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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2021-06-19
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okay oh that's a great question about the relationship between EP and libertarianism and if Doug does join us no one can speak to that better than him okay he'd been urgently texted okay let me see there was uh there was one poignant question that I noticed in the um in the question tool which was sort of like why why is this question tool disincentivizing um you know the the sort of this person was happy to ask questions whether they were answered or not before the question tool came along and now that the tool is there there's this up down vote phenomenon and it's um it's disincentivizing and I totally get that and I was a little worried about that when we brought that technology on um I find myself having the same experience when there's any you're essentially what you're you're doing is you're committing to your question in the Public Square in front of the whole village um and then you have to tolerate the the fact that I didn't realize that it showed dislikes but that's unfortunate I'll look into the settings and see if we can fix that but um it's it's really equivalent as far as your ex your subjective experience of it to announcing something in the Public Square and having people laugh at you and tell you it's a terrible idea and instead of like shutting you down um you don't there's this kind of notion that we're uh this Anonymous you know we can we can we can ask these kinds of questions without really committing to it it's really it doesn't work that way in the dregs of our Stone Age nervous system so I completely get that and you know if people if it's if it's more trouble than benefit this is it was an experiment like everything else so if other people feel that way um reach out and let me know if it's not useful or you don't like it or it um leads you to submit fewer questions or be less interested then we don't want to keep using it we just wanted to kind of have a different way for people to respond to each other and and have their own little discussion threads and see how that goes so it wasn't even the top loaded question but I wanted to get to it because I'm susceptible to such things too well it's looking more and more likely that he has completely thank you Daryl I appreciate that completely abandoned us so um I Amber's asking the love in the Q a what is the purpose of loud Motors on cars and motorcycles I I mean that's a that's a big testosterone Fitness indicator I think I don't think there's any other really good explanation for that it's sort of look at me look at what an alpha I am look at how loudly I Roar on the Savannah um you uh you don't see women with loud Vehicles making revving engines and making a spectacle of themselves unless they're highly testosteroneized women I think that one's pretty straightforward mm-hmm there are women who like it so I don't know if there are any women in this group uh that like it particularly but I have met many women who sort of get a little thrilled they get a little they they really enjoy um you know growing up in what we affectionately call Tundra Billy Alaska um you know there's there's this is a real phenomenon and I the middle of the Belk are for girls I went to high school with that louder the truck the sort of the more lifted the all of these kind of signals um that are cliches were very stimulating to those females uh for reasons I never could comprehend yeah I find it very frustrating the only thing I like less is leaf blowers which are hugely in season here I was um telling someone the other day that if I were elected president of the world or Queen of the Universe the first thing I would do would be to uh to Outlaw leaf blowers I'm happy to compensate all of the out of work leaf blower people with you know some sort of universal basic income I'm not a not a supporter of it in general but in this case it's worth trading off because I hate them so much okay um this YouTube Interview with David Pierce yesterday talking about the Abolitionist project have I heard about this plan to veganize the biosphere I have not heard about I haven't heard that particular phrase um so I would need more details about that I don't know him I've certainly heard about the Abolitionist project um but uh yeah I'm not fully up to speed on all of that you guys Doug has totally abandoned us I wonder if he had the wrong day or uh what happened let me just go back and make sure that I told him the right day this has been a very Mercury and retrograde kind of week so it's not impossible that we got the we totally got the wrong day settled but you're all here this is all since then I said Friday one o'clock and he said 1 15 and I said that works and so that was it it's this is totally he is he is completely to blame for not showing up to his own date okay how can emotional Off the Wall people try to change their behavior in response to things so this is kind of is this is a general um uh you know High emotional instability how to manage it and the best way to think about this is that you're never going to at least the way that I tend to think about this is that you're never going to really change the initial response that you're you're going to feel those feelings kind of bubbling up just like they always have so the only thing that you can really work on and and shift is to some degree your immediate response which can come with um a certain kind of practice that we could call mindfulness or mindfulness adjacent but I really think the the better place for emotionally it's like people who are on the higher end of the instability emotional curve um is to think about this in terms of how long are you going to let the damage last before you you train the people in your life to expect some outbursts and you um you allow for yourself to walk this kind of thing back so something that is very possible for most highly highly emotionally volatile people is that you know in your closest relationships you are clear that um you know I'm prone to flying off the handle uh with certain triggers and you can use whatever language that other person speaks around us um and I have a really hard time responding in the moment in a really measured way and so for me it is best to rather than getting into it uh all at once you know we can sort of start a conversation and when I start to feel really escalated it's best for me to pull back and take some time then we go to our separate corners for a while um and then when I've when I've cooled down and I'm in a better place I can come back with with a more measured approach to the whole thing or if you do you can't catch yourself in the moment which it's you know it's depending on your other personality factors and what the nature of the conflict is that's very possible that that might not happen then it's just about kind of people in your life come to expect and and recognize and respect that you're you you might go off the handle and then it's like okay I I've cooled down the my my inner five-year-old is no longer driving the bus and in charge of this whole exchange um can we start again can we have this conversation from a more reasonable Place uh so I have you know I've talked to a lot of people who are quite emotionally volatile who the people in their life just kind of expect that they they don't they don't take it as seriously when there's this big blowout because they know that it's it's not forever and it doesn't really represent the truth of the situation for that person um so that's the the kind of the general approach that I take to that because you can't you can't rewire yourself to be um sort of a intrinsically calm person and it's not going to happen you can certainly do you know some forms of meditation and mindfulness and CBT can help you interrupt it in the moment and get a little bit of distance from it the the way I always think of my experience with meditation is that it um it made me feel a little a little bit like Neo in The Matrix when he sees the bullets coming at him and he has he has that lead time to dodge them it's that's the effect that consistent meditation has on me there's just a little longer lag between the stimulus and the response I'm not as reactive and I'm a pretty emotionally stable person in General on the on the tests um but I think this would be true no matter where people fell so um that's my that's my best approach to that kind of thing and and to not expect that you can fundamentally change the way you see the world or how things are going to affect you you think of instability as uh you're you're a boat on the ocean and different votes are are disturbed by waves to different degrees and if you're a little boat you're an emotionally unstable individual relative to the cruise ship or the cargo ship and you're going to be bobbed around a lot more by the same wave that really doesn't bother that the smallership so that's that's how I think of that um and just being mindful of what that looks like and and being able to communicate in the moment hey I'm being blown over by this big wave let's wait for it to pass until I can speak about this more meaningfully is is probably the best way to do it I promoted Doug but I don't see him yet hold on figuring it out let me see there yep we can I can hear you I can't see you though I don't know why and sorry about that I misread my I never do anything on uh the uh the 15s you know so even though I suggest 150. even though yes I forgot and I had it down in my head is 1 30. oh no worries all right so I don't know how to get my get the camera on is it not uh just on the bottom when you hit the the start stop video it's not working it's uh start stop video I don't even know what that means so there should be a bottom bar on your Zoom screen there's mute on the one side yep and then there's a little camera next to that nope there's no camera next to it oh are you on your laptop yep it's I've never run into this problem before I did undo a camera icon yeah earlier and it didn't fly so I think I'm going to leave and come back yeah give that a try okay we'll try that okay this is uh you know I'm no longer a believer in astrology but there have definitely been some very classic Mercury in retrograde issues um I'm well aware I've gotten lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of emails about the last q a not being posted yet um so you don't need to tell me about it I definitely know uh and that was a combination of issues it was um Zoom screwed up they uploaded just uh there was audio but there was no video so we had to recover it from Zoom um and then we had to re-upload it and and that was fine but then it went to the wrong place and it got uploaded in the wrong place and so we our Tech guy will likely re-upload the correct one at the same time that he uploads this one so yeah Nancy you can you can join uh patreon um at the at the lowest level for access to that stuff or uh you know I I have no kind of particular notion of how often I'm putting out subscriber only content it's probably a couple of times a month um but there's no strict there's no strict schedule this is my openness this is the Perils of my openness is sort of like it'll happen when it happens it'll um it is what it is so but yeah I think the last maybe three episodes have been um just conversations between the two of us that have only been available for supporters so foreign yeah we might get him on his cell phone if he can't he can't connect with the keys back let me try to promote him again hey there you go there you are there we go good yeah all right well welcome nice for you to join us oh yeah well why not this is reminds me of when I showed up for the prison half an hour late it's like yeah oh excellent you get the pension either way well Mark Mark had a question that is just pure uh red meat for you which is what relationship do you see between evolutionary psychology and libertarianism so I was I was hoping that you would show up because no one is more interested or qualified to answer that question than you so um we can just wind you up and let you go on that one um yeah that's actually it's a good question strangely enough I don't know that I I thought through a crisp um a crisp set of thinking on this the um the EP is going to be is going to be essentially a set of adaptive mechanisms for human beings to live in stoneage environments under which what their uh the primary political issue is I mean what politics is going to be is it's going to be the way that um that groups deal with the the costs associated with group living the benefits associated with group living are numerous but we're going to find that when you look at an awful lot of animals they're not worth it so um the the animals themselves they don't go through a process by which uh in the in the evolutionary history of the the lineage that that there has to be a point at which um a group processes or group living is more beneficial than it is at cost and that's very often not the case so uh in some animals it is but the group and the way the group behaves um it's just a herd it's not the same thing as a human group it's not a it's a not a set of interacting individuals where there are credits and debits that are flowing throughout a social process so a bunch of horses um uh is not a group it's just a herd and they they hang together because there is a um uh uh there are there are benefits for being in a herd in fact there's geometry associated with your location and the herd and your relationship to other animals that is optimally advantageous and so uh William Hamilton actually wrote papers on the geometry of the the the genetic best interests of individuals with with respect to a herd and um and so animals are constantly swirling trying to get into those optimal circumstances relative to other members of their species human beings uh and a few other animals are literally group livers and human beings are unbelievable nothing trades and exchanges and interweaves its life like a human so you can expect that the reason why other animals didn't do it is that there's very significant costs associated with doing this specifically the costs are going to be that the members of your species have the same survival and reproductive problems you do therefore they are seeking exactly the same valuable circumstances in the environment that you are therefore you are in the ultimate competent competitive problem with them you want what they want and they want what you want okay and it's going to turn out that the way those problems are typically solved is through brute force uh and so it's literally the biggest elephant seal gets to mate with the females and the other males to think that they might be big enough get beaten bloody and bitten about okay that's just how it works now you can see the very same process is unbelievably important uh in human history and dominates the current world stage so the the Chinese dominance hierarchy is seeking net cases the uh Fanatics that are the head of the Communist Party would like world domination and subjugate Americans okay the uh Putin is a brutal dictator that that it is essentially uh derives resources for him and his buddies on the back of his slaves so throughout the world literally the political Norm has been a very interesting dance between the the benefits of group living versus the costs and the costs are extremely high just as you would expect they generally always are so human beings uh the natural history of humans really looked like this it looked like uh they were they would have been lone relatively solitary animals that uh around 2 million years ago started to form families and the reason they those were proto-humans that's a late australopitheism the uh we know this because we have a single set of footprints across some volcanic ash that shows a man a woman and two children okay that is exceedingly unlikely to have been done by chance they walked across there as a family so we know oh my goodness the late Australopithecus was in a family unit okay now the um so we know that humans everywhere are in family units so we know family unit psychology is as old as the species and probably seven times older than the species so the species is for all intents and purposes probably 300 000 years old in other words you could mate and reproduce with a human from 300 000 years ago you probably could not mate and reproduce with a human for 450 000 years ago so the species as as a species is probably 300 000 years old it has extremely similar motivational and you know basically psychological uh uh bells and whistles in other words it's basically it may be a Model T Ford but it's a car okay in other words it's going to be very similar to you and you could drive a Model T pretty quickly uh Etc but before that it wasn't it was so strikingly different it wasn't it wasn't the same machine at all now the um but what we see is we see evidence of group living that goes back pre-human in other words so Neanderthal uh and uh in various lineages of proto-humans living six seven eight hundred thousand years ago we're living in groups we don't know which ones of those were ancestors of ours and which ones weren't we don't know which out of the many lineages that existed in Africa a million years ago one of them became Homo sapiens 19 of them didn't okay but they all had very similar patterns and they lived in groups so we have not been solitary for a long time uh there's been essentially hunting uh hand axes and therefore what what they were was that they were little defenses against the food and the women uh and Etc so you couldn't make it as a solitary male because pretty soon a gang of 10 males would take your female kill your children and then your [ __ ] out of luck so you have you're like a kid in the ghetto you have to join a gang uh you don't get to not live in a game so gangs became or groups or tribes became human psychology and so uh and very often you might live in a tribe and not have a hell of a lot of interaction with other tribes it may be periodic it may be very dangerous a tremendous opportunity for mate swapping uh Etc all kinds of those things is happening that deals being done to trade my good looking daughter for two of your good looking daughters and no fighting for the next 12 months okay all kinds of that crap uh has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years in this species but within the group itself so we understand that out groups are always extremely dangerous they always have been so you live in a world today that the number one concern is out group violence nothing has changed okay it's the same problem so John Lennon you know wrote a beautiful song called imagine and that is exactly what it is Imagine you know imagine there's no countries nothing to kill and die for it's like that's a beautiful dream dude but we may be a thousand years off and what may be the end of that maybe a mandarin speaking dictator that may be how you wind up with a One World Government okay because the same process of consolidation that went from a group of 30 to a group of 60 in a group of 60 to a group of 100 and a group of 100 to a village of a thousand and a village of a thousand to Rome okay and then from Rome to the country of Italy and then from the country of Italy to you know uh the European Union okay that same process of consolidation is in the middle of happening and I believe we are hundreds of years away from a One World Government we don't know whether or not it will be half-assed it will be dairy free like America is or was huh yeah we don't know whether it will be dairy free we don't know whether at least some hybrid soft shell pretty free thing that looks like Denmark or we don't know whether or not it's going to be actually uh finally wind up under a you know 5 000 years of rule of something that looks like modern China that is unknown okay it's exceedingly unlikely that in our lifetimes that anybody's going to take over and that's because the military power is too distributed around the globe the threats are too great and nobody in our lifetimes is likely to pull the trigger and make a serious move okay so uh I get to live out my life under the uneasy process that human beings have always lived out their lives and probably never have to fire a bullet or have anything uh shot at me unless it's a some some gang who thinks they deserve my house and they didn't earn it okay now so libertarianism uh libertarianism is the the notion uh I mean what what is the is the notion that in principle people should be free from force or fraud in their interactions with other people that we could have in principle a uh a political organization of people that basically agree to a rule of law uh that that basically outlawed force or fraud in order to do that you have to have the the force to be monopolized by a leviathan government so you you have to have a government and the only way that you're going to do this well that you're going to optimize the freedom of individuals is you're going to have that that freedom of individuals be uh seeded to a process where there's one fundamental decision-making body in charge and they get to decide you know uh I.E the rule of law is actually the that we're going to have an agreement process and the guns are going to be behind that so we call it the rule of law but it's always the rule of force and no matter how you look at it violence is always the thing that decides it so when the Supreme Court decides the company a screwed over Company B and because they they the interpretation of the contract was that you should have paid this or that make no mistake the United States military is what is enforcing that law it is not the skinny weak brainy people that came from Harvard and Yale that are sitting on the Supreme Court it is in fact the the military force that started with George Washington okay yeah so libertarianism and ep the the notion here is that what we're trying to do is to get as many benefits as we can from group living and minimize the costs and so libertarianism is the is the notion of let's not have tyrants you know explode expropriating uh labor from people and making slaves out of them and telling them what to do that's libertarianism okay and you're seeing in the United States the left is very vicious right now they want to take all kinds of money they're coming after the wealth as fast as they can they they and all uh American governments write in lap to have stolen money from very uh highly conscientious Savers in the form of inflation they've been doing it ever since you know forever since the institution of the Federal Reserve 97 98 years ago okay they uh that is a that is a planned deliberate process to do that I suggest that you get on the right side of it by buying a house with a nice low interest mortgage because then you become a debtor just like the federal government is a debtor and you get on the right side of a tide that will never stop okay so the uh but uh libertarianism is in principle the concept that we should have the minimum of interference that that is necessary in order to hold order to a set of rules evolutionary psychology human beings want as much benefit as they can get from their from group living and minimizing the costs okay that has come with an awful lot of dead people it's come particularly with a lot of dead males uh that that the the natural history of our species is littered with dead males in tribal fights particularly almost always over women this is just standard operating procedure for humans so the people that want to go back to the land and back to the jungle and back to the way it was have no understanding of how unbelievably dangerous that was and is and the tremendous sense of relief that has taken place whenever a national government has come into some Stone Age environment and said no you guys don't get to do that and if we catch any tribe going after another tribe we're going to arrest you all and throw you in the pen okay that is a enormous relief to the males that did not exist uh uh in in the ancient natural history of the neural circuits that that wired up our our psychology I know by the way that I would not have lasted in the Stone Age for very long I have too hot of a temper to to to acute sense of justice and when I would have caught anybody doing wrong I would have called them out on it they would have been a [ __ ] and they would have been into it and I would have murdered them because I would have outsmarted them and then their brother's gang would have got me so I wouldn't have made it past 26. Alan widows okay he would have had to been a little more careful than he is about pissing people off but he's a cold-blooded manipulative dude and so he would have survived you've talked if you had an enemies list if you're the type of The Nixons among us would have done well now Nathan wouldn't have made it no way no Nathan's like you would have been afterwards 17. yep right the women survive they have the women survive their husbands get killed but yes they survive but don't be so wild it's sexually adventurous as a female that you sleep behind some Alpha's back then you're dead Okay so don't don't mate with O.J Simpson and break up with him because you're gonna be just like the coal so anyway the uh Pearls of Wisdom from the yeah [Laughter] from our Friday chat where else do you get such good life advice anyway I I hope that uh puts the connections together somebody like myself and libertarian thinkers for you know a long time but certainly since the days of Ludwig von mises have been really pissed off at governments and they've mostly been pissed off at governments because if Government mismanagement of the economy just they're just the avarice it's stealing money okay so that that has been very disgusting so the typical libertarian is a fiscal conservative and really pissed off at the political weap and they're pissed off at the crony capitalism uh on the right so Libertarians are reasonably homeless when it comes to Economic Policy because they're basically saying you're that Washington is a slapstick free-for-all comedy tragedy where everybody's stealing with both hands and the person on the street is being mistreated it according to the Constitution and that is true okay however what we've seen is that the constitution couldn't hold up so it was a nice idea but it turns out you can't hold up uh and so the the profit from stealing is so huge that you cannot stop people from doing it the difference today that we have that is alarming and disturbing is that they're not just stealing they're saying they deserve it okay this is different you know it used to be the hard-working men and women need more now it's no it's not fair for Rich to even exist and we're going to start playing favorites based on race and we're going to start making up for things in the past and this is how we're going to do it now I.E what you have is a bizarre looking it's not even a socialist agenda it's actually just a bizarre uh agenda that that is horrendous in its uh what it's at its root the um but you also have socialist agendas also that are that are fundamentally derivative of a single problem in the Stone Age which is the need to share and so we've covered that in other podcasts so we understand that that underlying concept is there and a Libertarian uh Libertarians differ tremendously on this on that particular issue most Libertarians are pretty adamant about not sharing at all not all of them and not me okay so a a reasonable libertarian as Charles Murray has written uh would understand that the bottom 10 of your population a lot of them are very ineffective and we don't actually need to see them starving to death uh to motivate them because there really isn't a stone age jungle for them to go gather nuts and berries from so at some point when some people become significantly ineffective enough a social welfare system of graded taxation actually makes perfect Humane reasonable sense and it does to me so uh so all of these are little factors in this equation but the fundamental issue is a Libertarian is wedded to the notion of why can't we have an agreement where we maximize the benefits of group living and minimize the costs and the answer is you can't do it because the gunpowder violence actually rules the day and the value of expropriating from your neighbors is so high that the incentives is so much uh more valuable for some people to steal their money rather than to earn it and as long as that is true and possible which it is that uh political problems will be rampant in any society and they are in the United States and they are in fact a worldwide problem of violence taking resources so make no mistake about it when they're talking about taxing uh wealth in the United States right now which is something that we've never done we've taxed income but we've never taxed wealth now that they're talking about that they this is now nothing other than violence uh basically coming after resources that people earned theoretically in free market processes and almost all of it was made in pre-market processes so the uh this is this is what it is and and uh Libertarians would say whoa we're back we're in the jungle and it's like well you don't expect that we were ever able to really leave it you you you you remain living in an environment where the threat of violence is Major and what pisses me off is I don't mind you taking a big chunk of my money but now you start saying that I can't go and not hear if I can't go there if I don't use your experimental gene therapy that I don't need for anything that starts pissing me off you know at a whole different level so but it's always then you know you can't you couldn't visit a prostitute uh without breaking the law and threatening to be thrown in jail and shamed in front of the world and possibly losing your job behind it because you're committed a crime you know this is like ridiculous uh you can't smoke pot well now you can boy and mighty you can't believe how much resistance there was they wanted to make California Police Association in the 1970s and 80s wanted to make sure that possession of marijuana was a felony and the reason they wanted to do that was because their their pensions and their their uh promotions dependent upon the amount of felony arrests that they had so they were adamantly opposed to this and would scream bloody murder and all the little hyper conscientious net cases worried about their children turning into heroin addicts you know voted right along with that crop finally now 40 and 50 years later we've seen that tumble so a Libertarian looks at the left and says well some of what you say is reasonable and it looks at the right and says some of what you say is reasonable that we fundamentally disagree with both positions in society because all we are saying is please can't we have an agreement where we optimize the the individuals benefits from group living and minimizing the cost and both other sides say no we don't want that we want to optimize us at the expense of you that is what both the left and the political right want they want to optimize their personal best interests at your expense okay that is why uh a Libertarian is on an island by themselves philosophically uh they they will share points with either side but they are on an island because they are the only view that is actually coming with that principle maximize Freedom minimize costs it is a pipe dream but it is one that seems like it should obviously be in existence but it isn't all right all makes sense I knew there would be a ranch in there half an hour yeah I didn't not that I've thought about this no I well you covered some there's some follow-up questions in the Q a section about uh what distinguishes libertarianism from you know when Noam Chomsky describes himself as a Libertarian socialist you know what is what does that mean I think you know this is this is the kind of thing that you get some political Theory grad students you buy them some beers and a pub somewhere and you'll debate this for days um but this is uh I I think there are many flavors of libertarianism as as Doug is pointing out so you can identify as a Libertarian and really it's about your relationship to trade-offs it's not about there's there's no set degree of intervention that Libertarians prefer from the state it runs the full Continuum so well maybe not the full Continuum like they don't they don't want a statist in you know environment so I think of something like libertarian Socialism or a Naco so anarcho Socialism or any of these flavors Eco and Arco like there are many um it's it's about the role of the state and the sort of um the authoritarian aspect of that so they they all want to reduce it and a lot of it is grounded in a view of human nature there's also a question about Peter kropotkin and mutual Aid a factor of evolution this sort of idea that uh Mutual Aid and altruism are evolved instincts that if we just if we just got the state out of the way and we we took the concentration of wealth away and we let everybody sort themselves out that it would all people would take care of each other accordingly and there would be this kind of utopian aspect to human um human life and and that's a lot of that is uh wishful thinking a lot of that is um there there may be some truth to some of it and I think you have people who identify as libertarian all over that rainbow disagreeing with what that means or what is optimal or what responsibility the state has for that 10 or more of people who really are going to struggle I'm with Doug I I you know to the degree that I identify as a Libertarian which is I guess closer than anything else I identify as these days um I do think there's a large role for the state to provide for people who cannot provide for themselves um particularly because of the the the specific dangers in the modern environment and the inability for people to live a stone age life you're you're thrown into this very unnatural environment and some people are just not equipped for that and I I think there is some kind of Democratic Socialist responsibility that we have to each other so I'm a fan of a fairly large safety net and I'm happy to be taxed to pay for that safety net but not every libertarian feels that way some of them are violently allergic to that very concept so um it's yeah it's just to interrupt you because I'm a male notice how cheap that would have to be because if you if uh if the average person um let's suppose 10 of people are not competent which is a very high number that uh but it could be in other words people wind up getting a back injury at 47 uh or a head injury in a car and their insurance is really inadequate at this point in history currents is massively better now than it was 80 years ago but it's really not what it should be and will be a hundred years from now and so as a result a lot of people get injured and there are are permanently not competent and what they did in compensation really isn't enough uh for them to live even halfway decently in the society so you could imagine that it's ten percent so imagine that the other 90 uh if they that if you actually had to make it so that the 10 lived at say oh I don't know the 20th percentile what the natural 20th percentile is that's not bad okay so so therefore the 20th percentile is only earning half of the median so if it's if that's at half in the median and you have 10 of the people so we distribute a very small percentage of the of the uh of the income of people that are above the 10 percent off in fact we don't have to take anything from the people for the next 20 percentile from 10 to 10 from 10 to 30. don't take a cent from those people okay starting at the 30th percentile we start taking you know one percent of your income uh in order to to to help the people of the bottom 10 by the time you're at the 75th percentile we start taking two or three percent okay by the time we're you're at the 98th percentile we take five percent that's a fortune that's way more than you need for the administration of having people the bottom 10 percentile live at the 20th percentile and you're like well what about the poor slobs that are up to 10 percentile honestly well they've got the incentive to get themselves to the 20th percentile okay so we didn't want to reduce their our incentives by you know what do you call it what is that uh everybody gets a grand no matter what they do Universal basic income that's absolutely insane Universal basic income is a reasonable concept for the people that are incompetent at the bottom 10 of per capability it's not even it's not right for anybody else well I just graduated from college and I've had a set of circumstances live in your mom's basement I don't care what you do you know you got you got a mouth and you got two hands get down to Jack In The Box and get busy for God's sakes and you're just gonna have to do that for a while until you find a new thing to do that's libertarianism libertarianism is we're not taking the incentive away for you to hustle however if you can't do it it is incredibly reasonable for uh the rest of us as a group living to me you know how do you know it's not going to be you miss you know Mr genius how do you know it's not going to be you how do you know you're not going to be friendless homeless how do you know you're not going to have a schizophrenic break at 37 and lose all of your friends and all of your confidence how do you know that you're not going to get addicted to heroin you don't have any idea so you damn straight it makes a tremendous sense in the modern environment uh in any environment for that matter the uh just humans against the problems of life it makes sense that if you can afford it you can't afford a safety net at 1840. okay you just can't everybody's up against it worrying that their crops are going to get wiped out of their family is going to starve but by 2010 you could have a very sophisticated outstanding safety net and there's no reason not to and the right libertarian Concepts that that shouldn't be there are pie in the sky and they are not consistent with anything that we know about human nature we're not going to be able to count on the charity to actually figure it out all the way down to some funny looking person with bad teeth on skid Rowan Compton don't expect the charity to get there okay so that's why I I would disagree with that and that's why you know this is as Jen says though everybody draws their lines their own way where do you want the power of the guns of the government to be leveled and what do you think is fair and and so this is uh you know the United States has the best set of rules that anybody ever came up with and it does a pretty good job but not nearly as well as I would like to see that's how the system except you know the the the it's the best that we have it's the it's the worst except for all the others right yeah except for all the others is well said yeah Churchill or I always forget there's some there's some little nugget out there not so just in history for democracy yeah yeah I mean there are definitely if you if you go to the libertarian circle jerk known as Freedom Fest which used to happen in Vegas every year and now they've moved to the where are they North Dakota I think or they've they've Vegas is too oppressive for them now so they uh you can go and and you know listen to those lectures and meet those people and there are people there who are hardcore like I've got mine that's all that matters I'm not paying a dime to the government to to redistribute anything because I owe nothing to anybody else and that that is a person who can honestly call themselves a Libertarian but you know that's a but there's a spectrum for sure and um I think most most people who identify in that camp are um you know feel that there is some responsibility to individuals in society at some level or for some amount of time right back yeah recognizes that one of the big things in group living is that we are ensuring the group of course yeah that is that is where that that is where the iron Rand philosophy and Atlas Shrug fails okay uh because she paints a picture of a coalition that they're all they all love each other and respect each other but nobody gives each other a nickel okay and the truth is is that it's [ __ ] that that is not in fact consistent with human nature and it never was it's just as inconsistent with human nature is um sort of the Marxist utopian ideal that everybody loves each other and shares indiscriminately and and gives and and Shakes and according to ability and need and that they don't need any kind of government to protect property rights or manage this in some sort of way so um both both extreme ends of this are utopian and unmoored from Human Nature yeah I would say one of those in my humble opinion tournament more entertaining things to watch is to watch a couple of uh left-wing type socialists uh in a family squabble over an inheritance no yeah that's a very entertaining thing to to do for sure you guys think you're going to get the whole world to agree on how to divide the pie and the pair of you like I watched a pair of sisters fight over two million dollars and they blew almost all of it on lawyers hmm it's like oh you think everybody should just Pony up and agree uh sure hahaha yep yep well there's there's probably a correlation with the disagreeableness informing both of those things got it I'm a children who's this you know Buddhist nun who's written these beautiful books on meditation and mindfulness and um is sort of a one of the first in a big westernizers of of uh classic mindfulness thinking um is is famous for pointing out that the the most disagreeable angry people you will ever meet are people protesting against War these are sort of like they're they're very upset and they're very they have this very strong objection energy um and that's like at the root of many much of their suffering according to her and the wisdom tradition so yeah yeah one of the little things that that is uh uh I think useful for just a useful perspective to some degree is to understand that that people even in the US as a country as extraordinary as this that you've never been free there never has been you have always been under the Specter of violence and that violence either comes from your own internal government or that violence comes from the threat that's coming from outside okay either way your life is actually being lived in a matrix of violence threats that's what it is okay so if you decide that you're going to start a little business on the side of a road somewhere and sell fruit somebody comes along and says no you can't do this without a permit that's a violent threat they they're threatening and they're saying oh and by the way you have to keep to keep a Cali on all that stuff and we're going to tax it violent threat okay you don't do that they're gonna cite you you don't pay the citation you know you're in jail okay so they'll come seize your assets they'll come looking for your old broken down forward and take it okay so you we are always living under the threat of violence that's what it is now you don't think of it that way because it's remote but but it's remote partially because you're not going to push back against it hey you have all kinds of you've got now really a relatively bizarre period in American history uh as a result of covid where there's a hell of a lot of a threat of violence is being pushed around and snarling coming from uh coming from the extraordinary fanaticism about how everybody needs to be vaccinated and you better not come into a restaurant without a mask on because you're a threat to the world okay which is all incredibly ludicrous and we could unpack that another day but the point of the matter is it's interesting to note that you're now watching the threat of violence start to be fair fairly substantial that's that now you can't go into an airport without putting a mask on no matter what you know and that you're we're not going to allow you to fly to you know I don't know Acapulco and then come back without this fed in the other it's like oh it's interesting okay now it can be irritating for those of us that know the math and can run the run the run the whole Matrix on all this and and are disgusted by all of it but at the same time guess what it's nothing like being a royalty in the middle of the French Revolution it's nothing like actually being a human being during the Cold War in 1952 worrying about the Russians dropping a bomb on you the truth of the matter is you're still very free that your freedoms have been constrained okay so your freedoms have now been constrained by what big Pharma the government big Tech there's been and the political left all of these have conspired to constrain your freedom it should piss you off okay but at the same time if they succeed you just have to live with it okay so we're not going to spend our lives we're going to beat our genes which might might want some of you to spend a bunch of time and resources trying to fix it forget it it's never worth doing that okay political action is a big waste of time what you want to do is is Harry Brown would instruct you think individually think about what is in your personal best interest and how to what do what maximize the benefits of group living and minimize the costs there will always be costs the cost will never be trivial okay they will be they will be modest or they'll be more substantial but our job is to figure out how to live your best existence without you know spending a bunch of time and energy trying to push and shove and change bend the world into a Utopia so that you can live in it forget it our concept here is you try to figure out your own personal Utopia you carve out your own Utopia as best can be carved from the marble that they give you okay and in the United States we've each been given a hunk of flawed marble is what we've been given and so uh in that as you chip away way and basically build the sculpture or the art of your life you're going to run into some problems in the marble and we just ran into some and that's okay you're just gonna have to live with it and modify and go on from there and it shouldn't really impact your capacity for happiness more than one percent and that's how we're always attempting to maneuver around the governments and their constraints I can't entirely agree that political action is always futile oh I think yeah it depends on who you are if you're Bill Gates you can actually make enough impact in political action to actually bend the world to your will but if you're an individual unless you do smoke unless you enjoy the process for its own sake which you very well might and are paid in the process for its own sake the truth of the matter is to with the the CD on getting a whole bunch of people to change their minds and change the guns of the government to point your direction as opposed to somebody else's direction that to me is statistically like an outrageous gamble of your time and energy so only if there's ancillary benefits do I think it would be worth it yeah yeah yeah it does it's an interesting moment in history because you know you you comparative political scientists are well uh sensitized to the relevance of social Revolution you know I mean there have been moments where history has turned on mass movements and Civil Society waking up and I mean obviously that doesn't come out of nowhere there's all kinds of factors involved um but it's it's an interesting question in this kind of um the benign surveillance state in which we in which we exist I I don't know if something like what happened in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s is possible in the same way um you know Contra the state if it's against the state's interests at a really fundamental level to organize socially and politically I don't know how what that looks like anymore or how possible that is and how that affects any individuals cloth benefit analysis in participating or initiating that but you know I also think about things like you know somebody like Brett Weinstein so he's not he you know he's not Gates he's he's well known and very rarefied circles um but not outside of those circles at all he's kind of this nerdy Professor he and his wife Heather have talked about him on this podcast before this q a before and elsewhere um have a podcast or at least until very recently have a podcast called The Dark Horse podcast where they have really consistently um been asking tough questions about covid including about covet treatment um and most recently about Ivermectin in particular and some concerns about vaccines and you know not not anything wholly out of the bounds of a rational evidence-based conversation these are not conspiracy theorists these are these are nerdy evolutionary biologists professors and um you know their most recent conversation that they had they had the the inventor of mrma Technology on with them which has since been pulled from YouTube so someone like Brett out there having these conversations a great personal risk you know acting politically obviously their status benefits growing to him um he he obviously has a subjective enjoyment of the process and there is you know it's but I think there's also something beyond that that it is it is worth I I you know I am free riding on his on his courage to do that um and to put himself out there and to risk his channel being demonetized and everything that he's doing like that is an important thing for him to do to improve my enjoyment of my life and to constrain the the power grab that is happening between the Unholy alliance with big Pharma in the state so and the first thing you learn day one of political science school is that what is the definition of a state it's the it's a set of Institutions that have a monopoly on violence that's what it is um and and your definition of violence is very relevant in this case so so I don't know I I think it's become a really uh complicated question with the state with its Monopoly on violence uh but through its many tendrils knowing exactly what we're doing and what we're looking at and who we're talking to and what we're thinking and what we're going to do next and what gets us mad and what calms us down and it has us all very precisely in our little avatars and we we can be controlled really effectively through through naked coercion and much more subtle methods um so it's a it's a disturbing moment well it's a disturbing moment because you you can feel now you're watching consolidation of power yeah the same way that the Soviet Union Consolidated power all over Eastern Europe you you are watching the consolidation of power in in the domestic uh Affairs of Americans and it's creepy but of course to my way of thinking um you know I I I I will the Bible of my life is how I found free in an entry world and the concept is is that if you've if you could have free states within free within an unfree World why can't you have free individuals within an unfree State and so the and knowing that your freedom is going to be constrained uh doesn't mean that you can't live your life quite well you know in a reasonably in some state that is not Nazi Germany so I don't see the United States turning into Nazi Germany I turning I see it turning shittier than I've ever seen in my life there's no question about it this is uh this is outrageous crap happening and it's disgusting as hell and I can't believe uh that what a bunch of sheep and head nodding you know uh basically you know uh uh accepting that people are of the kinds of things that are going down it's pretty disturbing however I also look at it and realize hmm you know what I I may I may have a couple of wings a couple of feathers clipped but it's not going to profoundly influence my existence and so the uh now you can you can say reasonably wait a second you know what's that mean for what looks like 30 years from now and the answer is hmm it might look halfway between modern day England and modern day China you know what I mean which in other words the tremendous Freedom that I lived my life under uh for for the last six decades is nowhere anywhere to be found okay I mean it may essentially disappear under this globe as you watch forces consolidate power and now they're able to do so in a way that they have not been able to do so right in the middle of a free state because of high tech so I can understand you know I think that's incredible they they pulled the podcast where he talked to the uh the the scientists that originated mRNA wow yeah it's a three hour rambling conversation with with two of them and another um you know somewhat more emotionally volatile characters but well educated have you seen this video do you know the one I'm talking about yeah I was up for about a week and uh yeah they've pulled it I don't know if it was another strike on the channel but the channel already has two strikes so one more strike and it's gone um and he's you know I I this is whatever whatever covid is or isn't or whatever damage it has done or hasn't done or I mean you can you can have a variety of opinions on this thing um it remains very clearly obvious to me that it is it is serving as um a really expedient pretext for a lot of Consolidated authoritarian power moves and and you know entropy is the force of the universe that the force of government is consolidation of power like there's no one in in power who doesn't want more power um and that is just that is what happens and and the the the the most common pretext for that throughout history if not the universal pretext is is an emergency it's an emergency we need to protect you um there are the scary things happening in the world and so this this is excusable surveillance is excusable the Civil civil liberty depression is is excusable um and so covid can be a human catastrophe and it can also be uh an excuse for for governments doing very bad things and wanting to do more bad things and and sort of because of the the difficulty of questioning the coveted narrative in any sort of way it's like this is happening and in slow motion and people are not as as concerned about it or not as willing to speak out about it and Brett is one of the very few people who puts those things together and um you know he's not speaking about uh ivermectin for its own sake he's it's there's the broader implications and so when you're watching the consolidation of authoritarian power uh and it's it's still there's still like potential in the system you know it hasn't been fully Consolidated and this is a moment where if you do have a CB to to speak out and to um and to take political action and to at Great risk to yourself or your reputation or your income stream or whatever it is there there is a responsibility to do that um incumbent on some people I think so I I feel that pressure I know it's not I I will pick up my Harry Brown and settle in and uh learn to love the bomb after it's all like you know like there's nothing more I can do but it feels like there's still something I could do even in my you know Eon status so I I don't know that's my this is personality differences I have all the same feelings and right uh the independent neural circuits inside my head say don't get sucked into an expensive losing cause I mean those are the those are two independent views of this and so uh in other words uh it's worth some part of it just as a as it resonates out of a Stone Age Village but if the Stone Age Village is going to make a disastrous political move then I better open at my mouth and try to essentially stop it okay and so the the the notion of hey this is uh outrageous unfair wrong and we need to essentially uh cut off the head of the snake because this whole idea and the set of people that are involved here need to go this isn't how this is how we live the um yeah the the the story painted by the Weinstein broadcast on Ivermectin is a story of Will and I continue to see it as I look at Ivermectin now and I look at what gets posted it's very clear there's worldwide intimidation on governments all over the world to make sure that their little Departments of Health all sing the same tune and it's completely irrational in other words in somewhere in India or somewhere some doctor got his license polled uh and they raided his uh rated his office Etc because he was using Ivermectin it's like really some little doctors using Ivermectin with covet patients and that is such a big tragedy and scare when there's no evidence at all it would do any harm none okay and so why are we so upset about this who is being incentivized to do that answer big Pharma has its tentacles All Over The World Health Organization the CDC United States government they are immensely powerful all around the world so to the point where they can actually grab a health official by their neck in Sri Lanka and you tell them you go grab a doctor and stick his head on a pike and you let every other doctor in that country know that they're going to get shaken down and thrown in jail if they use this very harmless you know drug that is absurd anxiety about this why would anybody he's so upset about this very simple and that's because it works and it works very very well and that is the last thing they needed to stop the emergency the last thing that big Pharma or our government needed was to have a screeching halt to this emergency this emergency was immensely profitable for people of enormous power in this world and so therefore they're going to make damn sure that this emergency doesn't end so this is this is there and that's exactly they don't actually quite connect those dots that graphically in that podcast but they they're saying it without saying it okay and I'm saying it why because I only have a few thousand Nut Cases to listen to me Brett's got 300 000 people listening to him so as a result he gets shut down okay this is you know this is that's amazing that that that is scary and disgusting you know I mean and it tells you guess what freedom freedom is shrinking folks right in front of you okay the the freedom that you had three or four years ago has now been constrained not trivially as consolidation is taking place uh in in the United States government so this is you know it is the US government a big Pharma can't kill anybody well maybe they could but the point is is that they're not out murdering people and they're not actually threatening them with violence all they're doing is putting big wads of money in the pockets of politicians that is not number one lobbyist on the hill I mean it's it's big Pharma is is the biggest lobbying force in Washington so um yeah people in the chat are saying the podcast is available it's also I think it's on both um I think it's on Rumble bit shoot Odyssey it's in all the you know sort of dark web sort of places um and it's the audio is still available I think on Spotify and maybe on iTunes this is this is sick when did any of us out there think the big Pharma the government and big Tech would all be in bed together what what does big Tech have anything to do with this why are they involved answer because there's a consolidation of power taking place fairly rapidly and very disturbingly right in front of our face and uh yeah it's a great analysis Jen that that the as you could say you could have a legitimate emergency but the real the real tragedy isn't the covet the real tragedy is what's happening to Freedom right in front of your face this is like a classic leftist critique that's part of why I'm so baffled and politically homeless right now is you know my my sort of introduction to that way of thinking about how how this has been used by would-be authoritarian since the beginning of time it was from Naomi Klein with her book the shock Doctrine um that sort of you take advantage of the disruption and the chaos to execute your Utopia and this is this is like what government does this is what people in power do um and sometimes they manufacture it you know Putin famously uh was behind the this bombing of several apartment buildings in Moscow before he initially came to power and he's been consolidating ever since um and there have been other Shady things that have happened that may or may not been the FSB is you know it's it's unclear but we know that he he was behind the apartment buildings um and this is just this is just the way that it is this is what pinpot dictators have done throughout all of human history uh and now we have it happening at scale and there's this there's the surveillance aspect and that's like people are are really you know you're never alone your thought you're never alone with your thoughts anymore so this yeah gives me great angst anyway yes oh yeah well we had we had other questions but we've already gone way over and one of them was about why why does Tucker Carlson keep talking about vaccine harms and vaccines but we can we can get to all that you know if you guys are you know we Doug and I rant regularly about the stuff on hot block too so yeah yeah well thank you for joining us for the ranch of the week um and uh we will see you next time it's great to see you as always it's you talk to you soon bye unless we get canceled bye
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