Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress

Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is the author of more than sixty academic articles in epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy, as well as eight amazing books. Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/--xKsIgv7tE. Listen on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3TwQB2Q, Spotify https://spoti.fi/3e5QB9U, or any other podcast platform. Podcast website here https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/michael-huemer. Buy Knowledge, Reality, and Value https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Reality-Value-Mostly-Philosophy/dp/B091F5QTDS and The Problem of Political Authority https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Political-Authority-Examination-Coerce/dp/1137281650. Read Michael’s awesome blog http://fakenous.net/ and follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp for new episodes. Timestamps: (0:00:00) - Intro (0:01:07) - The Problem of Political Authority (0:03:25) - Common sense ethics (0:09:39) - Stockholm syndrome and the charisma of power (0:18:14) - Moral progress (0:26:55) - Growth of libertarian ideas (0:33:37) - Does anarchy increase violence? (0:44:37) - Transitioning to anarchy (0:47:20) - Is Huemer attacking our society?! (0:51:40) - Huemer's writing process (0:53:18) - Is it okay to work for the government (0:56:39) - Burkean argument against anarchy (1:02:07) - The case for tyranny (1:11:58) - Underrated/overrated (1:25:55) - Huemer production function (1:30:41) - Favorite books (1:33:04) - Advice for young people This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hello folks and welcome to the Lunar Society Podcast. Today, it is my great privilege to talk with Professor Michael Hummer. 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 has 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 have 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 of Political Authority.

• 0:45Dwarkesh Patel?

  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 Hummer.

• 1:07Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, Professor Hummer, what is the problem of political authority? Why did you write this book?

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so here's a copy of the book. And you can order it on Amazon, that's the important thing. Or anywhere. Yeah, so 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 what I mean by the government's authority is, so first of all, it's usually thought that the government is entitled to give other people commands and force them to obey in situations where nobody else would be entitled to give commands and force people to obey, right? So like they could give commands that you don't already have to do,

• 1:55Speaker 01

  but you have to do them 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 decide I'm not getting enough contributions voluntarily, so I decide to just like force people to pay, right?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  If I do this, this is called extortion. And, uh, you know, I'm gonna wind up in jail, right? But besides that, I'm gonna wind up in jail, most people will be disapproving of this and think that, number one, I shouldn't be doing that, and 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 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?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  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?

• 3:27Dwarkesh Patel?

  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?

• 3:39Speaker 01

  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, um, 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, yeah, 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?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  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?

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's part of it. Another thing is, you know, the

• 4:40Speaker 01

  the ethical intuitions that I'm appealing to, so things like 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 cages and stuff like that. 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 reactions that the state has authority, right?

• 5:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  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. 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 with very different customs tend to think that their customs are superior to those of other societies. Like, how could that be?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Like, it has to be that they're biased in favor of the way things are done in their own society, right?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Right? So like, I've got an explanation of why people would have mistaken moral judgments about the state.

• 6:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. So I want to talk about your second point there, which is that there's more controversy on the political views than there is on the basic ethical intuitions about theft and so on. 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, don't have. It's not self-evident to me that like anarcho-capitalists outnumber 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 their services. I wouldn't say that anarcho-capitalism is less controversial than that. It might be, but I'm like, that's not self-evident to me.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Anarcho-capitalism is controversial.

• 7:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  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 all-

• 7:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  They still hold the political, most of them still hold the political view that the state has some unique authority, right?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Um, no, I don't think so. Right, so, and I mean, this is, this is discussed in chapter seven, where I argue that, 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 deny that this is what, what unifies libertarianism. But I think they deny that because they haven't read my book. And when they read my book, they will understand that, like, you know, they may not even understand what I mean by authority and skepticism thereof, okay? But, okay, this is what's common to libertarians.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  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. But we're not gonna call them murderers or anything like that.

• 8:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. Yeah. So, like, sorry, go ahead.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  There's a quotation at the end, that I put at the end of the book, from the Chinese philosopher Mao Tse, 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 hundredfold." 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. Right, because, you know, that's just like, it's just murder, but bigger, right?

• 9:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  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 blacks 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."

• 9:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting point like if if we held political leaders to account the same way hold individuals to account, it'd be an interesting way of looking at them. So let me ask you about the 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 their abuser and feel that the abuser is actually protecting them. And will feel gratitude towards small acts of mercy. I wonder, given the fact that people regularly criticize the president or regularly criticize government policies they disagree with. To what extent they're actually fearful of or in some way

• 10:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  incorrectly loyal towards the government in this particular way because of fear of authority.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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 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, the hostages didn't want to go out without the kidnappers because they were afraid that the police would shoot the kidnappers.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Right, once they got them, okay, so anyway, and then I think one of them like you know, tried to aid in the legal defense, like started up a legal defense fund for kidnappers, okay. And this is a phenomenon that occurs periodically in hostage situations, right? It wasn't just that one case. So like, you know, FBI negotiators are trying 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 there's a, you know, there's a little bit broader phenomenon that people will

• 11:39Speaker 01

  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 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 had formed with the hostages. So, so it might have worked. 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 the powerful people, that may help them to survive and prosper.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Right? So that might be why people kind of try to, try to take the side of the government, right? And then, you know, you asked about, well, 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.

• 12:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, I, I, so the, 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. For example, they'll say it's systemically racist. And these are also the kind of people who will want to increase the size of the government. But that also seems confusing. Like, if, if it's,

• 13:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  i- i- if fear of government should prevent people from, okay, so let's say it prevents them from criticizing 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?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm not sure they're questioning the legitimacy of the government.

• 13:40Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Like the, you know, the social justice warriors.

• 13:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Um, rather than just criticizing some of its policies, right?

• 13:48Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hmm.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Um, so, I mean, in my view, questioning their legitimacy would be saying, like, they shouldn't, um, they shouldn't have any entitlements that ordinary citizens don't have.

• 14:01Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  So like, if ordinary citizens aren't entitled to tax each other, then the state shouldn't be able to tax, uh, so, you know, something like that.

• 14:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Um, yes, I, and I don't think the left wing people think that exactly.

• 14:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  No.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Um, but I mean, they, you know, they are like, uh, they're like, sort of,

• 14:25Speaker 01

  actually, I mean, I, well, I'm, 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 was gonna say, like, they're accusing the government of being racist, but I'm not even sure that that's what it means. Right?

• 14:41Dwarkesh Patel?

  Oh, what do you?

• 14:42Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that systemic racism means that anyone is actually racist, right?

• 14:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's fair, yeah. Um, I, I, I wonder to what extent, so, uh, uh, Rene 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 Stalin, uh, 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 authority charismatic and violence charismatic. Uh, what do you think of that hypothesis?

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, maybe. So, I mean, I'm not sure if the academics knew about Stalin's, um, murders.

• 15:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hmm.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  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 shit about other people.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Right? It's like if you don't, if you don't give a shit 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.

• 16:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  That's my read on dictators, right? They let 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?

• 16:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Like, 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.

• 17:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, see thi- 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 uh ma- millions of people did. I I just there there was I I was missing like a module in my mind that those opposed to find him charismatic. I I just couldn't figure it out, but that's a good explanation, just the confidence itself.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I found him kind of anti-charismatic and but 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 fifteen Republican candidates in the primaries.

• 17:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Um, and yeah, it had a lot to do with being super confident, right? Which by my read is because he doesn't care.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  But the alternative explanation is it it's because he doesn't care about truth. So.

• 18:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  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 by a power itself than convincing arguments or by people who care about the truth?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  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. So I mean, the evidence of there being moral progress is compelling, right? It's like enormous progress. What's but, you know, what's the explanation? How did it happen?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that it's driven by relatively small number of people. Right? So there are a bunch of people who, you know, don't don't reflect very much and just go along with the customs of their society. And they're just sort of like, 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 and they and they push it slowly, right? Okay, but because.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  There are always reformers who are trying to improve society. It's a constant, it's a constant small force. So over the course of many generations, it accumulates to a lot of progress. Right?

• 20:01Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. So let me, I read Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism, which you also wrote. And I want to question you on whether on net there has been moral progress. At one point in the book, you say that the impact of factory farming rivals the suffering of all the humans that have ever existed. 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 to be more of a decline, right?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could make the argument, people find this shocking, but you could make the argument that like, you know, it would have been better if there were no humans. 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, right? And, you know, 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. You know, that might seem shocking, but the number of animals that we're torturing and killing each year is something like 74 billion.

• 21:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  And there have 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.

• 21:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right?

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So anyway, um, yeah, so like from a purely consequential standpoint, it's been like a huge regression. Okay. However, it does appear to me that it's turning around. So vegetarianism and veganism are becoming more popular. When I was in college, 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 could go to and stuff like that. And what's ultimately...

• 21:56Speaker 01

  What's ultimately going to change the situation is on technology, right?

• 22:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  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 synthetic meat, basically. So they're gonna 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.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  My 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.

• 23:04Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Okay, so, uh, assuming that there's more progress is happening. Um, you, you say in the book that you expect, uh, you expect the rate of progress to increase over time be- 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, hypothesized 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, uh, moral progress? Why, why won't we see, um, moral decline or just zero moral growth before we get to the point of anarchical capitalism?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Oh, um, I mean, so, any progress has to eventually slow down.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  And you know, because, because I, I think there's a maximum point, everything, right? Right. But that doesn't mean that will happen soon. Like, I can't predict where it will happen. Eventually, civilization will collapse and we'll all die. Eventually, the human species will go extinct. But I don't know when. 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. 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 poorer countries have a faster rate of growth, right? They're poor overall, but they're growing faster, so they'll eventually catch up. Okay, and like, and you can hypothesize the reason for this.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  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? 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?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Will it decline? Uh, I don't know.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  There's something about the accumulation of knowledge, and it tends to go, you know, it, it tends to just accumulate and not get destroyed.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, what, so will we stop, will the progress stop before we reach an archocapitalism? I don't know. I mean, that might be true if there's some,

• 25:37Speaker 01

  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 there are 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 that, 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 in the past was super stupid.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  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. Just like besides being really harmful, it's just dumb, right? Anyway, so like uh, you know, eventually people see that. Okay. But I think this is similar. So you know, the 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?

• 26:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, so I I I'm gonna try to critique that view, actually. Um, like it 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 that might have been 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, uh, 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.

• 27:35Dwarkesh Patel?

  And he vetoes it and he says, first of all, I can't find any um, authority within the constitution to do this. Second, 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 role of government. Uh, both parties seem to have a respect for um, the autonomy autonomy of the individual more so back then. So on the particular point of libertarian views, it seems that there's been regress. And I think maybe a better theory of changing attitudes has been an increase in safetyism. 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.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Lingering.

• 28:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, but it also means that they're more comfortable with regulations, with fines, with not so diligent in protecting property rights. So then this safety is a masochist to a regulatory state rather than an agrocapitalism over time.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that that could be true. Right. So definitely the United States has had growing regulation. You know, back when it was first started, the the Code of Federal Regulations. So this lists all of the federal regulations. It was started in, I guess, nineteen thirty eight or something like this, nineteen thirties. It was twenty two thousand pages, which sounds long enough. But it's now over one hundred and fifty thousand pages. Right. And, you know, like, you know, the size of these regulatory agencies is growing, more employees, right?

• 29:10Speaker 01

  So, I mean, it could be right that that's just what's going to keep happening, right? But it's not obviously right.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  So, I mean, there is a certain amount of pushback and there are people who are realizing the like the problems with regulation. So in many areas, just many areas of human intellectual inquiry, knowledge just accumulates. And, you know, we might just be in the primitive state of, you know, knowledge about social and political matters. Right? That, you know, it looks to me like there's

• 29:47Speaker 01

  accumulating libertarian sentiment. This could be wishful thinking or something, I don't know. But like, you know, when I was in college, 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, there are these different libertarian organizations now. There was no Students for Liberty when I was in college, right? Like that expanded also.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  There was, um, I recall there being basically like one well-known libertarian philosopher was Robert Nozick.

• 30:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  And, uh, and you know, now there, there are multiple ones, right? So I don't know, you know, possible.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  You know, part of what I think was happening, so I don't know about Robert Cleveland in particular, like, I don't know if he was 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, that's why they didn't want to do all this welfare state 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?

• 31:07Speaker 01

  So that would actually be a form of progress, even though, like, even, even though the policy is getting further from where it should be. So like the attitudes are getting closer to what they should be.

• 31:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, I, so I wonder if, instead of the attitudes getting closer to libertarian, what's happening is just that details have increased. So, I mean, uh, there, 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 socialist in Congress, right? Uh, so I, 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.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  That could be.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think like the internet culture might be making us more extreme, right?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, so, you know, it, it used to be that, um.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Information and just like, you know, the content that people consume 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. Right, but also like the socialist. 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? 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? There, so. Um, they're just sort of like this, um, you know, this optimistic philosophical view that the truth wins in the end.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe our view will go down because it's wrong, actually.

• 33:35Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, maybe. Um, so let's talk about the actual view then. Uh, I, I'm gonna try to pay devil's advocate now. Uh, so there's, uh, Hobbes had this idea that in order to, 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, 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 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.

• 34:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  And then during the feudal period where thousands of independent political units merged into centralized monarchies, there's another decrease in violence. So how come it's the case that empirically speaking, whenever power tends to centralize, the rate of violence, death, war, homicide, tends to decrease?

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, that could be true. So I think it could be that the, like the, the central power, the government, suppresses violence, suppresses the small scale violence, right? They do large scale violence, i.e. war, but they suppress like the just ordinary one-on-one murder and so on. But I mean, like, if you're asking, well, why is it that people are prone to violence to begin with? 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.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  But I'm not sure if he realizes that it's a completely different explanation. Okay, so the Hobbesian explanation is, you know, everybody's completely selfish and everybody knows that anyone can kill anyone. And 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.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  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, and you're assuming that you can't like immediately kill everyone else at once. 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 Steven Pinker's book, How the Mind Works. There's a particular passage that explains this. And it's basically what happened in primitive tribes was the men from one tribe would attack another tribe

• 36:50Speaker 01

  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 forty five percent chance that you die by starting this fight, but a fifty five percent chance that you survive and you capture one extra wife. Okay, then your reproductive success goes up.

• 37:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Like, it doesn't seem like it's worth it if there's a forty five percent chance of dying, like just from an intuitive self-interest standpoint. But from a, for the standpoint of expected reproductive success, your expected reproductive success goes up if you presently have fewer than two wives. Right? If you have zero wives, you have nothing to lose because you're gonna 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.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  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. 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?

• 38:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, but so long as that, so long as that instinct exists, why won't a state without a Leviathan or a society without a Leviathan fall back into that sort of it's the people will just fall back into that emotion of conquest. Why won't that happen?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  You know, private security agencies, you'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.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 39:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, I I guess it doesn't the case for private security. Doesn't that assume somewhat of a parity in resources that you could afford? A similar magnitude of help because 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. 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

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Buy some politicians.

• 40:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, fair enough. In anarcho-capitalism, they can buy, they can buy an army, whereas you can buy like one security guard. So then there's not a sort of parity in power and they can really roll over people.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  I mean, 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?

• 40:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  Or he's like, I'll pay you a billion dollars, just like, you know, let me get through this town. He tells us to keep a private security agency that.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Right, but what what's his, what is his purpose? Okay, so like, you know, Bill Gates hires like some really powerful security agency and to do what?

• 41:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  Steal resources, steal women.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  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, rich people do well with women.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Like, Bill Gates would not have a hard time finding a wife if he didn't already have one.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  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?

• 42:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Then, you know, not have to worry about the violence.

• 42:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, fair enough. Although, um, in such a situation, aren't the poor disadvantaged relative to the rich? I guess they 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.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, they're not, right? So, like, rich people are going to pay more for security.

• 42:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Like they presently do, right?

• 42:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  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?

• 43:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, okay, so 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, 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 why, so Pinker floats the idea that the first states were really just kind of mafiosos that took control of an area and expect a tribute every year. Why won't these, one of some of these private agencies kind of formed the proto-states? Where they demand tribute every year from the people living there in exchange for living safely? I guess you could say that's what the state is today anyways, but.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is what they are, although, you know, you might worry that maybe we would get a worse state than that.

• 43:48Dwarkesh Patel?

  Exactly.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Right? Well, I mean, it's just that.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  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. From that position, it's difficult to establish your 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 gonna be hard to get there, right? It's like, you know, without getting arrested by other people's security agencies and so on.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  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, like, 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, right? 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.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  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 organizations that would take over those functions are growing. If the government just collapsed immediately, it's never 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.

• 45:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, how how soon can this happen? Uh, like if everybody agreed, you know, uh, humor's right. I bought this book.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, as soon as everyone buys my book.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Paradise can begin.

• 45:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  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 bad things start happening?

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know. I mean, I don't 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 convinced, like, we have a democracy right now, if people were convinced that we should privatize more functions of the state, we can start doing that right now.

• 46:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  I mean, um, and, you know, sort of 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. Right? Like, like the city of Denver tomorrow could say, we're gonna 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?

• 46:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Are you pro defund the police?

• 46:55Speaker 01

  I mean, you could say that, like, in principle.

• 46:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  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?

• 47:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Oh, so here's a question I'll ask you. You wrote a blog post a few months back where you were criticizing social justice warriors and the 1619 Project in particular. And here's what you wrote. You said, the title of the post is attacking your own society. You wrote, "Here is another plausible way of eroding norms. Directly, verbally attacking the foundation of one society's. Preaching that the society is founded on fundamentally evil values, that large parts of 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 its members." And now, Professor, are you attacking our own society, right? You're claiming that coercion is illegitimate.

• 47:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  Our society is, in large part, founded on the idea that the state is legitimate, that its coercion is legitimate. If coercion is evil, then isn't our society illegitimate? And then, aren't you eroding, then, the norms which have brought us peace and prosperity, then?

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I might be doing that. Good thing nobody listens to me. No, um, I mean, I was thinking about, yeah, I was sort of thinking about 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, when you lose the election, you concede.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  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?

• 48:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  And sort of like...

• 48:51Speaker 01

  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 somewhat of a digression, it's not exactly answering your question, but anyway. You know, one of the things that made me think about this was, so many years ago, I read that some

• 49:14Speaker 01

  people, 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, 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 it was true compared to other countries, right? So like, there'd be people who are in opposite size 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.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  So, anyway, okay.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Then in that blog post, like, you know, I wanna, I wanna leave room for criticizing society. I wanna leave room for saying, like, there's some stuff that's very messed up that we need to change. Right? So, you know, how do we do that and not, not be accused of wrongly bashing 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.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  What, what I sort of sense from left-wing ideology today is that it is a lot of attacking. Right, just, just like for the sake of 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? And you're like, I wanna say, like,

• 51:12Speaker 01

  I've been known to have 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. So, let's not tear down the good stuff while we're trying to get rid of the bad stuff.

• 51:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, that, that makes sense. 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, how much editing does it take?

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I read it in an afternoon, but then I reread it multiple times. So, I don't know, so reread it a few times that day, but then reread it the next day. And like maybe just before it goes up. So I make small edits, which, you know, the small edits don't make that much difference probably, but.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, the total amount of writing that I've done on that blog is kind of a lot, right?

• 52:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Like one a week, so, and it's been going for a couple of years. So there's like, whatever is over a hundred posts.

• 52:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, and I, it's amazing how digestible, not just your blogs are, but just generally blog posts are. I just, they're bingeable in a way that books often aren't. Like, for example, I, I've probably 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've read a majority of yours, but I've certainly read a large part of it.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Read the rest of it. Scott Alexander is great, right?

• 52:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  That's like, you know, that's high quality stuff, right? That's better than, it's better than a normal book.

• 53:04Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Much better than academic books.

• 53:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  Did you read his non-libertarian FAQ, by the way?

• 53:11Speaker 01

  I don't think so, no.

• 53:13Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, so it's it's an interesting counterargument that's worth checking out. So I I wanted to ask you, 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?

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know, probably not, I don't think so. You know, I talked to Walter Block once, you know, a couple of years ago. Um, and, you know, in case anyone doesn't know, he's like, he's a big time libertarian economist over at Tulane. Wait, no, another university in New Orleans, and right.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  And his attitude was, you know, take as much money from the state as you can.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  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 going to give it back. They're not giving it back to the taxpayers, they're just gonna, you know, they're gonna waste it on something else. Anyway, and, you know, I think his attitude was that you're sort of like helping helping to undermine the state. Good to take money from the state to undermine the state.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  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 5% of our budget, it's something like that.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Now, the the same 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 of these students who are paying are super high prices. You know, like, most of them would not be paying if it weren't for financial aid provided by the government, right? So government helps these people get all these loans, which they probably wouldn't take.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  So you know, like, definitely, we, the university, are charging. We're overcharging, right? But I mean, everybody's overcharging, right? And we're overcharging less than most of the universities, so. Okay, not so bad, but. Yeah, in the libertarian society, there would be, there'd be less universities, right? Because there's a market distortion. You're created by all the financial aid, so there'd be less of it, and.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  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'd be, it would be cut down significantly.

• 55:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, I hope you have a job in that society. How would you? Sorry, go ahead.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, like, you know, the government has its hands in. Almost everything, right? There's hands 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. 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, and I know it could be, can't be a doctor. There are going to be benefits from, like, government regulations and so on, so.

• 56:27Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, yeah. I, I wonder how much stuff you could do, actually. You'd have to move it, move into the woods to actually find some sort of trade. Uh, uh, let me, let me just float a few other arguments against anarcho-capitalism for you. Uh, and see how you respond. So the first is a sort of Burkean argument, like, we shouldn't try things that haven't worked before.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  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 works, right? They tried it in Athens, and it didn't work that well. And, 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, it'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 trying.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  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, you know, there's a lecture by Brian Kaplan that you can find online somewhere where there was a title, there was something like less than the minimum,

• 58:17Speaker 01

  where his idea was you could have a subminimal state. And so the minimal state has police courts and military legislature, something like that. You could have a subminimal state, which they privatize the police force. And then they could privatize the court system. Right? And so that doesn't completely eliminate them, right? 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, and they could progressively outsource court duties. And there are some cases where that happens as well.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  There's some cases where the government court will refer you to a private arbitrator.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  But they could start doing that more and more. Okay, and so the person who's worried that an arche capitalism would be a disaster, you know, now they, they should answer at what point in this process they think the disaster would happen, right?

• 59:20Speaker 01

  There's like, 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 saying the rules. Like, they don't have a police force anymore. You don't have courts anymore, but they are giving rules to the police and the courts, so, okay. 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. The government could be much smaller. And you think, okay, so do we need that last bit?

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Right, which is like, I guess, the legislature. And then I guess there's the military, you might need that, actually. Right.

• 1:00:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  Well, what about the argument from the blacks, well, and that at every stage like this, you might have a 1% chance of destroying everything we might care about. And you make a similar argument, actually, dialogues against, uh, dialogues about ethical vegetarianism, where you say, even, 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 hundred 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 10th increment of decreasing the status possible, that something bad happens. It's still, it's still, uh, it's still good to not try it.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, but I mean, we don't have any evidence for that premise, right? We don't have any evidence that something bad happens at every 10th stage or whatever. I mean, the thing is like,

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  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. 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 there were a few times, yeah, there were 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 can just like, keep going, right?

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Just keep going forever and it's always going to be fine, right?

• 1:01:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, thi- this actually leads to my next argument against anarcho-capitalism. Which is sort of the Nick Bostrom vulnerable world hypothesis, if you've heard of that. Basically, the idea is with every new technology you discover, there's some small chance that i- it allows us to destroy everything. Like it's a technology that allows one guy with fifty grand to destroy an entire city. 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's gonna happen.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, in fact, I think I had a blog post that was kind of about this, right? And which, you know, which I, I guess I view as the strongest argument for strong state.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  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 tyrannical, but it was 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? But so that might, that might be the case if you're in a society in which one person has an ability to release a world destroying weapon. Right now, 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

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  you can produce larger effects with smaller effort, right?

• 1:03:40Dwarkesh Patel?

  But, 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's gonna be a human history, that's going to be the state. I mean, if these weapons come around in a hundred years and there's like a million years of humanity left, then for most of it, we're gonna need a state anyways. So what's the big benefit of doing anarcho-capitalism now?

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  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. 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 governments. Most weapons have been created by governments, right?

• 1:04:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  But isn't that a bit like saying in like the year nineteen eighteen hundred? Well, everything good that's ever, if you're an atheist and arguing for atheism, somebody could say, well, all the bridges and all the really cool things, all the knowledge has been made by 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 the state is.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  If 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?

• 1:05:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  But you you can't just build a nuclear bomb while states are dominant. They they won't let you. But if you can, then then you might.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  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'd been discovered, I don't know why a private person couldn't have done it.

• 1:05:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  Fair enough.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Except that it's super expensive and, you know, no, like, there wasn't a person who had a good incentive to do it, I guess. But um.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Anyway, yeah, so 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?

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  I'm not sure, because.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  You might say, yeah, even though the government is going to create this technology, like, they're going to create the world 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?

• 1:07:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  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. If we have them. Right, and, and I think there's a fair chance the government will cause it, because, you know.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  It may actually like hire people deliberately to create biological weapons, so, you know, it's a little hard to say. The, the alternative you might want is, you might want sort of.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  You know, 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.

• 1:08:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, blockchain but for nuclear weapons.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  I get, I mean, I think, is this Neil Stephenson's idea? I mean, I think I got this from some science fiction author, right? It should be, everybody should be watching everyone else, not one organization watching everyone else.

• 1:08:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  Is this from a book?

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  I just heard about this on the internet.

• 1:08:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay. Yeah, that's an interesting idea. A final argument.

• 1:08:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  A state in order to prevent people from torturing animals and eating them.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  But when we have the government, what they actually do is they're actually supporting the meat industry.

• 1:09:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:09:40Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Like, you know, I think it was like, so I think Cory Booker was the first vegan presidential candidate I saw, but like, I think that was clearly a liability for him.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Right? And like, 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, not doing that. Right? Cause if he said, yes, he's definitely out of the running, right?

• 1:10:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. Although he did propose some bills, um, calling for regulation of animal cruelty. Yeah. Although he didn't win, so I guess it makes your point for you, but.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:10:45Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, okay, so uh, now let's uh, 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?

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Uh, so is it overrated or underrated? Maybe about correctly rated, I suppose. 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, but basically, I think people who would be reasonably good at it to learn it.

• 1:11:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  And some people would just be terrible at it, so there's no point, right? Like, they could learn to do some basic stuff, and that would be useful, so.

• 1:11:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, you mentioned in one of your blog posts that if you didn't get into grad school for philosophy, you were considering becoming a computer programmer. So did you learn how to code in college?

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  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. All right, but many years later, I discovered that there's a language called game maker language. That some guy wrote, and it's really good for writing games. So I tried writing a game using that.

• 1:12:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  How fun. Um, the class of uh, uh, the class of people called public intellectuals.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Oh, uh, hmm, 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.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess, yeah, I guess underrated.

• 1:13:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. How about 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, people like Scott Alexander.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:13:32Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Although I guess not enough people know who he is, so.

• 1:13:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  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, so like not not worth reading, or they 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 PhD, they actually teach you some stuff.

• 1:14:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  And one of the 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.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  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 you're like, oh, reading a bunch of literature and you're finding out what people really think, right? And 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?

• 1:14:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's a Milgram experiment, but for a- academic discipline.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so, you know, like, um.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I run into people like on the internet and whatever, and sometimes I get email from random people. And and like, you know, there are people who've like written their, they've written their treatise on something or whatever. And they just don't realize that, you know, like they don't know what's going on. Right, like they don't, like I said, 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, caused you to be modified. And, you know, they, and they don't know what the reasons why it's wrong.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:01Dwarkesh Patel?

  If you were outside of, if you, for some reason, didn't get into grad school, but let's see, on the side, you were still publishing a blog, how much worse do you think you would be without the benefit of grad school?

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, you know, there's a possibility that it's, it's actually a selection effect rather than

• 1:16:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  the training effect, right?

• 1:16:28Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Like the people who have patience, people who have enough patience to do good work can make it through graduate school.

• 1:16:35Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  Like, if you don't have the patience, you'll be excluded by that, right?

• 1:16:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, so it was like, it's possible that it would still be good. Um, but I mean, I think that, uh, 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.

• 1:17:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. Um, a peer review.

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  Oh, peer review, underrated, overrated, uh.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  I don't know, um, yeah, probably, it's probably overrated, I guess. So the thing is like, 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, 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.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  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 your thinking. Um, I have no self-interest in doing this review fee 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. They just will do that. And I think that I'm a fine reviewer, like I'm perfectly objective anyway, but I don't trust everyone to be objective.

• 1:18:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  And so, um, yeah, and like, and 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? Cause like it reflects on the quality of the journal, but it's a, 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.

• 1:19:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Um, okay, how about online education?

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  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 is 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? 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.

• 1:20:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  Oh, or even better yet, if you think that there's something ineffable about like being there in person, you can still go in person. Nobody's gonna stop you. In fact, like, yeah, professors will often even grade your stuff, even if you're not in the class.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  The funny thing is, is, sorry, go ahead.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Yes, you know, 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.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  My grading.

• 1:21:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, it's funny, at my university, you need your ID to get into the gym. But you don't need any ID 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.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, nobody's stealing the knowledge, right?

• 1:21:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. I agree. Pronatalism.

• 1:21:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  I ask because you know, the average person is probably going to eat meat.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Oh, I see. Um, yeah, I mean, so I assume that that's going to end at some point.

• 1:21:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  Right. And so, um, it will be better to have more people.

• 1:22:04Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  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 and not. The population will be dwindling and maybe we'll go extinct from just, you know, not deciding to have kids, right?

• 1:22:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  And they'll be around to enjoy the moral progress. Uh, what, what, what do you think the idea that children have comparable or even equivalent rights against coercion as adults?

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  Um, hmm. 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?

• 1:23:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  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?

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, the increase is gradually, right?

• 1:23:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  And it also could vary depending on the maturity of the individual. So. Um, yeah. So I, I mean, I don't think that I can say a hard and fast rule. Now, you know, you might think like there, 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 eighteen as the time when you become an adult. I don't know.

• 1:24:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. So the claim is that, at least after a certain age, saying that this person is not entitled, does not have certain rights, is equivalent or comparable to saying that a particular race of people shouldn't have 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.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  You know, is it better than slavery? Well, you know, fortunately, most parents love their children. In a 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?

• 1:25:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, you might think though, like, well, there actually are some adults who are, like, not really suited to run their own lives, like, mentally retarded people or something.

• 1:25:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  It doesn't mean that you can treat them as slaves, but they probably do need, like, a guardian to tell them what to do.

• 1:25:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  Um, is it okay? Like, what if they don't want to listen to the guardian? Is it 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?

• 1:25:50Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Okay, final two questions. Or actually, final three questions. I didn't notice the third one there. First of all, at least in my opinion, and among the philosophers I know of that are living, you seem to have addressed the big questions more prolifically, creatively, and accessibly. What's the humor production function? How are you able to be this productive?

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Oh, um, I don't know. It's partly because I'm smart. It's partly because I love philosophy. 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. You know, in the academic world, there's sort of, there's not really incentives for 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.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Uh, there's no points for blog posts.

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  Although that might change in the future, but anyway, so, um, yeah. So you'd 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.

• 1:27:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:27:28Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, what do you think about the impact of intellectuals versus entrepreneurs slash engineers in shaping how the world turns out?

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  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. If you don't create that company and you know, these other companies like the Impossible Burger and the people who are doing the, um, 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 Reagan.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  So, but, but also like,

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  You know, after writing that book, apart from convincing entrepreneurs, like he tries to convince a bunch of ordinary people like I go to like I try to convince students and 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.

• 1:29:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  Oh, so are you?

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  Yes. 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.

• 1:29:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Right? But apart from the entrepreneur, the philosopher is having a much smaller influence on society.

• 1:29:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  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 be build the so-called machinery of freedom. Like, are you trying to inspire entrepreneurs more so than just convince people?

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  Um, I guess, I mean, I don't have a very specific plan, right? I just have the idea that it would be good if there were more people who had, um, true beliefs, you know, about important philosophical matters. And I don't know how it's going to happen, but in some way that is going to improve society.

• 1:29:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  Like, um, I kind of think that it goes from the top down, so to speak, that is, if you convince the elites, then the rest of society will go along.

• 1:30:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  It early, uh, I know Brian Kaplan thinks that you got to get the elites while they're young. Uh, because that's when they'll change their minds. So are you trying to convince like future elites, people in college? Or are you trying to convince like elites as the existing elites?

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I guess I try to work on all of them, but you know, like Kaplan's 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.

• 1:30:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, oh, uh, so a next question, uh, what are your three favorite books?

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Oh, uh, hmm, let's see, it would be three of my books, so.

• 1:30:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  That you did not write yourself.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, books, they're not my, I don't know. Um, like, like, I would probably have to spend a lot longer to actually accurately answer that.

• 1:31:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, that's all right.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  Um, I liked, I liked The Fountainhead a lot. That, that novel.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  And I guess, like, you know, it had an influence on me in, actually, Ayn Rand 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, do philosophy. What else?

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  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. Um, and also, I like The Cosmic Landscape by, um, um, I've forgotten 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.

• 1:32:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  Big, the quantum multiverse?

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Um, well, there, there's sort of like different versions of the multiverse. But I guess, like, he thinks that it comes out of string theory. Right, like, I don't know, and, you know. Uh, but, you know, there are different, different ways there could be multiverse, there 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?

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sorry. I can't remember this guy's name now. Anyway, but you know, there are lots of good books. I like the myth of the rational voter, right? That was very good. In, you know, just thinking about why politics works the way that it does.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  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?

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  I don't know, like, you know, my first advice is buy all of my books.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  But I mean, like, advice for like, what, like, what are they trying to accomplish?

• 1:33:26Dwarkesh Patel?

  Let's say they're technically inclined as well. So engineering is that's entrepreneurship.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Is, oh, I see. Um, I don't know.

• 1:33:35Dwarkesh Patel?

  Would you advise working in specific fields? Is there some thing you advise in terms of excellence and getting good at what you're doing? Or just where the important problems are?

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, like, I have, um, like, I would, I would give advice from the standpoint of self-interest to people. 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 a 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.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Right? And like, this is obvious, super obvious, but a lot of people don't do this. Like, we just keep having this boyfriend who's no good. I don't know. Try to change the person or whatever. You're not going to change people. And anyway, then the other thing is, um, meaningful work, right? So like going to a career that feels like you're doing something meaningful.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  Um, you know, but, uh, but like it's gotta 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 gonna be like, I have a lot of money, but boy, sure, I wasted my life.

• 1:35:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  Which you want to have happen.

• 1:35:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  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, you know, uh, buy a house, right? And, 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 great investment. And then you're like, when you have money, um,

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  invest in index funds, you know? Like, don't try to beat the market, because you're probably not going to.

• 1:35:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  There's there's stuff like, right?

• 1:35:40Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  Anyway, okay, but that's probably not what you might as know about.

• 1:35:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  No, that's the least, yeah.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  Might as well 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?

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  And, you know, like, my idea is, if we get enough people doing that, maybe the culture will improve.

• 1:36:24Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, let's hope so. Um, okay, so those are all my questions. Uh, Professor Hume, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate, uh, talking to you. This is a lot of fun.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:36:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah.