Streaming, Politics, & Philosophy | @destiny | EP 433

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, along with an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, out November 2024, We Who Wrestle with God. I'm looking forward to this; I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

When you look at, like, the fall of the Soviet Union, or you look at the failure of, like, socialist or communist regimes, I don't know if the issue there was so much redistribution. That was one of many issues. I don't think it was an issue at all, actually.

"What do you mean redistribution wasn't an issue? What the hell do you think they did to the kulaks?"

If you believe climate models or if you believe that we're heading in a certain direction, I don't believe any of those presumptions. People keep saying, "But we just got another one of the hottest years on record." That's a classic leftist argument. Why wouldn't Putin, why wouldn't Gane Pink, why wouldn't anybody else in the world call this out?

It was as horrible as it was; there are plenty of people attempting to call.

"No, you really think that you're in a position to evaluate the scientific credibility of the trials for the vaccines, do you?"

Hello everyone, I'm here today talking to Steph Banel, known professionally and online as Destiny. He's an American streamer, debater, and political commentator. He really came to my attention, I would say, as a consequence of the discussion he had with Ben Shapiro and Lex Fridman.

I decided to talk to him not least because it's not that easy to bring people who are identified, at least to some degree, with political beliefs on the left into a studio where I can actually have a conversation with them. I've tried that more often than you might think, and it happens now and then, but not very often.

So today we talk a lot about, well, the differences between the left and the right, and the dangers of political ideology per se, and the use of power as opposed to invitation, and all sorts of other heated, often heated, and contentious issues.

And so you're welcome to join us, and I was happy to have the opportunity to do this. So I guess we might as well start by letting the people who don't know who you are, get to know who you are with a little bit more precision. So why have you become known, and how has that developed?

"It's a pretty broad question. Um, I think I started streaming around 15 years ago when it wasn't really a thing yet. There were a few people that did it. I started early on. I was a--well, I guess back then you weren't a professional gamer yet because the game had just started to come out, but there was a game called Starcraft 2, and I streamed myself playing that game."

I was a pretty good player; I was pretty entertaining to watch, and then I kind of grew over, I guess, maybe the next seven years, just streaming that people would watch streaming on YouTube.

Well, back then I started on a website called Livestream, then I switched to Ustream, then I switched to a site called Justin TV, and then that turned into Twitch.tv. So after streaming there for like six or eight years, I was a semi-professional Starcraft 2 gamer. That game kind of came and went, but I had a lot of other interests.

Around 2016, I started to get more involved in the world of politics. It's kind of a left-leaning figure because of my background in, like, Esports and internet gaming and internet trash talk. I had more of a, kind of like, a combative attitude, and that was kind of rare for left-leaning people at the time.

So it's basically where my early political popularity came from. I think from, like, 2016 to 2018, I was debating right-wing people.

"So was there a game-like element to the debating, do you think? And is that part of why that morphing made sense?"

No, I wouldn't say so. I mean, if you get really reductionist, everything in life is kind of a game, but that's not very satisfying.

"I think I grew up, like, very argumentative. My mom is from Cuba, so my family was very conservative, and then I grew up listening to the news all day, listening to my mom's political opinions all day, and then I argued with kids in high school and everything. I've always been kind of like an argumentative type A aggressive personality, so I think that probably lent itself well to the political stuff in 2016."

Yeah, was that useful in gaming?

"Um, that personality in some ways, yeah, and in some ways, no. I don't know directly for the games itself. I don't know how much it necessarily mattered, but for all the peripheral stuff, in some ways it was really beneficial. I could cut out my own path, and I could be very unique, and I could be on my own. In some ways, it was very detrimental; I can be very difficult to get along with, and I'm very much kind of like, I want to do this thing. And if you try to tell me what to do, I don't want to have, like, a sponsor or a team or anybody kind of with a leash on me, so yeah, I guess it worked out."

It's interesting because that temperamental proclivity that you're describing, that's associated with low agreeableness. Generally, well, and it's more combative, it's more stubborn, it's more implacable, it's more competitive.

The downside is that it's more skeptical; it can be more cynical; it can be less cooperative. But generally, a temperament like that is associated with is not associated with political belief on the left, because the leftists tend to be characterized by higher levels of compassion, and that's low agreeableness.

So, you know that element of your temperament, at least, is quite masculine, and then a lot of the ideology that characterizes the modern left has a much more temperamentally feminine nature.

"So why do you think the shift from your popularity to political commentary worked and you said that started about 2016? And why do you think that shift happened for you, like in terms of your interest?"

I think I’ve always been interested in a lot of things, like I grew up with a very strong political bend. It was conservative until I got into my streaming years probably five or six years into streaming. I slowly kind of started to shift to the left.

"I would say that I guess in around 2016 when I saw all of the conversations going on with the election and all the issues being talked about, I just felt like the conversations were very low quality."

And in my naivety, I thought that maybe I could come in and boost the quality, at least in, like, my little corner of the internet, to have better conversations about what was going on.

"And so that was basically my injection point into that was yeah about those political issues and then arguing with people about them, doing research, and reading and all of that."

"So did you do that by video to begin with as well?"

Yeah, it was all streaming. It was all streaming.

"And so you... I presume you built an audience among the people who were following you as a gamer first, and then that started to expand, is that correct?"

Basically, yeah. Without getting too much into, like, the business or streaming side of things, basically, actually this probably carries over to all media, I would imagine, is you've got people that will watch you for special events.

So maybe you're like a commentator of the Super Bowl or maybe you're hosting, like, a really huge event. Then you've got people who will watch you every time you're participating in your area of expertise.

So for me, that's like a particular game I might be playing. It might be when you're on, like, a particular show or something that people watch you for, and then the fundamental fan, like the best fan that you're converting to the lowest and most loyal viewer, I guess, is somebody that's watching you basically no matter what you're doing.

And these are the people that will follow you from area to area, and I think because of the way I did game and I talked about a lot of other stuff, whether it was politics, science, current events, whatever, I had a lot of loyal fans that kind of followed me wherever I went.

"So how would you characterize your reach now? How would you quantify it?"

I think my...

"Can you be more precise? How many people are... how many people are watching your typical video that you might produce? And what are you doing for subscribers? Say on YouTube and total, any idea about total reach?"

Yeah, well, I mean, I guess my subscribers on YouTube are around... I think now it's around 770,000 on my main channel. I think I probably do between all three channels, I think around 15 to 20 million views a month.

"And then I live stream to anywhere from 5 to 15,000 concurrent viewers a day for hopefully around eight hours a day."

Yeah, okay, okay, so you have quite a substantial reach.

"And so you said that initially you were more conservative leaning, but that changed. What did it mean that you were more conservative leaning and how did that, how and why did that change?"

When I say I was conservative leaning, I was writing articles for my school newspaper defending George Bush in the Iraq War. I was like very much like I don't... I think it's like an insult now what people say, like neocon, but I was like very much like a conservative, a Bush-era conservative.

"So supported big business, supported traditional, all of the conservative, I guess, like foreign policy, you know, hawkish policy, for whatever that meant as like a 14, 15-year-old."

Right, was the whole Elian Gonzalez incident that was very big for Cuban Americans, where there was a Cuban boy that tried to come to the United States with several other people and his mother.

"And their raft, I guess, crashed or something happened. I think his mom died and some other people died, and there was a huge debate on whether or not to send him back to Cuba, and Clinton ended up sending him back to Cuba. And I know that my mom was super irritated and all that, to say the least."

"But once I hit college, I think I supported Ron Paul in 2000— would have been 2008. So I was a big Ron Paul libertarian guy in high school when I went from... I went to a Catholic Jesuit high school and I kind of became atheist in that process. I started reading Ayn Rand, so I was very, very, very, very conservative on the libertarian end."

"It sounds, yeah I would say so. Initially on the, like, that makes more sense in relationship to your temperament."

"Libertarian," yeah.

"Yeah, initially it was like Christian conservative and then it became like libertarian conservative."

"Um, without my life kind of took like a wacky path and then as I started working, I kind of had to drop out of school. I was working, and then I got into streaming, and once I started streaming, I had a son basically around the first year I started streaming."

"As I started to go through life and I went from kind of being in this like working poor position to making a lot of money, especially through the lens of my child, I saw how different life was when I had more money versus less."

"And I guess like the differences between what was available to me and then my child, as I made more money, while I was really wealthy versus not as wealthy, it kind of started to change the way that I—"

"I guess you got more attuned to the consequences of inequality."

"Is it? Yeah, okay."

"And so that—"

"Okay, how did that lead you to develop more sympathy for left-leaning ideas particularly?"

"I guess my core beliefs have never really changed, but I think the way that those become applied kind of changes."

"So much the same way that you might think that everybody deserves a shot to go to school and have an education that might be like a core belief where, as a libertarian or conservative, I might think that as long as a school is available, everybody's got the opportunity to go and study. But maybe now as like a liberal or progressive or whatever you’d call me, I might say, okay, well, we need to make sure that there's enough, you know, maybe like food in the household or household or some kind of funding program to make sure the kid can actually go to school and study."

"Basically, so like the core drive is the same, but I think the applied principle ends up changing a bit based on what is your concern. Essentially something like the observation that if people are briefed enough of substance, let's say that it's difficult for them to take advantage of equal opportunities even if they are presented to them."

"Let's say."

"Yeah, essentially."

"And you have some belief—correct me if I'm wrong—you have some belief that there is room for state intervention at the level of basic provision to make those opportunities more manifest?"

"Yeah, to varying degrees."

"Okay, okay, how—"

"So let's start talking more broadly then on the political side. So how would you characterize the difference, in your opinion, between the left and the conservative political viewpoints?"

"Um, on a very, very, very broad level, I would say if there's some, like good world that we're all aiming for, I think people on the left seem to think that a collection of taxes from a large population that goes into a government that's able to precisely kind of dull out, where that tax money goes, you're basically able to take the problems of society. You're able to scrape off hopefully a not super significant amount of money from people that can afford to give a lot of, and then through government programs and redistribution, you target those taxes essentially to people that kind of need whatever bare minimum to take advantage of opportunities."

"And then for, on the conservative end, I guess a conservative would generally think that why would the government take my money? I think from a community point of view, through churches, through community action, through families, we can better allocate our own dollars to our own friends and family to help them and give them the things that they need so that they can better participate in and thrive in society, basically."

"Okay, so one of the things that I've always found a mystery, I think there's an equal mystery on the left and on the right in this regard, is that the more conservative types tend to be very skeptical of big government, and the leftist types tend to be more skeptical of big corporations, right?"

"Well, you okay, so following through the logic that you just laid out, you made the suggestion that one of the things that characterizes people on the left is the belief that government can act as an agent of distribution, okay? A potential problem for that is the gigantism of the government that does that."

"Now, the conservatives are skeptical of that gigantism, and likewise, the liberals, the progressives in particular, we'll call them progressives, um, are skeptical of the reach of gigantic corporations."

"And I've always seen a commonality in those two, in that both of them are skeptical of gigantism."

"And so one of the things that I concerned about, generally speaking, with regards to the potential for the rise of tyranny is the emergence of giants, and one potential problem with the view that the government can and should act as an agent of redistribution is that there is an incentive put in place, two kinds of incentives: number one, a major league incentive towards gigantism and tyranny, and number two, an incentive for psychopaths who use compassion to justify their grip on power to take money and to claim that they're doing good."

"And I see that happening everywhere now, in the name of particularly in the name of compassion."

"It's one of the things that's made me very skeptical, in particular, about the left, and at least about the progressive edge of the left."

"So I'm curious about what you think about those two."

"First of all, it's a paradox to me that the conservatives and the leftists face off each other with regard to their concern about different forms of gigantism, and don't seem to notice that the thing that unites them is some antipathy."

"This is especially true for the Libertarians, some antipathy towards gigantic structures, per se."

"And so then I would say, with regards to your antithesis between liberalism and conservatives, the conservatives are pointing to the fact that there are intermediary forms of distribution that can be utilized to solve the social problems that you're describing that don't bring with them the associated problem of gigantism."

"And like this has been shocking to me to watch the left, especially in the last six years, ally itself, for example, with pharmaceutical companies, which was something I never saw, never thought I would see in my lifetime."

"I mean for decades, the only gigantic corporations the left was more skeptical of than the fossil fuel companies were the pharmaceutical companies, and that all seemed to vanish overnight around the COVID time."

"So I know the story. That's a lot of things to throw at you, but it sort of outlines the territory that we could probably investigate productively."

"Yeah, so a couple of things I would say that the current political landscape we have, I think, is less... I understand the concept of conservative supporting corporations and liberal support—supporting like, large government. I think today the divide we're starting to see more and more is more of like a populist—anti-populist rise, or even like institutional or anti-institutional rise."

"So for instance, I think conservative cities in the United States are largely characterized with, I would say with populism, and that they're supporting like certain figures, namely right now Donald Trump, who they think alone can kind of like lead them against the corrupt institutions, be them corporate or government."

"I feel like most conservatives today are not as trustful of big corporations as they were back in like the Bush era where we would, you know, conservatives would champion, you know, big corporations. I think that's right."

"Yeah, um, I strange, because it makes the modern conservatives a lot more like the '60s leftists potentially."

"Yeah, um, I mean, that brings us into the issue too of whether the left-right divide is actually a reasonable way of construing the current political landscape at all, and I'm not sure it is."

"But right now it kind of is, but only because so many conservatives are following Trump, so like your populist-anti-populist thing kind of maps on kind of cleanly to the left and right."

"It doesn't work with progressives, though, or the far left, because they're also anti-large everything."

"So in a surprising way, on very far left people, you might find them having a bit more in common with kind of like a mega Trump supporter than like a center left liberal."

"So for instance, like both of these groups of people on the very far left will be very dovish on foreign policy, probably a little bit more isolationist. They're not a big fan of like a ton of immigration or a ton of trade with other countries. They might think that there's a lot of institutional capture of both government and corporations."

"So both all of the mega supporters and the far far left might think that corporations don't have our best interest at heart and the government is corrupt and captured by lobbyists, like yeah, you'll see a lot of overlap there."

"Right, um, I think that sometimes, uh, there's a couple of things. One, uh, this is something I feel like I've discovered—people have no principles. I think that people are largely guided by whatever is kind of satisfying them or making them feel good at the time."

"I think that's a really important thing to understand because people's beliefs will seem to change at random if you're trying to imagine that a belief is coming from some underlying principle or is governed by some internal, uh, you know, like moral or reasonable code or whatever."

"I think generally, there are large social groups and people kind of follow them along from thing to thing, which is why you end up in strange worlds sometimes where, uh, you know, like the position on vaccines and being an anti-vaxxer might have been seen as something, you know, 10 years ago as kind of like a hippie leftist, and now maybe it's more like a conservative or, uh, it's associated more with like mega Trump supporters or whatever."

"I think as a result of how the social groups move around, um, when it comes to the—you mentioned this like gigantism thing, that's another—I'm not sure if people actually care about gigantism or if they're using it as a proxy for other things that they don't like."

"Like I could totally imagine a—I care about it, sure, yeah."

"Sorry, just in general."

"That's okay."

"Um, 'cause like 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 has a direct route—they can't tax."

"Well, I mean, 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 and significant. I mean, I get I get the overlap, don't get me wrong."

"Sure, but I'm saying, like, even if you had a local government, like a local, like, if you had a state government or a tribe, usually they've got some form of enacting punishment. It'll be sometimes more brutal, but they can throw you in jail; uh, conscription hasn't existed in the US since the Vietnam War."

"I mean, yeah, yeah, true."

"Yeah, true. Um, so yeah, I think that, um, I guess when I look at—so this is so let's go back, well, let's go back to the redistribution issue. I mean, we pay 65% of our income at, say, upper middle class, middle class to upper middle class level in Canada. It isn't obvious to me at all that that money is well-used, in fact, quite the contrary."

"In my country now, our citizens make 60% of—they produce 60% of what you produce in the US. That's plummeted over the last 20 years as state intervention has increased. I'm not convinced that the claim that the interests of people who lack opportunity are best served by state intervention—and there are a couple of reasons for that."

"I mean, first of all, I'm aware of the relationship between inequality and social problem; there's a very well-developed literature on that, and it essentially shows that the more arbitrary the broader the reach of inequality in a political institution of any given size, the more social unrest."

"So where all people are poor, there isn't much social unrest, and where all people are rich, there isn't much social unrest, but when there's a big gap between the two, there's plenty, and that's mostly driven by disaffected young men who aren't very happy that they can't climb the hierarchy; there are barriers in their way."

"And so there is reason to ameliorate relative poverty. The problem with that to some degree is that most attempts to ameliorate relative poverty tend to increase absolute poverty, and they do it dramatically."

"And the only solution that we've ever been able to develop to that is something approximating a free market system. I wouldn't call it a capitalist system because I think that's a capture of the terminology by the radical leftists; it's a free exchange system."

"And the price you pay for a free exchange system is you still have inequality, but the advantage you gain is that the absolute levels of privation plummet, and I think the data on that are absolutely conclusive."

"Especially—and that's been especially demonstrated in the radical decrease in rates of poverty since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 because we've lifted more people out of poverty in the last four decades than we had in the entire course of human history up to that date."

"And that's not least because the statist interventionist types who argued for a radical state-sponsored redistribution lost the Cold War, right, and that freed up Africa to some degree, and certainly the Southeast Asian countries to pursue something like a free trade economy, and that instantly made them rich, even China."

"So well, so that's an argument, let's say, on the side of free exchange, but it's also an argument—a two-fold argument pointing out how we ameliorate absolute poverty, which should be a concern for leftists but doesn't seem to be anymore by the way."

"And also an argument for the maintenance of a necessary inequality, like I'm not sure that inequality can be decreased beyond a certain degree without that decrease causing other serious problems, and we can talk about that, but a complicated problem."

"Yeah, let for one point of clarification, when you say leftist, what do you mean by that?"

"Well, we—I was going with your definition; like essentially that the core idea being something like the central problem being one of relative inequality and distribution of resources, and the central solution to that being something like state-sponsored economic intervention."

"I mean, there's other ways we could define left or right and we do that, but I'll stick with the one that you brought forward to begin with."

"Gotcha, gotcha."

"I only want to be clear on that because, uh, because people get mad if I call myself a leftist. Oftentimes online or in especially in Europe or worldwide, leftists will refer exclusively to like socialists or communists and anybody to the right of that would be considered like a liberal, if usually a fascist."

"Well, depending very rapidly, yeah."

"I just wanted to be clear on that."

"I'm absolutely a pro-capitalist, pro-free market guy. I'm not—I’m never going to—"

"Okay, okay, okay, okay."

"Well, that's good; it's good to get that clear."

"Why, yeah?"

"Because I would argue that when you look at, like, the fall of the Soviet Union, or you look at the failure of, like, socialist or communist regimes, I don't know if the issue there was so much redistribution. I think the problem that was one of many issues, I don't think it was an issue at all, actually. I would say, I think the issue was..."

"Commander!"

"Wait, wait a minute! What do you mean redistribution wasn't an issue?"

"What the hell do you think they did to the kulaks? That was forced redistribution; it resulted in the death of six million people."

"So maybe I'm not understanding what you mean, but that was redistribution at its pinnacle, and forced redistribution was brutal."

"When I think of the, um, when I think of the strengths of capitalism, um, the ability for markets to dynamically respond to shifting consumer demand is like the reason why capitalism and free market economies dominate the world."

"When you've got socialist or communist systems, uh, command economies where a government is trying to say, 'This is how much this is going to cost; this is how much you're going to produce and make.' This is a failed way of managing a state economy."

"Even in places where they still do it, there are always shadow economies and stuff; they were in the Soviet Union that prop up where people tried to, uh, basically ameliorate the conditions that are resulting from said horrible command economy practices."

"So I guess in a way you could argue a command economy is kind of like redistribution; it's a form of it, but no, it's a worse problem."

"If you're pointing to the fact that that's a worst problem, I'm— I'm I would say that's definitely the reason why these places, uh, failed because they just weren't able to respond to changing—"

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"Okay, so what's the difference between a state that attempts to redistribute to foster equality of opportunity and a command economy?"

"Is it a difference of degree? Like, are you looking at models, let's say, like the Scandinavian countries? Or I wouldn't use Canada, by the way, because Canada is now, uh, what would you call it—predicted by economic analysts to have the worst-performing economy for the next four decades of all the developed world, so maybe we'll just leave the example of Canada off the table."

"Scandinavian countries are often the polies that are pointed to, by I would say by people who at least in part are putting forward a view of redistribution for purposes of equality of opportunity like you are, but they're a strange analogy because they're very small countries and up till now they were very ethnically homogeneous."

"Exactly, and that makes a big difference when you're trying to flatten out the redistribution. Plus they're also incredibly wealthy which makes, you know, redistribution, let's say, a lot easier."

"So why doesn't the government that's bent on redistribution fall prey to the pitfalls of command economy and forced redistribution for that matter? How do you protect against that?"

"I think you have to do is very, very, very difficult, is people get very ideologically captured by both ends and they feel very, I guess, like committed, or they feel very allegiant to pushing certain forms of economic organization, and I think sometimes it blinds them to some of the benefits of what exists when you incorporate kind of multiple models."

"Or, I mean, you'd call them mixed economies, which is really what every capitalist economy today is. It's some form of free market capitalism combined with some form of, like, government intervention to control for negative externalities."

"These are the ways that all economies, even in Scandinavia, in the world work, and I think that recognizing the benefits of both systems are the best way to—"

"Yeah, make it work fair enough. And the Scandinavian countries seem to have done a pretty good job of that; like I said, they have a simpler problem to solve, let's say, than the Americans have."

"Negative externalities—that's a, you know, that's an interesting rabbit hole to wander down because the problem I have with negative externalities—you made a case already that, and again correct me if I've got this wrong—but I think that I understood what you said um as a free market, free exchange economy is a gigantic distributed computational device, basically."

"Right, exactly, enough. One of the big problems for command economies is called the computation problem because no central body can actually compute, you know, the right exactly right. That’s not, yeah, that’s a fatal problem, right? Because it doesn’t have the computational power; it certainly doesn’t have the speed of data recognition; it doesn’t have the on-the-ground agents if all of the perception and decision-making is centralized, right? It’s way too low resolution; it’s going to crash."

"Okay, so, and I think that that’s comprehensible technically as well as ideologically."

"Alright, so but having said that, with regards to externalities, all the externalities that a market economy can’t compute are so complex that they can’t be determined centrally by the same argument."

"And so there are ways to account for them though really that work with—"

"Tell me how. I can’t see that because I can’t see how that they can be accounted for without the same computational problem immediately arising."

"Yeah, and I understand that, and I think that's a problem sometimes of people very far on the left when they want to deal with certain problems, I think that they want to bring like heavy-handed, you know, like, things like price controls in to say, well we need less of this so let's just make this cost this particular thing, which ironically enough introduces a whole other set of externalities that will happen when you get a lot of friction between what your price floor or ceiling is set compared to what a market was set at."

"But ideally, if you're a reasonable person and you view economies as mixed economies, what you try to do is you try to take these externalities, meaning things that aren't accounted for with your primary system. So in a capitalist system, an externality might be something that causes a negative effect, but it doesn't cost you any money. Pollution would be a good example of that."

"And rather than saying like, well, no company can pollute this much, or you know if you're a company, you have to use these things because we—the other things are making too much pollution, all you do is you say, okay, well, if we've determined that say carbon is bad for the atmosphere, we're just going to attach a little price to that, government is going to say that, yeah, if you pollute this much, here's the price, and then if you want to pay for it, you can."

"But that type of intervention in the economy basically allows the free market to hopefully do its job because the government has tacked on a little bit of a price that it tries to account for the cost of that externality."

"Yeah, great! That's a great example. We can go right down that rabbit hole—carbon."

"Okay, so first of all, one of the things I've seen you—tell me what you think about this—something that I've seen that actually shocks me that I was interested in watching over the last five or six years: I wondered what would happen when the left—the progressives—ran into a conundrum. And the conundrum is quite straightforward: If you pursue carbon pricing and you make energy more expensive, then you hurt the poor."

"And I don't think you just hurt them. In fact, I know you don't; you just don't hurt them! I heard a man two days ago, who's fed 350 million people in the course of his life, heading the UN's largest relief agency, make the claim quite straightforwardly that that misappropriation on the part of interventionist governments increased the rate of absolute privation dramatically in the world over the last four or five years."

"And that has happened not least because of carbon pricing. Not just carbon pricing, but the insistence that carbon per se is an externality that we should control."

"Now Germany's paid a radical price for that, for example, so their power is now about five times as expensive as it could be, and they pollute more per unit of power than they did 10 years ago before they introduced these policies that were hypothetically there to account for externality. And the externality was carbon dioxide."

"I don't think that's a computable externality, and I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever that it's actually an externality that we should be warping the economic system to ameliorate if the cost of that—and it will be—will be an increase in absolute privation among the world's poor."

"So and here's an additional argument on that front. With regards to externalities, you get that wrong, and here's something you could get right instead: If you ameliorate absolute poverty among the world's one billion poorest, they take a longer view of the future, and that means they become environmentally aware."

"And so the fastest route to a sustainable planet could well be the remediation of absolute poverty, and the best route to that is cheap energy. And we're interfering with the development of cheap energy by meddling with the hypothetically detrimental externality of carbon dioxide."

"And so it's, I think this is a complete bloody travesty, by the way. We are putting the lives of hundreds of millions of people directly at risk right now to hypothetically save people in the future depending on the accuracy of our projections 100 years out."

"And these interventionists, these people who are remediating externalities, they actually believe that they can calculate an economic projection one century out. That's utterly delusional."

"So, okay, so, just as a— to be clear, the first thing I was just giving an example of how you can use like a government intervention to make a free market track something, which is what C and trade or like carbon taxes would do."

"I wasn't necessarily speaking to the strength of that individual thing, but yeah."

"But that's a good thing to focus on: externality. We can focus on that as well."

"So the first thing—I’m sorry, this is going to sound mean—but I'm you know, I'm very realistic. There needs to be a better argument than just 'it disproportionately impacts the poor.' Classic leftist argument. It might be right, but it's the same argument you made to justify your swing to the left at the beginning of our discussion."

"You said that you were looking at economic inequalities that disproportionately affected the poor. So I can't see why—and I'm not trying to be mean about this either—I can't see why you could base your argument that it was morally appropriate for you to swing to the left from your previous position because you saw disproportionate effects on the poor, and I can't use that argument in the situation that I'm presenting it right now."

"Well, because it depends on if we think it's a condition that ought to be remedied or not. For instance, if I walk, you know, around and I see homeless people, and I'm like, 'Man, this is really sad; we ought to spend more money on homeless people because it seems like they're disproportionately affected by their living conditions,' and then somebody says 'Oh, well, do you think we should still lock up, you know, rapists and murderers? Aren't they disproportionately poor?' I'd probably say, 'Well, yeah, we probably should go...' Well, isn't that hypocritical? Well, no, I think that rapists and murderers should probably be in jail, but we can also help the homeless at the same time."

"I think that just helping the poor isn't an argument like a blank check to do every possible thing to satisfy poor people. It's going to depend from..."

"That's fine because everyone's poor is not a victim; some people who are poor are psychopathic perpetrators, and it's very useful to distinguish them."

"But I was making a much more specific argument. My argument was that the fastest way out of absolute privation for the world's bottom billion people is through cheap energy."

"Yeah, I understand what you’re saying there."

"So just because something targets the poor is not necessarily an argument against it. Another depends on how hard it targets them, and it depends on whether mass starvation is the outcome. The outcome is important, that I agree with."

"So for instance, like a syntax outcome will be mass starvation; I'm getting to it. Okay, syntax is on like, cigarettes and alcohol, are always going to disproportionately impact the poor or even sugar, we might say, right?"

"But just because that disproportionately impacts the poor, is that a good thing or a bad thing? These are probably the people that suffer the most from those particular afflictions, right?"

"Right, right, and that is an immediate versus delayed issue too, right? Because the reason, I mean obesity is an immediate—I don't think—all the reason for the tax is is to stop people from pursuing a certain form of short-term gratification at the cost of their longer-term well-being, correct?"

"And that that exact same idea if you believe climate models or if you believe that we're heading in a certain direction in terms of climate, the overall warming of the planet would be the same argument you would make for climate change."

"If you believe that you could model economic development 100 years into the future, well we're not trying to model, we’re more concerned with modeling climate developmentally, no?"

"Well, okay, tell me how I'm wrong."

"I don't believe that because what I see happening is two things: we have climate models that purport to explain what's going to happen over a century on the climate side, but we have economic models layered right on top of those that claim that there's going to be various forms of disaster for human beings economically as a consequence of that climate change."

"And so that's like two towers of Babel stacked on top of one another."

"So because if people were just saying, 'Oh, the climate's going to change,' there'd be no moral impetus in that; it's the climate's going to change, and that's going to be disastrous for the biosphere and for humanity. But that's an economic argument as well as a climate-based argument."

"It's both, but the worst projections of what would happen if the climate took a disastrous turn are worse than the worst projections of what is our planet going to look like economically if we hardcore police."

"Why would you—"

"Okay, but understand the distinction between the models."

"Well, the argument would be that whatever pain and suffering poor people might endure right now because of a move towards green energy, that pain and suffering is going to be short-term and far less than the long-term pain and suffering."

"Right, but that's dependent on the integrity of the economic models and the climate models as well."

"Right, exactly, but in exactly the stacked manner that I described. And like there's nobody in 1890 who could have predicted what was going to happen in 1990 economically."

"Not a bit."

"Not a bit. And if we think we can predict like 50 years out now with the current rate of technology and calculate the potential impact of climate change on economic flourishing for human beings, we're diluted."

"No one can do that, and so and it's worse—imagine that as you do that and you project outward, your margin of error increases."

"That's absolutely definitely the case. And at some point, you're—certainly on the climate side, the margin of error gets rapidly to the point where it subsumes any estimate of the degree to which the climate is going to transform, and that happens even more rapidly on the economic side potentially."

"Right now, I think right now this is a disagreement on the fact of the matter, though, not the philosophy of what we're talking about in terms of controlling externalities."

"If we think I'm—so I'm curious, let's say that we think we can accurately predict the climate and the economic impact, and we think that the climate impact would be far worse if we don't account for that, both in terms of human conditions—"

"I don't believe any of those presumptions."

"I think—but I mean like obviously, if I agreed with that factual analysis, I would probably agree with you on the prescription here too, right?"

"And like none of the climate models were accurate couldn't accurately predict—"

"Well, they're not sufficiently accurate, that's the first thing."

"And SEC because they have a margin of error, and it's a large margin of error, they don't even model cloud coverage well."

"That's a big problem?"

"They don't have the resolution; they don't have nearly the resolution to produce the accuracy that's claimed by the climate apocalypse mongers."

"Because they just got another one of the hottest years on record? How many times are we going to have another hottest year on record? How many times are we going to have an increase of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere before we're finally like, 'Okay, I don't know?'"

"And the reason I don't know is because it depends—the scientific answer to that question depends precisely on the time frame over which you evaluate the climate fluctuation, and that's actually an intractable scientific problem."

"So you might say, well, if you take the last 100 years, this variation looks pretty dismal. And I'd say, well, what if you took the last 150,000 years or the last 10,000 or the last 10 million? You can't specify the damn—the time frame is incredibly important."

"That would be like saying, look at your, you know, let's say somebody developed cancer and they didn't realize it, and the person is lost, you know, 40 or 50 pounds in the past six months. And like you look very sickly, and you're like, okay, well look at my weight fluctuation over the past 10 years."

"Say, well, it doesn't really matter; what matters—"

"Saying the time frame isn't important—"

"Saying that it is important."

"Well, you would probably specify it with the beginning of the Industrial Age, right?"

"Why? Because when that's when carbon dioxide, which is a gas, is trapping more heat on the planet."

"Why is that relevant to the time over which you compute the variability?"

"Because it seems like as carbon dioxide has increased in the atmosphere, the surface temperatures have risen at a rate that is a departure from what we'd expect over 150,000-year cycles of temperature variations on the planet."

"No! Not with that time frame! That’s not the case!"

"Absolutely the case! No, what do you mean?"

"You just flipped to 150,000-year time span. What I'm saying is that if we expect to see a temperature do this in a 150,000 year time span in a 100-year time span seeing it do this, that's very worrying!"

"Michael Mann's hockey stick, the one that's under attack right now in court by a major statistician who claimed that he falsified his data, mean that spike. I'm talking about the record temperatures that are declared that have also increased with the concentration of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."

"I mean, I'm going to tell you that every model is perfect, right? Now, sure, but right now we're like standing in traffic with our eyes closed saying the car hasn't hit me yet, so I don't think there's any coming."

"I think it's pretty undeniable at this point that there is an impact on climate across the planet. I just—I think that's highly deniable."

"We have no idea what the impact is from. We don't know where the carbon dioxide is from; we can't measure the warming of the oceans; we have terrible temperature records going back 100 years; almost all the terrestrial temperature detection sites were first put outside urban areas, and then as, right?—and then you have to correct, then you have to correct for the movement of the urban areas and then you introduce an error parameter that's larger than the purported increase in temperature that you're planning to measure."

"This isn't data; this is guess."

"And there's something weird underneath it; there's something weird that isn't oriented well towards human beings underneath it. It has this guise of compassion: 'Oh, we're going to save the poor in the future.' It's like that's what the bloody communists said, and they killed a lot of people doing it."

"And we're walking down that same road now with this insistence that, you know, we're so compassionate that we care about the poor a hundred years from now, and if we have to wipe out several hundred million of them now, well, that's a small price to pay for the future utopia."

"And we've heard that sort of thing before, and the alternative to that is to stop having global-level elites plot out a utopian future, or even an anti-dystopian future."

"And that's exactly what's happening now with organizations like the WEF, and if this wasn't immediately impacting the poor in a devastating manner, I wouldn't care about it that much, but it is."

"You know, I watched over the course of the last five years the estimates of the number of people who were in serious danger of food privation rise from about 100 million to about 350 million. That's a major price to pay for a little bit of what?"

"What would you say for progress on the climate, that's so narrow it can't even be measured?"

"I don't think the increase in hungry people on the planet is because of climate policies."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't think that countries in Africa are being pushed away from fossil fuels the most developing—"

"Of course they are! They can't even get loans from the World Bank to produce fossil fuel development, and there's plenty of African leaders who are screeching at the top of their lungs about that because the elites in the West have decided that, well, it was okay for us to use fossil fuel so that we wouldn't have to starve to death and our children had some opportunities, but maybe the starving masses that are too large a load for the world anyways shouldn't have that opportunity."

"And that's that's direct policy from the UN fostered by organizations like the WEF."

"They're gonna have to turn to renewables!"

"Yeah, well good luck with that because renewables have no energy density!"

"Besides that, they're not renewable, and they're not environmentally friendly, and then one more thing—there's one more weird thing underneath all of this."

"Okay, well let's say if carbon dioxide was actually your bugbear and it was genuine; well then why wouldn't the greens, for example, in Africa, the progressives, be agitating to expand the use of nuclear energy?"

"Especially because Germany has to import it anyways, especially because France has demonstrated that it's possible we could drive down the cost of energy with low-cost nuclear, and there'd be no carbon production, and then the poor people would have something to eat because they'd have enough energy."

"And that isn't what's happening, and that's one of the things that makes me extremely skeptical of the entire narrative. It's like two things: the left will sacrifice the poor to save the planet."

"And the left will de-industrialize even at the nuclear level despite the fact that it devastates the poor. And that's even worse because if you devastate the poor and you force them into a short-term orientation in any given country where starvation beckons, for example, they will cut down all the trees, and they will kill down all the animals, and they will destroy the ecosphere."

"And so even by the standards of the people who are pushing the carbon dioxide externality control, all the consequences of that doctrine appear to me to be devastating even by their own measurement principles."

"We're trying to fix the environment? Well, boys and girls, it doesn't look like it's working. All you've managed to do is make energy five times as expensive and more polluting."

"You were wrong; that didn't work."

"And so—and I can't understand—you can help me—that's why you're here today talking to me. I can't understand how the left can support this."

"Just one quick thing. Let's say that everything you've said is true. What do you think is the plan? What is the goal? What is the drive? Like, why push?"

"Why push obviously horrible ideas for the planet and the poor?"

"That's a good question."

"That's a good question."

"Well, listen to what people say. Here's the most terrible thing they say: 'There are too many people on the planet.'"

"Okay, so who says that?"

"I've heard people say that for 30 years. Perfectly ordinary, compassionate people say, 'There's too many people on the planet.'"

"And I think, well, for me that's like hearing Satan himself take possession of their spine and move their mouth. It's like, okay, who are these excess people that you're so concerned about, and exactly who has to go, and when, and why, and how, and who's going to make that decision?"

"And even if you don't—even if you're not consciously aiming at that, you are the one who uttered the words. You're the one who muttered the phrase."

"What makes you think that the thing that possessed you to make you utter those words isn't aiming at exactly what you just declared?"

"And so that's, you know, that's a terrible vision. But when you look at what happens in genocidal societies, and they emerge fairly with fair regularity and usually with the utopian vision at hand, the consequence is the mass destruction of millions of people. So why should I assume that something horrible isn't lurking like that right now, especially given that we have pushed a few hundred million people back into absolute poverty when we were doing a pretty damn good job of getting rid of that."

"And I just don't understand what's happening in Germany or in the UK; like, it's insane! Like, look man, if they would have got rid of the nuclear plants and made energy five times as expensive, and the consequence would have been they weren't burning lignite coal as a backup, and their unit production of energy of pollution per unit of energy had plummeted, you could say, 'Well, look, you know, we hurt a lot of poor people, but at least the air is cleaner.' It's like, NOP! Air is worse, and everyone's poorer."

"So like explain to me how the hell the left can be anti-nuclear. Okay, I don't understand it at all."

"Gotcha, alright."

"This is something that I brought up earlier that is concerning to me. I feel like when people—people get political beliefs, I feel like what happens is what we think happens, what we hope happens, is you have some moral or philosophical underpinning, and then from there, you combine this with some epistemic understanding of the world, and then you combine these two things and engage in some form of analysis."

"And your moral—be nice if that was true, yeah."

"Okay, so, and now the signal for released entropy, which would be a consequence of, say, violated fundamental beliefs, is a radical increase in anxiety, right? And a decrease in the possibility of positive emotion, and so people will struggle very hard against that, which is exactly the phenomena that you're describing."

"Okay, I agree with what you said."

"Although, so here's my—"

"Yeah, so I'm not sure why it's relevant to what to the issue I was—here's my issue."

"Okay, so when I'm trying to evaluate a situation like to think that I have some—I’ve got some insulation from the effects of what liberals think or what conservatives think is because on my platform, I don't necessarily have an allegiance to a particular political ideology. Like right now, I'm like center-left to progressive, but I break really hard from progressive on certain issues."

"I think Kyle Rittenhouse is in the right. I think basically everything you guys are doing with indigenous people is insane, including the complete mass grave hoax."

"I think that I'm a big supporter of the Second Amendment."

"I have beliefs where I can break from my side, you know, pretty hardcore because I am not like Legion to certain political ideology."

"One thing that worries me with this constellation beliefs thing is that sometimes when it comes to evaluating a particular policy or a particular problem, I feel like it's part of the constellation, and sometimes it inhibits people from taking a step back and reasonably thinking about the issue."

"So when we're talking about climate change, you mentioned the WEF sacrificing tons of people, the UN Global Elites, five times energy cost in Germany, genocidal people. I feel like this is part of like a whole thing where it's like, okay, well, let's take a quick step back and let's just think rationally about this particular issue."

"So you asked me what the motivation for anti-poor policies might be, so that's why I was—"

"Well, I did, but I got all of those things before I even asked that question."

"Because I think it's totally possible that somebody might say, okay, well, when you put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it seems to cause an increase in surface temperatures. This has been happening from about the 1800s, and as we've started to track surface temperatures, whether the thermometer is on top of the Empire State Building or in the middle of the field, it seems like there's an average rise in temperatures, and people all around the world are observing this in some places more than others."

"If you live in Seattle and 20 years ago your apartment building wasn't built with air conditioner units, you feel that now. If you live in a place in London and you've never had an air conditioner before, now that's not acceptable."

"I think that people on the ground can see that there are changes, and I think that scientists, when they look in labs, can see changes."

"It might be that some models aren't precise enough, and it might be that for reasons we don't even understand—"

"Well, the economic models certainly aren't precise enough."

"Sure, maybe, maybe, maybe they can't even use them to predict the price of a single stock for six months."

"The economic models are not sufficiently accurate to calculate out the consequences of climate change over a century. Not in the least! When you—I like the comparison because economic models can't predict individual stocks, but they do predict the rough rise of the market if you invest in the S&P 500."

"Okay, call a cataclysmic collapse, nope! Even with the cataclysmic collapse accounted for, you're going to see about 7% returns on average with inflation over a long call."

"An average! A very sophisticated model analogous to climate change; that's the difference between climate and weather though, right? Is that climate isn't going to tell you what the temperature is on a given day, but it might tell you the average surface temperature over a period of one year or ten years."

"I think that's the difference between climate and weather."

"That’s like—it is a hypothetical, but again, we're seeing more and more and more data every single year."

"That getting—let's jump out of our cloud of presuppositions for a minute."

"Sure. Now one of the things that I—no, wait! I want to say there are some things that we've gotten as a result of investing in green energy that have been good."

"So for instance, the power of solar energy has dropped dramatically in the United States faster than anybody thought possible, such that solar energy is competitive or beating fossil fuels in certain areas."

"If as long as you can set the solar panels up, you're literally beating fossil."

"As long as the sun is shining; well, it's I mean it still is. We're not in a nuclear winter yet, but it isn't when it's cloudy."

"And why—depending on where you live. There are places, equatorial places, if you're trying to set up a solar panel in, in Seattle, you know, you might not have as much light, or New York City; you might—much or in Germany."

"True, also I think Canada—there are also other issues that are coming up that I think are obfuscating our ability to evaluate what's being caused by green energy."

"Works is not—when we look at energy increases in Germany, I think there's a similar constellation around nuclear energy."

"For instance, people don't want nuclear energy because they think of nukes and they think of nuclear meltdowns, and they think of Chernobyl and they think of Fukushima and they think of atomic bombs, and that's it, and that's stupid."

"And I agree with you. But nuclear energy is a totally viable alternative to other forms of..."

"Why does the radical left oppose it, you think?"

"It sounds they're worried about the same reason the right opposes vaccines, because it sounds scary. It's a big thing, and they don't trust it."

"It comes..."

"Well, the right has a reason to distrust vaccines in the aftermath of the COVID debacle because they were imposed by force, and that was a very..."

"You get to choose if you have a nuclear power plant, that's imposed by force too."

"No, you don't get to choose where your energy comes from! If you live in a country, you just—you turn the light switch and hopefully you don't have a Chernobyl that melts down in your particular town."

"Right, well, you get to choose, because you can buy it or not."

"Choice it, but the nobody had a choice with the vaccines nobody had a choice whether or not they lived near Chernobyl or not."

"Nobody's a choice!"

"There's a nuclear...

"Well, how realistic is it to move like 500 miles? That's like telling conservatives when Biden tried to do the ocean mandate for vaccines, like, 'Well, you just get a different job.'"

"Right, I don't want to debate about whether or not large nuclear power plants are frightening."

"They are."

"And there are Technologies now where that's not a problem."

"So I think I don't—I think that's a complex place for our discussion to go because I also understand why people are afraid of it."

"But what I don't understand, for example, is why the Germans shut down their nuclear power plants and the Californians are thinking and have doing the same thing when they have to import power from France anyways."

"Like it's complete—burn coal, which is a million times worse?"

"Not just coal, lignite!"

"Yeah, right. And then with regards to these renewable power sources, they have a number of problems; one is they're not, they're not energy dense; they require tremendous infrastructure to produce."

"They might be renewable at the energy level, but they're not renewable at the raw materials level, so that's a complete bloody lie."

"They're insanely variable in their power production, and because of that, you have to have a backup system, and the backup system has to be reliable without variability."

"And that means if you have a renewable grid, you have to have a parallel fossil fuel or coal grid to back it up when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, which is unfortunately very, very frequently."

"And so again, I'm not going to say there's no place for renewable energy, like solar and wind, because maybe there are specific niche locals where those are useful."

"But the logical, uh, what would you say, antidote to the problem of reliability if we're concerned about carbon, but we're really not, would be to use nuclear."

"And the greens haven't been, like, flying their bloody flags for 30 years saying, well, we could use fossil fuels for fertilizer and feed people, and we could use nuclear power to drive energy costs down in a carbon dioxide-free manner—that seems pretty bloody self-evident to me."

"And so then it brings up this other mystery that we were talking about earlier, you know what's the impetus behind all this, because the cover story is, 'Oh, we care about carbon dioxide,' which I don't think they do, especially given the willingness to sacrifice the poor it makes no sense to me."

"And I think it's relevant to the issue you brought up, which is that people have these constellations of ideas and there's a driving force in the midst of them, so to speak. They're not necessarily aware of what that driving force is."

"Don't we, isn't it more likely that people are either misinformed or misguided than people are legitimately trying to depopulate the planet?"

"Look misinformed and ignorant, that's plenty relevant and worth considering, and stupidity is always a better explanation than malevolence."

"But malevolence is also an explanation and no, I don't think it's a better explanation because why would we waste so much money sending food aid, having Bush do, you know, programs through Africa for AIDS, having other billionaires like Bill Gates invest so much money and anti-malarial stuff? Like, why would all the global elites be so invested in helping and killing the people here at the same time?"

"Okay, well, some of it's confusion."

"Okay, you know, and some of it's the fact, you know, many things can be happening simultaneously with a fair bit of internal paradox."

"Because people just don't know which way is up often."

"But the problem with the argument...Okay, so so you tell me what you think about this."

"So, you know, Hitler's cover story was that he wanted to make the Glorious Third Reich and elevate the Germans to the highest possible status for the longest possible period of time, okay?"

"But that wasn't the outcome! The outcome was that Hitler shot himself through the head after he married his wife, who died from poison the same day in a bunker underneath Berlin while Europe was aflamed."

"Well, he was insisting that the Germans deserved exactly what they got because weren't the noble people he thought they were?"

"And then you might say, 'Well, Hitler's plans collapsed in flames and wasn't that a catastrophe?' or you could say, 'That was exactly what he was aiming for from the beginning because he was brutally resentful and miserable right from the time he was you know a rejected artist at the age of 16.'"

"And so he was working—or something was working within him and something that might well be regarded as demonic whose end goal was precisely what it attained, which was the devastation of hundreds of millions of people and Europe left in a smoking ruin."

"And the cover story was the Grand Third Reich."

"And so there's no reason at all to assume that we're not in exactly the same situation right now."

"I think there's a great reason to assume. I think that Hitler's motives and everything he was trying to do wasn't a secret."

"I don't think that anybody had the guess that he was incredibly anti-Semitic, that his Aryan supremacy was going to lead to the destruction and the murder of, like, so many different people in concentration... like none of this was a secret; it's not like he was hiding it."

"Some, I mean, like he tried to maybe hide the death camp, but nobody in Germany was wondering, like, 'Wow, crazy, the pograms are happening as Jewish people—that's so crazy!' or 'Wow, they're all being shipped to just mainly the Jews to camps to work, like that's kind of interesting,' or 'Wow, he talks about this a lot in Mein Kampf, but maybe it's just a coincidence!'"

"I don't think you can compare, like Hitler to people that are worried about climate change."

"The worry that I have here is because if we apply this standard of evidence, apply this lens of analysis, couldn't I say the exact same thing about the conservative constellation of belief?"

"They don't want to intervene anywhere in the world because they don't care about the problems there."

"Uh, they're anti-immigration because they hate brown people."

"Trump wanted to ban Muslims from coming to the United States because he's xenophobic."

"Uh, conservatives don't want to have taxes to help the poor because they want homeless people to starve and die in the winter."

"I feel like if I—some of that's true, and yes, you can adopt that criticism."

"I think the difference with regards especially to the libertarian side of the conservative enterprise, but also to some degree to the conservative enterprise, is they're not building a central gigantic organization to put forward this particular utopian claim."

"And even if the conservatives are as morally idled as the leftists, and to some degree that might be true, they're not organized with the same gigantism in mind."

"And so they're not as dangerous at the moment. Now they could well be, and they have been in the past, but at the moment they're not."

"And so of course you can be skeptical about people's motivations when they're brandishing the moral flag."

"How would we—why would we say that they're not as concerned about the gigantism? I feel like everybody is when it's a particular thing that they care about."

"You mean if whether they would be inclined in that direction, for sure!"

"That conservatives wield the power of the government whenever they feel they need to adjust as liberals do, right? Conservatives were very happy to see, for instance, abortion was brought back as a—"

"Look, that's a good objection; I think that you're correct in your assumption that once people identify a core area of concern, they're going to be motivated to seek power to implement that concern."

"I think cancel culture is a good idea, too. I think conservatives, prior to the 2000s, if they could censor everything related to either LGBT stuff or weird musical stuff or something that they didn't want their kids to watch, conservatives would do it."

"But now that you see that liberals and progressives are kind of wielding that corporate hammer, now conservatives are very much like, 'Well, hold on! We need freedom of speech! We need a platform for everybody!' and now progressives are like, 'Well, hold on! Maybe we shouldn't platform people!'"

"I got no disagreement with those things that you said, and I have no disagreement about your proposition that people will seek power to impose their central doctrine."

"Okay, so then you might say—and so we can have a very serious conversation about that. What do we have that ameliorates that tendency in the United States?"

"We've got a—hopefully—a form of decentralized government."

"I can’t speak to Canada as much, but yes, ex—well, yes, that's true."

"So that's one of the institutional protections against that because what that does is put various forms of power striving in conflict with one another, right? And so that's a very intelligent solution."

"But then there are psychological and philosophical solutions as well, and one of them might be that you abjure the use of power, right, as a principle?"

"And so that's one of the things that was done very badly during the COVID era, let's say, because the rule should be something like you don't get to impose your solution on people using compulsion and force."

"There's a doctrine there, which is any policy that requires compulsion and force is to be looked upon with extreme skepticism."

"Now it's tricky because now and then you have to deal with psychopaths, and they tend not to respond to anything but force, and so there's an exception there that always has to be made, and it's a very tricky exception."

"But look, let me tell you a story, and you tell me what you think about this because I think it's very relevant to the concern that you just expressed."

"And I don’t believe that the conservatives are necessarily any less tempted by the calling of power than the leftists."

"That's going to vary from situation to situation, though I would say probably overall in the 20th century the leftists have the worst record in terms of sheer numbers of people killed."

"So I mean, it depends on how we're quantified."

"Okay, we just quantify my—a direct death of 100 million people! So you know that's a pretty stark fact."

"And if we're going to argue about that, well then we're really not going to get anywhere."

"So I'm not disagreeing that the horror happened as well; the Soviet Union and China were a war of—"

"I'm just saying for World War II, it depends on how much you attribute the war to Nazi Germany."

"I don't think—it depends on how much we attribute it; it's not without..."

"You know, there's no, uh, so I mean there was a National Socialist movement for a reason; the Socialist part of it wasn't accidental."

"Well but the... I mean there was no, you know, cooperatively formed businesses that were owned by all of the people for the people and distributed to the people, and I don't think redistribution was high on Hitler's list of things."

"That's true; it was a strange mix of totalitarian pol…I don't think it was strange."

"I think it was a bid to appeal to mid-left and center-left, the KPD and the German Socialist Party, by calling themselves National Socialists. I think it was very much like an authoritarian ultra-nationalist regime that pretty squarely fits with..."

"People get mad if you call something far right or far left because they have an, you know—one of the things I would have done if I would have been able to hang on to my professorship at the University of Toronto would have been to extract out a random sample of Nazi policies and strip them of markers of their origin and present them to a set of people with conservative or leftist beliefs and see who agreed with them more."

"And that analysis has never been done as far as I know, so we actually don't know."

"And we could know, if the social scientists would do their bloody job, which they don't, generally speaking. That's something we could know."

"We could probably use the AI systems we have now—the large language models—to determine to what degree left and right beliefs intermingled in the rise of national socialism."

"So that's all technically possible, and it hasn't been done, so it's a matter of opinion."

"Sure, I don't necessarily disagree."

"Um, that that's something you could do."

"Okay, so I was going to tell you a story. Okay, well, this has to do with the use of power, so I spent time with a group of scholars putting and analyzing the Exodus story in an Exodus seminar recently."

"And so the Exodus story is a very interesting story because it's a, it's a, what would you say, it's an analysis of the central tendency of movement away from tyranny and slavery; that's a good way of thinking about it."

"So the possibility of tyranny and the possibility of slavery are possibilities that present themselves to everyone within the confines of their life, psychologically and socially. You can be your own tyrant with regards to the imposition of a set of radical doctrines that you have to abide by and punish yourself brutally whenever you deviate from them."

"And we all contend with the issue of tyranny and slavery, and there's an alternative path, and that's what the Exodus story lays out, and Moses is the exemplar of that alternative path."

"Although he has his flaws, and one of his flaws is that he turns too often to the use of force."

"So he kills an Egyptian, for example, an Egyptian noble who has slain a Hebrew's, uh, one of Moses' Hebrew slave brothers, and he has to leave."

"There's a variety of indications in the text that he uses his staff, he uses his rod, and he uses power when he's supposed to use persuasion and legal or verbal invitation and argumentation."

"And this happens most particularly—most spectacularly—right at the end of the story."

"So Moses has spent 40 years leading the Israelites through the desert, and he's right on the border of the promised land, and really what that means at a more fundamental basis is that he's at the threshold of attaining what he's been aiming at, what he's devoted his whole life to, and he's been a servant of that purpose in highest order."

"And the Israelites are still in the desert, which means they're lost and confused; they don't know which way is up; they're still slaves, and now they're dying of thirst, which is what you die of—spiritual thirst—if you're sufficiently lost."

"And they go to Moses and ask him to intercede with God, and God tells Moses to speak to the rocks so that they'll reveal the water within."

"And Moses strikes the rocks with his rod twice instead, right? He uses force."

"And so God says to him, 'You'll now die before you enter the promised land.' It's Joshua who enters and not Moses, okay?"

"And you might wonder why I'm telling you that story. I'm telling you that story because those concepts at the center of that cloud of concepts that you described are stories, right?"

"They're stories, and if they're well-formulated, they're archetypal stories."

"And this is an archetypal story that's illustrating the danger of the use of compulsion and force."

"No, and so one of the problems you're obviously obsessed by, and that I'm trying to solve, is what do we do as an alternative to tyranny, whether it's for a utopian purpose in the future or maybe for the purpose of, like, conservative censoring music lyrics they don't approve of."

"And one answer is we don't use force; we do the sort of thing that you and I are trying to do right now, which is to have a conversation that's aimed at clarifying things."

"And so that's a principle that—that's something like the consent of the governed."

"Right? It's something like, but it's also something like; you have the right to go to hell in a hand basket if that's what you choose, and I'm—as long as you don't, you know, in doing so, you're not in everyone's way too much."

"You