I remember when I was invited on the show, I thought to myself, as soon as I walk in this room, room, I'm going to know just from the way he says hello and shakes my hand, whether he's in the mood for like a fight or whether it's going to be more friendly. And when I walked in, he sort of went, Alex, hi, how are you? shook my hand. And I was like, okay, this is going to be fine. And we kind of got on and it was fine. It was pretty friendly. What was the energy like in the room for you? Because your debate, discussion with him seems to be a lot more jousty than mine. It was fine. He seems like a nice guy in your life. I think most of the people that

you meet once you hit a certain threshold of popularity, they're going to have some. amount of people's skills in real life. I don't think I've met like a disgusting or deplorable person, even if I disagree with them politically on almost everything in any of these environments. What was it like afterwards where, I mean, there are points where he's practically shouting at you. I mean, it's quite sort of heated in the look on his face. If you take like a screenshot from one of those moments and said, you know, what do you? That's one I remember. Yeah. And you're so like, if you show this to somebody and sort of go like, you know, what do you think's happening here? They'd probably be like, gosh, this, this man must be like,

like must be full of hate right now. I don't know who he's talking to, but he must hate him. And then the camera sort of stop. And is it just sort of instantly that shakes off like, oh, right, that was fun. Yeah. Well, thanks. See again. Cheerio.

Or was there sort of a feeling of like, gosh, all right. Like sort of, man, yeah, all right. Like, see you later. Like I'm, I'm, I seem to be okay after. I'm always fine after that. I can be incredibly confrontational to the person. And then after we're done, I'm like, I'm chill. And he's fine.

That's great. Because that's a real skill as well, I think. I mean, I, one of the biggest struggles I ever have with like a debate is a lot of the time, if you're doing like an event somewhere and you're going to go and debate somebody, you know, the organizers will have it so that maybe you go for dinner first and then you're in, you know, you're like backstage and you're hanging out for half an hour. And I find it very difficult to meet someone sort of, hey, hi, nice to meet. Yeah. Oh, how was your trip? Like, all this kind of stuff. And then suddenly on stage be expected to sort of change up. And I mean, my job there is to be like, look, I think you're wrong and I'm going to tell you and I'm not going to apologize for that. But it sort of feels like I'm changing my energy in a way that almost feels like at least one of those becomes a deceit, even though it's not. It sort of feels that way to me. So I think it's a real skill to be able to just sort of switch that on and off naturally. I guess I sort of struggle with that, which might be part of the reason why some of these conversations I have are less jousty because of the sort of energy that I bring to the room. I don't know.

There's one particular moment in your discussion with Jordan Peterson that I think went sort of semi-viral. I kept seeing it all over the place and YouTube shorts and stuff where. You make a comparison to what he calls like gigantism or sort of big government and Catholic Church, where you say, well, look, a lot of people say that they're suspicious of gigantism, they're suspicious of big companies and big government, and yet they'll be in favor of something like the Catholic Church. I could imagine somebody saying that, like, they don't trust, like, a large government. They think there's too much, you know, prone to tyranny or something like that, but also be supportive of an institution like the Catholic Church, which is literally, you know, one guy who is a direct line to God. Right, but they can't tax. and they don't have a military and they can't

conscript you and they can't throw you in jail that is true yeah I mean well those are major those are major and significant I mean I get the overlap don't get me wrong

sure and Peterson says yeah but they can't they can't tax you they don't have a military they can't conscript you they can't put you in jail only send you to hell eternal pain and suffering I guess I wondered like

because that moment sort of got a lot of attention I wonder what your sort of post-mortem on that particular part was in terms of like should I had like a snappier comeback um that I mean do you think do you think he was right do you think no I think it's a ridiculous point the idea that just because something is larger means it's like intrinsically bad or that something is smaller is intrinsically good

I don't think that being large or small is necessarily like has the characteristic of being good or bad I think that you would have to do a more honest analysis of a particular thing to arrive at an actual good understanding of what's going on you know some of the most tyrannical dictatorial, fascist people can be abusive parents. And the only control that they have might be over a singular child. So obviously, gigantism isn't at play here. And I think that we have some pretty large entities that do a really good job. You know, churches and, you know, different denominations can do a lot of good throughout a lot of society. I mean, you bring up the point that, like, well, they don't have armies or they can't tax you. I mean, Walmart and Amazon can't tax me, but some people might say

that they engage in immoral practices, like whether or not you have the ability to deploy some sort of force, whether or not you have the ability to collect taxes. I don't think necessarily make you good or bad. I don't think a large country that collects taxes is worse

than a small country that collects taxes because of gigantism. It's just not like, that just felt like a buzzword that I'd never even heard before, like that gigantism is like necessarily has the properties of badness in it just seems like a really silly,

but most of those arguments felt like I'm trying to figure out like how to navigate. Like if I was truly like in my in the old blood, sports days, and I'm not trying to be nice to everybody, so I get invited back on the shows. I would just say, like, let's figure out some examples and show me, can you demonstrate on a particular thing? Why is this bad just because of the size of the particular thing? You think the United States government is bad because of gigantism? Okay, well, let's say I cut

the union in half, and I'll be about 25 states. Is it half as bad as it was before? Like, what level of badness is even influenced by the size? Or what do we have to start peeling out before it becomes bad to go? Let's say the United States government can no longer collect taxes and doesn't have an exclusive use on force. Yeah. Is it no longer bad at that point? Like, the idea that badness is related to large or small is just ridiculous. Why do you work for the daily wire, it's a larger company than you're just being self-employed. Have you become more bad working for a larger company? Or what if the daily, like, it's just such a ridiculous notion. But that seemed to be, in particular, what you just said there, like, if the government can no longer

tax and can no longer conscript you or put you in jail, I don't know if it would necessarily make it, like, less bad. I'm not sure if the argument is like gigantism is bad in the sense that it produces a worse outcome or the, the organizations that are bigger are worse, but that with gigantism comes a bigger risk that if that company is bad, the badness is sort of. much worse. So, for example, if the U.S. government can't put you in jail anymore, if it's some horribly corrupt government, then maybe its inability to jail you in corrupt ways is better, right? Maybe that does sort of relieve it of some of that power. It doesn't mean that it's actual intentions or ideology or anything actually changes. It's just that by being bigger, by having more

power, it means that when things go wrong, they go wrong much worse. That's fine. That's an Alex O'Connor argument, not a Jordan Peter's art, it's an argument. If you want to make the argument that a thing being larger necessarily means that a bad thing can be so much worse because of the size, I would obviously agree with that. And my obvious retort would be, but the good that it can accomplish is a large thing is also much larger. So, like, it's obviously it's a thing that you have to very carefully try to extract the benefits from while creating enough checks and balances, not to slow down the benefits, but to keep and control the negatives. But, yeah, I would, I would, of course, I agree with that. But I mean, like, in economics is a concept called

an economy of scale that a large enough corporation, a large enough firm can create a product, not just create tons of products, but the marginal cost of each product, the per product cost, is actually lower than what an individual can create that particular product for, just by virtue of being larger and being able to specialize and segregate different orders of the operation or whatever they're creating. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, I did rewatch that conversation you have with Jordan Peterson quite recently, but I remember that part and that discussion.

I struggle to remember exactly the specific point that he was making, was he just saying that bigger is worse? I mean, is that, is that really the, the idea, but behind that that would be ridiculous if that's what he was saying. But it seemed, it seems so, so obviously ridiculous today. Doesn't it? It makes me tempted to think that he must have been saying something more like what I'm saying that people are scared of gigantism, right? And, and like, and I suppose your point about the Catholic Church, right? Somebody says, like, they're, they don't like big government or whatever, but they're, they're okay with the Catholic Church. And Peterson and saying, well, they can't tax you and stuff, like maybe, like, you would, like, even those

people who was in support of the Catholic Church would say, well, to be honest, if the Catholic Church started trying to tax people and throw people in jail and developed a military, then actually maybe I would start to be a little concerned about it. And why? Not because Catholicism would change, not because, you know, the Pope would have different moral views or anything, but just because of the fact that there's something more, like, unnerving about a company getting, or an organization getting more power and sort of, you know, bigger, bigger institution. I don't agree with that anymore. You don't think?

I think that most people are pretty close in terms of, like, how they want the world to look. I think that most people are very close in terms of principled positions. I think that the application of those things is what causes people to diverge so much. And I think that if you were to ask a person, if they were comfortable with, like, a church being armed or something like that, I think that different people, a different points of time would say in some cases, yeah, actually, you know what, that would be awesome. And in other cases, they say absolutely not.

I think to be, I try to give an example for both sides. I can't think one on the left or now, but like on the right, like I think that there are tons of things that Donald Trump has done that Bush era, neo-conservatives would have shuddered in agony, the idea that a man who's cheating on his wife or making fun of prisoners of war, or a guy who talks about suspending the Constitution, or a guy that talks about like any of the number of things that he's done are just so contrary to things that used to be principled positions like conservatives have. But I think that at the end of the day, I just, I don't think people are very principally tied to anything. I think that what happens

is I think people have these very applied level disagreements, but because nobody actually does any of the grounding for any of their beliefs, there's a lot of like normative confusion with their actual applied, their applied like physical positions. And then what happens is we get in this weird world where people think that they're really far apart on something, and they're actually probably done it. To ground this out an example, I think a really good example is our vaccine mandates. My opinion on the, on the moral level, is I actually think there's about 100% congruity in worldwide society, at least America in the West, on vaccine mandates. In that, if you had a virus, and I could prove to you 100%, that the lethality rate of this virus

is 0.001%, and that worst, it's a cold. I don't think anybody in society would be, okay, mandating that vaccine. But if I could demonstrate a virus that incubated for two weeks and at a 50% fatality rate, I think conservatives would be exercising their second right to force everybody to get vaccine. It wouldn't even be a question. You're not going to, I'm not going to get infected. Yeah. So people think that they have like these principal differences like, well, is a mandate okay or not okay? But that's not really, well, you're really arguing about it's how dangerous do you think the virus is? That's really where the disagreement. Yeah, that's, that's really interesting, actually. It feels like, I mean, and I think this happens all the time. And the way you say people

aren't really principled, do you mean that, like, in practice, in reality, they don't abide by their principles? Or do you mean that, like, it's not the way people actually function or can function? Because I'm more in that second camp of, like, where you say people, people say, well, I have a principle of free speech, and I have a principle of bodily autonomy. And so, you know, I, and that might affect my views on abortion or on vaccine mandates or whatever. I think that, like, you can say you have a principle. But like you say, what you're actually debating is something else. Like, that principle will fall apart at some point. Like, trivially, there's always some kind of example of something you can think of where someone's

principle just goes out of the window, you know. Yeah, kind of, but I don't even like the way you're phrasing, because you're almost making it sound like there would be like a crazy test case. It's not even that crazy. Yeah, but yeah, that's the thing. Yeah, I know, yeah. I think people say they have principles, but what they really generally mean is they like the things right now that are coming from that principle. Yeah. So it's actually a pretty cool thing, that principle. But as soon as that changes, that principle goes out the window. That's why earlier, I don't remember we were talking about, but I gave the example of like, if I think of a thing that I want the government

to somebody else to do, the first thing I think of it was like, what's the worst way that this could be abused so that I know if I actually support the thing or if I'm like, you know what, actually I don't think I would principally support the thing because if it was used in a way to a way, I would hate this thing. So do you think it's a problem that people do that, that people don't actually act in according to their principles when they sort of think they are. Because, as I say, I can't really condemn that as a bad thing because I think that is just always going to be the case. Or do you think there is a way of sort of approaching politics that genuinely does have a set of principles and abides by them? Do you think that's possible in practice?

Of course, it's possible. And I don't think it's bad when people do that. I just think it's bad when people don't recognize it. I would be okay with a whole host of behaviors so people just knew what they were doing. If somebody said, listen, I actually really like it when our politicians can fuck around and your politicians can't because fuck you.

I'd be like, you know what? I can respect that. I disagree that it's dumb, but I can respect that. But I don't like it when somebody's like, I think that every politician should be principled, but I'm going to tell you 50 million reasons why my guy going to jail, getting a conviction, getting caught with a kid, these don't actually matter.

But this is why your side needs to be held to account for everything. It's like, okay, well, now you don't even know what you're saying. You don't even know what you're talking about. So I wish people had more awareness of what they were doing and what they were saying. Maybe principles need to be more qualified as well. But then that sort of stops them from being principles. I mean, you know, famously the right to life seems like a cool principle to abide by.

Yeah, like it's like the most fundamental right. You have a right to life. Cool. But then, okay, what if somebody's trying to kill you? Can you kill them in self-defense? Yeah, sure. Okay, so you have this principle. You have a right to life except.

in self-defense. Okay, what about if it's not self-defense, but somebody is innocently threatening your life and the life of your family? Can you kill? Okay, yeah, maybe the right to life except in this circumstance, in this circumstance, and you sort of qualify that principle so much that it's no longer really a principle. You're just sort of describing every single possible outcome. Potentially. And I feel like with something like, well, I'm pro-free speech, that's my principle. Well, unless it's an incitement of violence, and unless it's like a copyright infringement, And once you actually get to a point where that principle is never going to rub up against a test case and you're going to change your mind, if you've got your principle so fleshed out that every single example you come across,

if it would be immoral to be pro-free speech, you've got your qualification that gives you that exemption. If you get it to say that in principle, that always happens, that principle is no longer just a print. It's no longer principle. It's just like this, this highly, this highly itemized list of possible events. and what you would do in either circumstance, right? And then you're not talking about a principle of free speech anymore. Exactly. It's almost like, I don't know if you'd say like a form of emotivism or a non-cognitivism,

where when you say a principle, all I really hear you doing is expressing some emotional state to me. Because I don't know if I could ever, given a set of principles, given a set of principles from a person, can I present to you something that you would be uncomfortable with, but you'd be forced to support? Because it feels like that's never the case. And if I can, if a person can say to me, like, I think that prison should be for rehabilitation, really even for people that molest children no well no fuck them they need to be executed and ranked a million times of children right well it doesn't sound like you actually what about somebody that's like murdered like a serial killer well not for them it's like oh okay right

it's like oh it's like there's a lot of people for instance that support forgiveness yeah but but they don't actually they just want to forgive the things that they think weren't really bad in the first place like if i right right right yeah like oh like well there's a woman and she killed her husband who was abusing her for 10 years and i think i'd forgive her for killing okay would you ever forgive the husband for abusing the wife well fuck no what do you mean it's like okay so you don't actually yeah yeah i mean for this worth i think there are some people who do have like i would say the moral strength to do that i mean there are these they're very moving accounts of you can watch people in court cases who you know they're like christians and they

have this you know philosophy of forgiveness and then they come face to face with the person who's like brutally abused and murdered their children and they look him in the eye and say i forgive you And it's moving. It takes a sort of moral courage. But I think a lot of that comes not from you just naturally want to forgive them, but because you remember you've got this principle that you sort of want to live by. I think some people are better at doing it than others. But a little bit.

The problem there, though, is that in the court case, it's not zero sum. And in politics, it kind of feels that way sometimes. In the court case, if you forgive a person, technically, you only have stuff to gain. You follow your principles. It's good for you. Like, that's fine. In a political environment, there's a limited. of seats. And now to execute your principle, if it means condemning your side on something,

well, any ground you give is ground gained by the enemy. And now, fuck, in a zero-sum environment, well, holy shit, yeah. Yeah, I saw one person. I can't remember this is exactly how they said it, so I won't say who it was. But they were talking about, like, the protests that are happening in the UK at the moment, the, like, Palestinian protests. And they were really fearing. They thought there's sort of an existential threat to British society, you know, all of these radicals on the streets or whatever. And I think somebody made this point being like, yeah, but what about, you know, free speech? What about the right to protest? And this person says something like, look, that's all very well and good, but when my actual

country is at stake, I, like, that doesn't matter to me anymore. Maybe didn't put it quite so strongly, but I sort of got the impression that that was what was being gotten across, this sort of like, yeah, look, I, you know, I'll talk about, you know, free speech and assembly, and these are great principles and stuff. But like, if my sort of, you know, bravely sticking to my principles means that my country is actually going to cease to exist. I, like, it's not even a contest anymore for me, you know what I mean? That means the principle was bad. But that's the thing.

It either means the principle is bad, or it means the principal needs qualification, or it means that the principle sort of never actually existed. Yeah. And I'm, that's why I say, I'm more in the camp of saying, like, you think you've got a principle, but all you've got is a general rule of thumb that you haven't found a counter example to yet. And trivially, if you want to be like a pedantic philosopher type, you can always think up some ludicrous, obvious counter example. Oh, you're in favor of free speech. What if, like, supporting this person's free speech meant that every single person on planet Earth was

like brutally like burned in a, in a fire for a billion years? Like, okay, obviously then I'm not going to stick to my principle. But then what is a principle? As I say, it's just a general rule of thumb to which you haven't thought of an example or haven't found an example in the real world that approximates the obviousness of that kind of wrong. And so I'm quite pessimistic about the idea of principle as a whole. I mean, people say, like, if you're looking for values and a politician, what do you value in your elected official? Somebody might say, I like a, I like a man of principle or a woman of principle or whatever of principle, you know. And I'm sort of like, why is, I mean, what does that even mean? I don't even know if that's, if that's, like, achievable. I mean,

Do you feel like you have principles? Like, are there any, even like one that you could point to where you would say, this is my principal, and with these qualifications, this is something I think I would never sort of, like, falter on? Yeah, I think I'm quite principled, actually. So, for example. I think there's a lot that I can talk about leading up to this, but there are a lot of principles that I think underlying, like liberalism or ideas relating to the United States,

to the Bill of Rights that I feel very strongly, like, principally attached to, that I think should be defended in almost all circumstances. To ground this out an example, one thing was... Like gun rights. I'm joking, by the way. Oh, sorry. I really like firearm. Yeah, but, like, to the extent that you would, like, never say someone shouldn't be able to...

I don't feel as strong to me about that. But I would say, for things relating to, like, protests or freedom of speech. Sure. Like, here's a question that I run into... Or not, there's a question I present a lot. It's very frustrating. It's on a lot of shows, especially because I'm doing that, is where a Palestine think or a lot, people are asking me, like, what do you think?

about these protests, what should be done about these protests, blah, blah, blah. And my answer on every single one of these is I have no idea why I would have an original idea about what should be done about these protests. My answer for these would be the same as any KKK protests, any Nazi protests, any BLM protest. I think that you have a right to assembly. As long as you're not breaking any of the rules or restrictions on college grounds, you should be allowed to protest to say whatever you want, assuming you're not failing Brandenburg, you're not inciting to violence. Yeah, then you should be able to do it. That's it. I don't know why would I need a special analysis here for this particular thing.

And I try to be aware of when I'm asked questions about like, what should happen if this politician is convicted to this crime? What should happen? It's like, well, I try to like make the person like a blur and then, well, how would analyze the situation? Because I think the more asteris, astricks you have on a particular belief, the more qualifiers, the less it is a principle and the more it is just like, you know, like, well, I've actually got a different application of this in every single sense.

It's like, okay, well, you're not really doing anything then. Yeah, you're just emoting, you know, how you want a particular outcome to look and you're willing to twist in bed for anything. So, yeah, I think, yeah. I feel like maybe you might, if we were to investigate this, you might sort of accidentally blend what could be called like a legal principle and a moral principle. So, for example, you might say my principle is as long as you're not breaking any law, you should be able to protest. Right. And it's sort of like my moral principle is that if you're not breaking any legal, law, you should be able to protest because I've also got this other sort of legal principle

that you shouldn't break the law, right? And so you've got a moral and illegal principle sort of coming together. But when people say, you know, what should we do about these protests? And you say, well, I mean, like anything else, as long as they're not breaking the law, I think what they're really asking is, well, do you think we should change the law? Like, do you think that... I would love that question. That would be so much more honest, though. But nobody ever asked that question. It might be, it might be dishonesty, sure, but it might also be like when people sort of like they have some kind of grievance and they're sort of finding it difficult to precisely put their finger on what it is and so they say something like you know what do we do

about all these protests when really if you like spent the time with them and broke it apart you'd be like okay so I think what you're really getting at here I think the real problem is that yeah so you're someone who likes the law you don't like people breaking the law but you think that this kind of thing should be illegal right and so your your principle wouldn't change right about like being able to protest without breaking the law but some other principle about, you know, what should be legal or not might be being challenged there, right? And so I don't know, I guess like, um, there's two things going on with what you're saying. One is you can have a principled attachment to the law. I think that's totally fair. When you're operating in a particular area, there is an assumption that you're consenting to the rules and regulations of that area and that there is an

intrinsic moral goodness to following the particular rules of that area. So strictly following the law or supporting a law, I think can be seen as a moral good, even if in principle you might be opposed to some provisions of that law, depending on how deep those, the deep the opposition goes, right? So, like, you might think that, like, I think ethically we should be able to protest until midnight, but the law says till 10, and I need to be in a country of law-abiding citizens because I understand we all have different moral foundations and we have to agree on a collective morality and we've kind of like called this the application of that is law. So fine, I'll only protest is done.

But that doesn't necessarily mean you have to say, like, well, ideally in society, I wouldn't want to own people, but slavery is the law. So, you know, I guess, you know, I'm going to buy a slate, right? Obviously, there are going to be some differences on what you accept and what you don't accept. So on one, I would say there is a principled attachment just to following the law in an area. You have to have a collective group of citizens that all have that shared feature of wanting to follow the law, broadly speaking. And then the second thing in terms of like the changing of the law itself, I would say that right now the laws on the books are pretty good when it comes to protests. And I wouldn't apply them differently to different groups of people.

If somebody would ask me, do you think we should change the law to protect some types of things of protests? I'm actually going to use that, and oh, that's a new debate tag you just gave me. If somebody tells me, like, what do you think we should be by this person? I'm going to ask them, oh, what would you change in the law to deal with these? And I don't think anybody would answer. But if somebody wanted to talk about changing the law, I was like, okay, well, let's explore those changes. Do you think that we shouldn't be able to protest about, you know, foreign affairs or about hate speech or whatever? Then my next question, of course, we go, well, let's test this on the opposite direction.

How would you feel it was applied, you know, to A, B, and C, and would we all support that? Like, yeah, that's how I would basically. I think so many, like, so much time can be wasted. not just by sort of being charitable in debate, but also if you think someone is making a mistake of the kind where they're asking the wrong question, even to get their own point across, just being like,

like, I don't mean to insult you or anything, but are you really asking me this? Like, is this really what you're like, what you're driving at, you know? I mean, I could think of a bunch of examples, but I wanted to, I mean, I said I think you were merging the legal and the moral principle. Like imagine that we weren't allowed to speak

in terms of law. We're just talking about what we think is morally the case here. So, for example, yeah. I mean, I mean, for example, that principle,

as crudely spoken, would probably break down in another country where the laws were abominable about protests, where you said, well, what should we do about

protests in an authoritarian government? And you say, well, my principle is that as long as people aren't breaking the law, they should be able to protest. But it turns out that in, you know, ex-authoritarian country,

merely protesting is against the law. and therefore by your principle, they should be thrown in jail. I think in that particular country, then I would probably be opposed to that particular law. Exactly. And so really, when you say, well, I think as long as they're not breaking the law, I have a moral principle that as long as they're not breaking the law,

they should be able to protest. It sounds like that could be something more like, I have this moral principle that as long as they're not doing anything, which I think is so principally immoral that it should be illegal, then I think they should be able to protest, which is basically like saying, as long as they're not doing anything, I don't morally dislike.

I'm morally okay with it, which is the kind of principle that like just trivially applies to any situation ever, right? Kind of. I mean, like, there's a bit of an assumption that like in the United States, just because of my upbringing and everything, my morality is probably going to roughly map on to the laws here. I think that's probably true for almost everybody in the United States, roughly speaking. But like I could imagine, we could imagine there are different laws that we would feel

differently if they were to pass. So before the Supreme Court right now, there's a big question on whether or not the president of the United States should have immunity from all. criminal accusations while he's president of the United States. That's something that I would be completely and totally opposed to. Right now, I believe the understanding, although it's debated, the understanding is that he doesn't have unlimited immunity for criminal action. If the Supreme Court decides otherwise, then I would say, well, this is something that should change.

I would be opposed to this particular thing. I do agree that depending on the flavor of the conversation, sometimes people can get confused between the legality and the morality of it, but I haven't found anybody that would verbalize that, like, we need to change the laws for these protests. It seems to be that they're trying to hint at some other thing that in the existing framework, they should be made illegal. But if somebody would suggest a change of laws, I would entertain that conversation. That'd be interested in me. Well, look, man, I mean, if the laws, if you thought the laws were immoral, then you wouldn't be able to say, well, as long as they're not breaking the law, I think it's, you know, I'm going to morally defend it.

Because you think the laws are immoral, right? Depends on how immoral, I guess. Like, the way that I see it is, the United States, any state, a state works because you've got a collection of people that can have moral disagreement between each other, but there's enough shared agreement that we can codify some morality into our legal system, and then we've got a group of laws that you now have to follow under compulsion of force. Not all of them, but a lot of things, a lot of moral principles we have, but there are going to be things that we disagree on morally that we might feel like there should be a law.

Like, is it like, you can lie to me? I should be able to call the cops on you for lying with me. That's not fair. It's like, well, no, it's immoral, but we don't have a law for that. But that's it, we kind of, we have to live in a society where we can have some moral disagreement, even unfortunately sometimes on laws, but still be able to function out of that. But obviously there's going to be a level of incongruency where like if it comes to slavery, something else, we might think that we have a greater moral obligation to kind of like change that system and move it in a way that is more than group of our values. I think, man, it's really interesting this question of principles because I think, I mean, it's reminding me of something I thought about when I was studying at university. I did a bit of political philosophy for like eight weeks, right?

And one of the things that comes up is the idea of a right to do wrong. And you can have moral principles about the law and you can just have legal principles. You can maybe have legal principles about morality. You can even have like legal principles about legal principles, but you can't really have moral principles about moral principles. So, for example, do you have a legal right to do moral wrongs? Yes. Yeah. Do you have a moral right to do legal wrongs?

Like sometimes, sure. like and then there's this question of like do you have a moral right to do moral wrongs I mean I would argue I would argue it's a form of begging the question where the answer is no but I would say you also don't have a legal right to do legal wrong but that's the thing it's sort of like can you have a can you have a legal right to do legal wrong seems seems like definitely not in principle I mean there's a sense in which in the moral case you might say well you have a moral right to do moral wrongs like you have a sort of I don't know you have a you have a right to a certain level of moral imperfection you have a right to right to sometimes lie or that kind of thing in a way that you can't have a legal right to do a legal wrong. It's like really interesting. I think that this is another thing where I don't know if I read this in Wittinstein or what, when I say read it in Wittinstein, I mean a paragraph of, but like this idea that like a lot of the philosophical hypotheticals are only like incredibly thought provoking and interesting if the language is like vague or ambiguous. And so that's where all of the contemplation happens. When we say, so the real question is, well, let's break this

on. We say, what is a moral right? Does a moral right to, just mean, because I think that when we hear moral right, there's two things that pop up in our head. One is something virtuous, moral good. And then the second is a right generally feels like something, a protected ability to do something that feels like it exists more in the room of law. So if we think it would have a moral right to do a moral wrong, what I'm really thinking of is if I say, well, if I don't have a moral right, the contradiction to that feels like

somebody can stop me from doing something and can somebody stop me from lying. Oh, exactly, right? Yeah, exactly. And it seems like, well, the answer to that would be no. But then, well, what is a moral right then? Because it feels at that point we're talking more like, like we're talking more like positive freedoms. Like, do you have the right to do a particular thing, even if that might be wrong. But that right to do that particular thing, it feels more like a legal type of right to do a moral type of wrong, which, yeah. This is probably the problem with like the legalization of morality. Like you said, you know, there's sort of like this great tradition of virtue ethics and sort of just doing the thing the virtuous person would do. And we've like transformed and defaced morality. become this sort of utilitarian calculus and there's sort of like, you know, rights and wrongs. And it's probably a framework of our sort of legalistic thinking being applied to morality too. I'm not entirely sure. But this, I mean, this question of, I mean, we'll put the principle, the question of principle to bed,

because I think we're sort of almost doing it to death now. But I've always found it really fascinating how principle is seen as a virtue in itself. If you're a person of principle, that's a good thing. If you stick by your standards and you're, even if you don't like, someone's principle. You can kind of respect. It's kind of like, you know, you know in those like presidential or prime ministerial debates where some clever journalist says, well, why don't you both say something you like about each other? And the audience laughs and it's this great sort of moment of frivolity. And one of the things they often say, because they're like panicking,

what the hell is Hillary Clinton going to say she likes about Donald Trump? You know, they might say something like, well, I like that they stand up for what they believe in. You know, I like that they have their beliefs and they stick by them. And it sounds like a nice thing to say about someone, but like, do you? Like, would you say that about someone you actually think is immoral? Like, would you say, you know, well, that sort of racist, like, KKK member over there, you know, he might be doing terrible things, but at least, you know, he stands by his principles. You know, he's got his principles and he's not a hypocrite. He lives by them. It's not automatically a virtue to live by principle, right? It's only virtual to be principled if your principal is a good

one, which means that you don't actually value the, you know, the idea of being principled. You value the moral good off the principle that they're holding, right? And so this idea of principle just disappears in front of my eyes. Yeah, I think there's two things going on here. So firstly, what you just said reminds me when somebody's like, it's like this level one appreciation of somebody where people say this a lot about a certain politician in the United States that I won't name who's running for president, who was just convicted of like 33 felonies. People will say this thing where it's like, you know what, I appreciate that at least he's honest. Right. And I'm like, okay, that's cool. But now you're

have to evaluate what he's being honest about. Exactly. Okay. Like if I come up to you and I say, I really want to cut your throat and just like spit down your, you know, bleeding, gushing blood esophagus. I've never met someone so honest. Hey, good for you. Yeah, you're so honest.

I appreciate that. You would never say that. Okay. So there's tons of psychology going on there, which I think most of philosophy actually just boils down to psychology and shit. Yeah, that might be right. Yeah, unfortunately. Because when somebody really says, I like that, what they're really saying is I actually

like that person and the ideas that they stand in, but I'm too much of a weak fucking spineless coward to actually say that. So I'm just going to allude to some vague bullshit. But going back to the thing about I like their principles, I think that when people say that, if they're being a bit more honest or not more honest, if they are more principled, ideally what you're saying is, and this is true, and I would say by this, I appreciate somebody being able to have different principles than me, but us still being able to work together in a coherent system,

which I think is probably the single most important underlying feature of our society, that people with diametrically opposed moral opinions or political beliefs can still work together to create some like greater whole or greater good and that even though we're having huge losses to each other morally and politically at times we're still all willing to row the paddles on the same ship to move us forward have you heard of just stop oil are those the people that did the orange paint on the stonehenge thing yeah so yesterday i think um environmental activist group i've had a representative on my show before from just up oil they want to end specifically like the UK's licensing of new like fossil fuel you know licenses or whatever um but

you know they they don't like oil and in order to spread what many people like think is a good message i mean people who get angry at them they very rarely say that they think that they're campaigning for a bad cause yesterday they went to stonehenge and desecrated it with with orange i think it was cornflower so the idea is it's just going to like wash off whatever but but people were just blown away like i've never seen political unity like I have when I've seen people from all different areas of politics coming out to condemn just off oil. The interesting thing about these protests is that they're specifically chosen. I was told by the guy that spoke to me about this, that they put a lot of thought

into this kind of stuff. I first became aware of them when they threw soup on Van Gogh's sunflowers in the National Gallery. It's this stunning video where they just take this kind of soup and they throw it. And everyone there is just like, oh, especially at this time. the one where there's like glass over those sort of yeah so they weren't super famous at the time i think and so people would have just i mean now you're like oh it's just up well but at the time it would have been like whoa what the hell is going on but there's glass over the front right and they've said you know we don't know this is true but they've said like obviously we wouldn't have done this if there wasn't glass and with stonehenge it's cornflower and it all washes off and so their

their argument is sort of like all the things we're doing are like like literally not causing any harm whatsoever any lasting harm and yet they have this unique ability to bring up this animal rage in people, including me, when I see videos of them like blocking traffic, I'm just like, oh my, I'm like, I'm like, you know, if I was one of those drivers, I don't know what I would do. What are your views on this kind of direct action? We've been talking about unified society and rowing in the same direction, but when the boat is rowing in a direction that you don't like, and you can see that it's going in the wrong

direction, but nobody seems to agree with you. What do you think about these kinds of protests? I think it's really dumb. when I think of like radical activism I think of like the Bushnell guy who set himself on fire for Israel Palestine when I think of like those types of forms of radical action

these things I think have a place in society when there is an issue that for whatever reason can't get any attention nobody's paying attention to it they compare that Bushnell guy to like a monk that sent himself on fire in I don't think it was Vietnam

it's the front cover of the of the Rage Against Machine album it might have been but if I've I've dumped this information from my mind because I read this for literally one day and I was like this is I'm done with this but like when you when you dug into the issue that those monks were facing these were people that had no political voice not really any coverage internationally and him doing that form of radical activism like put that topic on the front page of like newspapers all of the world obviously everybody was was for a moment in time aware of that particular thing and it brought about immense pressure to change that thing

I don't understand, I haven't had it presented to me, the good argument for why would you do this about a topic that's already so unbelievably popular? So I think of that Bushnell guy, why are you sending yourself on fire for what is the most popular political topic discussed right now? You're not bringing any more attention to it. You're a slight distraction and everybody's going to go back to me about it. That might be true. And maybe there are other motivations involved there. It's hard to say. But in the case of, I mean, the environmentalists is an interesting case, are an interesting case because...

While, yeah, a lot of people talk about environmentalism, it is true that no one seems to really being very proactive in doing very much about it, especially given like the level of emergency that these groups perceive. And so you could say, well, look, everyone already knows the environment's, you know, going to shit, but what they're saying is like, you will know this and yet no one's doing anything. And we've tried, we've said, we've made it a mainstream issue that governments will say we need to do something about this and yet they still don't. So now we're completely stuck, right? It's no longer just about raising awareness. It's like demanding a certain level of it. It's like, you know, the encampments on university campuses across the world. Like in the UK, in the US, people are protesting and like Palestinian protesters, I mean.

And it's not like this issue needs any more awareness, but what they're doing is they're saying, we have specific demands. You need to divest. You need to have a conversation with us about your ties to Israel, this kind of thing. And so it's not just about raising awareness anymore. It's like if you don't submit to our demands, we're going to keep doing this. Sure, but I feel like the problem, I don't think I'm necessarily like principally opposed to those types of protests. It's just the problem is oftentimes they're protesting on a thing that is incredibly complicated.

They don't even have like a clear cut solution for what we ought to do. So it's like, I don't know if you've ever tried to work with like a like one of those like puzzles where you're trying to like get the horseshoes to go around each other or where you're trying to. There's like a thing where you have to do like a particular. set of moves or actions with some kind of keys and locks or like little puzzles. And sometimes you get mad and you just want like, whar, and you're just like crushing it. But it's not, you're not doing anything. And those protests feel like that sometimes where it's just people that are like, oh, like we just shove the puzzle. We said enough. We just bring out enough attention and action.

And what you're doing is you're, you're accurately, you know, displaying some level of emotional attachment. Maybe you're accurately summarizing some underlying annoyance or, or, you know, upsetness for a situation. But nobody has like a clear path forward. It's not like there's a thing that we could act on, that if we stir up all of this anger and resentment, we have a clear path forward, right? When people saw little black kids getting, you know, eaten by dogs, not eaten, but like attacked by dogs, you know, police officers, like, we need civil rights for black people in the United States. It was like a very clear, like, here's a thing. There's how you feel about it. Here's the wrong. And this is what we need to do. It was way,

way, way more clear versus like, we need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels about making ourselves economically non-competitive with the rest of the world without undermining developing nations that haven't fully industrialized yet while also like investing in green energy and not falling behind our adversaries and not making certain countries non-competitive and making sure everybody's bought

into the same types of policies so that some countries don't have advantages over others that aren't adopting this is amazing there's like it's such a complicated issue just throwing something on something doesn't even I just I mean these guys like to see themselves

as the continuation of direct action movements of the past I mean there's such cleaner easier like women should be able to vote This is the thing, right? Black people should have the same rights of society, yeah. Okay, you let them vote, job done.

That's literally, it's like it becomes so much more inexcusable for a government not to act when the solution is straightforward and simple. And, you know, the suffragettes actually slashed paintings, famous paintings. They sort of, there's a few cases, I think, but at least one that I'm thinking of where, you know, someone takes a meekleaver to this portrait in a gallery and actually damages it, right? And people sort of look back fairly fondly in the suffragettes, partly because they suppose. support the movement, and partly because it's so long ago, it's a sort of part of history that it doesn't have the same sort of shock factor. Yeah, but also there's like, I think it means something when, when the protest has a thing to do with the wrong itself and when there's like a clear path forward. Like, let's imagine a city where you've got a poor part of the city

where the water is just never clean to drink and you've got a wealthy part of the city where the water is like always clean to drink. And the excuse given by the government is traders, we don't have the time, the resources, we can't fix like this destroyed, like this water system. We just don't have the money for it. Well, let's say, now this would be a radical form of protest, but let's say as a radical former protest, you took a bunch of people over and you destroyed the plant or whatever that was cleaning the water on the positive city. Now, or on the wealthy part of the city. And let's say that they see this happen. They're incredibly angry. They mobilize their forces. And, you know, in about a week, they have it all fixed and up and running

again. Well, now, like, what is your protest demonstrated? You do have the resources to fix this. You just choose not to do it for us. Fuck you. And you guys hated this situation so much. You were able to mobilize and get this done instantly. Like, that's like a form of radical protest that involves like vandalism and destruction of property, but like it's showing a clear wrong. There should be clean water here. And it's showing like there's a step to take to do it. You can fix it here. You should be able to fix it there. But like how does like dirtying Stonehenge like make us like, okay, well now we need to invest 22% more in solar and wind energy? I don't even know that. What is the path forward?

I do. I mean, I'm not an environmental scientist. I have I have no idea what can be done or should be done. But I do have this feeling that, I mean, if the emergency is as serious as environment claim that it is like we're talking about like existential threat world's going to you know completely disappear and climate refugees everywhere and all of this kind of stuff right like then it's the kind of emergency that probably does deserve at least more attention than we're giving it and so I'm imagining a situation where you know world leaders aren't really doing very much to tackle climate change a lot of lip service a few conferences maybe they're doing something but like if you like kidnapped all of their children like every world leader you kidnapped their children families and

said, we are going to execute your children if you do not do everything you can to reduce our carbon emissions. I don't know if they would like fix climate change, right? But I have a feeling that they would probably do a lot better, right? We would probably be in a more environmentally safeguarded. Possibly. But the environmentalists say that at least the kind of emergency that they would personally feel is the level of emergency possibly more so that we should feel collectively as a society with this problem that we're facing? Potentially, but there are two huge things I would caution though. So one, on environmental stuff, we can hypothesize in this area because we're starting

from a foundation of this assumption that every single step we take towards alleviating climate change is good. That's not necessarily true. There might be huge things that we can do to alleviate carbon emissions on the planet. They would immediately make life worse for the bottom 50% of people. The Jordan Peterson has loved to talk about this. And it's true to some extent that the increased cost. of green energy might make things worse for people that are at the bottom of society.

Now, climate change activists will always hand with us go, oh, just text the rich more, blah, blah, blah, but it's not that simple. You know it's not that simple. That's one part. The second part is the thing that I always caution people against, and I've done it multiple times here, is I always say that like whatever tactic that you allow, you need to imagine that it's also okay for other people to utilize this tactic. And you really need to question if, one, the tactic should be greenlit at all, and two,

is truly something that you think you have a right to protest in this way for. Because should it be the case, let's just say democratically, we just aren't paying that much attention to green energy, should it be the case that, you know, five people can abduct children and force the entire planet to go along with what they want? It was a minority of people in Canada that believed that the particular mandates that they had for COVID should end. And those people clogged up the traffic, all the truckers and everything, and they tried to bring the economy to a crawl.

Should a few people have the right to dictate policy to the entire country just because they've got ways of protesting that grind everything down to a standstill? Like we say this particular thing about climate change, you know, what about something like veganism? Or what about something like should 16-year-olds have the right to vote in the United States? If children can work, why can't they vote? I can pay taxes. I can be affected by all these policies. Like you can pass all these laws that might impact me more than adults sometimes and I don't have the right to vote. I should be able to abduct your children until you give me the right to actually go and vote at the ballot box.

Because once you've greenlit it for climate change, like you could, yeah, there's like... I mean, it sounds almost ridiculous as think, but I mean, if you think about the amount of people who have engaged in all kinds of protest and legal activities because they wanted representation, because they wanted to vote, you know, throwing tea in the harbor or whatever it is, because they wanted to vote. The idea of like, you know, 16 and 70-year-olds, 17-year-olds waking up and something being like, hold on, it is actually like morally abominable that we can't vote to the level that they, you know, start protesting. I mean, for the record, I'm not suggesting that we abduct anybody's children, but what I mean to say is that if the emergency were, like, because the question you were asking was, well, it's a complicated issue. It's not so straightforward as just like, you know, giving women the right to vote. What I was saying is if hypothetically, doing my stupid pedantic philosophy thing again, if the people who had the power to do something felt it was enough of an emergency, I'm sure they could probably be doing more. But you're quite right to point out that that's not, that's not, that's not to say that A, the problem actually can in fact be solved and then it's not going to be. make things worse in the in the in the in the short term i also think that on on that point too i think that it's important that the types of protests or actions that i would okay are going to dramatically depend on the type of society that you live in as well yeah it was another reason i was critical of like the bushnell protest is that like this is a democracy like i don't know

if it's always appropriate to engage in those kinds of forms of radical protests because more or less the government is i don't know i guess you can argue with some people at varying levels it's expressing the will of the people now if you lived in an authoritarian regime where the government was not expressing the will of the people as much, I could definitely see people, I could understand different types of protests. Like, I think it would be silly if you've got a government where, you know, like 80% of people feel a certain thing

and 2% of people want to do another thing, I don't know if those 2% of people should be able to hold the government hostage and force people to, you know, force government to get action. But if you live in an authoritarian regime where like 80% or 90% of the population want a thing, but the rulers are preventing it from happening, well, I can understand the protests at that point more. Yeah. One thing I found really interesting when speaking to this Justop Oil guy, James Skeet,

and I can't remember what episode number it was, but it was maybe about a year ago, was when I asked sort of, why are you doing this? You know, like, why do you find yourself sitting on the road at Grand Prix? You know, there's this extraordinary scene of them at the Snooker World Championships where they climb up onto the snooker tables and cover the green felt with orange powder. It's amazing some of the things that they're doing. And it was sort of like, we've been backed into a corner here. You know, we've tried doing the voting and the protest.

It doesn't work. We don't want to be here. We don't want to be doing this. We've literally got no other option. And I was like, well, of course you've got another option. You could commit violence. You could take hostages and demand that something happens. And they say, no, we would never, we'd be very clear about this.

We don't engage in violent protest. I was like, why not? Why not? Well, because, you know, violence is wrong and immoral. Yeah, but like, you know, blocking traffic is, to a lesser degree of wrong and immoral, like damaging Stonehenge, like desecrating a pagan religious site is immoral and wrong. But look, man, we've been backed into a corner. We've got no other choice. What else can we possibly do? It's like, in principle, I couldn't see a reason why that wouldn't also apply to political violence. But here it comes again, they said, well, it's sort of like, this is just a print. It's a principle. We don't do violent protest. But it seemed very strange that the justification for doing something which otherwise would be a moral and which they don't want to do was like we've got no other choice this is the only way to get it done i was like it's not usually you don't want to you probably don't want to sort of face the fact that you could probably achieve a lot more by like taking hostages right you'd probably have more of an impact that way but you've got this moral principle that says i'm not going to do that right and it's it was really interesting to see that that that means that like it can't just be as simple as like you know we've been back to a corner here and we've got nothing else to do uh like again to be clear i'm not advocating that they commit political violence. And I think that political violence requires a lot more justification than, you know, sitting in a road or something. But it seems so strange that they were just ruling that out in principle, even though it's still the case that they believe the planet is about to collapse and everyone about to die and all of this kind of stuff. But it still seems

that there are things you just wouldn't do, even if it genuinely is going to be so much worse. Yeah, that's, I'll always push people when they're alarmist like that. I think that people don't match their convictions all the time with what they truly know or understand. I'll do this a lot with, yeah, I'll do this a lot with conservatives. Where it's like, I think the vote is going to be rigged. I don't trust the election. It's like, okay, cool. Like, we should get a bunch of people together with us all rifles and bracket launchers and we should go blow up the capital building.

Like, we should do this. Because you truly believe, you really think that your country's being stolen from you. A fascist authoritarian leader is about to take over. And there's not, like, would this not be like a worthy, admirable cause to engage in, you know, like in actual answer. Wait, I thought I put my phone on. If somebody, I think that sometimes people's convictions

don't always match their their predictions or what they're willing to stake on something. I talked about this before on my stream. Something I found happened, it was really interesting. Somebody wrote about this. It was like,

it was their hume or somebody else. Some philosopher wrote something on this that matched by experience. Exactly. I was actually shocked. But basically, when I started feeling was if you're going to be a political commentator

and you're going to make these outlandish predictions, you need to be willing to stake some money on it. Otherwise, fuck you. Okay? If you're going to come out and say something, thing, like there's a 95% chance that X, Y, C, happens. 95% chance, that means that you should be willing to, um, you should be willing to give me like one to 20 on my money, 20 to 1 on my money.

I'll bet you, you know, 100 bucks. And if, if I'm right, you should be $2,000. I'll give you $100 bucks otherwise, okay. Um, or you need to scale back way, way, way, you need to scale back what, what, you're the conviction on this particular thing. And suddenly they start going, well, actually, I mean, I don't know, like, maybe this could happen. No, okay.

Yes. I didn't think that was a possibility. I thought one of two things that. I thought they would, I thought they would, or I thought they'd foolishly accept, which very few people did, I think one person did. Or they would just, yeah, that's it. Those are the only few things. What I didn't expect to happen is what did.

This dramatically changed the way that I view people. Because now I think most people are or possess the faculty for like really elevated levels of like reason and rationality and all this bullshit. And it's just social factors that are fucking it up. But what I find is that when I would challenge people like this, So instead of freaking out, whatever, they suddenly became far more reasonable in ways that they illustrated that they actually had all the information in their head and they were capable of evaluating it in a critical way, but they just weren't applying it before.

Maybe going back to what I said before about if the three of us would have a debate on whether or not we could fly, we could solve that very quickly. Because when you stake out strong political positions online, there's not an immediate test for them. So if you're wrong, it's not immediately felt, but I think that when somebody bets you on something, very immediately you're forced to confront reality in a way that you hadn't before. And now all of a sudden, that 95% chance is we, you know, it goes all the way back to a 55 or maybe 50%. Like, what do you think of the chance is that Trump's going to be present? It's like, 100% chance. There's no way he loses it. It's like, well, okay, he could get sick, I guess. Maybe something actually comes out that's bad as possible or maybe something. It's like, okay, so it was all here before. You just weren't using any of it? Like, yeah. That shocked me that people suddenly become far more reasonable than I realized.

How do we get that out of people more? I mean, if it's already all in there, I mean, you said a second ago, it's social factors or whatever that sort of stop that from being realized. But like, how does that happen? If people are fundamentally rational and hold the rational capacities within them to make the right kinds of decisions, I mean, firstly, like, why is that not happening? And secondly, how do we bring that out without just going around, you know, asking people to put their money on the line?

Yeah, I think it goes back to the, um, uh, what were we talking about where, um, fuck, we were talking about this near the beginning. But basically, people don't, I, I wouldn't care if people did the things they did if they were just aware of what they were doing. And people navigate the world, uh, assuming that we're evolved for like, propositional logic. That's like what our brains evolved to do. Like if A, then B and, you know, um, you know, contrapositives and all these. That's what our brain is evolved to do. But it's not. I think our brains are fundamentally things. that are, like, seeking things that make us feel good about ourselves because it helps us survive and helps us propagate our species. That's it. There might be times when not knowing the truth about a particular thing is advantageous. Personally, I think that truth is largely instrumental. We use it, like in the form of technology as a way to take, you know, information like science and apply it to our life to make us feel good or feel better. But as soon as that truth or scientific thing can't be applied in some way, I think we largely stop caring about it. Or if we can find a way to make untruthful things make us feel better,

then we would gravitate to those almost instantaneously instead. It takes an unhuman, it takes a metacognitive commitment contrary to your intuitions to not eat the candy bar or to go to the gym for an hour and work out, to do these things that are not fun, they don't feel good, our senses weren't evolved to make us desire these things, we have to push ourselves in that way. And we understand this when it comes to things like health, but we don't understand this when it comes to things like our brain for some reason. So when I look at people in society, people largely inherit collections of beliefs from the social groups that they're in, and there's a lot of social pressure to believe in those particular things, and the particular things that you believe in are confusedly tied back to these, like, ethical positions that you've never even considered before. And then you go through life assuming the same of every other person, and that's more or less how every single person operates. And I think if people just knew that, we would already be like a million times better than people assuming that they're walking through life on some rock-solid moral foundation, unaware that if the constellation,

of beliefs that their particular social group would have changed slightly, they would be directly contradictory to the supposed ethical position they hold. They would follow through with it the next day. And what does this, you know, going to the brain gym look like in practice? I mean, someone who says, okay, they're listening and they're like, I want to be more aware of when I'm doing this and I want to prevent against it. I mean, like, how do you do it? Is it a case of like just daily reminding yourself of the kind of person you are and kind

of brain you have? Are there like mantras you can say to yourself? for their sort of epistemic principles that you can develop and instantiate? I think you have to exercise in like actual critical thinking where you are engaging like meta-cognitive processes that are trying to check against and for biases that every single human has.

We can think about our thoughts. I think that's unique to humans. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we can think about it. We can consider the things that we're considering. It's really important. We know that there are certain pitfalls that we have that we're more likely to agree with something

that makes us feel good. So if you're watching something that makes you feel good, maybe be a little bit more critical about it. When I do research on stream, if I'm watching a video from Jordan Peterson, I know I'm primed and not like Jordan Peterson. And rather than pretend that I can rise above that, I'll write that down at the sermon else. I don't like Jordan Peterson. So if he says something and I'm like, that's fucking wrong, I'll stop from him. I was like, okay, I know that I wanted to be wrong. Let me look this up because I might just be thinking just because he said it.

Like, yeah, there are points in an argument. You get so upset that somebody can say 2 plus 2 equals 4 and you want to fight on that. And you'd be like, well, it's sort of depend. I mean, what if you're in base 10 or like there's a way. And the thing is, if you go into a discussion or even just watching a bit of material, even if they're not in front of you, if you go in looking for them to be making mistakes, then they will. You'll find them.

You're going to find what you're looking for. And I've noticed this, like, I think about how I used to make YouTube videos. And my real bread and butter was response videos. And I'd, you know, see something that I wanted to respond to. And I'd cut it up and I'd put in my comments. I remember I sort of used to look. And I still occasionally look for things to respond. to and you're sort of, but at the time it's really you type in like atheism into YouTube

and set the search results for the past week and just see if there's people saying things and maybe I can find something to respond to. And I'm like, oh, this looks promising. Here's someone saying, atheism is stupid and it's a 10 minute long video. And I put it on and there's no way whatsoever that I'm thinking to myself, okay, let me watch this and, you know, see if they're right. Like, there's just no way that I was thinking that in my head. I'm thinking, I'm going to watch this because I've got a very specific goal in mind,

which is to find out where all the flaws are and make a video explaining them. Like, what am I doing? What the hell am I doing claiming to be someone who's like exploring ideas and this kind of stuff? If, without even realizing it, I am watching a video, like, and I've already decided that I'm not going to agree

with this conclusion before I watched it. What's the point in watching it then, you know? And I feel like people do that all the time in conversation, especially like you say, you know, you listen to Jordan Peterson or whatever, Or someone says, oh, that Jordan Peterson, he's such an idiot. I'm like, about everything. I mean, fair enough.

Some people are sort of idiots about, like, most things or many things enough to call them an idiot. But I'm like, you think he's like an idiot? Like, what do you mean? You think he's like, you think he's like not very sharp? You think he can't string a sentence together. You mean, like, what exactly do you mean? Because when it comes to, like, you know, people who are pretty smart, pretty intelligent, the problem with Jordan Peterson, if you don't like him and you don't like what he has to say,

the problem is that he is smart. And he does know how to put a tenets together, and he does know how to convince people. He doesn't know how to back up a point. And I feel like that sort of instantaneous, you know, pre-analysis, you sort of have this, like, I know I'm going to disagree with this person. The problem is it's self-reinforcing, because you're right. If you know you're going to disagree with someone, then you do, you know? And it's kind of hard to break out of that.

Yeah, that's why you need to actually, like, I can always tell very quickly if I ask a person, And like, oh, like, well, what do you do, you know, to be aware of this? Like, if you don't have, like, a concrete set of things that you do, then it's like you're, so you're full shit, you know? Because if you, if you were aware, if you were trying to avoid these particular things, you would have answers and strategies that you, like, deploy every single time you approach a topic. That would be more than just, like, like, the standard one that I hear from feels like, oh, like, how do you, how do you not be biased about, like, how you cover media? I try to read media from a variety of sources. Bullshit. The fuck.

That's like the bog standard fucking answer that every fucking person says. Like, tell me what, what do you act? Like, okay, so if I give you like one Fox News article and one CNN article, how the fuck do you decide who's right or wrong on that? Like, you read both sources. Does that really give you, like, any kind of information? Yeah. Yeah, or when it comes to, like, not falling into like cognitive pitfalls.

And there's like, what you need is like a, there's like a whole bunch of things, yeah. Breakdown of, of, of, you should be able to argue both sides of anything that you feel strongly about with high levels of conviction with astounding levels of steelmanship. Like, if I'm debating a particular topic, you better believe I can argue both sides of that better than the person than I'm arguing every single time. Because if I didn't know the best arguments on their side, what the fuck am I? Am I just hoping that they don't happen to know them when we're in a debate because if he brings them up, I'm fucked? Like, that's not going to happen. Or if there's a particular thing that you believe in, you should always know, you should always have this in your mind, what would it take to move you or change your mind in a particular position?

If you can't even fathom the answer to that, well, is this a matter of faith to you then? You're claiming this is, you know, like if, yeah, and there's a lot of things where when I, when I, when I, start posing questions to myself like that, you know, like, well, what would it take to convince me that maybe Donald Trump is being charged unfairly with a crime? Or what would it take to convince me that maybe Joe Biden isn't the best leader right now that ever? Like, what would, if I don't if I can't even imagine and answer that, then it's like, ooh, I'm probably a little bit too emotionally attached to these positions and I need to like back up and reconsider things. And here's something really interesting that I think we should keep in mind here on this

point about changing minds. I was talking to Peter Boghian on this podcast. I'm like so good at advertising my own podcast. I should give myself a brand deal. We were talking about his method of street epistemology and how he'll ask people often what would change your mind. And it's a difficult question, you know, oh, you believe in God, what would change your mind? Oh, man. God, that's such a big question. But he said, it's kind of the wrong question to ask. The question to ask is, what would just make you, like, move closer towards that? Like, what, you don't necessarily need to think what would actually make me abandon this position? What would just move me a bit further away from it? What would change me from 95% confidence to 90%

confidence? And that's kind of a much easier question to answer. Like for an atheist, they might say, what would change your mind? Well, I have no idea what would make me believe in God. But like, I don't know if it turned out that animal suffering was a complete illusion and they didn't actually feel any suffering, that would probably like raise my credence in it a little bit. And that makes, I think that's an easier task to fulfill, that's what I mean. Potentially, yeah. Or it could reveal that somebody has a huge issue. There There are these things, I call them transcendental entities. There are these things that when people have these ideas about a thing, it's interesting

that sometimes it feels like there's actually no disconfirming evidence that they could ever be presented with because there's some identity, there's some entity that transcends the whole problem that can actually account for any particular outcome that happens. A really good example of this would be the Tates, okay? The Tates are innocent, and I know that they're innocent, and I know that the system is after them. The system is like the transcendental entity. The Tates are never going to be charged with the crime because everything that happened that was accused of them was bullshit. Okay, well, that's a prediction that I'm making, but then the Tates do get charged with a crime.

Well, of course they got charged with the crime. The system is fucking rigged, and of course they're going to be charged. They're not going to be convicted because all of this evidence is fucking bullshit. So there's no conviction because it's all, you know, a horse and ponies, blah, blah. Well, then they do get convicted. Well, of course they were going to get convicted. The system is fucking rigged. It was always going to come out together, right?

You end up in this world, and I noticed there are certain people that I debate where there's actually no form of disconfirming evidence ever because the overall, this transcendental idea is always accounting for every possible outcome where there's no way. When it come to, you know, like the DOJ is rigged and it's always going to be unfair. Okay, but what about the fact that Hunter Biden just got convicted for some pretty insane crimes? Well, yeah, they're doing that because they don't want you to catch on to what's going on. Yeah, right, right, right.

Wait, okay. Well, like, you know, the CIA, the NSA, they do all these. He's like, well, why wouldn't they just get this one guy who's like the biggest person that complains about it? If they killed like Seth Rich on his other people, well, they got him to would be too obvious. It's like they're simultaneously all powerful, all knowing and control of everything. But then also like faltering and failing when it comes to like kids on the internet exposing their stuff. And like, yeah, one fan of mine, I don't know if there's a name for this fallacy. He said you should call it the all roads lead to Rome fallacy.

But basically like literally no matter what happens, your particular theory makes no predictions. because every single thing that happens can be accounted for with your particular theory. Yeah, it does your crazy. So when you ask, I have one thing that I do like this, I can't help it, I'm an atheist,

but the way that it would manifest in me, and if you have a talk out of this, I would be very curious, is that question that you just asked, well, what would actually prove to you that God exists? And I feel like for a lot of atheists, we have this idea about atheism

to where if you were to give me any evidence towards God, what I would probably say is that wouldn't move me closer to believing a God. it would just move me closer to believing that I have schizophrenia. Yeah, right. So this is the big problem.

For the materialist. And it can't be accounted for in a physical and material sense becomes delusion. This is a famous moment in a debate between William Lane Craig and some kind of atheist, apologist, if you like, and they're talking about the resurrection and how the disciples claim to see Jesus after he died and all this kind of stuff. And the atheists are sort of saying, look, I think that they were possibly experiencing a delusion. They were delusional. You know, they didn't actually see it. they thought they were seeing it. And Craig's like, but really, I mean, they all said this, they all said they saw it. He's like, no, just, just delusional. Later on in the debate, you know,

Craig says, well, what would change your mind? And the guy was like, well, look, man. I mean, like, if, if, if God, like, wrote in the sky and said, you know, here I am and you should worship me and use my name and all this kind of stuff, then, then, you know what, Dr. Craig, then I would believe in God. And Craig just says, oh, and he sort of goes, sort of like sits back in the chair. Oh, are you sure about that? Are you sure you wouldn't just, just think that you were delusional and the audience like erupt and laugh and clapping because yeah like he would think he's delusional I would a lot of people will actually will actually say this in a minute as well as like really like if I woke up and I heard an actual voice in my head saying Alex Alex why are you

persecuting me I would probably think I've gone insane I'd go to a hospital before I went to a church let's put it that way um so because of that it is worth considering what would actually change your mind? Because you often think as an atheist, like, well, okay, I mean, if God really wanted to let himself be known to me, he could just do it. He could do it with something like that. He could just speak to me right now. But if it is actually the case that you would, in fact, think that you were just being delusional, he'd have to do it in a more subtle manner. So, I mean, you're an atheist. Stephen, what do you think would change your mind about that? I think that the, I think it's actually, I don't actually think it's an atheist religious thing. I think it's a,

it's a fundamental challenge to materialism, to where, for materialist, anything. that like the challenges is like okay well here you're going to show me some immaterial thing prove it it's like well how do you want me to prove an immaterial thing show me that I can measure it somehow it's like okay well here now you can measure it well now it's material fuck you it's like oh okay well in that case basically what you're what you've set up as a system um I'm not going to invoke girdle because every time that's done is incorrect so I won't do that but what you've essentially done is you've created a system that can never ever ever be invalidated because either you have a way to account for it with the system itself or anything that

would be disconfirming is somehow subsumed into the system. So when it comes to having God right his name of the sky, you're accounting for that in a materialist sense by saying that neurons in your brain are misfiring and that's why. So you can never be proven wrong in that. I just accept that. That's the limit of my human cognition, whatever God or whatever exists outside of conscious experience, I just don't know. Fuck me. So that's the one freebie I'll give anybody on that. Okay. So outside of the God question, I mean, do you, do you remember the last time that you changed your mind on something non-trivial, like what time you think it was? You know, like something of political significance?

When was the last time you changed your mind? The last time I changed my mind is something non-trivial, like big, hmm, for big political stuff over the past like eight months, I feel like I've spent most of my time in the world of like Israel-Palestine study. And I've, the thing is, is I think I've just like kind of,

I've gotten better about not trying to stick out like the hardest positions, despite what some people might see in a clip that says otherwise. So I feel like I generally do good at navigating myself in a way that like I can, can be moved on something because I try to match my conviction with a level of information I have. And it's pretty rare now that I've got a high degree of information about something and I'll change completely because that would demonstrate that I had a mismatched level of conviction

for what I believed in. I think historically probably the things I've moved the biggest on that I can remember is like I used to think that lobbying was like one of the most important things affecting the U.S. political system. And then I kind of got moved out of that with some arguments with a conservative friend prior to that. That was a while ago, though. I'm trying to think if there are big things that I've moved on recently fuck my chat

would probably have some of they thought of any. Do you have any for you? Well, I mean, it's a difficult question and I ask

it's always a good sign if you can think of it but also at the same time there might have been things you change your mind and you sort of forget that big things so it's a difficult question

I don't mean to like ambush you with it but the interesting thing about it is that the more significant the change I think the less overnight it is. Sometimes yeah, for sure. And so, I mean, I think it's rare that somebody, you have, like, religious conversions.

But even, even those seem to be like the culmination of a long series of events. And so with these, like, huge shifts, you don't just suddenly, you don't be like a lifelong Democrat for, like, your entire life. And, like, yesterday you were still, like, totally on board. And then overnight, you're a Republican, doesn't happen like that. So I think that something that I've tried to do over the past few years now that I think has probably kept me from having these big of a thing or this big of a change on things. Because I'm trying to, like, I really do try to match conviction with how much I know about a particular belief. Like, I'll even say it on stream when I'm talking about, like, somebody asked me like, oh, did you see about, like, this thing that came out in this report? And I was like, I think that that this said this, but this is like a 30% for me.

Like, I think I read like a few paragraphs about it. Like, I don't know that much. So if I'm wrong about it in the future, I can move off of it, like, pretty easily because I haven't like, you know, gotten mired down and defending it. So, like, there are going to be things around I did a lot. of debates relating to like COVID and vaccines and stuff like that. These types of debates though, like I feel like especially now because I'm used to getting clips so much. This is even bled in my personal life sometimes the negative waves, but I hedge a lot in a lot of the things that I say. So like I have a pretty strong belief right now. For instance, that I think that COVID or SARS

COVID to the virus, I think it came from the lab, the wet markets in Wuhan. I think there's been a decent amount of research that's like pointing in that direction. I'm aware that the U.S. intelligence agencies changed their perspective on it, where a couple of them are saying, well, actually, we've got some stuff and we think it actually came from the lab. If that were to change more in the future, then I would like change my mind accordingly. But I don't have this like strong ethical commitment to the wet markets and that being the place that the virus came from. I think because I'm trying to hedge and like map my conviction on more appropriately, it's pretty rare now that in the past few years that I have like a very high conviction belief that is like,

Oof, I was totally fucking incorrect. Because conviction is getting better at tracking the available facts. Yeah, I place a high level not so much on being correct right now. Well, correct, I do place a high level on that. But I place a very high level on knowing where I'm out on a particular thing. Like, if I have like 10 particular things, I don't care as much if I was right or wrong on them. What I care about is did my conviction match me ending up being right or wrong? For sure, yeah.

It's interesting that like what really counts is changing your mind as well because, you know, when the, when, as I think Keen says, you know, when the facts change, my mind does too. What about you? Yeah. And there's a sense in which, like, suppose you think that, like, you think vaccines are, like, totally safe and you say everybody, that maybe there should be vaccine mandates and all this kind of stuff. And then it comes out that actually vaccines are, you know, have a, have a 10-year delay and then they're going to start arbitrarily killing people, right? You would probably suddenly stop telling people to take the vaccine. Have you changed your mind? Kind of no, because your position was.

always like, you know, given that these are perfectly safe and beneficial, we should be taking them. That position hasn't actually changed. The only thing that's changed is the facts. It changes how you behave, but it hasn't actually changed your like conviction at all. Yeah. So this actually ties into what we were talking about earlier where I said that people have this like normative confusion with their applied positions. Yeah. Yeah. Where they think like personally, I don't give a fuck about vaccines. I care about public health. And I care about like ultimately like people being happy healthy and to be free from other people making them not health. So if you show me tomorrow that vaccines, you know, have some delayed ticking time or whatever, I have no problem saying fuck all vaccines.

There's no like, oh, but what about my like vaccine principle? Yeah, no, I don't have that. But since people don't do the work on that, they end up becoming, they end up becoming way too attached to these applied political positions and then they confuse them with the, with the normative positions. And the more irritating part is it when you argue with them, because they've done that confusion and they don't even realize it, when you present your applied position, they assume. the normative position, and they don't even deal with your applied position. I might have a conversation with somebody, and the topic is, we need to address homelessness in the United States. And they might say, I think that rent control is an essential thing that we need to help

people afford apartments. I don't think rent control is actually that good. What they just heard me say was, I hate homeless people. This actually, this has actually happened to me once when I was on the Pierce Morgan show, and we were talking about the monarchy and why I don't think it's at least UK monarchy is kind of self-defeating and stupid

and he said to me what about Prince Williams campaign to end homelessness he just started this new campaign and put a lot of money in it and I said well you know that's fine that's great but it's nothing that he couldn't have done as a private citizen

to which he said and I quote what have you got against homeless people what about Williams' campaign in the moment to end homelessness yeah fantastic funded by what Funded by us? And what's this?

Like 3 million pounds? You see, you don't like his campaign against homeless. I think it's formidable. What have you gone against the homeless? It's nothing he couldn't do as a private citizen. We give him 22 million pounds. What do you have against the homeless? We give him 22 million pounds.

We could spend that on. You don't want him to help the homeless. What have you got against him? He said like three times in a row. And the thing is he wasn't joking. No. I remember thinking afterwards. I should have done this at the time.

I remember thinking to myself, hold on. If I could have just been like, pause, no, shut up. Just everyone just be quiet for a second. I'm going to nail down on this one particular point, right? I just said, we're just going to rewind this. I just said that in response to, you know, Prince William's new homelessness campaign, I said that it's nothing he couldn't have earned as a private citizen. To which you responded, you thought an appropriate response was what if you got against homeless people?

Just stop for a second. I'm going to give you a chance to just rethink that. Follow that line and thread. Like, do you actually think that? And I'm almost certain that if we really slowed things down, down, and I really got the opportunity to ask step by step, there's like no way that he's like repeating that. There's no way that he's being, there's no way, unless, unless he tries to do some kind of hyperrationalism where he's like, yeah, well, you know, I know that you think

that, but because it sort of comes across this particular way, you're actually going to, you know, undo the monarchy and that's going to have this effect and that will actually end up badly affecting homeless people and you should know that. Therefore, you must be against homeless. Like, fine, he could do that. Yeah. But I think, really, more realistically, he's probably just going to go like, I mean, it's indefensible. You can't seriously think that I've got something against homeless people because I think that Prince William having a anti-homeless campaign is not a good enough reason to uphold British monarchy. You cannot rationally think that. But even just saying that sentence that I just said, takes longer than

you get on the Piersmoreman's time before it interrupts you, right? And if you actually did it, they don't think that. Maybe, but the big problem is a lot of the audience does too, because, again, And I think most people come to beliefs this way. Like, it's very, very hard. And, yeah, I've had so many debate. And I still have to, I spend most of my time. It's funny because people say, like, oh, it's all just like rhetoric and you just blah, blah, blah. And it's like, my rhetoric is my weakest point because I like, I like, let's do the discreet, like, disentangle this and that and that and that.

And then sometimes, like, all get ahead of myself where I'll say something. And then I realize, like, fuck, I should have, I needed to go back and explain this point. I had the big debate with Finkelstein and Rabani over. A point comes up relating to the definition of genocide And as far as international law is concerned Genocide has two components There's an actus reus, there's the action that you do

Which is like one of five things And then there's the men's rea component Is a special intent And Dolos Pesiel is a highly special intent To eliminate a group of people in whole or in part And both of those need to be met In order for it under international law to be genocide And we're going to back and forth

They're like oh well you don't think And one of the things I said was like You could nuke the entire Gaza Strip And it might not necessarily be genocide And in my mind, it's obvious because I've given the Actus Reyes, and there's no Dola Specialis there. Right, right, right. But the average person, she's like, you think you could nuke and kill every single cousin? And I realize that people are here, it's like, fuck, no.

Yeah. Yeah, so you have to navigate very carefully. And I think you have to short-circution, if somebody were to think that. Like, if they heard you say that, oh, you could nuke the gaza strip and it would be. Yeah, but you have to understand. I gave an extreme example, but it's also, I could hear a lot of people saying, why would you not like Prince Harry or William Redover the fuck helping homeless people? You just hate homeless people There's no other possible reason

Like he could do it as a private citizen He's not a prince I don't understand That's the issue The difficulty is as well That even if somebody then came to you And said well hold on you you You said that like

You know if Israel were to nuke Gaza It wouldn't be genocide And you'd say well no hold on I'm making this specific point About the definition of genocide And you could like explain it And they could say But no but hold on wait wait

I'm just gonna play this clip And they play this clip of you saying If you nuke Gaza It wouldn't be necessarily be a genocide Yeah And they'll be like you just said it and you're like, but you're not, but they're so like, and maybe not just because they're like intentionally trying to, uh, trying to misrepresent you or something, but, but because

like we were saying earlier when you go in, like looking for the mistake to make, they, they actually think you're making that mistake. Yeah. And if they only got rid of that preconception and thought, like, let's actually, instead of trying to look for mistakes in something I think, you know, might actually be kind of fine. Let's, let's try and look for what's good in what I, I, I otherwise I think is actually going to be really, really bad. I'm going to try my very best to try and find any kernel of truth. Right, you can reverse this principle, whereas I would look at these videos and go, I'm going to look for any kernel of falsity that I can, like, latch on to make a video about. We should be doing the opposite. And if they did that, then it would take like five seconds

to clear up that confusion. Yeah, but then you rendered the problem before where for a lot of debate, it's zero sum, like we did with the democracy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because there's got to be a winner and a loser. I tried to do this in that same debate where I tried to short circuit that process, maybe in a way that you would and it also didn't work where we were arguing over one of the other one of my opponents Moina Rabani tried to catch me he's like I watched one of your streams and you said

that you don't think that Jim Crow in the United States would have counted as apartheid and my response was I don't think it would I think apartheid is like a top down system from the government that you know separating races Jim Crow was like an informal collection of policies and he was like and I think I answer something like and he's like I just can't believe

that you would say that you wouldn't think this and I obviously understand what's happening and I asked him, I was like, do you think I support Jim Crow? And he was like, maybe you do. That, what? Yeah, because I reject your comparison here. Do you think I'm supporting this thing? And that was the answer that I gave it. And a lot of people that listened felt the same way. And I'm like, what? Like, would you, would you even like? Yeah. And luckily there, as you say, you have an audience. And so a moment like that is, is even if you don't win the other person over. Like it's, but most people. you know, we're quite lucky. I mean, a lot of people say to me,

how do you say so calm in a debate? How do you not get really frustrated? And the truth is that I don't, right? There are people in my private life that I have conversations with where I'm just like, oh my God, you idiot. Like, you're not understanding I get, like, riled up and angry. We have this great sort of beautiful benefit where if I'm having a debate and somebody is being totally irrational,

like, frustratingly irrational, I can just be like, well, as long as they're being sufficiently irrational, If it's irrational enough to actually get me frustrated, it's irrational enough for everyone who's watching this, which is what I'm doing this for, to notice that. So I'm not going to, in fact, it's a good thing for me because, you know, they're doing the work for me. Whereas if you take away the cameras and take away the audience,

then I can imagine it gets a lot more frustrating. So we have that extra benefit that most people don't get to experience, which... Potentially, yeah, depending on the size of your audience and everything too. So I think it's more of a problem with something like that, like when you say, but look, man, do you think I bought Jim Crow and they're like, yeah, it's like, in that environment it's sort of like all right man but in like over the dinner table at

thanksgiving it's like oh for god's sake like i'm about to get over there and smack you so i think that people should you know bear that in mind when they sort of compliment the virtue of debate as they see online managing to managing to stay calm which is another thing that's why i bring up that like i think a lot of people arrive at their belief systems through social pressure and stuff because um you know people like i try to be relatively free of different pressures socially but I can do that because I'm pretty isolated in my real life like I all my life goes into work and everything and I try to remind people like yeah like I can stake out these like really brave positions but like it's my job to do it and I don't incur much cost now that my fan base is

large enough to support me there's not really a big cost um it would be way braver to stake out a strong position on a particular social topic if your family was in the opposite or if your social group your friends but you obviously your co-exam that's a much harder thing to do yeah um okay Before we finish, okay, I need to vent to you about your Jordan Peterson conversation. Yeah. There's a thing that happens, okay, that I fucking hate and I know Peterson does this intentionally. Okay. It's this game that is played when somebody asks a question, when somebody asks you a question,

and you don't want to engage with the answer, and instead you endlessly obfuscate contextually on what's being asked, okay? Every single person in the world knows that when you ask the question, did Jews leave Egypt and cross the Sinai or whatever, did that happen? What, it's like, does everybody know that, Stephen? Does everybody know that? Because, I mean, like, you know, there are people in the room across the way right now who haven't even heard you ask that question. They might not even have heard of. You're doing it now, right? So how would they...

You're doing it yet? You're doing the thing? Well, I don't even know what you're talking. I don't even know what you're accusing. In fact, the very idea of having to accuse me of something means that you must have some kind of, like, standard by which you're judging me. And to be honest, if you didn't believe in that story, if you didn't believe that, you know, the, let's say the, what would you say, the value of individual autonomy over the sort of oppressive group force. And that's standard must be sort of, you know, like, okay. There's two things that drive me crazy about this, okay?

Yeah. One, here's one thing, okay? The first thing is that there is value in questioning some of the fundamental assumptions made in a question. I think there's value in that. But when you do this in philosophy, you question it and you explore the outer realms of your imagination so that you can bring it back to say something meaningful, right? Like I think an interesting response would be something like, well, did they cross the desert or did they not? When you ask me that, what does it actually mean? You say that that might mean in a material sense they did.

But let's say that I tell you that that exists, regardless of it, material. happen or not, regardless of it material happen or not, it exists in an immaterial sense to us because it exists as a story. The fact of the matter is actually irrelevant. So you could explore the outer run of that and you could bring it back. You could go. There are many things in history that we can extract valuable stories from. And whether materially they happen or they didn't matter, it really doesn't matter, as an immaterial universal concept to us or an immaterial concept to us that doesn't actually trace back to the matter, just the fact that the story exists. There's like a way you can do that one or, okay, that's a way that you can take something, make it abstract and then bring it back for value. But the thing that, really drives me crazy, okay, about when people do that, is the problem I don't like it when Peterson does it, is he only does it on certain topics. Oh, yeah. Because when we talk about, did the Jews leave Egypt, well, that's a question that, you know, could be endlessly, endlessly pontificate upon, consider. It's like infinitely more complicated than, then, like, you could possibly imagine, you know.

So, wait, wait, so, but how does a guy who cannot even begin to come close to the horizon of declaring a material factor or not have such a strong position on the efficacy of vaccines or the threat of climate change. If there was anything to, you know, to endlessly consider, would it not be some of the most macro policy topics in the world? Like how can a guy who won't even approach a material analysis of those things, be able to concretely tell you that all government that is large enough is bad? Like where's the curiosity?

That drives me crazy. I feel like they're different kinds of conversations, right? No, they're not. There's the, and I'm actually not doing the Peterson thing now. I know you're not. The religion, the religion topic, I mean, there are people who think that something like the Exodus story is mythological or is, um, is not, let's say, primarily a history text or something like this. And those are interesting conversations to have. And that's quite, for somebody who was a bit wishy-washy on that, it would be unfair, I think, to say, well, if you're so wishy-washy on that, why are you not so wishy-wishy-wishy on that?

Why are you not so wishy-washy on, you know, your position on vaccines, for example? However, the thing that Peterson does, it's like we've come back to this three times now. I don't mind you doing it, just notice that you're doing it, right? Like, saying something like, I mean, if you want to say, look, the Exodus story, I'm not really sure if it was historical. I don't know if it actually happened, but I'm sure that the main purpose of the story is not whether it was historical, but rather, like, if you start off that, then everything else he says is fine. But it seems to me that that is basically what he's saying. He's just doing it in a roundabout way. I disagree.

That, like, well, as in, I think that's, I think that's what his position probably actually is. But he's smart enough to say that. But that, that's what gets me is that, like, like I say, he is, he is smart enough to note that, like, when I was asking him about, you know, did it really happen, like, with Jesus leaving the tomb and stuff? And he says, you know, well, he's often said he doesn't really like the question or, like, it sort of depends. And I'm sort of like, even if that's true, even if the question is inappropriate, even if you think it misses something important, you're smart enough to know, you know what you're being asked. You know what you're being asked. And even if the answer is, I don't know, or maybe or probably. That's why the only, like, I thought about how can I, like, the main thing I did was try to make sure in that conversation that every single question I asked preempted any possible derailment, which is impossible.

Which required watching other people ask similar kinds of questions and seeing what sort of went wrong. Where did it go? You know? And so, you know, with the question of Jesus' resurrection, you might say, but like the historical, and you immediately interrupt yourself and say, and I know you don't like this question, you know, and you say, and I know you don't like this question, you know, and you say, like, the way I ended up wording it was so that it can't be like, well, what do you mean happen? What do you mean historically? I asked the question, if I took a Panasonic video camera and put it in front of the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea with the little LCD screen show a man exiting the tomb, to which he said, I would suspect yes. Whoa, you know, I was like, and people have told me this afterwards, you know, I spoke to Jonathan Pajot about this, who's, who's a close, I think they're pretty close friends, Jordan Peterson and Jonathan, and they have, I mean, Jonathan Pajow has obviously had a big influence over Jordan's religious thinking. And then they had endless conversations about religion.

Like they're always talking about it with each other, sometimes like as a duo. And Jonathan said to me, I was kind of taken aback when he said that. And this is a man who spent probably more time talking about religion with Jordan Peterson than maybe anybody else. And he was like, when you got him to say, I would suspect yes to the question of whether Jesus exited the tomb, suddenly he was like, I think he might believe in the hysteresis of that event even more than I do. Yeah. And yeah. And I think it was a result. of knowing that Peterson does have a tendency

to do this obfuscation, but also trying to understand as hard as I can why he does that? I don't, but the thing that I have is, yeah, it feels like it's an avoidance technique. It's not like one where he's so endlessly curious about a topic that his mind, his imagination is just running far ahead

and he's trying to catch up to it, more so because any reasonable person knows what you're asking when you say that. Any priest will know, any rabbi, any teacher, any religious man. Well, I grew up in a Catholic, society, I went to a Jesuit high school and everything, that if you were to ask a question like that, like, did this actually happen historically? They know exactly what you're

asking and they know the value that they want to give you, and they're going to walk between both worlds in a way that makes sense and it's meaningful. I do kind of get it. Even if, like, I do actually think that he is sincere in his position that these religious questions are infinitely more complicated than other kinds of questions. Even if it's kind of a bit silly or a bit weird, I don't think he's like, I don't think he's trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. And if he is being an obscure antist, I don't think he's doing so knowingly. I would suspect that how he probably feels, from what I've seen, is a bit like if a quantum physicist was being asked by some, like, kid who had no idea, who hadn't, didn't really know anything about physics. And let's face it, most people don't have a very thorough understanding of something like the biblical canon, right?

They don't know the ins and outs of the stories and how they interlink. And, you know, they are sort of a question about physics and they've got like two objects and they bang them together and say, you know, like, you know, why do the objects bounce off each other? And it's sort of like, well, you know, it depends what you mean by objects, right? Because the objects don't, the objects don't bounce into each other. And because you're thinking in your head, it's, well, it's actually subatomic particles with negative charges that like repel each other at the subatomic level. And you're like, yeah, but no, but like do the, do the rocks like bounce? of each other, yes or no. And you're sort of like, well, like, it kind of depends what you mean by the rocks. And it also kind of depends what you mean by, like, bounce, because it's

not really the rocks. It's kind of the atoms that make up the, and it's not really a, like, I understand what you're saying. I fully reject the answer. You'd suddenly start sounding a bit Petersonian in your sort of, oh, man, but nobody says that. You would never say that. You know that objects don't truly touch each other, right? Because there's like, there's the, there's a different subatomic forces that are preventing actual, like, there's no atoms colliding with each other here. But you would never give that answer to somebody, right? So even though you have the knowledge, you know that, if a kid asks you that, like, you're never saying that answer. This is why, although it might seem like, especially when consider that the kid

might not be asking, like, you know, do the objects touch each other, they might be asking something which sort of relies on the assumption that things touch each other. So it might sort of be like, you know, when one billiard ball knocks into another billiard ball, why does the third one, you know, move away? When, when bulls touch each other, why do they, why do they, why do they move in the same direction and you'd have to start by being like, well, well, hold on, we need to actually break this down because, you know, things don't actually touch. It's kind of subatomic. And it would start getting a bit like, oh, come on, man, stop beating around the bush. But you would at least be able to say something like, well, they don't actually touch. Like, they don't actually touch.

But for all intents and purposes, at the macro level, we sort of act as if they do touch. And that's good enough. Right. That kind of answer is the equivalent saying, well, I think historically the Exodus maybe didn't happen. I don't really know, but sort of as a mythological story, we can talk about it as if it did or something like that. That kind of, so sort of the complication of the question, I don't think is like an unfair thing for him to do. I understand why he's doing it. And I think he's doing it sincerely. I understand what you're saying. I just disagree. Again, I think you can complicate a thing and bring it out, but you do that so that you can explore the topic and then kind of bring it back. But to just to pretend that you don't

even know what's being asked, and then to walk it out into these very obscure areas, especially when the question is like pretty fundamentally being asked, like, well, I'm just curious about this material fact of the matter. And like I said, again, if Peterson was like a random person, sure, but he's a communicator. He goes public. He wants to be understood. He wants to communicate these ideas to each other. He knows what a material fact is. And when asked about the material fact, he knows what's being asked. And he could just like, again, if he would have prefaced it with like a simple statement of like, I understand you're asking me, like, were there, really people that walked out of the desert. And I'm not entirely sure on that, but here's

why I don't think that matters. That's like a more honest engagement with it. And to be clear, like I agree with your criticism. I guess what I'm trying to do is, you know, defend the ghost of pieces and seeing as he's not here to defend himself. But ultimately, I do come down on your position here, which is on your position here is how I should have emphasized that, that series of words. That, yeah, like, like, okay, man, it's a complicated topic. And it's not just as straightforward as like, oh, it's just some work of fiction or, oh, it's just a history, but like, it's obviously much more than that. But you know what you're being asked, man? You literally know what you're being asked. And it would be, and it's inappropriate in certain contexts

to do that. It's, it's kind of like, I made a similar comparison in this conversation with him to, like, witnessing a crime. And let's slightly adapt this analogy. Suppose, like, the police bring you in for questioning and they say, can you describe the suspect? And you sort of say, well, you know, The guy had a lot of drive. You know, he had a lot of drive about him. And, you know, I've got to say, he seemed like a man of principal. And it's sort of like, well, obviously that's not the information we're after. You know, like we want to know.

Sometimes I feel like Peter's even more abstract where they would ask him. They would say, could you describe the suspect? And people would go, yes, I could walk away. Or would be, all would be so, so out. And even then when they then say, well, hold on, Dr. Peterson, we just want to know what he looks like. It's like, oh, oh, you think that, you think that who a person is, can be what, what, condensed into, into what they look like. Oh, oh, so, so, you know, if I'm blind, if I'm blind, and I meet someone, I don't, I don't get to know, I don't know who they are. And it's sort of like, well, and then you suddenly feel yourself in a position where you kind of want to defend against it.

You're like, well, no, that's obviously not what I'm saying. Oh, well, I, then, then why are you asking the question? Why are you interested? It's like, you know, Dr. Peterson, I'm just trying to ask you, what did the guy look like? And he's like, well, I reject the premise of your question. Yeah. And you can understand how he's got. Because if he doesn't, I mean, I mean, if he actually is thinking like, well, hold on, why are they trying to, you know, if they're asking who this person is, why are they trying to convince this down to what he looks like, then when they just basically say, whatever, man, but just tell me what it looks like anyway, then he'll be like, well, I don't even, like, literally the question, I can't even interact with that question anymore.

Yeah. And then I feel like you run back into, but something's gone horribly wrong there, obviously. Yeah, I feel like it's, I think I brought this up several times now where I feel like it's, it's not even interesting what's happening. It's really just a breakdown in the language of the thing to where all of the complicatedness is, ironically enough, what Peterson says. And he's like, did they leave the desert? And he's like, well, when you say did and they and leave and you mean the desert, what do we mean by all of these things? And it's like, well, all of human language is incredibly abstract, as much as people might want to have you think it's not, right? When I walk into a room and I say like, hey, are you hungry for anything?

I'm implying like 50 different things for that. Like, if I were to walk into a room and say, like, hey, are you hungry? And you were just like, I am pretty hungry. And then I would just walk out and not talk to you. And if I said to Jordan Peterson, well, like, what do you mean, woman? Because, like, you know, there's sort of like, I mean, you could say it's like biological sex, but then this. Then he would probably be like, oh, you know, up yours, work moralists. Yeah.

Like, we know what a woman is. And suddenly the language would become a lot more precise. I suspect, again, I don't know. That's a good point. He's not here. That's true. You know. What does it mean when somebody's walking out of Egypt?

Well, that's an incredibly... What is a woman? Well... An adult female with human reproductive gamets. It's like, oh, we became very, very concise, very quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but then I think it's because one of these issues is politicized. When somebody...

I've made this point before, when someone says, what is a woman? They're not actually interested in your definition of women. It's a litmus test to see what side you're on. I've pointed out in the past once probably to, like, in what may have been a mistake on G.B. News because, like, I should have seen that this was going to come from that particular audience. Some of the commenters, the point that I made was, what is a woman? And somebody answers, adult, human, female, right?

And it's like, okay, cool, but so the task that that's fulfilled is, is you now know, like, what side they're on in the issue. Like, great. And maybe that's the purpose of the question. That's fine. But if you actually think that's a suitable definition, hold on, define adult. Yeah, it's literally a totology. A female as a woman.

Like, all of these words are still going to have, like, further definitional problems. Now, I made this point in GB News, so people were like, what? Like, you know, female is not a nebulous concept. Like, whatever, man, I don't care. You're missing the point that I'm making, which is that, like, definitions are hard, man. They're really, really tricky. And you need to be consistent in either just saying, like, no, no, no, it's very straightforward. And things can be defined, in which case you can't do the whole Exodus thing.

Or you have to accept that, yeah, sometimes things are infinitely more complex than they seem, in which case you can't be so hard line on the science stuff. I don't know, man, like the Peterson phenomenon is interesting, but I remember I was watching him talk about religion, and he's doing his classic. My friend Sheen calls it the octopus trombone, this thing, you know. But I was watching him talk with a friend. and they made this comment. I don't think they really listened to Peterson, but we were hearing him talk about religion and doing all this stuff that we're talking about here.

And they said, he wouldn't be famous if this is what he was famous for. I thought, you know what? That's probably right. And I don't really mean this as an insult because Peterson is a smart guy, and he says a lot of insightful things. But like, if he started in the, like, religion debate,

sphere, if that's where he got going, if that's what he was a professor of, and that's what he did. There's no way that he would have become as famous as he is, and people wouldn't be listening to him in the numbers that they're listening to him. But because he's, through other means, become so famous, now people listen to him on these issues with the same fervor that they would, you know, the psychological stuff, which rightly so probably he became super famous for. And it's strange. And my assessment, my, or my prediction about Jordan Peterson is that he's probably spent he probably spends most of his time either with people who think he's like one of the smartest guys in the world and so when he starts talking about

like religion wishy-washy stuff they sort of maybe don't really get it but they go but you know it's your big words there's like yeah it's Jordan Peterson but like so so you know and they're sort of they're like trying to understand it they're like yeah I can see it yeah yeah sure and so he's either surrounded by people who are like yeah yeah totally absolutely all by people who are saying you're literally the worst human being I've ever met in my life and you should go and kill yourself, right? And what I was trying to do in my conversation with him was be somebody who would say, no, I think that this is an unhelpful approach to this question. I don't think you're making a lot of sense on this point, and I think you need to be more clear, but I also don't think

you're some, like, idiot. I don't think you're, like, doing this because you're stupid and immoral, right? And that is surprisingly rare in online debate, especially when you're, like, debating with audiences of people like you're either getting people who are like you've changed my life and you're the most amazing person in the world and I'm going to hang off every word you say or people getting up on the mic and having their moment where they tell you to fuck off you know so I don't know man I I also I was on his show as you were on his show and I'm sort of I feel like it's a different kind of dynamic to if I was having him on my show to have a have an interview or much different from if we were having like a moderated debate on a third party platform you know

what I mean. And people have noticed this with me. They've noticed that I just like shift in tone totally between like a conversation like I'm having now or if it's like a debate. And I kind of, I can't help but do it. I felt like I was a guest. I was glad to be invited. I was, you know, I'm reaching a whole new audience of people. And so it's going to be a bit sort of toned down. But ultimately, I think I agree with you. I mean, he didn't do it in your conversation. Like not really at all. We didn't because we're all on, we were. on very concrete topics that he would want to obfuscate on. He wants to have strong positions here.

Notice the difference. Watch the conversation I have with him and watch the amount of times you have to just, it's starting to go a little and you have to sort of reel it back in and be like, no, but hold on, you know what you're being asked. Like, can we ask these? You wouldn't have to ask questions like, you know, the Panasonic video camera in front of the tomb thing on a question of politics. You wouldn't need to break it down in that language because there's none of that sort of airy

fairiness. But he would say that that's because this is something that's intrinsic to religious discussion that just doesn't really exist in the political. So I suppose that would probably be his defense. But to find out for sure, he'll have to come on my show. So we'll try and make that happen to some point. Maybe when he gets this new book out, we who wrestle with God is the book that he's going on tour for like now, even though the book isn't out yet, which I think is a pretty bold and respectable move. I don't know. I imagine you'll probably, I don't know, do you think you'll have to kind of comment. No, he isn't happy with me now. So really. It feels like

all the shows he goes on. He said that I argue just to be right. Oh, sure. Yeah. Actually, no, he was very annoying. It's annoying because there's, on a lot of these, like, larger shows that go on, I have to, I dial it back a lot to try to be, like, very gentle with the people. And it was with him and with Candace Owens. They both came away, feeling like I was being too aggressive. It's like, I was so gentle and I am irritated that you still have this negative impression. You don't think you were aggressive in that conversation. With Peterson? Yeah. Not anywhere near at a level I could have been, yeah. And I feel like he was leading with most of the aggression, Which I'm happy to follow up, but I also like, pull back.

Yeah, like, I mean, it's exciting and it's raw and it's passionate. I mean, I'm not condemning him for it. But it definitely seemed that in those moments of passionate outburst, they were coming from Peterson. Which I'm fine with. I have no problem with that. And so where do you think he's got this idea? I mean, he said, I think he said it on Matt Frad's show on Pines with Aquinas. He said something like, you know, oh, you know, well, when I was younger, I used to, I used to sort of argue to be right.

You know, that's what I cared about. And he seemed to sort of identify that quality in you. Where do you think that came from? I don't know if it was just comments or what, but like comments that he saw, then he got ass mad about it. But the way that I feel when I hear people say things like that is if you don't provide an example,

I assume that you're emoting something different, that you're just unhappy with the way the conversation went. It's a lot of like standard copy-pasted critique that I got of like, you know, this guy just reads Wikipedia or this guy just, you know, he just like screams at people, blah, blah. It's like, okay, well, like, show me where I was like wrong on a particular thing. Yeah, didn't Joe Rogan say that about you at some point? Yeah, he made a,

Yeah. Made some, like, Wikipedia. That joke carries very, very far. Yeah, that's extraordinary. Hey, at least you're in the popular conscience, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I am, yeah. But it's so very rough-fitting. Was it no publicity, something, something, something?

No, that doesn't work. It's not true. You saw what we just talked about the corn starch in the Stonehand. All publicity is not necessarily a good publicity, but yeah. You don't even know what the good criticism of Wikipedia are, but yeah. I do, I don't know. And, hey, there's nothing wrong with a Wikipedia search. You know, it can get you to, it can get you somewhere.

I can get you somewhere. Yeah, a starting point is probably the key thing to note. Well, Stephen, hey, thanks to coming back on the show. We'll have to see this again sometime. Yeah, good luck with your debate tonight or tomorrow. Thanks.