hello folks and welcome to the lunar society podcast today it is my great privilege to talk with professor michael humer he is in my opinion the best philosopher alive he's a professor of philosophy at the university of colorado and he has written more than 70 academic articles on epistemology ethics meta ethics metaphysics and political philosophy
he's also written eight books the newest one of which is this introduction to philosophy knowledge reality and value i highly highly recommend it it's incredibly clear and easy to read it covers all of the arguments and philosophy that i've been curious about since i was a teenager so i've included a link to his amazon page in the description where you can go and
buy it today we had an incredibly wide-ranging conversation about a previous book of his the problem with political authority just a reminder as always to please please share this podcast on social media or with your friends if you enjoy it this is a small and growing podcast so word of mouth really really helps without further ado here's professor michael humer
[Music] okay professor humor uh what is the problem political authority what did you write this book yeah so uh you know here's a copy of the book uh and uh you can order it on amazon that's the important thing or you know anywhere um yeah so you know the the problem referred to in the title is a philosophical problem about government basically the
problem is what's the basis for the government's authority and you know and what i mean by the government's authority is so first of all it's usually thought that the government is entitled to um give other people commands and force them to obey in situations where you nobody else would be entitled to give command to force people to obey right
so like they could give commands that you don't you don't already have to do but you have to do them because only because the government commanded it and then the other part of this notion of authority is that it's generally thought that you have a moral obligation to obey right to obey the law merely because it's the law and again you know the law could be things
that you're not already obligated to do right so example if i decide that i'm going to collect money from other people to give to the poor right like i started a charity and collecting money to help the poor and i decided i'm not getting enough contributions voluntarily so i decide to just like force people to pay right um if i do this this is called extortion
and uh you know i'm going to wind up in jail right but besides that i'm going to wind up in jail most people will be disapproving of this and think that number one i shouldn't be doing that number two they don't have to pay me okay but when the government does this this is called taxation and you know social welfare programs which is uh generally most people
approve of right and they think that the government is entitled to do that and that we are obligated to pay so and that's just an illustration of the idea that the government has a special moral status right that most people think they have a kind of status that puts them above other ordinary people and so the question is why like you know why do they why do they
get to do all this stuff that nobody else can do and why should we obey them right so you're pointing out a contradiction between common sense morality and common sense political philosophy why should we resolve that contradiction in favor of uh common sense intuitions rather than you know the prevalent political abuse yeah um common sense ethical intuition i mean
so yeah so there are the intuitions that you would apply to kind of ordinary people and then there are the intuitions people have about the state um but i think if you raise this issue with most people they will see that some sort of explanation is required right so like most people have the initial reaction that the government has
authority but they um they will not generally say and yeah that's just self-evident and needs no explanation like most people can see that it needs an explanation right and so then they will try to give an explanation then it will just turn out that none of the explanations are any good right so i mean right so part of the reason why we don't just go with our
um initial intuition about politics is that we also you might say we have the intuition that it requires an explanation right um yeah so that's part of it um another thing is you know the um the ethical intuitions that i'm appealing to so things like um you shouldn't go up to people and just like steal their money or you know like threaten people with
violence to get their money or and then lock them in cases and stuff like that um these are not controversial intuitions right like these are intuitive reactions that any normal person would have regardless of whether they're democrats or republicans or libertarians the thing about the state having authority is not so uncontroversial
right so there's a significant number of people who are called libertarians who do not have any intuitive reaction that the state has authority right yeah yeah you know i have like in the book in chapter six i have a series of explanations for why people might have this bias in favor of the state um you know based on different findings in
psychology right but i mean one of the obvious things like maybe the most obvious thing is that people have a bias towards the status quo right and like there's there's just very clear independent evidence of that like without talking about the problem of political authority there's independent evidence that there's a bias for the status quo right so this explains why people in
different societies um with very different customs tend to think that their customs are superior to those of other societies like and how could that be like it has to be that they're biased in favor of the way things are done in their own society right um right so like i've got an explanation of why people would have mistaken um moral judgments about
the state yeah so i want to talk about your second point there which is that there's more controversy on the uh political views than there is on the uh basic ethical um intuitions about theft and so on um it's not self-evident to me that so there are libertarians who believe that the state should be significantly smaller but as far as people who believe that
the state has no unique authority that non-state actors have uh don't have it's not self-evident to me that like anarcho-capitalists outnumber uh the people who think that you should have to pay somebody your neighbor has a right to make you pay when you have benefited from his services even though you didn't ask for those services um i i wouldn't say that
anarcho-capitalism is less controversial than that i it might be but i'm like that's not self-evidence to me um and narco capitalism is controversial right so right so anarcho-capitalism is the extreme version of libertarianism right so there are not very many of them but there are a substantial number of libertarians right and pretty much they still hold
the political most of them to hold the political view that um the state has some unique authority right um no i don't think so right so and i mean this is um this is discussed in chapter seven um where i argue that um you know what differentiates libertarians from everyone else is skepticism about authority that is that is the basic libertarian
view by the way many libertarians um deny that this is what what unifies libertarianism but um i think they deny that because they haven't read my book and when they read my book they will understand that like they may not even understand what i mean by authority and skepticism thereof okay but okay this is what's common to libertarians they think that you should
apply the same moral standards to the state that you apply to ordinary people and they do that and then right and so when the state does something like the state commits murder the libertarians go murder and you know the partisans of conventional political views go oh well you know i guess they shouldn't have done that but you know yeah
but we're not going to call them murderers or anything like that right yeah so good there's a quotation at the end that i put at the end of the book from um the chinese philosopher matzah which was you know like whatever some thousand years ago or something but um he says you know to kill one man is a capital crime and to kill ten men is to multiply
the crime by tenfold and to kill a hundred men is to multiply by a hundred fold okay and this the rulers of the world all recognize but when it comes to the greatest crime of all making war on another state they praise it because you know that's just like it's just murder but bigger right yeah um and so he says you know if a man on seeing a little black
says it is black but when seeing a lot of black says it is white then it's clear that this person cannot distinguish black from white and similarly the rulers of the world cannot distinguish right from wrong yeah yeah and that's it it's an interesting point like if if we held the political leaders to account the same way hold the individuals to
account um it'd be an interesting way of looking at them so let me ask you about the uh biases you were talking about one of the ones you point out in the book is stockholm syndrome where a victim of abuse will feel loyalty towards her abuser and feel that the abuser is actually protecting them and will feel um gratitude towards small acts of mercy
uh i i wonder given the fact that people regularly criticize the president or regularly criticize government policies to disagree with to what extent they're actually fearful of or in some way um incorrectly loyal towards the government in this particular way because of fear of authority yeah um so you know so the original stockholm syndrome you know just for anyone doesn't know
refers to there's a bank robbery in stockholm sweden whatever like decades ago probably 1970s or something where um the robbers took some people hostage in the bank vault and then it basically turned out that the hostages kind of emotionally bond bonded with the kidnappers at one point they thought that the kidnappers were protecting them from the police
right at the end um the the hostages didn't want to go out without the kidnappers because they were afraid that the police would shoot the kidnappers right once they got them off okay so anyway um and then i think one of them like um you know tried to aid in the legal defense like started up a legal defense fund for okay and this is a phenomena that occurs
periodically in hostage situations right it wasn't just that one case so like you know fbi negotiators are trained to be prepared for stockholm syndrome now you know what happens with the government isn't literally exactly that they're not literally kidnapping us but my idea is um there's a you know there's a little bit broader phenomenon that people
will instinctively take the side of those who are who have power over them and there's an evolutionary explanation for why this would be right so and you know people have said about stockholm syndrome that it's a survival mechanism which by the way there's evidence for thinking that it worked because um the like the kidnappers in that case
said like they were thinking of shooting the hostages but they couldn't do it because of the emotional bond that they formed with the hostages so um so it might have worked uh and you know my more general point is it's common in human societies for someone to have power over others and if the people in the weaker position form an emotional bond with a powerful
people that may help them to survive and prosper right so that might be why people um kind of try to try to take the side of the government right and then you know you asked about well um people are often very critical of the president and i guess i think it's because people are distinguishing the government from the current office holder it doesn't feel
like you're being disloyal to the government what you're saying is you just want like the other party like you wanted the other party to be in power which which they're also like you know half of the government or something like that mm-hmm yeah so but then there's people who i mean not from a libertarian perspective there's people who question the
legitimacy of the government in other ways uh for example they'll say it's uh systemically racist uh and these are also the kind of people who want to increase the size of government uh but that also seems uh confusing like if it's uh if fear of government should prevent people from okay so let's say it prevents them from criticizing uh the legitimacy of the
government but not but it allows them to criticize the president why are people comfortable criticizing the legitimacy of the government in this particular way i mean i'm not sure they're questioning the legitimacy of the government yeah like the you know the social justice warriors right um rather than just criticizing some of its policies right
um so i mean in my view could questioning their legitimacy would be saying like they shouldn't um they shouldn't have any entitlements that ordinary citizens don't have right so like if ordinary citizens aren't entitled to tax each other then the state shouldn't be able to tax us or you know something like that right um yes all right i don't think the left-wing people think
that exactly but i mean they you know they are like uh they're like sort of actually i mean i well i'm not quite sure i understand your view right so um because i'm not quite sure i understand what the systemic racism is right so like um i'm gonna say like they're accusing the government of being racist but i'm not even sure that that's what it means
right like what do you mean i'm sure that systemic racism means that anyone is actually racist right that's fair yeah um i i wonder to what extent so uh uh vernae girard thought noticed that after stalin died uh support for the soviet union amongst academia in the west declined and so his hypothesis was that the academics didn't support uh stalin
despite his violence but because of his violence so it wasn't fear of authority but more so um that the charisma of authority that they find uh authority charismatic and violence charismatic uh what do you think of that hypothesis um yeah maybe so i mean i'm not sure if the academics knew about stalin's um murders right um they might have not known
because they didn't want to know right but so i think there's a phenomenon that um horrible people are often charismatic or right or you know charismatic to ordinary average people so stalin was probably a charismatic character although like i haven't seen him but um because uh like people um ordinary average people don't admire moral virtue
they admire power like they admire somebody who is who appears strong and confident right but the people who are very strong and confident are often bad people so like and like the reason why they're strong is because they crush all opposition right and the reason why they're confident is that they do not give a about other people like if you don't
if you don't give a what other people think and you don't care what effect you have on other than other people then you don't worry like you're not worried when you're talking to them because you don't care what they think about you like and you know when you're when you're just taking actions like if you're the leader and you're like putting forward your new policies
you do it with total confidence because you don't care if it's wrong right that's my read on dictators right they like they act like they're totally confident that this is the right policy because they don't actually care if it kills lots of people or not right right like that's a normal person would be worried what if i'm doing the wrong thing but
then that worry would make them look unconfident and then people would not support them right yeah see this does help explain um something about the last four years so i'm not claiming that uh trump was stalin or anything but i never found him charismatic in the way that millions of people did i just there was i was missing like a module in my mind
that was supposed to find him charismatic i just couldn't figure it out but that's a good explanation just the confidence itself yeah i mean i found him kind of anti-charismatic and because i think about half the country found him anti-charismatic so to speak but you still have to explain why half of them found him you know particularly
charismatic like better than the other 15 republican candidates in the primaries right um and yeah it had a lot to do with being super confident right which by my read is because he doesn't care and like he'll say stuff with total confidence and the the ordinary person thinks because he's talking with complete confidence that means that what he's saying must be true
right but the alternative explanation is it it's because he doesn't care about truth so so then why do you think moral progress is likely if the average person cares about power or you know is more is more convinced to buy a power itself than convincing arguments or by people who care about the truth yeah how do we get moral progress i mean so
i mean first like why do i think that there's moral progress because i looked at history because like you look at what people were doing you know back in ancient rome you know gladiatorial combat they were like forcing slaves to fight to the death for fun because they thought it was amusing to see them cut to pieces and then you know like just 200 years
ago in america we were enslaving just like enslaving people just because they had darker skin and stuff like that um so i mean the evidence of there being moral progress is um compelling right it's like enormous progress uh what's but you know what's the explanation how did it happen um i mean i think that it's driven by a relatively small number of people
right so there are a bunch of people who um you know don't don't reflect very much and just go along with the customs of their society um and they're just sort of like um sort of neutral and there's a small number of people who kind of see the flaws in the current in the status quo and they tried to push society you know towards the towards the moral truth right
and um and they and they push it slowly right okay but because um there are always reformers who are trying to improve society it's a constant um it's a constant small force so over the course of many generations it accumulates to a lot of progress right right uh so let me i've read dialogues and ethical uh vegetarianism which you also wrote
and i want to question you on whether on that there has been moral progress at one point in the book you say that um the impact of factory farming rivals the suffering of all the humans that have ever existed uh and how can a world where factory farming has been increasing be one where there's been tremendous moral progress on net there would seem people moral decline right
yeah yeah i mean you could make the argument people find they're shocking but you can make the argument that like you know would have been better if there were no humans that's nice maybe the world would be better with no human beings right because the amount of pain and suffering that we cause just like a few years of human beings
the amount of pain and suffering that we cause to other species is probably greater than all of the suffering in all of human history and you know how probably outweighs all of the pleasure that human beings have ever experienced you know among all of the 100 billion or so humans who have existed um you know that might seem shocking but um the number of animals that we're
torturing and killing each year are something like 74 billion right and they've only ever been 110 billion humans so like two years of factory farming we tortured and killed more creatures than the total number of us who have ever existed right yeah so anyway um yeah so like from a purely consequentialist standpoint um it's been like a huge regression
okay however it does appear to me that it's turning around so um vegetarianism and veganism are becoming more popular when i was in college um you know there were there were not many vegetarians and i think i never met a vegan i think like nobody heard of that and there weren't like vegan restaurants you'd go to and stuff like that um and what's ultimately what's
ultimately going to change the situation is um technology right right so now there are all of these products there are these um you know substitute products substitutes for animal products which are really convincing and there didn't used to be also they're working on um synthetic meat basically so they're going to make meat without the cruelty
and that's probably what's ultimately going to end it right so like right now it's really bad but it's probably going to get better when we perfect this technology right also i mean you know and this kind of um you know this kind of fits with what i was saying earlier this is being driven by a small number of people right there's like a small
percentage of society who cares because there's like a small percentage of human beings who are basically morally decent i mean a small number of people give a crap about morality at all but okay but that's enough right so like the um the technological changes are being driven by um you know animal welfare advocates basically like that's that's why we have people who are
interested in developing synthetic meat and stuff like that yeah okay so uh assuming that there's more progress is happening um you say in the book that you expect uh you expect the rate of progress to increase over time because of exponential growth um this seems to contradict a blog post you recently wrote uh talking about how progress will end
uh where you said that because of diminishing marginal returns uh actually exponential growth has to stop and you even uh hypothesize that it'll actually decline at some point uh so i mean you were talking about scientific and technological knowledge here but why doesn't this also apply to moral progress why why won't we see um moral decline or just zero moral growth
before we get to the point of anarcho-capitalism oh um i mean so any progress has to eventually slow down [Music] um and you know because because i i think there's a maximum point in everything right right but that doesn't mean that will happen soon like i can't predict where it will happen um eventually civilization will collapse
and we'll all die eventually the human species will go extinct but i don't know when um it could be you know i don't know it could be in the next hundred years or it could be in a million years okay right um but what about moral progress oh yeah and and part of why i said that in the blog post was there's been a decline in the rate of economic growth
in the united states and um poorer countries have a faster rate of growth right they're poorer overall but they're growing faster so they'll eventually catch up okay and like and you can hypothesize the reason for this um if you're already doing pretty badly it's easier to improve and like the united states is already pretty efficient so it gets harder and
harder to improve right um and that could happen with moral progress too like it will presumably slow down when we get as we get closer to the moral truth the rate of progress will have to slow down right um will it decline uh i don't know um i don't i don't know why that would have to happen i mean like eventually we'll all die but i don't know why we would have to become
immoral before we die um it's not something about the accumulation of knowledge that it tends to go you know it tends to just accumulate and not get destroyed yeah um yeah what so will we stop will the progress stop before we reach another capitalism i don't know i mean that might be true if there's some um if there are some truths that are
super hard to apprehend then it might be that like you know human species never become advanced enough to understand them like that could be true but this doesn't seem to me like it's that hard right so i mean i think my basic moral point is the government isn't special like they're people like you and me there's no reason why they should get to
do a whole bunch of stuff that that you consider to be immoral if anyone else does them right so like the basic idea i don't think is that complicated um and i mean i think this is similar to other bits of progress that have occurred in history like a lot of the stuff people were doing the past was super stupid like not only bad but stupid okay so like the idea
that um oh you have more rights than somebody else because of your skin color like that's super dumb besides being really harmful it's just dumb right anyway so like you know eventually people see that okay but i think this is similar so you know the idea that you don't have different rights because of your skin color i think that is kind of similar to you
don't have different rights just because you're in power right yeah uh so i'm gonna try to critique that view actually um like it you could say that the change in attitudes over the last few centuries has been towards greater respect for the individual a stronger presumption against violence and coercion but uh that that might be true globally
because like the default state of mankind is you know authoritarian control but in the united states it seems that in 19th century obviously to the exclusion of blacks and women attitudes are far more libertarian uh there's a particular example of uh grover cleveland to send a bill from congress authorizing what would be 250 000 today for some natural disaster that
occurred in texas and he vetoes it and he says first of all i can't find any um authority within the constitution to do this second that this sets an expectation of uh you know uh paternalistic uh help from the government in the future and we should just rely on the charity of fellow citizens this is not the proper world government
uh both parties seem to have a respect for um the autonomy of the individual more so back then uh so on the particular point of uh libertarian views it seems that there's been regress and i think maybe a better theory of changing attitudes has been an increase in safety ism and in most cases this is a good thing because countries that care about safety
don't do genocides torture war and so on or you know like dangerous yes yeah yeah but uh it also means that they're more comfortable with regulations with fines with uh uh not so um diligent in protecting property rights so then this safety is a mathematics to a regulatory state rather than anecdotal capitalism over time yeah i mean that that could be true
right so definitely the united states has had um growing regulation um you know back when it was first started the um the code of federal regulations so this lists all of the federal regulations it was started in i guess 1938 or something like this or 1930s it was 22 000 pages which sounds long enough uh but it's now over 150 000 pages right and you know like uh
you know the size of these regulatory agencies is growing more employees right um so um i mean it could be right that that's just what's going to keep happening right but it's not obviously right um so i mean there is a certain amount of pushback and there are people who are realizing the like the problems with regulation so um in many areas just many areas of human
intellectual inquiry knowledge just accumulates and uh yeah we might just be in the primitive state of you know knowledge about social and political matters right um that you know it looks to me like there's um um sort of accumulating libertarian sentiment this could be wishful thinking or something i don't know but like you know when i was in college
um you know like the institute for humane studies they had a summer seminar which i went to they had a summer seminar but like in the next few decades they expanded greatly right and you know these there are these different libertarian organizations now there was no students for liberty when i was in college right like that expanded also um
there was um i recall there being basically like one well-known libertarian philosopher it was robert nozick yeah and you know now they're there are multiple ones right um so i don't know you know possible um you know part of what i think was happening so i don't know about grover cleveland in particular like i don't know if he was um typical of people in that time um but i mean
it so here's an interpretation it used to be that people believed in the authority of the state but they just didn't care about the poor so like that's why they didn't want to do all this welfare estate stuff right and then you know later it developed to where they still believe in the authority of the state but they started caring about the poor
as well so they thought okay well we'll use this power to help the poor right so that would actually be a form of progress even though like even even though the policy is getting further from what it should be so like the attitudes are getting closer to what they should be yeah so i wonder if instead of the attitudes of getting uh closer to
um libertarian what's happening is just that the tales uh have increased so i mean there wasn't students for liberty maybe uh a few decades ago but were the democratic socialists of america a significant force back then either um or were there socialists in congress right uh so i i don't know if it's uh fair to say that the change has been towards libertarian
libertarianism per se rather than just towards the extremes there could be um you know i think like the internet culture might be making us more extreme right um yeah so you know it used to be that um information and uh just like you know the content that people consumed was produced by this small elite and now that everybody can
have a voice on the internet uh yeah there's just more room for more extremists like like us um right but also like the socialists um yeah i mean i don't know where that's going right so like it could be that the internet is just like a bad influence on all of us all right right but it could be that you know this is kind of like relatively early days it
could be that it's going to settle down and and improve right so um they just sort of like this um you know this optimistic philosophical view that the truth wins in the end this isn't guaranteed to happen but generally speaking like good ideas tend to be more persuasive than bad ideas like you know if you have the opportunity for all the information to
come out and you know everybody gets to share their arguments and so on like if you hear all of the arguments usually that favors the correct views if you assume that the libertarian view is correct then you know having more information and more discussion and so on should favor it um this is a general tendency it's not guaranteed because there are biases in
the human mind right there could be systematic biases um and um yeah and also you know the possibility maybe we're wrong you know so right maybe maybe our view will go down because it's wrong actually yeah maybe um so let's talk about the actual view then uh i i'm gonna try to play devil's advocate now uh so there's uh hobbs had this idea that in order people go engage in violence to
steal each other's stuff or to launch preemptive strikes or just in just to get revenge and glory and then he said we need a strong government uh to stop this kind of violence now you explain some uh game theoretical reasons why a strong government may in fact increase violence in those cases uh but uh in uh in uh pinker's the better angels of our
nature he lists out some empirical evidence showing that first of all when we go from primitive tribes to the first states there's a decrease in violence and then during the feudal period where thousands of independent political units merge into centralized monarchies there's another decrease in violence so how come it's the case that empirically
speaking whenever powers tends to centralize the rate of violence death war homicide test decrease oh yeah uh yeah that could be true so i think um um it could be that the like the the central power the government um suppresses violence suppresses the small-scale violence right they do large-scale violence i.e war but they suppress like just ordinary
one-on-one murder and so on um but i mean um like if you're asking well why is it that people are prone to violence to begin with uh i think like the so i think pinker in that book takes up the explanation like the hobbesian explanation which is totally wrong and makes no sense okay but but in a different book pinker gives a different explanation that i
think is actually correct but i'm i'm not sure if he realizes that it's a completely different explanation okay so the hobjin explanation is um you know everybody's completely selfish and everybody knows that anyone can kill anyone and um you're afraid that somebody else is going to attack you and kill you so you attack them first because there's like
some advantage in combat to the person who attacks first okay and you know this makes no sense because so if there's more than one other person who is worried about being attacked and you go around attacking people without provocation then everyone else is going to know that you're the biggest threat like you're the one who's most likely to
attack them without provocation so all of these people who are thinking about doing preemptive attacks like you become the biggest target for them right so like you know what you should do is uh you know assuming that you can't like immediately kill everyone else at once right what you should do is like just try to mind your own business and stay away and
not start any fights right okay however this isn't what happens in primitive societies this is not what what human beings have actually done throughout history and so why is that and i wondered about this for a long time until i read stephen pinker's book how the mind works there's a particular passage that explains this it's basically what happened in
primitive tribes was the men from one tribe would attack another tribe in order to murder the men and kidnap the women right and this is extremely dangerous there's a high chance that you die when you're doing this so on the face of it it seems like you wouldn't do that it doesn't doesn't make sense okay but here's the thing like
say there's a 45 chance that you die by starting this fight but a 55 chance that you survive and you capture one extra wife okay then your reproductive success goes up yeah like it doesn't seem like it's worth it if there's a 45 chance of dying like just from an intuitive self-interest standpoint but from a from the standpoint of expected reproductive success your
expected reproductive success goes up if you presently have fewer than two wives all right so if you have zero wives you have nothing to lose because you're going to have zero reproductive success if you don't right and by the way it was probably common for men in primitive societies to have zero wives because most societies practice polygamy
which means the majority of men have zero wives right because like you know there's some like dominant character who's taken multiple wives and so on right anyway so if you have one wife still you have a chance of either doubling your reproductive success or cutting it down to zero and it's a good deal as long as it's slightly more probable that you succeed
right okay so like that's the evolutionary explanation of why this would happen this is super bad right it's very bad that that's the case but that would explain why um okay you know human and so human beings like they're not thinking that when they go to war what's happening is they're driven by emotions but this is all to explain why we would
have the genes that would give us the emotional reactions that would make it likely for us to attack other tribes right yeah but so long as that so long as that instinct exists why won't uh state without a leviathan or society without a leviathan fall back into that sort of um the people just fall back into that emotion of conquest why won't that happen um you know
private security agencies they'll hire private security agencies so i mean the primitive tribes didn't have private security agencies they didn't have like a just like developed economy um and you know it might be that indeed anarchy doesn't work starting from primitive society right but it might still work if you transition from an advanced society
right so like i mean my theory is you know you transition from democracy to anarchy to anarcho-capitalism and uh and it doesn't work if you just start if you start at a much earlier stage of society right plausibly it won't work um yeah yeah i i guess it doesn't the uh case for private security doesn't that assume somewhat of a purity and resources that you could afford
a similar magnitude of help because um if over time that rich people just because either they're smarter or they have a lot of capital to begin with can grow their capital stock much more than poor people um this is not a problem in a normal democracy or according to me it's not a problem in a normal democracy because what are they going to do with it right
but in in some politicians yeah fair enough in antarctica capitalism they can buy they can buy an army whereas you can buy like one security card so then there's not a sort of parity in power and they can really roll over people i mean i i don't i don't buy a security guard right like i sign a contract with a security company right
so it could be a large company but i'm just one of their customers right everybody but he's like i'll people billion dollars just you know let me get through this town he tells us to keep a private security agency that right but what what's his what is his purpose okay so like you know bill gates um hires like some really powerful security agency and to do what
uh steel resources uh steel woman okay but i mean he's got billions of dollars why doesn't he just buy them so right so i mean the thing is like this is why rich people usually don't do this because they could just buy the thing that they want that's why they don't have to steal it right and it's probably it's cheaper so like i mean rich people um which
people do well with women like bill gates would not have a hard time finding wife if he didn't already have one um just because of that right and but the thing is like so if you want to pay somebody to help you steal money from poor people like okay the amount of money that the poor people are willing to pay to not be stolen from is about equal to the
value of the stuff that would be stolen right so like what you could do is you could just buy it from them right yeah then you know not have to worry about the violence yeah fair enough although um in such a situation aren't the poor disadvantage of relative to the rich i guess you are in any society but if they if a larger portion of their income
and assets has to go toward security than anybody else they're not going to see the kind of growth to their wealth than anybody else would yeah but i mean they're they're not right so like most people are going to pay more for security yeah like they presently do right yeah um because they have more to protect like more stuff to protect so it makes
sense to do that but also like and also for their personal safety they place a higher monetary value on their personal safety right like okay nobody wants to be beaten up but like if you ask how much money will you pay to not be beaten up the answer is larger for the rich person right so like they will pay more more dollars right for security yeah okay so
um one possible answer to your question like what are they gonna steal if they can just buy the assets i mean you could ask a similar question about the us government like uh why do they expect tribute every year why don't they just trade with people and the answer is they have nothing to trade with right the only thing they have to trade with
is their coercion and um why so uh pinker floats the idea that the first states were really just kind of uh mafiosos that took control of an area and expect a tribute every year why won't uh these ones some of these private agencies kind of form the proto states where they demand tribute every year from the people living there in exchange for a living safely i guess
you could say that's what the state is today anyways but yeah that is what they are although you know you might worry that maybe we would get a worse statement exactly right um well i mean it's just that um if you already have one of these organizations it's easy to keep it going but if you don't already have one it's hard to get it started
so like if we had if we had the anarcho-capitalist situation just set up the way it's envisioned by the end caps um from that position it's difficult to establish your um state-like entity right like everybody's got a security agency and then like you try to start up a gang of people to attack people right and so so you're not already rich
and you don't already have all these resources you're hoping to get the resources by attacking other people well it's going to be hard to get there right because like you know without getting arrested by other people's security agencies and so on but so but you know it matters how this whole thing comes about right so if if the anarchy comes about by
you know one day the government just disappears right and the cops disappear then it would be chaos right so you know the first thing that would happen is there would be chaos in the street and the second thing that would happen is people would immediately start setting about setting up another government attorney okay but um that's why that's not the way i
envisioned the transition going right the transition would have to go by the government progressively privatizing its functions so the government would outsource policing to private security companies right maybe they would do this gradually and similarly they would gradually outsource the courts to private arbitrators right so the idea is that the government
is shrinking while at the same time the private um organizations that would take over those functions are growing if the government just collapse immediately it's no good but if there's this you know simultaneous process then um then you could get to a stable situation where now it's hard for an individual to overturn it yeah how soon can this happen uh like if
everybody agreed you know humor's right i bought this book uh yeah as soon as everyone buys my book paradise can begin but if if today everybody agreed how long would it take to privatize things to the point where we're living in a system of anarcho-capitalism without doing it too fast so that uh bad things start happening um i don't know
i mean i don't have expertise on that i have to like we probably have to observe things happening right but i mean like if people were um convinced like we have a democracy right now people were convinced that we should privatize more functions of the state we can start doing that right now yeah um and you know so like depends on how
cautious you want to be but like you know a a city right now could say yeah we're going to stop this police thing right now like like the city of denver tomorrow could say we're going to like start hiring private security guards to patrol so and then they could pass laws to you know change the change the asymmetry between government police and security guards right
yeah are you pro-d from the police uh i mean you could say that like in principle right but i mean i'm not sure what those people mean because it kind of sounds like they mean just cancel the police and then have no security yeah like no i don't want to do that but i would i would take that money and give it to private security companies i wouldn't take it and just not give it
to any security right yeah um oh so here's a question i'll ask you you wrote a blog post uh a few months back where you were criticizing social justice warriors and the 1619 project in particular and here's what you wrote uh you said you at the top of the post is attacking your own society you wrote um here's another plausible way of eroding
norms directly verbally attacking the foundation of one societies preaching that the society is founded on fundamentally evil values that large parts of this that society have no reason to be loyal to the whole and that its institutions are fundamentally just a sham designed to take advantage of most of his members and now uh professor are you attacking
our own society right you're claiming that coercion is legitimate our society is in large part founded on the idea that the state is legitimate that is coercion is legitimate if coercion is evil then isn't our society a legitimate and then aren't you eroding then the norms which have brought us peace and prosperity then yeah i might be doing that good thing
nobody listens to me no um i mean i was thinking about um yeah i was sort of thinking about um what they call the democratic norms which is you know partly partly democracy but a bunch of things that are associated with it that are not exactly democracy right but you know like um when you lose the election you concede um but you know also like with the you
know social justice warriors just saying like everybody's racist america's racist and so on right right um and sort of like um [Music] you know in america there's sort of a norm of respectful discourse like that's that's one of the things that i'm worried about there used to be maybe and i say this because so this is some somewhat of a digression that's not
exactly answering your question but anyway um you know one of the things that made me think about this was um so many years ago i read that some um some like leaders from iraq came to visit the united states so that they could kind of learn about how the political system works here and uh you know they visited like a city hall meeting in boulder or something
like this and like the main impression they had was they were struck by how respectful our discourse was and up until that point i didn't realize that our discourse is respectful right but uh it was true compared to other countries right so like there would be people who are on opposite sides and they would be like disagreeing with each other
but they'd be doing it in a basically respectful way right and apparently that doesn't happen in other countries right so you know one of the things i was worried about is that that's eroding so um but anyway okay um [Music] then in that blog post like you know i wanna i wanna leave room for criticizing society i wanna leave rome for saying like there's some stuff
that's very messed up that we need to change right um so you know how do we do that and not not be accused of wrongly violating the norm so like i didn't have that much of an answer to that but basically i'm thinking well you know have an alternative that you're saying we should do like don't just attack but say here's something we should be
doing instead of what we're doing right and now we can compare these and i can explain why this thing is better than the status quo right okay so that's like constructive criticism um what what i sort of sense from um left-wing ideology today is that it is a lot of attacking right just just like for the sake of um undermining confidence in america like
there's a lot of just wanting to say that america is bad not not clearly for the sake of promoting something good instead right um and you know like um i want to say like um i've been known to have um a fair amount of criticisms of the government okay but i also want to appreciate that it's a lot better than most governments it's like much better than
the vast majority of governments that people have had right it's like just let's just keep that in mind right so let's not tear down the good stuff while we're trying to get rid of that stuff yeah yeah that makes sense um but by the way how long does it take you to write a blog post because they're all so good and you write so many of them
is are you just writing it like one state of flow how much editing does it take um yeah i read it in an afternoon but then i re-read it multiple times right so okay i don't know so we read it a few times that day but then we read the next day and like maybe just before it goes up yeah so i make small edits which you know the small edits don't make that
much difference probably but um yeah like yeah the total amount of writing that i've done on that blog is kind of a law right yeah like one a week so and it's been going for a couple years so there's like whatever is over a hundred posts yeah and that um it's amazing how uh digestible uh not just your blogs are but uh just generally blog posts are just
they're bingeable in a way that books often aren't like for example i've probably uh read most of scott alexander's writing and you know that's got to be at least a few books right but it does not feel that way at all you know it just feels like yeah it just goes by very fast and same with yours i've read i i don't know if i read a majority of yours but
i've certainly read a large part of it uh read the rest of it scotty alexander is great right right that's like you know that's high quality stuff right that's better than it's better than a normal book yeah yeah much better than academic books did you read his non-libertarian faq by the way i don't think so no yeah it's it's an interesting counter argument
that's worth checking out um so i i wouldn't ask is it unethical of you to believe that coercion coercion is evil but your your job is subsidized by the fruits of that coercion is that unethical of you to have that kind of job um i don't know probably not i don't think so uh you know i talked to um walter block um once you know a couple years ago um
and you know in case anyone doesn't know he's like he's a big-time libertarian economist over at um tulane wait no no another university in new orleans anyway um uh and his attitude was you know take as much money from the state as you can because right like you know they're because they're going to do something bad with it if you don't and you know like if you don't take it
they're not gonna give it back they're not giving it back to the taxpayers they're just gonna you know they're gonna waste on something else and anyway and you know i think his attitude was that you're sort of like uh helping helping to undermine the state good to take money from the state to undermine the state um but you know but i should tell you
like the difference between university of colorado and a private university is minimal right so i think that the state provides something like five percent of our budget it's something like that um now the the state university of course like universities are subsidized in general so like we get we get a subsidy in the same way that every other university
gets a subsidy namely all these students who are paying are super high prices um you know like most of them would not be paying if it weren't for financial aid which is provided by the government right so government helps these people get all these loans which they probably wouldn't take okay um so you know like definitely we the university are charging
we're over charging right but i mean everybody's overcharging tonight and we're overcharging less than most of the universities so okay not so bad but yeah in the libertarian society there would be um there'd be less universities right because there's a market distortion um you know created by all the financial aid so there'll be less of it
and um would i still have a job i don't know like some professors would still have jobs it wouldn't go down to zero but it would be you'll be cut down significantly yeah i hope you have a job in that society how would you survive yeah i mean like you know the government has its hands in almost everything right they have this enhanced in all kinds of industries so
you know like if you say oh well i don't know i can't work in an industry that is like um benefiting from government distortions of the economy there's a lot of things that you can't do right because i like what matters isn't whether nominally it's said to be a state institution or whatever right what matters is something like i don't know
how much benefit they're getting from the state or something but like there are lots and lots of industries that then you can work like it could be can't be a doctor they're getting big benefits from like government regulations and so on so right yeah i i wonder how much stuff you could do actually uh you'd have to move into the woods to actually find some sort of trade
uh uh let me let me just float a few other arguments against anarch capitalism for you uh and see how you respond so the first is a sort of burkina argument like we shouldn't try things that haven't worked before yeah yeah i mean um yeah you know you can imagine somebody saying this back when the us was founded right they could have said this democracy
thing it never worked right they tried it in athens it didn't work that well and um you know notice how all the countries in the world are dictatorships this just shows that that's the natural state right society evolves to dictatorship which is a you know a lot like what people say about anarcho-capitalism right like we have states everywhere it must
be that that's the only stable society right okay now um you know you might say correctly well that's kind of like kind of anecdotal like okay that's just one case right and so i'm not saying that that means that every radical change is worth 20. okay but okay but so you know that's just to prepare you for the fact that there could be big fundamental progress
that we don't we don't want to rule out right by being overly conservative okay but we do want to be careful about the way we pursue progress right because like if you make radical changes you should expect there to be unexpected consequences right okay but so what you should do to mitigate this is to move kind of gradually right so um you know
there's a lecture by brian kaplan that you can find online somewhere where um there was a title that was something like less than the minimum where his idea was you could have a sub minimal state and so the minimal state has police courts military legislators something like that you could have a sub-minimal state which um they privatized the police force
and then they could privatize the court system right and so that doesn't completely eliminate them right um doesn't completely eliminate the state but it makes it much smaller okay and so you can imagine this this process where the government could be progressively outsourcing police duties which by the way they have done in some places there are some places where the
government will hire private security instead of using their own police okay they could progressively outsource court duties and there are some cases where that happens as well there's some cases where the government court will refer you to a private arbitrator but they could start doing that more and more okay and so the person who's worried
that an arc of capitalism would be a disaster you know now they they should answer at what point in the process they think the disaster would happen right there's like that if you make this transition gradually like i don't see where a disaster would happen so you could get pretty close to anarchy but you know you still have like somebody that is
um saying the rules like they don't have a police force anymore they don't have courts anymore but they are giving rules to the police in the courts so okay um and you know like if you're if you're already sympathetic to libertarianism we could eliminate all these you know business regulations and all this so the government could be much smaller
and you think okay so do we need that last bit right which is like i guess the legislature and then i guess there's the military you might need that actually yeah well what about the argument from the black swan that at every stage like this about a one percent chance of destroying everything we might care about and you make a similar argument actually in dialogues against
dialogues about ethical vegetarianism where you say um even if even if you alone stopping eating meat doesn't you know cause people to produce less meat that in expected value terms if like every hundredth person stopping eating meat like causes a decrease in animal suffering it's still worth it for you to do that in a similar way here if
i i don't know if at every tenth increment of decreasing the state it's possible that something bad happens it's so it's still uh it's still good to not try it well yeah but i mean we don't have any evidence for that premise right if we don't have any evidence that something bad happens at every tenth stage or whatever um i mean the thing is like
um sure anything that you try could have some unknown bad effect right and by definition it's unknown so i can't give an argument that it won't happen right because we haven't specified what it is okay i do want to say though that like bad stuff could happen from maintaining the status quo and so like you know in the book i mentioned that
um actually there's a pretty good chance that the government is going to kill all of us right like i don't think that's a outlandish possibility right like they've actually i think they've come kind of close to that a few times so they're going to be there yeah there are a few times when we were pretty close to a nuclear war right so like they could have killed everyone
luckily they didn't but that doesn't mean that we could just like keep going just keep going forever and it's always going to be fine right yeah you probably have people right now who are working on you know bigger more destructive weapons right more destructive but cheaper right so we probably have people who are working on biological weapons or you know other
things nanotech weapons or things like that yeah this actually leads to my next argument against anarcho-capitalism which is uh sort of the nick bostrom uh vulnerable worlds hypothesis if you've heard of that basically the idea is with every new technology you discover there's some small chance that it it allows us to destroy everything like it's a technology that
allows one guy with 50 grand to destroy an entire city uh and in such a world you need strong government regulation in the sectors where this kind of technology is possible and without a government that regulates this kind of development it's almost guaranteed that something bad is going to happen yeah i mean in fact i think i had a blog
post that was kind of about this right and um which you know which i i guess i view as the strongest argument for strong state um and yeah i i think it was titled you know something about the case for tyranny or something like that and then a bunch of people started arguing about whether i should have used the word tyranny there right like oh it's not necessarily
tyrannocoin but it's just an argument that there needs to be somebody like monitoring individuals in a pretty close way right so like you know not not having much privacy and able to stop them right um so that might that might be the case if you're in a society in which one person has the ability to release a world destroying weapon right now uh right now that's not the
case but yeah as technology advances that could definitely happen right because as technology advances like what just what what it means is that you can produce larger effects with smaller effort right but then isn't the worry that by the time you get to that point you've already destroyed the state capacity to regulate that kind of stuff
and so you might you might as well preserve the state and also for most of human history if there is going to be a human history that's going to be the state i mean if these weapons come around in 100 years and there's like a million years of humanity left then for most of it we're going to need a state anyways so what's the big benefit of doing
anarcho-capitalism now yeah i mean you know that that might be right right like i mean like i think this is the strongest argument for keeping the state um but you know i think there is a like there's an argument on the other side which is well actually the government is likely to be the ones who develop the deadly technology right so so far there's one technology that
would plausibly be capable of killing everyone that's nuclear weapons and it was created by the government and has only ever been used by the government but in fact i think every weapon of mass destruction has been created by governors well most weapons have been created by governments right but isn't that a bit like saying in like the year 1800
well everything good that's ever if you're an atheist an argument for atheism somebody could say well all the bridges and all the really cool things all the knowledge has been made by um religious people but you could respond well that's because there's been nobody else around right like if there's if there's not an anarcho-capitalist society where you're
permitted to build nuclear weapons on your own then obviously everyone is religious then yeah all the good things are going to be created by religious people but not everyone is a government employee right you can't just build a nuclear bomb while states are dominant they won't let you but if you can then you might uh yeah so before the nuclear bomb was
invented could could a private individual have invented it i don't know i mean after it was invented by the us government then the us government would stop anyone else from building them but before they you know before it had been discovered um i don't know why a private person couldn't have done it fair enough except that it's super expensive and you know
no like it wasn't a person who had a good incentive to do it i guess but um anyway yeah so um you might think yeah but if we didn't have a government then maybe there would be more i don't know would there be more people who are trying to build weapons of mass destruction um i wouldn't think that i mean i mean i understand why governments are doing this right like
they well there's this thing called war that happens between states and like and so they build all these standing armies and so they just they're constantly looking for bigger and more powerful weapons right and so like that's just like this constant um you know pro destruction destructive technology lobby right so i mean it just looks like that's the
way to accelerate the time that we get the world destroying technology right um okay but you know but um i'm not sure because um [Music] you might say yeah even though the government is going to create this technology like they're going to create the world's destroying technology sooner you might say but they're still safer right because like you know maybe
private parties will develop that technology much later but when they do then someone is going to release it right unless there's a government to stop them okay yeah but by the way like i'm i'm not sure that the government is going to stop it even if they're if they continue to exist right so like you know one of the things i'd be worried about now
is genetic engineering of biological weapons so maybe somebody could engineer a virus that would be extremely dangerous and would cause the extinction of the species right like so you know that might happen just naturally but it's a lot more likely if somebody's trying to make it happen and that might just become cheaper and cheaper so you know you might think oh
we need the government to stop that from happening although i'm not sure the government will actually stop it even if we have them right and and i think there's a fair chance the government will cause it because you know it might actually like hire people deliberately to create biological weapons so you know it's a little hard to say um you know
the alternative you might want is you might want sort of um distributed monitoring like people monitoring each other just regular people monitoring each other all the time rather than like a single central authority monitoring everyone else yeah blockchain but for nuclear weapons i guess i mean i think is this neil stephenson's idea anyway i think i got this from some
science fiction author right there should be everybody should be watching everyone else not one organization watching everyone else is this from a book a book i just heard about this on the internet okay yeah that's an interesting idea um oh final argument uh a state in order to prevent people from torturing animals and eating them yeah
yeah so like if the state would actually do that that would outweigh all of the other bad stuff they're doing right like most most other libertarians would not accept this but this is obviously true um but when we have the government what they actually do is they're actually supporting the meat industry yeah and so you know they're actually making it worse so
and you might think oh but you know we we can just change that but no it's not so easy right most of the things the government does it's not an accident that they're doing them right like well i mean they're they're obviously not going to ban meat when most people want it right right like you know i think it was like so i think cory booker was the first vegan
presidential candidate that i saw but like i think that was clearly a liability for him right and like it and in fact um you know there was a time when an interviewer asked him hey so are you going to like try to make everybody vegetarian and he was like no no i'm not doing that right because if he said yes he's definitely out of the running right
right although he did propose some bills um calling for regulation of animal cruelty uh yeah although he didn't win so i guess it makes your point for you but yeah i mean yeah so like that is a plausible i think that society has to make more progress so like i think if the majority of people cared about animal welfare then the government could pass
regulations that would promote animal welfare it would get a lot better right so but this will only happen after most of the problem is solved and then the government will come in and sort of like sweep up the remainder of it from like you know the backward people who are still promoting cruelty yeah yeah uh okay so uh now let's let's do a game of
underrated overrated the rules of course is this thing underrated overrated and you can pass if you want and you can also offer a brief explanation for why you think so so you wrote a few pieces recently a few blog posts about what students should be learning in school and in college uh one thing you didn't mention either a for or against was like a
coding class and this has been proposed by a bunch of people recently that because of the dominance of computers in our society everybody needs to learn how to code what do you think of this idea uh see is it overrated or underrated maybe about correctly rated as follows i mean i think it's um useful but i don't agree that everyone needs to learn to code
right so like i think some people um basically i think people who would be reasonably good at it should learn it right and some people would just be terrible at it so there's no point right like they could learn to do some basic stuff but it would never be useful so yeah you mentioned in one of your blog posts that if you didn't get into grad
school philosophy you were considering becoming a computer programmer so did you learn how to code in college um i mean i took one course on pascal which was a programming language language that i guess nobody uses anymore um but you know it was not enough for me to do anything useful with it right but many years later i discovered
that there's a language called game maker language some guy wrote and it's really good for writing games so i tried writing a game using that fun um the class of uh the class of people called public intellectuals oh uh yeah i mean they're they're greatly overrated by some and underrated by others i guess like i i like public intellectuals so i mean um i think the
academic intellectuals underrate the public intellectuals because they're like oh yeah these public intellectuals are not being rigorous enough or they're not like citing all the academic literature the thing is yeah the reason they're not doing that is no one will listen to them if they start blabbing on about boring stuff like you know boring little details that
are in the academic literature okay so um [Music] yeah i guess uh yeah i guess underrated right how about uh intellectuals outside academia or maybe not even intellectuals but thinkers outside academia who have a blog but aren't associated with an academic institution so for example uh people like scott alexander yeah i mean like well scott alexander is
probably correctly rated because like i think that he has an extremely high reputation among people who know who he is right right although i guess not enough people know who he is um but you know about about non-academic intellectuals more generally i don't know so um i mean most non-academic intellectuals i think are not good and like if they're like not not worth
reading or they wouldn't it wouldn't be worth it to me to read and i don't think worth it to other people to read but um but that's you know i'm like i'm not trying to be a snob or whatever um but i think it's i think because you learn stuff when like when you go to graduate school and you get the phd they actually teach you some stuff
right and one other thing one of the problems is like if um if you don't go through that kind of training like people are naturally lazy and like in order to do stuff that's really good and useful um it requires work and effort and stuff like this that is not it requires some stuff that's not so fun right and then and um you're like
oh reading a bunch of literature and you know finding out what people really think right and um you're just not going to do that unless you have like well few people will do it unless they have somebody else who's telling them you have to do this and that's what happens when you're in graduate school right yeah yeah it's a milgram experiment but for academic discipline
yeah and so so you know like um you know i run into people like on the internet and whatever and sometimes i get email from random people and um and like you know there are people who've like written their they bring their treatise on something or whatever um and they just don't realize that you know like they don't know what's going on
right like they don't like so like they just haven't read the stuff that's written on the topic that they're writing about so they don't know that they're a reinventing the wheel but b like doing a simplistic version of it right like they're defending a view that has already been defended but they are defending the simplest like least adequate version of it
because they haven't looked at all the objections that you know causes you to be modified and you know they they don't know what the reasons why it's wrong and like they don't know what the alternative views are so like they can't adequately respond to them or they'll respond to alternatives that are stupid and don't need to be discussed right so you know that's like a thing
that happens if you were outside of that if you for some reason didn't get into grad school but let's see on the side we're still publishing a blog how much worse do you think you would be without the benefit of grad school um i don't know um and i mean you know there's a possibility that um it's it's actually a selection effect rather than
right with a training effect right yeah like the people who have patience people have enough patience to do good work can make it through graduate school right like you don't have the patience you'll be excluded by that right yeah um you know so it's like it's possible that it would still be good um but i mean i think that let's see
actually i mean a lot of the stuff that goes on on the blog is kind of social commentary which i think doesn't require that much of you know reading literature or stuff like that it's like most of that would be the same but like if i were writing about issues that are debated in academic philosophy and i didn't know the literature like it just wouldn't be good right and
like you know like my undergraduate papers just weren't good right they were good for undergraduate papers okay but they weren't good for you know academic papers right um a peer review oh peer review underrated for already uh um i don't know um yeah probably it's probably overrated i guess so the thing is like um people think that i guess right i guess the average
opinion is that it's a pretty good quality control mechanism and i think that um probably most people don't realize like kind of how lame it is right so like you get all right so you don't get paid for doing these reviews right which means that not that many people want to do it so like you have this editor who's trying to find peer reviewers and like
they just keep they have to keep going down the list i've never been an editor so i'm assuming this is what happens like you try to get top people in the area of the paper to review it and they say no i'm too busy and you know and it's not in my interest to do this they don't say that last part but that's what you're thinking i have no
self-interest in doing this review for you for free so can't do it and so they just like go down the list okay and like you have things where graduate students are reviewing papers and then you have situations where like the person who's being criticized by the paper is reviewing the paper and i know that that happens because they've sent to me papers that are criticizing me
and i think that i'm a fine reviewer like i'm perfectly objective anyway but i don't trust everyone to be objective right so um yeah and like in you know just my experience reading referee reports i often think well like this guy did not read this carefully at all you know like he he's raising some objection that i answered and he doesn't seem to be aware
that i answered it right or he's like totally misunderstood and like i clearly explained you know what i meant and like he's misunderstanding it like and it would make sense that they wouldn't read it carefully right because they have no no stake in it right um the the editor would have more of a stake in it right because like it reflects on the quality
of the journal right it's so it's an anonymous review so it doesn't reflect on that person no one will ever know if you did a bad job of reviewing so yeah um okay how about online education oh um i mean it's probably like it's a good way of learning if that's what you want right but i think it's a less good way of getting prestige
right so which is what people actually want so i mean i guess i think um most people so most people don't actually want the education they want the prestige but also most people don't realize that that's what most people want so like so you know online education isn't i don't think that it's going to take over it would if people just wanted knowledge
right but so people don't realize why it's not taking over but that's the reason right yeah actually by the way like if you just want the knowledge you don't have to pay somebody a bunch of money not even for online courses right if you just want knowledge like almost all of this is on the internet you can get a great education for free just reading sites on
the internet or even better yet uh if you think that there's something ineffable about like being there in person you can't still go in person nobody's gonna stop you in fact like um yeah professors will often even grade your stuff even if you're not in the class yeah yeah the funny thing is sorry go ahead yes yo i would be happy to have extra people show up
who actually want to learn in my class but to be clear i'm not grading your paper [Laughter] um migrating yeah it's funny at my university you need your id to get into the gym but you don't need any idea whatsoever to go into any class you want which goes to show you what people what they think people are actually likely to steal or like you know try to use voluntarily
stealing the knowledge right yeah like i do i think the in-person education is better like it's a better experience right but the thing is like it's just not better enough that it would justify paying whatever ten thousand dollars or whatever people are paying right right i agree uh pronatalism i asked because uh you know the average
person is probably going to eat meat oh i see um yeah i mean so i assume that that's going to end at some point right right and so um it will be better to have more people yeah i am to some degree worried about the population dwindling right because as um as people become wealthier and their living standard goes up you know their fertility goes down
and like it's at the point now where in the wealthy countries like the fertility of well-off people is below replacement rate right so i am somewhat worried about the human species dwindling right just as we become good just as the moral progress reaches a point where it's better for us to be around than not the population will be dwindling and
maybe we'll go extinct from just you know not deciding to have kids right it will be around to enjoy the moral progress uh what do you think the idea that children have comparable or even equivalent rights against coercion as adults um i mean i think they have comparable rights against malicious coercion i can have that right but um you know
about paternalistic coercion like that seems justified to me uh i mean i don't have like a particularly involved argument for that like i don't have an interesting or surprising argument for that right i guess i just have a conventional view which is that um you know like these children just don't know what they're doing they don't have enough knowledge and
they just need somebody to take care of them right right uh but but at what point do you think that now there's an expectation that you can't just tell this person what to do so like 12 16 18. i mean you know it increases gradually right yeah and it also could vary depending on the maturity of the individuals so um yeah so i mean i don't think that i
can say a hard and fast rule now you know you might think like there are there's some people who are not mature at 18 right like they still need someone to take care of them then but you know what can we do like we need to have a general rule for society in general right so so i guess i guess it's kind of reasonable to pick 18 as the time when you become an adult i don't know
right so the claim is that uh at least after a certain age um saying that this person is not entitled it does not have certain rights is equivalent or comparable to saying that a particular race of people shouldn't have uh rights in that like maybe you can come up with some explanation for why they can't handle those rights but at the end of the day just human dignity
means that you have to respect those rights yeah i mean um yeah so like the way that children are treated is somewhat like slaves right like no rights parents just tell them what to do all the time right yeah and you know is it better than slavery well you know fortunately most parents um love their children in the way that most masters do not love
their slaves so things work out better right but also you know it was factually true that the children couldn't make decisions for themselves it was not true that the slaves couldn't make decisions for themselves we just weren't letting them right yeah um now you might think though like well there actually are some adults who are
like not really suited to run their own lives like uh you know mentally people or something yeah um that doesn't mean that you can treat them as slaves but they probably do need like a guardian um to tell them what to do right um is it okay like what if they don't want to listen to the guardian is okay to force them i don't know you know probably depends
on the situation right like if they want to go play in traffic i guess yes right yeah okay final two questions oh actually final three questions i didn't notice the third one there um first of all uh at least in my opinion and among the philosophers i know of that are living um you seem to have addressed the big questions uh more prolifically creatively and
accessibly uh what's the humor production function how are you able to be this uh this productive oh um i don't know i'm creative yeah it's partly because i'm smart um it's partly because i i love philosophy um if like if you don't love it and you know you're just doing it as a job then you won't do that much of it um you know in the academic world there's
sort of there's not really incentives for um producing like you know blog posts or stuff like that there's not incentives for producing public philosophy so like you don't get prestige from it the other academics are not so much impressed whatever and um you know like literally in my department we literally have a point system for publications like you get a
performance review every year and like we assign points for each publication uh there's no points for blog posts for academic publication although that might change in the future but anyway so um yeah so you would only do this if like you're just like well i mean i'm on a mission right i'm on a mission to um promote rationality in society yeah and like
you know like i'm i'm in philosophy not just as a job but to get a paycheck or whatever or to get prestige or any of that like i'm trying to improve the world intellectually right yeah what do you think about the impact of intellectuals versus entrepreneurs class engineers in shaping how the world turns out yeah good question um you know so like
i mean this makes me think of an example so think of the example of um there's peter singer and then there's um the people who are like um beyond the beyond meat people people create that company and you know these other companies like the impossible burger and the people who are doing the synthetic meat okay so um i think peter singer is kind of the
reason why people are doing that like i think those people uh like the entrepreneurs i think are um animal welfare advocates or something like this and it's you know largely because of peter singer and other philosophers like tom regan um so but but also like you know after writing that book apart from convincing the entrepreneurs like he tries to convince a bunch of
ordinary people like i go to like i try to convince students i write this book and i think that that part is having a lot less influence right like it's super hard to convince people to change their life in a way that's not in their personal self-interest you know for ethical reasons you can get like a few percent you can change a few percent of people's
lifestyle for ethical reasons because that's how many people care about morality anyway but like a few percent of those people are like entrepreneurs who are going to like and make a big difference huh so are you yeah so i mean you know if you want to assess like well who's making the bigger difference that's hard to say right like because the entrepreneur probably
wouldn't be doing it if it weren't for the philosophy right right but apart from the entrepreneur the philosopher's having a much smaller influence on society yeah um so is your goal then with your books not to convince not to just to convince people like oh you're right but then to get some of them to build the so-called machinery of freedom
like are you trying to inspire entrepreneurs more so than just convince people um i guess i mean i don't have a very specific plan right i just have the idea that it'd be good if there were more people who had um true beliefs you know about important philosophical matters i don't know how it's going to happen but in some way that is going to improve
society um i kind of think that it goes from the top down so to speak that is if you convince the elites then the western society will go along our elite uh i know ryan kaplan thinks that you got to get the elites while they're young uh because that's when they'll change their minds are you trying to convince like future elites people in college
or are you trying to convince like elites as the existing elites yeah i mean i guess i try to work on all of them but you know like kaplan is probably correct like it's a lot harder to get people who have already formed their beliefs and you know have been have been there for a few decades right yeah yeah yeah uh oh uh so the next question uh what are your
three favorite books oh uh um let's see it'll be three of my books so that you did not write yourself oh okay books they're not my i don't know um like i would probably have to spend a lot longer to actually accurately answer that yeah that's all right um uh i liked i liked the fountain head a lot um that that novel um [Music] and i guess like you know it had an
influence on me and actually iran had an influence on me in um doing philosophy right although she was not a professional philosopher and ultimately was not very good at philosophy she still influenced me to do philosophy um what else yeah i mean i'm you know like i might so like when you ask me this and i haven't thought for a long time i'm
biased towards books that i read recently okay so i like the book time and chance by david albert because it's just like fascinating right just fascinating stuff about um you know what physics teaches us about the nature of the universe and so on and also i like the cosmic landscape by um i've gotten his name now anyway um you know which uh was about the
multiverse theory which i just find amazing it's just just an amazing fascinating idea the quantum multiverse um well they're they're sort of like different versions of the multiverse but uh i guess like he thinks that it comes out of string theory right like i don't know and yeah but you know they're different different ways there could be multi-diverse it
could be like just really far away other universes that that um the space in between our universe and the other universe is expanding so fast that there's no way to ever reach the other universe so they're effectively isolated right um yeah i'm sorry i can't remember this guy's name now anyway but you know there are lots of good books um
i liked the myth of the rational voter right that was very good um and you know just thinking about why politics works the way that it does um yeah uh and then the final question what advice would you have for a philosophically inclined 20 year old who doesn't want to go into philosophy as an academic discipline but is still interested in philosophy um
i don't know like you know my first advice is buy all my books but i mean um like advice for like what like what are they trying to accomplish uh let's say they're technically inclined as well so engineering is that's entrepreneurship yes oh i see um i don't know would you advise working in specific fields is there some thing you advise in terms of
excellence and uh getting good at what you're doing or just where the important problems are yeah i mean like i have um like i would i would give advice from the standpoint of self-interest to people like um it's so like okay i mean that this is probably not what you're asking about right like you know how you can you can be happy or something
right but anyway okay this is what i figured out it's very simple but the secret to happiness is first of all having um solid meaningful relationships so like hang out with people that you get along well with and develop close relationships with them right and uh and like people that are not beneficial just cut them out don't don't hang around with people who are not
beneficial to you right and like this is obvious super obvious but a lot of people don't do this like they just keep having this boyfriend whose name do it they just like i don't know try to change the person or whatever you're not going to change people anyway then the other thing is um meaningful work right so like going to a career that
feels like you're doing something meaningful um you know but uh but like it's got to make enough money to pay the bills right but you know it needs to feel like you're doing something meaningful because otherwise when you get later in your life you're going to be like i have a lot of money but fully sure i raised wasted my life right yeah what the hell happened oh yeah
you know and then like i you know i have like you know smaller scale advice like at some point i'm probably gonna like maybe i'll put this in blog post i'll put my advice for like people about um you know uh buy a house like you know you know if you're going to be somewhere for a few years buy a house or a condominium or something like that because it's a
super good investment and you like when you have money um um invest in index funds you know like don't try to beat the market because you're probably not going to be right because there's stuff like that right anyway okay but that's probably not what you wanted to know about you know that's so easily uh you might have wanted to know like oh how can we improve the world
i don't know that's really hard right um like on a small scale um my idea is to model rationality right like interact with people in a way that is reasonable and rational and like part of part of that part of the reasonableness is like you listen to them and try to actually understand what their point is before saying your thing like don't just only
be thinking about your point right um and you know like my idea is if we get enough people doing that maybe the culture will improve yeah yeah let's hope so um okay so those are all my questions uh professor hubert thank you so much for your time i really appreciate uh talking to you this is a lot of fun thanks for having me [Music] [Applause] foreign