Latest / PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy / Victor Interviews a Debate Bro (ft. Mouthy Infidel)

Transcript

Victor Interviews a Debate Bro (ft. Mouthy Infidel) · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:00
  This is how it like every conspiracyy dies. It doesn't work. It's because
• 0:03
  like you have like these all powerful like entities, they control so many parts
• 0:07
  of the government, but then they all get cracked by one guy reading primary
• 0:10
  sources on fucking YouTube, or like they had all the power to do all
• 0:14
  this shit, but they didn't think of this one thing that would have saved
• 0:16
  them everything. Right. Also, are your politicians love you, man?
• 0:18
  They're just trying to do things for your own benefit. They just like,
• 0:23
  I like how you're trying to make the claim that, like our narrative is
• 0:26
  implausible when you're the one positing that Mueller was so corrupt that he was out
• 0:31
  to get Trump to overturn the results of the election, but then he released
• 0:34
  a document which exonerated Trump. And similarly, the Democrats were so concerned with
• 0:39
  overturning the results of the election that they cheated and manufactured all these ballots for
• 0:43
  Biden and still got fucking wiped out in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
• 0:48
  It just seems like what what kind of like dumbfucks are concocting these conspiracies
• 0:52
  where they're like going halfway to like fuck over Trump, but then like they
• 0:57
  just decide to quit there and like that that's it. Like I don't understand
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  is there like no such thing as like nuance in the world. Hello plastic
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  pills listeners. Today, I'm joined by YouTuber and political commentator mouth the Infidel.
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  He is likely best known for his many online political debates on topics like
• 1:23
  should there be welfare, healthcare and redistribution, socialism and capitalism, and trans
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  rights, as well as several other In this wide ranging discussion, Mouthy and
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  I touched on topics including the value of online debating, rationality and politics,
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  good and bad versions of the left, Richard Wolfe's views on socialism, and
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  many more topics. I hope you enjoy well, Mouth the Infidel, thanks,
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  thanks a lot for coming on. I mean, you know, I
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  didn't have specific things in mind that I wanted to talk to you, but
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  I was just curious, I mean, on the on our podcast, which
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  I don't know how much you know about it, but like, you know,
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  where a bunch of PhD students are actually two of us have our PhDs,
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  and then two of us are still working on our PhDs, and we
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  mostly look at we're mostly studying various forms of philosophy. I don't know how
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  much. I mean, you seem to be pretty good at arguing at least,
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  but I don't know how much like actual philosophy reading you've done. But
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  you know, don't worry, not expecting us to go too much into the
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  weeds. But you know, the reason I mentioned that is because there's like
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  two schools of thought in philosophy. I don't know if you're familiar with,
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  like continental versus analytic philosophy. Yeah, I'm passingly familiar with the distinction.
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  Yeah, passingly familiar. Yeah, obviously, I think continental philosophy gets disparaged
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  a lot for being unclear and you know, like full of kind of French
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  and German elitism or something and impenetrable language. You know, I've been persuaded
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  that I think there's a lot of value in both traditions. But in any
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  case, we do tend to do mostly continental accepts. The two political members
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  of the podcast, me and Matt McManus, we both dabble a little bit
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  more into analytic philosophy as well. But yeah, so we've done some episodes
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  on like I guess what people pejoratively call like debate bros or whatever, Right,
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  and I think we had Ben Burgesson to talk about that a little bit,
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  but I thought it would be interesting to actually talk to somebody who does
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  do a lot of debates. And you know, I think sometimes like people
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  in academia like think it's weird that I love watching these debates so much.
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  I don't know, like I sometimes think that there's like a bit of a
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  I don't want to say like snobbishness exactly, but I think some people get
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  a little bit They're like, you know, why are you spending time watching
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  these like debates that go nowhere? And you know, I think the way
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  sometimes I've explained it before in the past is, you know, some people
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  like to watch like Marvel movies, some people like to do like whatever,
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  watch reality TV shows, and like I like to spend my time watching these
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  like really combative debates. Yeah. Well, there's also so you're familiar with
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  the debate that Richard wolf had with Destiny, right, oh yeah, And
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  there was an interview that the Serfs did with Richard wolf after that which I
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  really like something that Richard Wolfe said, where so this Sert's kind of brought
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  up this point of like people were saying, like, oh, you know,
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  why would you even degrade Richard wolf by putting him on this platform with
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  a debate bro or whatever. And Richard Wolfe said, you know, if
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  socialist ideas are, you know, just restricted to academia, then like our
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  movement's never going to get anywhere. Right. So I think in a lot
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  of ways the kind of like snobbishness that you're talking about can be pretty counterproductive.
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  Yeah. No, I mean, I totally agree with you. I
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  think that it's a way of disseminating the ideas. But I guess, you
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  know, the worry is that most people watching the debate, and I'm sure
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  this is true, right, are are like very stuck to their specific ideological
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  position. They're probably not going to be but I know, Destiny sometimes himself
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  argues that there's like a twenty percent, which might be, in my opinion,
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  a bit optimistic. I think it's probably less than that that like are
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  willing to be turned. But you know, I did, I was hoping
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  we could start. I'm curious just like what got you into doing debating and
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  making YouTube videos? Like how did that all start for you? Like what
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  was kind of the trajectory? Yeah. So it's funny because I've actually been
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  making YouTube videos about politics since I was like twelve. When I was like
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  really really young, I started reading Failed States by Noam Chomsky. That was
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  the first thing that I ever read like politically, and that was really interesting
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  to me. So I kind of just went down the political rabbit hole very
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  very young. And so I did YouTube videos for a while, but there
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  really wasn't a market for it at the time, and nothing ever really happened
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  with it, and then I just kind of resigned to making essays and arguing
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  with people on like, you know, niche social media platforms. But then
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  once there started to be a sort of resurgence of like, Okay, people
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  are actually interested in listening to people make videos and talk about politics, I
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  started doing that. And I guess for me, debating is more just it's
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  not really a specific thing that I like to do. It's just more of
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  a it's just one of the ways that I can express ideas and engage with
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  like different arguments, and that's really what I'm interested in, right, right,
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  So it's almost like a vehicle for you to just explore those ideas in
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  a little bit more detail, right, And yeah, exactly, And when
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  you were initially on some of those other like you know, fringe social media
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  platforms, Like what were those ones that you were like like kind of just
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  on comment boards, just back and forth, and then it kind of evolved
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  from there where you'd invite people to be like, well, let's get on
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  and make a video about it. Or is that how it started or yeah,
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  more or less. Yeah, I would argue with people and like comment
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  sections and like threads on Reddit and on Instagram and stuff like that. At
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  one point I started like uploading like short essays about politics on Instagram, and
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  sometimes I would like debate people over like Instagram Live, and eventually I decided
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  to just do a YouTube channel about it. Interesting you said you you started
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  getting interested in politics from reading that Chomsky book, you know, And I'm
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  curious at that time, like before you read that, did you some kind
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  of like political predispositions or like did you think about politics much and like just
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  tell me a little bit about that. I was very before that. I
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  was sort of very just passingly familiar with political issues. I would occasionally like
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  watch videos on YouTube of like you know, John Stewart or like you know,
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  Bill O'Reilly or Crossfire with Tucker Carlson and that other guy whose name I
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  don't remember, right, So I would sort of like watch some political stuff,
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  but I didn't really have like strong opinions on it. It was more
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  so just like an entertainment thing. But yeah, sort of like reading Chomsky
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  was the first thing that sort of pushed me to actually start to deep dive
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  deeper into it and like try and ground my positions. I guess, yeah,
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  that's cool. I think I had a similar experience, you know,
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  I remember watching John Stewart and I think, you know, I'm I'm in
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  Canada, and I'm probably quite a bit older then, you know, I'm
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  not sure actually how old you are, but you know, I remember there
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  was a time when Fox News wasn't available in Canada at all, but I
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  would like hear about it, and I remember we got it, like we
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  like when digital cable was becoming a bit of a new thing, like back
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  in the early two thousands, and I was I was pretty young, and
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  I remember we subscribed we had Fox News, and I remember just being so
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  fascinated by the like the level of like of sensationalist rhetoric that was going on
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  there, like it was almost just I got it was weird. I like
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  so disagreed, but I couldn't take my eyes away from it. Yeah,
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  yeah, definitely that was I wanted sort of my experience for a really long
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  time. Yeah yeah, I wonder if that's like it. It seems like
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  most people aren't actually that interested in exposing their views to scrutiny, and like,
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  I think most people find it quite unpleasant to watch things like that,
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  they that they adamantly disagree with, And it seems to be like a weird
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  quirk of some random chance that you know, you and I maybe have this
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  disposition where we derive some pleasure from it. Yeah yeah, yeah, Yeah,
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  for sure, there's there's a lot of people who like in so far
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  as they watch content where their ideas are being engaged, it's kind of more
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  just a hate watch thing. You know, Like a lot of people will
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  come to my debates that I'll do with you know, name of various you
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  know, odious right wing figure, and they'll just be like, this kid
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  needs to cut his hair, and like it's it's very clear that there's not
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  like an actual motivation to be intellectually challenged, which is I guess a bit
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  disappointing, but I mean it is how it is. Yeah, that is
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  disappointing. And actually that makes me think something else that occurred to me earlier
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  when you were talking about, you know, the the value of debating as
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  a vehicle for you know, testing your ideas. And I did have a
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  browse through like a lot of the debates you've done, and I think,
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  you know how, I guess I was curious, you know, how often
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  have you actually been satisfied by you by your debate partners where they actually tested
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  your ideas in a meaningful way. So I unfortunately I can't name that many
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  examples. I guess. I a recent debate with y'uron brook, and I
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  thought that was interesting because it gave me sort of more of an insight into
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  like I guess Randian thinking and where like my sort of moral predisposition would conflict
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  with that. But yeah, I don't know, it's a it's it's less
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  common than I would have hoped. Yeah, I mean, would you would
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  you not say that the majority of people that you end up engaging with are
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  like, you know, potentially bad faith, Like I don't know, maybe
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  yeah, yeah, Well specifically so, I feel like a lot of the
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  libertarians who I've debated so like I debated a Dutch politician who's a libertarian,
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  and I debated, You're on Brook. A lot of the libertarians I've debated
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  seem to engage in good faith. I think when you get into the territory
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  where it's like, you know, more like Trump type alt right figures,
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  that's where I sort of run into people who are less interested in making arguments
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  and more interested in being like, oh, you know, you're autistic or
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  you're gay, or yeah, that kind of territory. Yeah, for sure,
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  for sure. In fact, I think I discovered you because I saw
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  that you did that debate with Destiny, like the tag team one or whatever,
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  and and you know, I wonder if you will agree with this.
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  But you know, I think Destiny has a bad reputation for some good reasons,
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  Like I find that he's a little bit like I think he can just
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  be straight up mean sometimes like unnecessarily I would say, but I think that
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  the core of the views that he has, I often find myself agreeing with
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  him, not always, but like I would say, the majority of the
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  time, I do. But it almost seemed like you were presenting like arguments
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  in a in a way like I feel like you don't have the like the
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  the meanness I guess that that Destiny has. But I feel like you you
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  offer compelling arguments, like I think Destiny's usually good faith, but he he
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  sometimes like gets I don't know how to put it, like just too too
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  caught up in like trying to own or like catch the other person, and
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  like, I don't know, what do you think about that? So that's
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  a big problem for I think debate culture in general, where and I think
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  in part it's because people criticize me for defending Destiny too much. But I
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  genuinely think that Destiny was sort of the aticenter that debate culture kind of originated
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  out of. And I think that there are certain things about Destiny that a
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  lot of people who liked Destiny even sort of grew these misconceptions and then tried
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  to replicate them, and then it became problematic. So like what you mentioned
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  with like a Destiny being like really focused on like gotcha's and stuff, I
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  think that can sometimes be true. But I think that Destiny generally engages in
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  pretty good faith with regards to I think he's genuinely like when I've heard people
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  make arguments that he can't refute, he will like shift his position, right,
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  He's not somebody who I don't think is like or who I think is
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  like refusing to actually engage intellectually. But I do think that he can be
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  a bit over inflammatory and over aggressive sometimes. I think that's just kind of
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  how he is. Yeah, but I think that did have some utility,
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  I guess because when Destiny kind of rose to prominence, it was the era
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  of like, you know, people like Sargon of a Cod and these sort
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  of super aggressive right figures who kind of built this reputation around. You know,
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  I'm a manly right winger intellectual, and none of the lib cucks will
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  debate me because they're too afraid. And so I think there might be some
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  value in having people who are challenging ideas in a sort of aggressive kind of
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  way like that. But that's not personally how I like to approach it.
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  It's just not I just can't really approach it in that way, Like I'm
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  just not interested in having sort of screaming matches. I guess, yeah,
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  no, for sure. I mean, you know, I have to say
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  I agree with you, like I actually do think that at the time,
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  you know, when you put Destiny into historical context. I think that's an
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  important point that you know, he really was coming in at a time exactly
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  as you say, where like these right wingers were dominating, and he came
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  in and kind of like gave them a taste of his own of their own
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  medicine, except with actual arguments that were good, right, and I think
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  exposed a lot of them. And you know, he often I think I've
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  heard him say about that twenty percent, which is probably smaller of people who
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  are watching, who are maybe willing to be moved that the key he thinks
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  is like when he can embarrass the person that they supposedly like, like that
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  can maybe have some sort of impact where they'll be like, oh, the
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  guy that I was kind of leaning towards, like his points kind of seem
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  stupid and maybe so yeah, I mean that's interesting. But I think also,
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  like, you know, he calls people stupid a lot and idiots,
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  and I just feel like he goes a little far with that sometimes. But
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  but I do also think that most people who criticize him haven't actually spent the
• 14:46
  time to really like understand what his arguments are. There seems to be this
• 14:50
  really weird like mob mentality on the online left, where in one way that
• 14:56
  that manifests is like the online left will just latch on the certain figures and
• 15:01
  then just completely dehumanize them and just like attack them relentlessly. Right, Like
• 15:07
  the one person who I think I'm guilty of doing this towards is Dave Rubin,
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  But that's more just because I think Dave Rubin is really funny, Like
• 15:13
  the things that he says is really funny. But like there's a lot of
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  this, like people will just decide, you know, I hate Joe Rogan
• 15:22
  or I hate Elon Musk, and then it's like anything they do or anything
• 15:24
  they say, there's just this giant Twitter mob attacking them. I mean,
• 15:28
  yesterday, actually me and Matt, the two political guys from our podcast,
• 15:33
  we went on the Vanguard podcast. I don't know if you're familiar with them,
• 15:37
  and look like they were both really nice guys. I'm pretty fond of
• 15:41
  them. I probably disagree with some of their takes, but their audience,
• 15:43
  Oh my god, their chat was like like just because we were sort of
• 15:48
  what were we were arguing for, is that like the left should be like
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  outcome oriented, right, And it's like I sometimes I think I describe myself
• 15:56
  in my Twitter bio as a non non partisan leftist, and what I mean
• 15:58
  by that, you know, there's a tendency to get emotionally attached to like
• 16:03
  certain labels, so like socialism, and you can even see this sort of
• 16:08
  weird distortion or fixation on labels happen in a different, an analogous example,
• 16:14
  which is like when everybody wanted to call Trump a fascist. I think what
• 16:18
  we should be doing instead of calling people labels is just it's lazy to lean
• 16:25
  on the label, because you forget what makes Trump actually bad, like talk
• 16:27
  about what he's doing that actually sucks specifically, rather than just being like fascist.
• 16:33
  When you just like hide behind the fascist lael label, you get to
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  be a lazy thinker and not actually realize and take to the front of your
• 16:41
  mind why what he's doing is actually bad specifically. Similarly, for socialism,
• 16:45
  I feel like, rather than just fixating around the label, we should be
• 16:48
  talking about specifically what kind of a society do we want to be building,
• 16:52
  What kind of outcomes do we want? I want a society where we can
• 16:55
  make as many people as possible flourish, and I don't really care how we
• 17:00
  do it right, So like I'm gonna I'm agnostic, or it's an empirical
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  question, right, like how we're going to do it? Best do it?
• 17:07
  But like so it might be the case that sometimes market solutions are are
• 17:10
  the thing. But yeah, obviously when I was saying all this on that
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  podcast, a lot of the chat was just like, get these fucking centrists
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  out of here, get these like lib lib cuts out of here. But
• 17:19
  yeah, I don't know if you have reactions to that. So there's this
• 17:23
  phenomenon. Have you read or are you familiar with the book Politics Is for
• 17:26
  Power? No, I'm not, actually so one of the points that's made
• 17:32
  in that book is that if you look at people who engage with politics and
• 17:37
  you look at the way that they actually spend their time engaging with politics,
• 17:42
  it seems like all of the time people spend is focusing on sort of you
• 17:48
  know, far away important but sort of far away headline issues and you know,
• 17:53
  listening to just podcasts and reading stuff, and almost no time is spent
• 17:59
  you know, sort of actually engaging in activities that might bring about change,
• 18:03
  like engaging in like local organizing or local elections or things like that. And
• 18:08
  basically what he calls it is political hobbyism, and it's this idea that the
• 18:12
  way that people tend to engage with politics is less because they're concerned with actually
• 18:18
  making change and more just sort of it's an exercise and self identity, right,
• 18:25
  And that gets really frustrating because sometimes you'll make arguments like hey, or
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  like you'll try to be pragmatic for example, right, and you'll say like,
• 18:33
  hey, maybe we should like maybe we should not call ourselves social or
• 18:37
  something, maybe we should just focus on policy. And then people will get
• 18:41
  really mad at that because the reason that they're interested in politics in the first
• 18:45
  place is because it's like their identity is socialist, is like important to them,
• 18:49
  rather than like their actual desire to see the change that we talk about.
• 18:55
  Yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean I think it's uh.
• 18:56
  I think the identity point is actually son because I do think that there's
• 19:00
  a lot of fixation on like kind of almost like an affective enjoyment, uh,
• 19:07
  from being attached to a certain label and kind of the Yeah, one
• 19:11
  of my favorite fields of theory is like Lacinian psychoanalysis, and you know,
• 19:15
  they in that view, they often they the view often says you know,
• 19:22
  we are struggling to find some stabilizing identity, and I guess we often get
• 19:26
  attached to these what he calls master signifiers, and there's a lot of enjoyment
• 19:30
  derived by kind of constructing this fantasy in her mind that like, you know,
• 19:34
  underneath this master signifier, we can feel whole again if we just like
• 19:40
  you know, affirm that identity as and then there's and then obviously, like
• 19:44
  people get very hostile when you try to kind of disrupt that sort of fantasy
• 19:48
  construction. I definitely agree with you. I wanted to ask also about you
• 19:52
  know, like what's your educational background or your study background or your plans to
• 19:56
  study because it does I mean, you seem pretty knowledgeable about philosophy. Is
• 20:02
  are you self taught or have you done any education on that? Yeah?
• 20:04
  So, my education, so at least so far, is that I barely
• 20:11
  passed high school, and then I've spent a bunch of time like illegally downloading
• 20:17
  like studies and papers on like cy hub and like reading them for my own
• 20:19
  enjoyment. That's pretty much beenett I'm basically I'm entirely self taught. Yeah,
• 20:26
  wow, which I guess sometimes I run into certain problems or insecurities with that
• 20:32
  where it's like, can I really feel confident in this position? Like like
• 20:37
  yeah, but that's basically my educational background. Yeah. Well, you know,
• 20:41
  let me tell you a story, Like, you know that sounds very
• 20:44
  it sounds familiar what you're telling me, because I can tell you that when
• 20:47
  I finished high school, my my average was like D D minus. Like
• 20:52
  I was a terrible high school student. I didn't I hate doing my homework,
• 20:55
  especially when it's about stuff that I didn't care about. I mean,
• 20:57
  part of it was probably that I was just too young, but but I've
• 21:00
  kind of realized as I've gotten older that I feel like I need to have
• 21:03
  a really strong sense of autonomy or like self directedness, Like I don't like
• 21:07
  to have set kind of benchmarks for when I have to have something done.
• 21:11
  And I think in high school there's a lot more small assignments they have just
• 21:15
  hand in and I would just always fall behind. So then in the city
• 21:18
  that I grew up in in Ottawa, there's a university that had this kind
• 21:23
  of ability to enroll as a special student. So like I didn't really know
• 21:27
  what I was doing with my life. I think I was probably like five
• 21:30
  years out of high school, and I was like, okay, well,
• 21:33
  all enroll as a special student and basically you do two courses per semester and
• 21:37
  then if you do well on those, then they'll admit you full time based
• 21:40
  on kind of like how well you do. And I took like some philosophy
• 21:45
  courses and it like totally changed. I all of a sudden felt motivated.
• 21:48
  It's like all I have to do is write this one essay by a certain
• 21:51
  time, and I can do what however I want. Like it just really
• 21:52
  changed. So yeah, I mean, you know it's I think sometimes these
• 21:57
  things can come a little bit later. So it seems like in a lot
• 22:02
  of your debates, the thing that really stood out to me is, you
• 22:04
  know you have a quite a strong recall of of studies, right, like
• 22:10
  you often come armed. I noticed this move where you'll be like, you
• 22:14
  know, this person has really done really good research on this, and like
• 22:17
  you'll start naming like studies. So how do you prepare? What's that process
• 22:21
  like for you if you're if you're going to debate somebody, like how much
• 22:23
  reading do you do? Like do you take notes? Like what's and do
• 22:26
  you have them in front of you at the debate, like, what what
• 22:29
  does that look like? Uh? Yeah, So I have a strong belief
• 22:34
  in the necessity of, like, I guess, examining empirical research before forming
• 22:41
  opinions on like the efficacy of certain policies or things like that. And I
• 22:48
  guess the reason is it seems like throughout history there have been so many times
• 22:52
  where we just like intuitively think a certain thing and then upon further investigation,
• 22:57
  like, it turns out to be wrong because there are just certain the world
• 23:02
  is so complex that there's always going to be certain factors that like our intuition
• 23:06
  is just not well equipped to take into account. So like, for example,
• 23:11
  the argument against the minimum wage has always been, well, we can't
• 23:15
  raise the minimum wage because wages are set by supply and demand in the labor
• 23:19
  market, and so raising it would cause businesses to no longer be able to
• 23:23
  afford as many workers. But then it's like the problem with that is that
• 23:29
  that model is overly simplistic and it doesn't take into account things like monopsony,
• 23:33
  where because there's such high concentration in labor markets, labor markets or wages are
• 23:40
  actually set below what they would be set in a free market and by like
• 23:44
  strict supply and demand mechanisms, and so there actually is room to raise the
• 23:48
  minimum wage without causing disemployment. And I could go on for like examples of
• 23:52
  this kinds of thing for like forever. But I guess that's just why I
• 23:56
  think, like looking at empirical evidence rather than just relying on into it is
• 24:00
  really important when I'm coming to my positions. So when I'm thinking about any
• 24:03
  given issue, whether that be you know, what do I think about like
• 24:07
  trans issues even, or what do I think about a certain economic policy or
• 24:11
  a certain economic concept, I'll generally spend like a lot of time trying to
• 24:17
  read all of the studies that I can find on a given issue, and
• 24:19
  I'll like take notes. I'll be like, Okay, so this study says
• 24:22
  this, and this is the basic methodology that it used, and I'll try
• 24:26
  to like compare different studies see what the consensus generally points to. Sometimes,
• 24:33
  like I'm if I have like a debate that I'm like really nervous for,
• 24:37
  sometimes I'll like write out like a research document like I did this for the
• 24:41
  uron Brook debate, where I kind of like have all of the sources that
• 24:44
  I think I'll need in front of me so I can bring it up,
• 24:48
  but usually I don't. Usually it's just kind of memory based, right,
• 24:52
  Like if someone's making the point that like socialism or redistribution suppresses entrepreneurship, I'll
• 24:59
  be like, oh, I remember I read all these papers by Gareth Olds
• 25:02
  that said that it actually increases entrepreneurship by giving people more economic security. So
• 25:07
  yeah, it's kind of like that. That seems like an unusually high aptitude
• 25:12
  to be able to do that. Like I don't think that I could be
• 25:15
  able to memorize that stuff. And you know, I mean, you don't
• 25:18
  have to answer this, but it's just it's funny to me that you're able
• 25:21
  to memory, to remember all these things and recall them. But you said
• 25:22
  that, you know, high school was was was a bit of a chance?
• 25:26
  Was it just because you didn't care about high school or like this stuff?
• 25:29
  More or less? Yeah? I have like I have like pretty bad
• 25:33
  adhds. So like it's hard for me to bring myself to do things or
• 25:37
  learn about things if I'm not like genuinely really interested in them. So like
• 25:42
  when it comes to like algebra, its like I don't care, Like I
• 25:47
  just don't care and so when it's like I have to do my algebra homework,
• 25:51
  it takes like an incredible amount of like will power to bring myself to
• 25:55
  do that, and more often than not, I would just end up like
• 25:57
  just not being able to bring myself. But when it comes to I guess
• 26:00
  political issues, politics is just something that I have, like super a super
• 26:07
  high level of I guess curiosity about an interest in And so when I'm like
• 26:11
  reading papers and writing them down, it's less of like a task and more
• 26:15
  of like I'm doing it for fun because I'm fulfilling some like curiosity that I
• 26:21
  have. I guess, right, Yeah, I mean that makes sense.
• 26:23
  I mean, like I said, I think it resonates with me a lot.
• 26:26
  I think I had somewhat of a similar experience. I was never diagnosed
• 26:29
  with ADHD, so I have no idea if I have that. But I
• 26:32
  still, you know, even now as a as a doctoral student, you
• 26:36
  know, and I actually did two master's degrees because I was like very indecisive
• 26:38
  about what I was going to do. I did one in urban planning,
• 26:41
  and I also did one in philosophy. And then now I'm in now I'm
• 26:45
  in political science and doing political theory as kind of a like a middle ground
• 26:48
  I guess between planning and philosophy or something. I don't know, Like I
• 26:52
  have to build in like probably sixty percent procrastination time into my expected time of
• 26:59
  doing actual work. Even now, it's like very but I don't know.
• 27:03
  It's worked out for me and I've gone this far so so hopefully it'll it'll
• 27:06
  continue. But yeah, I was, you know, I know you sent
• 27:11
  me before you've written this essay about you know, Richard Wolfe's view, and
• 27:17
  you know, I thought maybe we could talk about that a little bit if
• 27:18
  you're interested, Like, so maybe you could you run down like the basic
• 27:22
  argument. I mean, I know, I really like Richard wolf and I
• 27:25
  remember the first time I came across him. I think I watched a Google
• 27:27
  talks that he had on YouTube, and I thought he makes very compelling,
• 27:32
  interesting arguments. But ultimately, like you know, there's some ambiguity about in
• 27:37
  what ways is he actually advocating for like kind of a socialist social transformation as
• 27:41
  opposed to just like being a champion of like worker democracy. So I don't
• 27:45
  know, maybe you could run down some of the tensions you identified in him.
• 27:48
  Yeah, So I guess my issue primarily comes in his model that he
• 27:53
  advocates for of market socialism. So his critic of central planning is one that
• 28:02
  I agree with. And his critique is that if you have like a centrally
• 28:07
  a highly centrally planned economy like that in the Soviet Union, there is no
• 28:14
  meaningful workers don't really have much meaningful power over where they work, right,
• 28:18
  It's still a highly authoritarian structure within the workplace, and that creates all sorts
• 28:22
  of problems, right, Like when workers feel like they don't have power over
• 28:26
  their work, they become alienated. There becomes political tensions and inequalities, and
• 28:33
  that's all very harmful, right, And so I think that's a very valid
• 28:36
  critique of central planning, And I guess his proposed alternative, I think goes
• 28:41
  too far in the other direction, where all businesses are just solely run by
• 28:45
  the workers, and the revenues of businesses just a crewe and are distributed solely
• 28:52
  by the workers who work at those firms. And I guess the two problems
• 28:57
  I have with that are that, really they're just two problems with capitalism in
• 29:02
  general that I don't think worker co ops necessarily fix. The first is that
• 29:07
  if you have revenue being distributed by the workers in a given firm that's producing
• 29:12
  the revenue, and they are the ones who distributed amongst themselves, that certainly
• 29:17
  is going to reduce inequality within the firm. Right now, there's no longer
• 29:22
  CEO who's getting all of the revenue and a bunch of workers who are getting
• 29:25
  table scraps. So it reduces an equality in that receipt in that sense,
• 29:29
  but it does not reduce inequality between different firms. Right So, even in
• 29:33
  a sort of worker co op economy, different worker co ops are going to
• 29:37
  vary massively in how profitable they are, right and so there's still going to
• 29:41
  be certain workers who work for a highly profitable co ops, some workers who
• 29:45
  work for less profitable co ops, and there's going to be a lot of
• 29:48
  economic inequality in that respect. The other issue that I have is when it
• 29:52
  comes to internalizing externalities, where it seems like one of the major problems with
• 29:59
  capitalis is that firms act in the interest of the firm, even at the
• 30:03
  expense of acting in the interest of society broadly. So like climate change is
• 30:11
  a good example, where like firms will pollute the environment because polluting the environment
• 30:15
  is profitable for them, but it hurts society, but they don't care because
• 30:19
  that cost to society doesn't show up on their balance sheet, right, And
• 30:23
  the same is true with the worker co op, right, Like, I
• 30:26
  see no reason why a worker co op fossil fuel company would have any less
• 30:30
  of an incentive, because it's still going to be the case that those workers
• 30:33
  in the co op, even if it's a democratic profit, they're still going
• 30:37
  to be profiting from polluting the environment, and they're not going to internalize the
• 30:41
  social cost. And so yeah, I guess those are my problems. And
• 30:45
  then my alternative, which I guess we can get into a bit more if
• 30:48
  you want, but just vaguely, my alternative is you have worker power through
• 30:52
  unions and through co determination policies, where like maybe workers have certain representation on
• 30:57
  like boards of directors or have certain amounts of shares. And then on the
• 31:02
  alternative side, you have state control in some sense in terms of nationalization of
• 31:07
  certain industries. But then obviously we want the market in some industries, and
• 31:11
  so where we have a market, you have sort of indirect state ownership through
• 31:17
  a social wealth fund where the state buys up stocks and the competing companies in
• 31:21
  the market and can internalize externalities in that respect. Yeah, that's interesting.
• 31:25
  You know, I'd never like thought about the Social Wealth Fund, but I
• 31:27
  did want to ask something about, you know, the critique of I think
• 31:32
  you're right. I'm convinced that obviously, the like Wolf's proposal, right,
• 31:36
  there's going to be inequality between firms. But like, I'd be curious,
• 31:41
  what's is that? How is that a bad thing? To what extent is
• 31:45
  inequality unjustifiable? To what extent? Maybe is it justifiable or like, how
• 31:48
  do you see that in this context? Yeah? So I guess this sort
• 31:53
  of gets deeper into like my broader moral framework, right, And I guess
• 32:00
  kind of the way that I think about it is inequality isn't always bad,
• 32:05
  But generally speaking, I think inequality creates problems. Firstly in that it can
• 32:10
  be harmful to social cohesion, right, Like, if there's some people who
• 32:15
  are much more rich than other people, that creates conflict between those two groups
• 32:19
  of people. Also, if wealth then income is distributed massively unevenly, people
• 32:24
  who get more of that wealth therefore are able to garner more political power,
• 32:29
  which I think is also problematic and is toxic to democracy. I think when
• 32:36
  you have large amounts of inequality, you have situations where people on the lower
• 32:39
  end of that aren't as able to sort of participate in society right to a
• 32:47
  degree that they find fulfilling. This is actually an argument that Marx made that
• 32:52
  I really like, which is, if you have like a bunch of people
• 32:55
  and they all live in like a small hut, right, then the person
• 33:00
  who lives in a small hut is going to be like, oh, okay,
• 33:01
  whatever, this is fine because this is like the norm. But then
• 33:05
  if you have a situation where like three people live in a hut and then
• 33:07
  a bunch of people live in a mansion, then the people in the hut
• 33:10
  are going to be like, oh wait, what's going on here? And
• 33:13
  all of a sudden they're going to be more dissatisfied, right because of that
• 33:16
  inequality. And this is why researchers Actually a lot of people criticize the relative
• 33:24
  poverty metric because they think it's sort of a measure of low end inequality and
• 33:29
  too in a respect, it is, right, like, relative poverty is
• 33:32
  just measured by if you're, like, I think, fifty percent below the
• 33:37
  medium income. And the reason we do that is because it's a meaningful to
• 33:42
  talk about how many people are barred from participating in like the basic norms and
• 33:47
  activities that you're expected to participate when you live in a certain society. So
• 33:52
  I think inequality can be harmful to all those respects or in all those respects.
• 33:57
  Yeah, I agree with that for sure, I think. But I
• 33:59
  guess you know, the question is, you know, what are the conditions
• 34:02
  when it is justifiable? Right, because I guess there's a certain sense in
• 34:07
  which you know, people are obviously going to have different potential talents and like
• 34:10
  and like they're going to have, people are going to have more or less
• 34:14
  favorable, for example, psychological dispositions. You know, I don't know how
• 34:19
  familiar are with like rawsy in arguments, right, like you know, the
• 34:22
  veil of ignorance and stuff, the difference principle. I'm curious, like how
• 34:24
  does that set like or do you find that to be a convincing argument or
• 34:29
  would you want stronger equality than that? Yeah? No, I actually generally
• 34:32
  do agree with the rawlesy and difference principle, Like inequality can be justified in
• 34:38
  so far as it's beneficial to like the least well off people, right,
• 34:42
  So like, if paying doctors more means that there's more doctors and that's helpful
• 34:46
  to you know, all the poor people who need doctors and they're better off
• 34:51
  as opposed to if doctors were paid less. Then of course I think that
• 34:54
  inequality is justified, but I guess I don't, so I don't trust the
• 35:00
  market, even a co op market, to create inequalities on that basis,
• 35:06
  right, Like in a co op market, inequality is just going to be
• 35:10
  is going to be created on the basis of which firms the market the sides
• 35:15
  are more profitable than other firms, right, rather than which inequalities are actually
• 35:21
  beneficial to people. Yeah, no, that makes that makes sense. And
• 35:22
  I guess the idea of wealth funds, as you mentioned, Maybe you could
• 35:25
  say a little bit more about that because I'm curious, but I guess the
• 35:30
  idea would be that those kinds of sort of institutional implementations would be a way
• 35:35
  of getting to like that sort of rawsy and difference principle, or it could
• 35:37
  be a way. Yeah, it could be, because basically what you have
• 35:42
  when you have a social wealth fund is a lot of the shares in a
• 35:45
  corporate in a given company are owned by the state, and so when a
• 35:51
  company generates revenue, rather than just going to either a CEO or the workers
• 35:54
  in that firm, a lot of that revenue goes directly to the state to
• 35:59
  be like redistributed, right, And so this is beneficial in terms of inequality.
• 36:05
  So like, okay, so, like one example that I could give
• 36:07
  is I've mentioned inequality between firms. Another thing I could mention is inequality between
• 36:14
  people who work in general and people who don't work in general. Right,
• 36:17
  And this is a problem that's often underestimated by a lot of people because if
• 36:22
  you actually look at the statistics, about half of the population, like fifty
• 36:25
  percent of the population are classified as non workers, like people who don't work.
• 36:31
  And most of those most of that fifty percent are is people who don't
• 36:36
  work because they're disabled, or their elderly, or their children, or their
• 36:39
  caretakers or students, generally people who not only aren't working, but shouldn't be
• 36:45
  working, like we as a society shouldn't expect them to work. And so
• 36:50
  under a market system sort of there is no way unless you have like a
• 36:55
  sort of a welfare state, right, there's no way to distribute money to
• 37:01
  non workers, right, because all the money that businesses are generating is going
• 37:05
  to the workers, even in a co op system, in that firm.
• 37:08
  And so the idea of a social wealth fund is that a lot of the
• 37:10
  revenue is going to the state, and then the state can redistribute that revenue
• 37:15
  among the population in ways that are democratically determined. And so I think that
• 37:20
  puts us in a better decision or in a better position to decide democratically to
• 37:28
  distribute revenue in ways that we determine would make society better, rather than in
• 37:32
  ways that the market determines. Right. And then and do you what kind
• 37:37
  of democratic mechanism do you think would work? So would that be like,
• 37:39
  I guess, implementing some sort of worker democracy, or like just like do
• 37:44
  you think electoral politics? I guess is my question is sufficient for that?
• 37:46
  Or do we need some some further forms of democratization. So I generally advocate
• 37:53
  for I generally advocate for like representative democracy, but sort of I guess furthering
• 38:01
  how democratic that is? Right? And one way to do that is,
• 38:07
  obviously, you can have like laws that outlaw things like lobbying. You can
• 38:10
  have laws that limit inequalities so that you know, there's the government is more
• 38:15
  representative of everyone rather than just people who have disproportionate amounts of economic resources.
• 38:22
  You can even do that through unions. There's one example that I like to
• 38:28
  bring up from Finland where there is I think a prime minister. I might
• 38:32
  butcher this story, but I think there was like a prime minister who tried
• 38:37
  to cut pay for a certain group of workers. And that's like, I
• 38:42
  mean, in America that would be like nothing, right, Like that happens
• 38:44
  all the time. But in Finland that was so not well received that there
• 38:51
  was a general strike, right. And what we have to remember is that
• 38:54
  in Finland, unions cover like ninety one percent of workers. Right. Unions
• 39:00
  were so large that the workers could say, hey, no, you can't
• 39:04
  cut pay, We're going to go on a general strike. And as a
• 39:06
  result, that prime minister had to resign, right wo. And so that's
• 39:10
  just one example of sort of having building up alternative structures like unions and community
• 39:16
  organization structures can sort of be a check against the power of the state,
• 39:22
  or can make the state be more meaningfully representative of I guess, the will
• 39:27
  of the people, if you want to put it in those terms. Yeah,
• 39:29
  No, one of the things that's you know, I think the left
• 39:31
  sometimes doesn't talk about or enough I think is and I guess maybe I have
• 39:37
  a bias because this is something we study in political science all the time.
• 39:39
  Is just like the institutional makeup of American politics is just so bad that like
• 39:45
  to make a change like that, Like you know, the fact that it
• 39:51
  has so many veto points, right, if you know what that means,
• 39:52
  right, there's just so many places where legislation can stop that. You know,
• 39:57
  even if Bernie Sanders would have won and been president, it's like the
• 40:00
  difference it would have made would have been like foreign policy and like some executive
• 40:05
  orders, but like structural change, just it would have made almost no difference.
• 40:08
  Like like I mean, I think, I mean maybe it would have.
• 40:10
  It would have made a symbolic difference, right, it would It would
• 40:13
  have seemed like there was something, you know, and I think one of
• 40:15
  the differences in Canada, like, you know, our system's not perfect,
• 40:21
  for sure, there's there's problems with it, but I think pro parliamentary systems,
• 40:23
  broadly speaking, what's good about them is when a party wins all the
• 40:28
  seats, they just get to do what they said they were going to do
• 40:30
  right, like they actually have legislative freedom, and then you know, you
• 40:34
  might get like we had before Trudeau. We had like ten eleven years of
• 40:37
  like Harper Conservatism, and it's like, yeah, it was kind of bad,
• 40:40
  but at least he got to do what he wanted to do and then
• 40:44
  we got to see it and then we got to actually judge whether we liked
• 40:46
  it or not. Right Whereas in the States, it's like nobody actually gets
• 40:50
  to do anything, so everyone's just blaming everyone else for nothing happening. And
• 40:52
  I guess like that seems like such a like big puzzle about how do you
• 40:58
  overcome that? I mean, how do you change the institutions? I mean,
• 41:00
  it seems almost fucking impossible. I mean it's yeah, So I think
• 41:04
  that there's a part of that that I do agree with. I think that
• 41:07
  in a large part, the way that the American government was constructed was like
• 41:13
  a very sort of checks and balances oriented thing, where like this, the
• 41:17
  sort of the intention was that, you know, there has to be we
• 41:21
  have to sort of force some level of compromise in order to do things,
• 41:24
  because you know, we don't want you know, if someone gets elected.
• 41:28
  We don't just want them to be able to do whatever they have to get
• 41:30
  approval from the courts and from Congress, et cetera. When it comes to
• 41:37
  how we deal with that, whether or not that's a good thing or bad
• 41:38
  thing, I'm not really sure. I mean, it's probably it would probably
• 41:44
  be better if we had a system where people could more easily do things.
• 41:47
  I am sympathetic to that argument. When it comes to how to deal with
• 41:52
  that, I would say, realistically, we're just we're very far away from
• 41:57
  being able to do anything like abolish the Senate or abolished Supreme Court or anything
• 42:01
  like that. I don't think that's happening anytime soon. So I mean,
• 42:06
  the best thing that we can do at this point is just try and get
• 42:08
  more people on the left elected in Congress, try and run more aocs and
• 42:15
  places where you know, progressives, like in places like New York where progressives
• 42:21
  can reasonably get elected, and just hope that over time we can grow a
• 42:24
  stronger sort of electoral presence of the left. I guess, I mean,
• 42:30
  I think that that really is all you can do. And I think the
• 42:32
  reason why the sort of institutional observation is important is because already the stuff that
• 42:37
  they say sometimes when they're trying to OU don't know, force the vote and
• 42:39
  do all these things that are kind of cringy. If you really like hold
• 42:44
  firm or you hold in the front of your mind like these institutional barriers,
• 42:47
  it's like, you know, that seems even more stupid. I feel like
• 42:51
  it's like you have to just you can't have like these radical demands are just
• 42:54
  so frustrating because yeah, it is just going to be that boring work of
• 42:58
  you know that the treasury of trying to get like grassroots people elected as much
• 43:04
  as you can. But yeah, I mean it's not it's not an easy
• 43:06
  path. I mean, you know, to some extent, I'm not all
• 43:07
  that optimistic, but I totally agree with you with regards to a lot of
• 43:15
  people on the left sort of have a fundamental misunderstanding of like how our government
• 43:19
  works. And I guess this can most be seen on sort of the I
• 43:23
  guess, like a Jimmy Dorish side of things, where there's a lot of
• 43:28
  talk about like, oh, why hasn't AOC done this, Why hasn't even
• 43:31
  why hasn't Biden do this? Why didn't Obama do this? And they sort
• 43:37
  of take the fact that like AOC hasn't unilaterally enacted Medicare for all, and
• 43:42
  then they run with this rhetoric of like, oh, AOC is a trader,
• 43:45
  right, and it's like, well, no, I mean, we
• 43:47
  have to understand that there are limits to what our elected officials can do.
• 43:52
  Even a more sort of I guess another example of this would be like a
• 43:55
  lot of people will be like, well, why didn't Obama. They'll be
• 44:00
  like, well, Obamacare is insufficient? Why did not Obamacare pass a single
• 44:02
  payer healthcare system? And it's like, well, there are valid critiques of
• 44:07
  Obama, but even if he wanted to pass single pair, it would have
• 44:08
  never happened. He just he didn't have the votes, right, Yeah,
• 44:12
  there's a narrow majority in Congress, and even the Democratic Congress people were like
• 44:16
  almost entirely against a single pair. So yeah, I do think it's important
• 44:22
  to sort of give our politicians at least more leeway or like more understanding in
• 44:28
  so far as like the conditions that they're working with, rather than just doing
• 44:31
  these sorts of knee jerk attacks that a lot of people try to do.
• 44:35
  Yeah, for sure, And you know, I think one of the problems
• 44:37
  too back to earlier we were talking about sort of the psychology of the sort
• 44:42
  of enjoyment and pleasure people get out of, you know, like kind of
• 44:45
  being radical or whatever. And I think that plays so strongly with this,
• 44:49
  you know, it's just it's so fun to condemn people, right like that.
• 44:52
  That's such a strong, like and relevant cognitive bias in our political discourse
• 44:58
  that like, you just have to notice how much fun you're having when you
• 45:01
  get to condemn people. And it's actually like a little bit less I guess
• 45:05
  libidinally or psychologically satisfying to be to be, like, I don't know,
• 45:08
  a careful thinker, or at least it seems it seems that way anyway.
• 45:13
  I mean, it's just I don't know, it's almost like there's this old
• 45:16
  right wing term of like virtue signaling, right, It's almost like that where
• 45:22
  it's like it feels better to just condemn people like AOC because then you get
• 45:27
  to say, oh, I'm the most radical one, I'm the I'm the
• 45:30
  real lefty. Everyone else is a fake lefty And it's sort of like a
• 45:35
  self flagellatory thing. I guess. Yeah. It's it's also kind of I
• 45:38
  think related to sort of implicit ideas of moral purity. Right. It's like
• 45:43
  people don't want to contaminate their morally righteous perspectives that they so enjoy right by
• 45:50
  being you know, contaminating it by compromise. Right. It's such a dirty
• 45:55
  word. I mean, I know, I mean it's fresh in my mind
• 45:58
  because I was on the vanguard yesterday. But I remember somebody in the chat
• 46:00
  was like, I think Matt was talking about incrementalism, about how like sometimes
• 46:04
  that's important, and like, oh my god, the hatred for like even
• 46:07
  mentioning the word incrementalism was was, Yeah, it was insane. So I
• 46:12
  recently read well audiobook. I don't know if you ever listened to audiobooks,
• 46:15
  but I sometimes do because I feel like, if I'm not worri if I
• 46:17
  can only really afford to actually read things that are related to my dissertation,
• 46:21
  so any other pleasure reading I kind of just like do with audible. But
• 46:24
  I don't know if you heard about it recently. This this book that came
• 46:27
  out called The Scout Mindset by Julia Galliff. I think you really like it
• 46:32
  basically, like she makes this argument for like it's basically about cognitive biases and
• 46:38
  how to kind of try to overcome them. And she says that like usually
• 46:43
  when we argue with the metaphor we use is like soldier mindset, right where
• 46:46
  it's like I'm going to defend my position, I'm going to attack, Like
• 46:49
  all the metaphors are like about war debunk right, And then she and she
• 46:53
  says, you know, actually we should try to cultivate what she calls a
• 46:55
  scout mindset, meaning what's a scout doing right, just surveying the world and
• 47:00
  creating a map and then revising the map as you go along, as opposed
• 47:05
  to just like being a soldier mindset, scout mindset. And I really like
• 47:08
  the metaphor. I think it was very compelling. And one of the examples
• 47:14
  she brings up she brings up some political examples, and she talks about how
• 47:19
  like the soldier mindset is so entrenched in political discourse and hostility, and I
• 47:23
  think she she talks about how during the AIDS epidemic when it was new,
• 47:29
  a lot of the activists who were like really angry at you know, the
• 47:32
  government. And I think at that time it might have been Reagan or Bush
• 47:35
  Bush the first, I can't remember, it was one of those two and
• 47:37
  they weren't really paying that much attention to it, right because at the time,
• 47:39
  of course, it was perceived to just be like a gay plague,
• 47:43
  right pejoratively, and like who cares. So there's a lot of activists who
• 47:47
  wanted to push for more research, and you know, they they did all
• 47:52
  their like cringey political tactics right where they're being like with this logic of like
• 47:58
  angry opposition. I think they like chain themselves to like the desk of like
• 48:01
  the head of the NIH, like the National Institutes of Health, to like
• 48:05
  do more research, right, But like obviously nothing happened. But then like
• 48:09
  they decided they realized that they had to try something else. So they started
• 48:14
  looking into the research, right, like specifically learning about how it works,
• 48:16
  and then like coming to them with an alternate proposal of the kind of research
• 48:22
  that could be done. And they basically entered into the system. And what's
• 48:24
  interesting about it is like a lot of the activists, the heads of the
• 48:28
  activist organizations kind of admitted and talked about how like kind of initially how deflationist
• 48:34
  it felt to kind of be part of the system, when before they were
• 48:37
  like deriving a lot of kind of enjoyment and power from taking these righteous stands.
• 48:42
  But what it resulted actually because of their research and their insights, it
• 48:46
  actually resulted in the research changing directions and actually leading to, like I forget
• 48:52
  what it's called PREP or whatever these drugs are that people use for who have
• 48:54
  aids that can basically bring your viral load down to zero. And it resulted
• 48:59
  from them kind of compromising and entering into the system. And she talks about
• 49:02
  it as an example of kind of like Scout mindset of how you kind of
• 49:05
  have to, you know, try to see the world the way it is,
• 49:07
  not the way you want to see it, right, And I think
• 49:09
  the righteous attitude sometimes is based on that, right. Yeah, Yeah,
• 49:14
  that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I think you'd like the book,
• 49:16
  so you might. You might enjoy checking out. The other thing I
• 49:21
  was curious about is, you know, I wonder if I could persuade I
• 49:25
  mean, I'll see if I can persuade you of something I have like kind
• 49:29
  of a hot take on democracy. I mean, I don't know how hot
• 49:34
  it is. It's like very very academic y, So I'll see if I
• 49:36
  can like explain it persuasively here. But basically, like I think electoral politics
• 49:44
  create very perverse incentives, especially American electoral politics. So I mean, we
• 49:51
  can go through a list of perverse incentives that are created, but I think
• 49:53
  a lot of them are pretty obvious. So like and I'm sure you've thought
• 49:57
  of them, you know, like party discipline, right, Like the fact
• 49:59
  that often politicians are elected and they have a motivation to just be loyal to
• 50:02
  the party. They have a motivation to kind of work their way up the
• 50:07
  party hierarchy. Right. You have to think about this in contrast with the
• 50:10
  kind of the incentive towards I guess we could say social empowerment, or egalitarian
• 50:17
  values or the common good. Right, these are all the things that we
• 50:20
  would hope that our politicians are doing. But I think that there's so many
• 50:24
  perverse incentives. So that's one. Obviously, the incentive to be re elected
• 50:29
  is a huge one. Like I think that prevents politicians from being oriented towards
• 50:34
  social empowerment, you know, fundraising right, Like another one also, this
• 50:40
  is another really big one, right, the fact that they are often attuned
• 50:44
  to trying to make the other side look bad. So you might get into
• 50:46
  a situation, right where both parties know that the evidence is like good on
• 50:52
  some policy proposal, but then if they see that the other party is trying
• 50:55
  to pass it, they don't want to give that other party an election victory,
• 51:00
  right, they don't want to make the other party look good. So
• 51:01
  there's an incentive to actually stop. So there's a few other ones. But
• 51:07
  like those kinds of perverse incentives have kind of led me to think to return
• 51:10
  actually to ancient Athens and think that maybe we should be getting rid of electoral
• 51:15
  politics and replacing it with something called sortition, which would use random sampling,
• 51:22
  and it would be kind of like jury duty, except we might call it
• 51:24
  civic duty. So people there would be no elections and you'd get a random
• 51:29
  representative sample of the population and they would be selected to come and serve in
• 51:34
  some like legislative body. Like there's obviously a lot of details that we would
• 51:37
  have to go into about, you know, how it would work, but
• 51:40
  you know, you know, I think that they would have all the kinds
• 51:45
  of resources that a currently elected person would have, right, Like they would
• 51:47
  have a staff, they would have researchers, there would be like legislative rules,
• 51:52
  there would be like an oversight committee. But the idea behind that would
• 51:57
  be that it would it would The reason I find it appear is because it
• 52:00
  would eliminate all those perverse incentives, right, So there would be no because
• 52:04
  there'd be no incentive be reelected because you can't be re elected, right,
• 52:07
  and you could only ever serve once. So I wonder, just initially,
• 52:10
  how does that sound on your ears? Yeah, so there are I think
• 52:16
  that sounds interesting in the sense that it seems to overcome certain valid observations that
• 52:22
  you made about certain flaws of electoral democracy. I guess the question, of
• 52:29
  course, just ultimately comes down to would this system have its own flaws that
• 52:34
  sort of supersede that and thinking about what those may be. So one example
• 52:39
  that I could think of is, so it might be the case that democracy
• 52:45
  provides some mechanism through which the people who are creating policy, like people,
• 52:52
  there's a certain filter there where like certain people are filtered out who like we
• 52:57
  wouldn't want making public policy, right, like for example, maybe like we
• 53:01
  wouldn't want like Jeffrey Dahmer as our president, right, And a democracy kind
• 53:07
  of addresses that because you know, if people have to vote, nobody's going
• 53:12
  to vote for Jeffrey Dahmer if they know he kills people, right, But
• 53:15
  it seems like one of my concerns would be, like, if you're just
• 53:17
  picking people randomly and there's no filter for who it can be, like,
• 53:22
  what's to stop like someone being elected who's just like a complete psychopath, right
• 53:28
  or something like that. I guess I'd be like one of my concerns.
• 53:31
  Yeah, yeah, so that's that's a good concern. I mean, I
• 53:32
  think you're actually raising as I see it, there's two strong objections to it,
• 53:37
  and I think you've kind of hit on one of them, which is
• 53:42
  you could broadly call it competence. Right, So it's like, what like
• 53:45
  we have to worry about the competence of these I mean I would imagine that
• 53:47
  there would be similar filters that you have for jury duty, right, So
• 53:51
  like you know, like obviously jury duty has a filter where, yeah,
• 53:53
  you can be randomly selected, but you know, if you have, like
• 53:58
  I don't know, psychopathic tendencies or something, you'd expect that those people would
• 54:01
  be filtered out. But I think like one of the really interesting advantages of
• 54:05
  sortition is you know, right now, who's who's in Congress. Right,
• 54:08
  It's like lawyers it's like, you know, do we want that to be
• 54:13
  the people who are just like deciding what is in the the common good?
• 54:16
  Where are the world? Where's working class representation? Right? So, like,
• 54:20
  if it's actually a representative sample of people, you would expect that you
• 54:22
  would have a roughly equal number of working class people in there to to uh,
• 54:27
  to express their interests. So, I don't know, does that seem
• 54:29
  compelling to you? Yeah, it does. I guess I just have a
• 54:34
  sort of a visceral feeling of like maybe this is just me being elitist,
• 54:39
  but I don't know, like a lot of the people I've like, I
• 54:43
  just I've interacted with on my day to day life, Like, it sounds
• 54:45
  very scary to have these people being the ones who are making decisions in a
• 54:50
  sense where it's like there's so many people. I would say the vast majority
• 54:54
  of people in America are people who just like have no familiarity with politics and
• 55:01
  are just like you know, very very emotional in their reactions to things like
• 55:07
  couldn't really substantiate any of their positions on anything. And I guess it's just
• 55:13
  worriesome. I feel like maybe democracy provides some kind of a filter where it's
• 55:17
  like people who are being elected are people who at least have some competence with
• 55:23
  regards to political issues. I guess, yeah, for sure. I mean
• 55:28
  I think that's a valid concern. You know, there's some anecdotal examples that
• 55:31
  I could offer, So I think the most prominent one is in the province
• 55:37
  of British Columbia. I think in like two thousand and seven or two thousand
• 55:39
  and eight, there was a citizens council that was selected, according to Sortian
• 55:45
  to consider electoral reform. So they were like looking at changing from first past
• 55:51
  the post right to like a proportional representation system. So they wanted to assemble
• 55:55
  a citizen's council and it was selected on according to sortitionan And I think what's
• 56:00
  interesting about that example is like you had people come in and they had the
• 56:04
  status quo bias where they were like, you know, let's just stick to
• 56:06
  the system. It's what I know. I don't understand what mixed member proportional
• 56:09
  is. I don't understand what single transferable vote or all these complicated things are.
• 56:14
  Right. But then like when they took the time to examine the policy
• 56:16
  issue, right, and they're presented with experts on both sides who kind of
• 56:19
  explained to them similar to the way you have like a prosecution and a defense
• 56:24
  in an injury duty right in a criminal trial. And what you ended up
• 56:29
  happening at the end of that was like it went from something like I don't
• 56:32
  know, twenty percent being open to change to like ninety or eighty percent people
• 56:36
  who were like, yeah, we have to change it. All the advantages
• 56:37
  of proportional representation way outweigh, so, like, I guess the idea would
• 56:43
  be, like, I agree with you that people are very like low information
• 56:45
  and like are scary, but I think that one of the problems is because
• 56:50
  people don't have, right now, the incentive to actually read up and look
• 56:52
  at an issue. And I think that if you're selected for a sortition assembly,
• 56:55
  and we assume that they're going to get paid for this, right,
• 56:58
  they're going to get the same salary as a like what an elected representative gets
• 57:00
  now, right, I think there's going to be an incentive to actually examine
• 57:05
  the issue. And you know, in some other example, similar to the
• 57:07
  British Columbia one, people talk about, you know, how they felt a
• 57:10
  sense of responsibility, like they felt like, oh, like that you know,
• 57:15
  and I think you see similar things occur in jury duty where people actually
• 57:20
  feel a real sense of responsibility. Now, don't get me wrong, jury
• 57:22
  duty has its problems, like there are documented issues with it. But I
• 57:25
  guess, like you know, when you compare how bad electoral democracy is,
• 57:29
  I'm like, I'm sort of persuaded that I think that it could be an
• 57:32
  interesting solution. So I don't know if that what do you think about that?
• 57:36
  Yeah, yeah, it's definitely an interesting potential solution. I would have
• 57:39
  to think about it a bit more, I guess. I just yeah,
• 57:43
  I don't know how it would work out. Yeah, there's another thing I've
• 57:46
  heard of, or another model I've heard of that may be interesting, which
• 57:52
  is like the ideas that you have sort of like like councils that are designated
• 57:58
  to like certain spects of policy. Right, So might have like a healthcare
• 58:01
  policy council or like a foreign trade policy council, and you have like the
• 58:07
  population, like the democratic population vote like via direct democracy on sort of like
• 58:14
  broad policy proposals, and then it's like councils of experts who are just sort
• 58:19
  of tasked with taking those broad proposals that people voted for and then turning them
• 58:23
  into like actual like working policy. I guess, well that's interesting, Yeah,
• 58:28
  haven't. So that's so the idea would be like people like everyone would
• 58:31
  would be eligible to vote for something. Yeah. I mean that's interesting.
• 58:36
  That's like expanding direct democracy. And I think, you know, it's funny
• 58:40
  because my problem with like that kind of direct democracy, and the reason why
• 58:44
  I like sortition better is because I worry about the low information voter, right,
• 58:47
  because because if everyone is getting to vote into direct democracy, then really
• 58:52
  the low information voter is actually a real threat, Whereas, like my thinking
• 58:54
  is, when you when you have a random sample that's representative, then those
• 58:59
  people are actually to be incentivized to be high information voters, right. And
• 59:01
  it's like that's a problem that I see direct democracy happening, where like low
• 59:07
  information voters threatened good decisions, and I feel like sortitionan is like a solution
• 59:12
  to that problem in my that's my thinking about it. Anyway. Yeah,
• 59:15
  that's interesting. Yeah, yeah, I think that makes sense. I mean,
• 59:19
  if you're curious, I could tell you too. What the other like
• 59:21
  the other main objection to sortian I guess is like it is I guess democratic
• 59:29
  legitimacy rights, like the fact that only people selected have an input, like
• 59:32
  it kind of creates a problem with democratic legitimacy. So it's like, if
• 59:36
  like the rest of the public really hates something that the sortician chamber does,
• 59:39
  like, how is there a way to is there a way to overcome that?
• 59:43
  Right like the and and something feels wrong about that, right, Like
• 59:45
  so you're saying, if I don't get picked, I just have no say
• 59:50
  in what gets decided, right, Like that seems bad. And I guess
• 59:52
  like the solution that I that I proposed to that would be to kind of
• 59:57
  adopt a Swiss model, a Swiss augus mentation of the system, where maybe
• 1:00:00
  you could have like if you collect one hundred thousand or what however many signatures,
• 1:00:06
  you could trigger an automatic referendum. But I would want it to undo
• 1:00:09
  what the soortition Chamber did, but it would have to reach a very high
• 1:00:13
  bar, like I would want it to have like eighty percent voter participation in
• 1:00:15
  like sixty percent majority or something like a clear majority and high voter participation.
• 1:00:21
  So that's, uh, yeah, I don't know. That's that's my thinking
• 1:00:22
  about that issue. If you find it interesting, no, I think that
• 1:00:25
  makes sense. Yeah, I would have to think about it more because this
• 1:00:29
  is a it would be a very like radical change. Yeah, it would
• 1:00:32
  be. Yeah, it would absolutely be a radical change. But yeah,
• 1:00:36
  I kind of I came across it when I was in this democratic theory seminar
• 1:00:38
  and you know, just that problem of low information voters was like really on
• 1:00:43
  my mind and it seemed like a compelling solution. But but yeah, so
• 1:00:49
  I was also curious, like, what other stuff you've sort of been thinking
• 1:00:52
  about lately, because I know, I think I saw you tweet yesterday and
• 1:00:54
  I responded right that you're you're going to be coming out with a video maybe
• 1:00:58
  a video I say that you were happy with. I mean you can if
• 1:01:00
  you want. I'd be curious if you want to preview some of the things
• 1:01:04
  you've been thinking about here. Oh yeah, So it's kind of like a
• 1:01:07
  sort of a response to Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro made this new show called
• 1:01:14
  Debunked, and he uploaded one of his episodes to YouTube, and it's called
• 1:01:19
  Debunked Transgender Ideology, right, oh god. In other words, he's very
• 1:01:25
  upset about trans people, like requesting, you know, basic human rights,
• 1:01:30
  human dignity, et cetera. And he's kind of like the core of that
• 1:01:35
  video is like he's kind of arguing, like, oh, how absurd it
• 1:01:38
  is to say that a man could be a woman or something, you know,
• 1:01:42
  that kind of thing, right, And so I've been thinking a lot
• 1:01:45
  about sort of the claim that trans women are women, to claim that trans
• 1:01:51
  men are men, and I've been thinking about how to evaluate that, how
• 1:01:54
  to argue for that. And my sort of thinking is that words, obviously
• 1:02:01
  are just constructs that humans create for the purposes of our own utility, and
• 1:02:07
  a definition of a word right can't be like right or wrong, like definitionally
• 1:02:13
  right, like I think, in order for something to be correct or incorrect,
• 1:02:17
  it has to be like a proposition right, and a definition of a
• 1:02:21
  word it's not a proposition. It's just us choosing to define a word in
• 1:02:24
  a certain way. And so if a definition of a word can't be right
• 1:02:29
  or wrong, then how do we evaluate what's the quote unquote right way to
• 1:02:34
  use a word? And my sort of thinking about that is because words are
• 1:02:37
  just constructs that we create for our own utility, the right definition of a
• 1:02:44
  word is just a definition that we derive the most utility from and then so
• 1:02:49
  my argument would be that we get more utility out of a definition of woman
• 1:02:53
  which is inclusive of trans women, because obviously trans people suffer a great psychological
• 1:02:59
  string us when they feel as though society isn't recognizing them as the gender that
• 1:03:02
  they identify with. So that's sort of like my sort of from fundamental principles
• 1:03:08
  argument about the trans women or women claim, which is the sort of thing
• 1:03:13
  that Ben Shapiro was focused on attacking. I guess that's interesting. You know,
• 1:03:17
  what you're saying makes me think about Ludit Wickenstein, if you're familiar with
• 1:03:22
  that philosopher, right, Like his argument is meaning is use, right,
• 1:03:23
  Like, so like the meaning of a word is its use in a language
• 1:03:27
  game, and a language game. Really what he means by that is just
• 1:03:30
  kind of like forms of life, like what we do in our life world,
• 1:03:34
  Like when we're just out there engaging with things, we play different language
• 1:03:37
  games, right, Like when you're with your friends or whatever or whatever.
• 1:03:39
  If I'm with my girlfriend and like you know, I will speak about things
• 1:03:44
  and words might take on a different meaning because of the context, right,
• 1:03:47
  because of how I'm using it, right, And like I'm sure like you
• 1:03:50
  know, if you're in a clique of friends, right, sometimes those little
• 1:03:52
  cliques of friends have special little meanings that are particular to that group of friends
• 1:03:57
  where they'll use something and it's kind of like an inside joke. Right.
• 1:03:59
  So, Like there's kind of all these language games, and I think you're
• 1:04:01
  exactly right that it's sort of based on utility in the sense that you know,
• 1:04:06
  those games we play with words, you know, they're doing something,
• 1:04:11
  right, Like they're they're kind of fortifying a form of life, like you
• 1:04:14
  know, my group of friends, or like the world I create with my
• 1:04:16
  girlfriend, or the world you create with your friends or whatever, right,
• 1:04:19
  or your parents. It's like those games are part of kind of building up
• 1:04:25
  to that kind of like life world. Right. So I think that's that's
• 1:04:29
  interesting. I think like that's a correct view in my opinion of language.
• 1:04:32
  I notice that you I think you've had a couple of other videos, what's
• 1:04:34
  uh? And like you said, I didn't actually notice a video about Dave
• 1:04:38
  Rubin, but I know you mentioned him before, and you you kind of
• 1:04:40
  you kind of said apologetically that you that you'd belittle him. But you know
• 1:04:45
  what, like I think I think it's it's it's fine to to like belittle
• 1:04:48
  people when you actually spend some time watching them. And I think I think,
• 1:04:51
  in my opinion, Dave Ruben is worthy of of some belittle mint because
• 1:04:55
  he seems very like he seems like such a grifter to me, I don't
• 1:04:59
  know, Like, yeah, he's a huge grifter and he's just like I
• 1:05:03
  don't know, just the things that he says are so hilariously stupid that I
• 1:05:08
  can't like laugh about it. Like, I don't know if you've seen this,
• 1:05:12
  but there's a video where Dave Rubin is like he makes the argument because
• 1:05:16
  he's talking about COVID, right, and he's talking about climate change, and
• 1:05:19
  he goes the left says that we should trust the scientists. But that's a
• 1:05:25
  stupid notion. Haven't you seen science fiction movies? There are evil scientists.
• 1:05:30
  Like that's like the argument that he made just like unbelievable to me. Yeah,
• 1:05:33
  and then obviously there's the funny one of like Dave Rubin versus words.
• 1:05:38
  That's that's also a good one, right, I forget there's a couple of
• 1:05:41
  really funny ones. Yeah, he just totally misuses Oh, Like I think
• 1:05:44
  the gaslighting one is hilarious. I forget what he claims gaslighting is, but
• 1:05:46
  it's hilarious. Like the gas lighting is when you say something so crazy that
• 1:05:51
  it confuses your opponent or something like that. I have no idea where he
• 1:05:57
  got the definition from, but yeah, yeah, that's ridiculous. Cool.
• 1:06:01
  So I guess, I mean, do you have any questions for me or
• 1:06:04
  anything you're curious about? Oh? Okay, so you you talk in your
• 1:06:10
  in your article that you wrote that you sent to me about sort of the
• 1:06:15
  issues of like punitive justice versus restorative justice, and I guess it's it's interesting
• 1:06:27
  to think about how those sorts of notions are often like like people like on
• 1:06:32
  the online left, for example, will often pay a lot of lift service
• 1:06:36
  to like, you know, we support restorative justice, right, and then
• 1:06:41
  they'll act in ways which kind of betray that ethic. Right, do you
• 1:06:45
  sort of is that the sort of sentiment that you think you were getting at
• 1:06:48
  or is that something that you agree with? Yeah, it is the sentiment
• 1:06:51
  that I was getting at. I mean I think, right, I think
• 1:06:54
  the idea, Yeah, I forgot that I sent that to you. That
• 1:06:56
  the the in the article, I kind of make this argument that like sometimes
• 1:07:00
  the left has kind of forgotten about it's its roots in what I see as
• 1:07:02
  the roots in compassion, right that, like, I think the left is
• 1:07:06
  supposed to be, I think, oriented towards I guess, second chances and
• 1:07:12
  like and like keeping front of mind the inherent humanity and everybody when possible,
• 1:07:16
  when reasonable, and obviously the left or something like, I mean what people
• 1:07:20
  call broadly the SJW left. You know that there's there seems to be a
• 1:07:27
  kind of when someone disagrees with you, they're no longer worthy of compassion.
• 1:07:30
  Right. But then obviously there's a lot of people who are prison abolitionists,
• 1:07:33
  right who think that criminals deserve our compassion, and I actually happen to agree
• 1:07:38
  with them, right, But I just think that compassion should be a leftist
• 1:07:42
  value that applies to everyone, even even you know, right wingers. And
• 1:07:45
  I think I also bring up an example in that article about you know,
• 1:07:47
  people who were radicalized like on the right, and how like, you know,
• 1:07:50
  we should try to welcome them back, right and like not not hate
• 1:07:56
  them if they if they if they change their mind, because I think people
• 1:07:58
  are just trying to find a place in this world. Then that's just a
• 1:08:02
  very human desire. I guess that kind of ties in with like when people
• 1:08:05
  talk about like issues of like cancel culture or whatever. I think cancel culture
• 1:08:11
  is a weird thing because I feel like, to some extent, cancel culture
• 1:08:15
  has and will always exist, right, Like, there's always going to be
• 1:08:18
  certain cultural values that any given society wants to reflect, and the converse of
• 1:08:25
  that is there's always going to be certain values that society tends to disassociate with
• 1:08:29
  and condemn people for. But then I guess the question is like how where
• 1:08:34
  should the bar be, right like what should we be willing to condemn?
• 1:08:38
  And it feels like we've gotten to this point where it's like if you're like
• 1:08:43
  a soccer mom who like wrapped the N word along with like a rap song
• 1:08:48
  in her car one time, then you might as well be like, you
• 1:08:51
  know, the Grand Wizard of the KKK or something. And I think it's
• 1:08:55
  just like a very crazy space to be in where that's how we think about
• 1:08:59
  these things totally. And I mean, I think it's so related to what
• 1:09:02
  we've talked about a few times with you know what I've been referring to like
• 1:09:06
  the pleasure of righteousness, right Like, Like I think so much of it
• 1:09:11
  stems from the kind of lobidinal payoff, if you will, of just like
• 1:09:16
  of just like condemning people. It's it's certainly true that if we want to
• 1:09:21
  be like electorally successful or even just like convincing people, it would be a
• 1:09:28
  bad idea to frame every issue purely along you know, this is going to
• 1:09:31
  help marginalized communities, because whether or not, I mean, we should absolutely
• 1:09:36
  make that argument, but it shouldn't be the only argument, right, because
• 1:09:39
  we also need to appeal to people who might be like white and very self
• 1:09:44
  interested, or you know, maybe don't even care about like marginalized communities or
• 1:09:48
  whatever. And so that being said, I'm a big advocate I guess of
• 1:09:55
  what I think is intersectionality. I'm open to somebody telling me I'm using the
• 1:10:00
  word wrong or something, but basically my way of thinking is that there's a
• 1:10:03
  bunch of different axes of oppression, right, there's oppression along class lines,
• 1:10:09
  along racial lines, along gender lines, et cetera. And it's really important,
• 1:10:15
  like theoretically to understand how all of these different axises are distinct but like
• 1:10:20
  overlapping, right, and kind of see like where they're where they separate,
• 1:10:26
  where they overlap, for example, like racial oppression can often overlap with class
• 1:10:31
  oppression, Like if you're in a poor black neighborhood, you might get more
• 1:10:34
  oppressed than someone who's you know, more wealthy and black. But at the
• 1:10:39
  same time, if you're someone who's more wealthy and black, you might still
• 1:10:43
  be more likely to get pulled over by a cop than someone who's more wealthy
• 1:10:45
  and white. So I think there's sort of theoretical value to approaching it along
• 1:10:50
  that lines, right, like focusing on racial oppression sometimes, but also kind
• 1:10:56
  of having a more general focus as well to kind of supplement them. Yeah,
• 1:11:00
  no, absolutely, And I think you are using intersectionality correctly. I
• 1:11:03
  mean, I think it's just become such a it's become a boogeyman because,
• 1:11:06
  I mean, the original article by Kimberly Crenshaw was just incredibly reasonable observation about
• 1:11:12
  the way the legal system impacts like people with intersecting identities, and like,
• 1:11:16
  you know, it's just very uh, I mean, I don't want to
• 1:11:19
  say obvious, because it was you know, like a valuable literature at the
• 1:11:24
  time. But it's just like there's nothing wrong with that article like that,
• 1:11:27
  like at all. It's a pretty reasonable article the original Intersectionality one. So
• 1:11:30
  yeah, I mean I think I feel like we've covered a lot. So
• 1:11:33
  yeah, that was really good. You know, if people are if people
• 1:11:38
  don't know about you and want to find you, like, what debate would
• 1:11:41
  you recommend, Like if if you know, in your mind, if someone's
• 1:11:45
  going to discover mouth the Infidel, where's the first place that they should look.
• 1:11:49
  Oh jeez, that's a good question. It really just depends on what
• 1:11:55
  kind of thing you're interested in, you know, if you're interested in like
• 1:11:58
  social issues. At a debate with on this channel politically provoked with this guy
• 1:12:03
  named big Papa Fascist that I thought was I guess was received really well.
• 1:12:09
  I honestly, I just I judged the quality of my debates based on how
• 1:12:12
  they're received because I don't I don't really watch my stuff very frequently. If
• 1:12:18
  you're more interested in like economic stuff. I had a recent debate with the
• 1:12:24
  chairman of the Iron Rand Institute and author Yaron Brook about welfare, which I
• 1:12:32
  thought was pretty fun. But yeah, I guess those are the two things
• 1:12:38
  that come to mind in terms of like recent debates. Awesome, awesome,
• 1:12:43
  and yeah, we will put the link in the description. So that's great.
• 1:12:45
  Thanks a lot most the Infidel, Yeah, no problem, Thanks for
• 1:12:48
  having me. All right, cool, I'm gonna stop recording here.