Progressive Myths w/ Dr. Michael Huemer & Keith Knight

Welcome to Keith Knight, Don't Tread on Anyone. In the Libertarian Institute Today I am joined by the author of Progressive Myths, Doctor Michael Humor, a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. Dr. Humor Where is the best place for people to go find this book? Yeah, so it's on Amazon and it's also on Barnes and Noble. I took the precaution of putting it on two platforms in case it gets cancelled off one of them. Nope. Good, good thinking.

Definitely. I don't want to have all your eggs in one basket. Yeah. So it's good to see you. You look a little different from the last time I saw you. No. Thank you I I appreciate that. I actually did the carnivore diet which is just meat and cheese. I cut out carbs and lost 110 lbs. So my question for you, author of Ethical Veganism or Ethical vegetarianism, I am totally open to switching diets.

What is an alternative diet I can use that will help me not gain the weight back and have another 25 years of getting no woman's attention? Well, I'm not, so I'm, I'm not a nutrition or health expert, but you know, like what everything that I've heard indicates that a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables is good for you. I mean, I know that Jordan Peterson is like doing this meat based thing, but he's not, he's

not a nutritionist. And like, and all the health experts seem to seem to think, you know, fruit, fruits and vegetables are good, you know, sort of like low glycemic load foods, right. And, you know, like a, a lot of fiber, you know, like I, I think like if you eat a lot of less, let eat a lot of lettuce, you know, kind of like lowers the glycemic load of your meal. And yeah, good, good for heart

health. You know, there there's some research on this, that it looks like vegetarian and and vegan diets give you lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a little bit lower cancer risk. Got it. All right, I will absolutely check those out. All right, on to progressive myths. Mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns were necessary to society in order to save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. How can we falsify that claim to determine its validity?

Well, I mean, so you know, in the book I have a chapter about the masks and there have been a number of studies about masking. Now most of them were done before COVID-19. So they were, they were studying other kinds of influenza like illnesses, right? And and it just, it just basically turns out that there was either a tiny effect or no effect or possibly even a negative effect from wearing

masks, right? So they've done multiple studies and some of them find significant benefits, but some of them find harms and some of them find no effect. OK, so like it's common for the mask enthusiasts to quote, but there was a study in Bangladesh, which is the most popular thing for the pro mask people, right? But that's one of many studies that have been done. So it found a positive effect, but there have been other studies that found negative effects. And you might wonder like, wait,

how? How could masks actually actually have a negative effect? How could it actually harm, you know? And then, and there was one where there was one study where wearing cloth masks increased your risk of disease by something like sevenfold, OK, which is like, that's a way bigger difference than the alleged benefits, right? And the alleged benefit from masks appears to be like a 5% risk reduction, which is tiny

and could be nothing, right? If it's that small, it might be nothing, but OK, OK, But you know, but it could be a huge increase. And cloth masks in particular, because basically the germs survive in the cloth. And so it becomes like a breeding ground for germs, right? And like, because you're exhaling and you're exhaling saliva into it, so then that creates material for the viruses and bacteria to live in, right?

So OK. And there's the cost of being uncomfortable 8 hours a day when you're at work and there's either a government or employer mask mandate and you can't hear people and you can't see facial expressions.

So the reason that I want to harp on the mask mandate before getting into the other two of lockdowns and vaccine mandates is they had no problem really increasing, really inconveniencing millions amount of the working class people they claim to be, you know, fighting on the behalf of with little or no reason to do so. So as far as what else about masks, as far as how we can verify whether or not the mandates were effective and whether or not they actually

achieved the goal they claimed they were achieving? Yeah. I mean, you know, basically just look, you know, look at the medical studies, right? The the same people who are saying, you know, all all of these things, like they're the people who say, oh, you have to trust science, right. But the people who say you have to trust science almost never look at it, right? What? So what they actually mean by trust science is trust what political activists tell you

about science, right. But what the political activists tell you is usually bogus. So anyway, so and you know, generally you want to look at a meta analysis. So there have been many studies. So you want to look at some paper that reviews the studies, right? Which is what I did for that chapter. That was the basis of the stuff that I was saying. So you know, it probably, you know, overall the mask mandates, they probably either made no difference or actually made

things worse. And the reason I say that is partly because a lot of people were wearing cloth masks, which are probably harmful. And so it's it's plausible that that would have actually outweighed the benefit of the surgical mask, which are relatively better. What Tom Woods did in his book Diary of a Psychosis is he compared geographical areas within the Lower 48 and some Asian countries, areas that had mask mandates, and compare them to areas that did not have mask mandates.

Is that a scientifically sound way to approach whether or not these mandates achieve their alleged goal? Yeah, I mean that. So that's a legitimate kind of evidence. It's uncertain because it's not, it's not randomized and and controlled, right. So, so in other words, like it might be that there are other differences between the places that had mask mandates and the ones that didn't besides just the mask mandate.

Like maybe they were more, they were probably more left wing, which means they might be more urban, which that could make a difference to the spread of the disease. So you know, but like, if that, you know that if that's all the evidence you have and that that's what you look at, right? You never really get perfect evidence. Could we also look at the rise in cases before, during and after the implementation of a mask mandate in order because it

was sold to us? Here's where the the cases of death and illness are drastically increasing. What you got to do is you got to get this mandate. Once you get that in, you'll see a drastic decrease. Now if you lift the mandate because people want us to, well, then we're going to see that line go straight back up. I could not find that in any graph. Tony Fauci was not able to ever present this empirical data in any long term form. Is that a sound way to approach this? Yeah, yeah.

So you know, as I, as I call it, there's time series data and there's cross-sectional data. So yeah, you can look at the time series and yeah, see if the infection rate went up or down. And and so I haven't myself actually looked at that, but I would expect that there's no detectable difference and you know, partly because they would have told us if there was. I certainly think that would have made the headlines. Anything about vaccine mandates or mandatory lockdowns that you

think people should be aware of? Yeah, so, you know, like, I mean, unlike some of the, I don't know, right wing figures, I'm not an anti vaxxer. Like I think I think vaccines are helpful. They're usually helpful. There could be side effects. They probably underplay the side effects and they overplay the effectiveness. But that doesn't mean that it's not good, right?

It wasn't as good as people were initially saying, but it still significantly reduces your risk a lot more than the mask does, by the way. So I think the risk ratio, yeah. So the risk ratio was like your probability of getting the disease if you take a certain measure divided by the probability if you don't take that measure. OK, So the risk ratio for masks is maybe .95, right? Like risk ratio of one means it does absolutely nothing. Risk ratio of .95 means it does a little bit.

I think for the vaccine, the risk ratio might be like .3. So that like that's a lot that that's right. It's not 100% right, but anyway, but should you, should you mandate it? Well, I wouldn't mandate it just because I think people own themselves. You own your body. It is it is good for you. But you can like you can risk your life if you want to,

because it's your life. Now there is of course the problem that, well, you might infect other people, but The thing is like, well, the other people can also choose whether to get the vaccine. Like the vaccine mainly protects the people who take it. So like, if you take the vaccine, you should be mostly protected from the people who didn't take it. So you you don't, you shouldn't really be complaining about them, right?

So my reasoning for not getting the vaccine was one the companies did not have any liability. You couldn't sue them if you got vaccine injured 2. The people promoting the vaccine had horrible reputations with regard to mask mandates and lockdowns regarding the data that I mentioned earlier. And three, there was a blatant disregard for obvious alternatives.

Hey, we're working on a vaccine, but in the meantime, obesity is killing people with COVID, so we want to embrace low carb diets and go outside a lot and exercise. You want to look at alternative treatments? None of that. It was literally stay inside and wear a mask until Pfizer tells us they're ready. Was that irrational on my end to not get the vaccine for those reasons? I don't, I don't know. I mean, so like, I understand why people don't trust public

health officials, right? Because like, they proved that they can't be trusted. Like, so, you know, on the mask thing, like they obviously lied, right? They said one thing and then like several weeks later they said the opposite, right? Like, you know, like Anthony Fauci started by saying there's no reason for people to be going around with a mask. And then like a couple months later, he's like, everybody needs to wear these. OK, So like, which time were you lying?

OK, but anyway, and then and I I think they kind of said, well, we were lying because we wanted to preserve the masks for the public, for the healthcare workers. But like, if you're lying for that reason, then how do I know you're not lying? You know, the rest, the rest of the time, if you're like, why would I think you only lie about masks and that you wouldn't lie about vaccines. Why wouldn't you lie about vaccines too?

So anyway, now, but I don't think that they were lying about the well, they were maybe they were exaggerating about the vaccines, but they weren't totally lying. OK, but but you know, like like you were probably at low risk. Like the people who really needed it were old people and the old people mostly got it. There weren't a whole lot of anti vaxxers because like their doctors told them or whatever. Got it. All right, racism against blacks is a very big problem in America today.

How can I go about falsifying this concept? Yeah, I mean, you have to say it's like, you know, it's like some some of the progressive claims are just so broad that you can't test it just like that. Like, OK, because like what counts as racism? That's a little bit subjective. Like people disagree about whether things are racist and like, you know, is this joke racist or not? Or like, is this word offensive or not? OK. But you know, like, you can look for specific testable claims

made in this vicinity. So like you could look at, well, OK, so is it true that there's a racial bias in police use of force? And then, OK, well, you could look at studies of that or So, you know, are police more likely to shoot you if you're black than if you're white? And in fact, we have data on that. And the answer is no. They're more likely to shoot you if you're white, actually, you know, which if anything, indicates racism against whites, Although I don't think that's

exactly the explanation. I don't, I don't think it's really because they're racist. So what? This was research out of Washington State University that found that in the simulations, your cops are more likely to shoot a white person than a black person. What do you think explains that? Yeah. I mean, what? So you know, just to describe the study a little bit. So they do these simulations in which somebody they, they have actors who act out a scenario

that a cop might run into. And then the cop goes into the simulator where the scenario is on the screen in front of them. And then and he has a gun that shoots infrared light and not bullets so that they can track where he shot. And then the cop has to decide whether to shoot or not. And sometimes the suspect like pulls out a gun and then sometimes he pulls out a wallet or something like that. And then you got, you got to decide what to do.

And, you know, they're doing different things, they're yelling, whatever. OK. And so they do a version of a scenario with a black actor, then a version of the same scenario with a white actor to see if the cops are more likely to shoot the black guy. And it turns out that they are more likely to wrongly shoot a white person. And also they take longer to shoot the black people, a little bit longer, like .2 seconds longer. OK.

And if it took longer to shoot the white people, then you know that people would be saying, oh, that's racism, OK. But it takes them longer to shoot the black people. Why? Why is that now? And I think the best explanation is, well, they know that they're going to be massively scrutinized in the media and by political activists if they shoot a black person, but they're not going to be scrutinized at all if they shoot a white person, right, Almost at all.

So like, if they kill a white person, they'll make the local news that will not make national news. Like, you never hear national news stories. Even though there are more white people being shot by cops, you never hear national news stories about them. And so it just makes sense that you you got to be more careful about the about the black suspects.

Yeah, but we even have a case on camera of, well, Daniel Schaefer was one along with Dylan Noble. But Ashley Babbitt was literally shot in the head by a black officer and there was not even a trial. There was like an ABC interview where he said he's so proud that he defended Congress on January 6th even though she was unarmed. There was never even a

discussion. Well it it the white supremacist society, black person kills an unarmed white person, you'd think he'd get like 1000 years in jail for this. Nope, not not, not, not even a trial. Yeah, I mean, you know, as as you're perhaps suggesting if the racist had been reversed, it was a white person and a black, you know, black suspect and a white cop then.

But, well, if it had been at some of that other than a Trump, if the victim wasn't a Trump supporter and they were black, then, you know, there would be all kinds of media attention. So I love Part 1 of this book. You go through myths about individuals. Why is it that the corporate press will focus on stories about individuals as opposed to

statistics? We're a country of 330 million people, and they want us to focus on Jacob Blake or Trayvon Martin or Amy Cooper. Why do they focus on anecdotes instead of statistics? Yeah, I mean, they're, well, basically 2 reasons. One is entertainment value. So vivid story about one person is a lot more entertaining than a bunch of statistics. You know, You know, Stalin's famous, possibly apocryphal quote, a single death is a tragedy. 1,000,000 deaths is a statistic.

So anyway, and the the news media is not in the business of keeping people informed. They're not in the business of making sure democracy works, blah blah, blah. None of that. They're in the entertainment business, that is, they're in the they're in the business of capturing people's attention so that they can sell it to advertisers. So what they want to put is the thing that captures most attention.

OK. And then the other possible reason is if you are like, politically motivated, it's a lot easier to sell a narrative if you can pick anecdotes. Because in a country full of 300 million people, there's always going to be some stories that support the narrative you want to tell, but the statistics will not necessarily support that,

right? So like, if you want to portray that there's all these racist cops murdering black people just for being black, you can tell that story by giving anecdotes because there's always going to be some black people being killed by white cops. But if you give the actual statistics, and it's not going to support that, right? Because it's not true. Did you find any disparities in the genders that are killed by police or the age of people who are killed by police? I'm not sure.

I'm not sure about the age distribution. I would bet that it's a bunch of young people. I bet, I bet there's not a bunch of 80 year olds getting shot. But OK. But I did look up the statistics on, on the sex of shooting victims and it's shocking. You're going to be amazed by the amount of sexism in American

police. OK, because like, they're men are only 50% of the population, but there are 95.5% of the of the police shooting victims, meaning that the cops are 21 times more likely to kill you if you're a man than if you're a woman. So obviously the cops are incredibly sexist. What is an alternative explanation? If I don't buy that I don't believe massive disparities are in it of itself proof of

discrimination. What is an alternative thesis as to why we see such a disparity in male and female police shootings? I guess it could be that there's more violent behavior by male suspects is that could be, I guess it could have something to do with the fact that 88% of murders are committed by men. And and so that could be like an indicator of more violent behavior by men than women. And almost all cop killers are men, right?

If you want to sort of like focus on the threat that they pose to police specifically, which could explain why the police are shooting them. Like, you know, in one year that I looked at, I think there were like 60 cop killers. By the way, there's not a lot of cop killing going on. OK. So that, you know, the cops might be more afraid than they need to be. But anyway, there's something like 60 male cop killers and there was one woman who assisted her husband in killing a cop.

It wasn't even her idea. It was the husband's idea. OK, so all right. So anyway, that could be why the cops are more likely to kill a man than women. And you're like, if, if you want I, I guess we could try applying similar logic to racial differences like OK, so. Black people are 13% of the population, but they're around 25% during according to the year of the police shooting victims

or the police homicide victims. OK, but they're 40% of the murderers and something like 43% of the cop killers. So actually the rate at which the police are killing black people is disproportionately low compared to the rate at which black people kill cops, right? That is so like, it appears that the threat that black people pose is sort of greater. It's like out of proportion to the rate at which the police are

killing them. The reason that I mentioned the male disparity first is because the explanation as to why men, young men in particular, are more likely to get killed by police's higher testosterone levels lead to less impulse control. Men tend to be more violent. And I have no intention of vilifying men as a group, but it's an important explanation for us to have. So we're not raising little boys and telling them you're oppressed because of your gender.

There's nothing you can do about it short of electing politicians. It's good to know. I think the same thing for blacks. I was shocked to read the disparity when it came to violence between the races on this. On page 32 you said majority of homicides are interracial, that is people killing other members of their own race. Homicides committed by blacks against whites are more than twice as common as homicides by whites against blacks in the

USA. Randomly chosen black person is thus 13 times more likely to kill a white person than a random white person is to kill a black person. So if the Michael Humors of the world do not explain this through a proper context, only the National Socialists will have this statistic and they will get positive attention for it. I don't want that. I want people like you, people like Brian Kaplan talking about

this. How can someone look at that and not be completely enraged and turn into more or less a white nationalist and say I thought I was the oppressor this whole time? Please walk us through a proper way to productively analyze such a reality. Yeah, the, the white, the white supremacists are going to be disappointed that they don't get to be the oppressors. They're probably disappointed that there aren't more white

murders of black people now. Well, I mean, you know, it's worth keeping in mind that the overwhelming majority of people are law abiding. There are very few murderers, no matter what your race or your sex is, Right. So when I say 88% of murderers are men, it's not an attack on men. There are very few men who commit murder. But among the tiny number of people in our country who are murderers, you know, the vast

majority are men, OK? So also the vast majority of black people are not criminals, and they're not going to do anything to you, so, you know, relax. However, among the criminals, there's a disproportionate number who are black, right? Something like 40%. OK. But you know, that, like, that doesn't mean that you should be suspicious of or like, you know, punished or whatever, just ordinary black people, right?

You know. So Thomas Sowell basically says this is as a causal result of he actually kind of does say that it's from slavery because blacks were kidnapped and heavily concentrated in the South where they embraced the culture around them, which was the redneck culture of low impulse control, being quick to violence whenever someone insults you, low caring, very low amounts of caring for schooling and education and lack

of economic initiative. Do you think it's a cultural reason that there's this disparity, or do you believe it's biological? Yes, Sir. I don't know what the cause is except that I don't think it's racism. Like the only, the only explanation that the left wants is, oh, it must be due to racism. Oh, if black people are committing more crimes, it must be because of white racism. Like, you know, when black people do something, if it's good, then they get credit for it.

But if it's bad, then we have to blame the white people for it. But, you know, then does that mean, you know, why can't the white people blame somebody else for the things that we're doing? But anyway, you know, it's like only white people have agency anyway. Like, yeah, what? What does it cost? So, you know, there's that. There's the thing that you you said that Thomas Owell said, right. Some people actually think that government policy has contributed to the problem,

right? And that that's because so it used to be that to get welfare, you kind of, so you're a mother with kids. To qualify for welfare payments, you have to be below a certain income. And if there's a man in the household, then they would count his income. And so you have to kick the man out of the household to get to get welfare payments. So then there are more single parent households.

It used to be that in the African American community, they had higher rates of marriage, but now they have drastically lower and drastically higher rates of out of wedlock pregnancy. So in it, and you're like, I'm not a sociologist, so I don't know exactly why it was, but it could be partly because of government policy, because because of left wing people trying to help them, right?

That's just like, you know, you know, when, when somebody says I'm from the government, I'm here to help, you know, and you should run. Absolutely. Well, that's also what Seoul says. He says black incomes were increasing at a faster rate in the 20s, thirties, 40s and 50s along with their them getting into a high paying positions faster than after the Civil Rights Act. So I I completely agree with that. What explains the Asian white income gap? You know, I don't know that

either. I didn't exactly research it. There are higher Iqs among Asians. I think it's something like seven or eight points higher on average. So, you know, 108 IQ instead of 100 IQ. Also, there's a culture of appreciation for scholarship, appreciation for education. And like you're, if, if you're in the Asian community and you're like not studying and you're not, not going to school, then you're considered bad and you will, you will be

disrespected for that. You'll get lower respect and lower status. And if you're doing well in school, you'll get higher status. And so then you succeed, right? And it's kind of the opposite in the black community, or so I've read like I haven't, you know, I haven't been in that community, but so I've heard there's a lot lower value placed on education. Well, I mean, you're not going to succeed in this society like in a modern advanced society if

you don't value knowledge. Chapter 11 is titled The Myth of the Gender Wage Gap. What is the gender wage gap myth? Well, so it's said that women get paid a lot less than men do for the same work. And you hear different statistics quoted. That used to be the, the original statistic was that women got paid $0.59 for every dollar that men earn, Right. And then it went out from there. So, you know, then you hear $0.70 and then $0.77 and then finally it got up to 82 cents,

$0.82 for every dollar. And it's occasionally said and more often just assumed by the audience that that means for the same work. But it just turns out, actually, no, it doesn't mean for the same work. It actually means for different work. What the statistic actually represents is that men tend to take higher paying jobs or, you know, within a given job, they tend to do the stuff that you need to do to get paid more. OK, like work longer hours, work on weekends, you know, more

seniority. So like work more years in the same company or in the same industry, might get more training. Just all the stuff that you have to do and like, and yet like, you have to make sacrifices, right? So you have to do stuff that you don't really want to do. We're like, the company wants you to move to another city and men are more likely to do it. So they get more money, right? They would do it for the money. So OK. And so like that's, that's what

the gap actually represents. So how can we explain the straight white male wage gap? Some straight white males get a lot of money and some straight white males are homeless. What explains the difference between people who get high wages and people who get low wages when they're the same race, same sexuality? I mean, most of the difference in your earnings is probably due to what you're doing to make money or not doing. Like in other words, it's due to

your choices. Well, if you decide to go into a high paying profession, then you're going to get more money right now. OK, Now you can't always necessarily decide to go into the profession that you want. OK, but you can try. And then if you decide to not not work or not even try to work, then you're not going to get any money. Like why are why are some people homeless? I don't know, because they don't want to work. That's probably OK.

Some of them are homeless because they're they have schizophrenia or something like that. But a bunch of them are people who could totally work, but they don't want to. Brian Kaplan would tell us it's because of housing regulation, and I think he makes a very good case in his book Build Baby, Build OK, Even the same work. I don't even want to concede that the same work should yield

the same monetary compensation. If Mila Kunis and I start an Only Fans account, she has her own and I have my own. We both put five hours of content every day. I suspect there would be a very big gap if Chris Rock and I both did one hour on stage. I'm assuming me because I'm the male and men just get paid more. If Chris Rock and I both stand on stage and talk for one hour, I am guessing there would be a huge disparity in favor of me again because I'm white and he's

black. I don't even concede that the same work creates the same value, so the same work should never assume that we get the same result. Is that even? Yeah, of course it depends on what you mean by the same work. Right, exactly. So yeah, if you mean the same number of hours, no, no, like working for the same. Number, but they always mean the same number of hours when they're doing.

It Yeah, I mean, you know, presumably you got to control for the profession, right, But, you know, there are various other things that affect how much you get paid, right. And like, well, like, what if I'm just a better worker, OK. Like you and I, you know, we're both, we're both writing libertarian essays, you know, but my essays are just better than yes, I'm going to get, I'm going to get name 1 you. You got that PhD next to your name.

I I I need a fraudulent certificate, just like I had with that vaccine passport. Yeah, one of you. Do some diploma mills. Yes, if you could get me an honorary doctorate, I'd, I'd appreciate it. All right, in speaking to progressives, I will commonly say the government already spends $6.27 trillion a year, and you think taxes should be increased. You want more taxes. You already say the government's corrupt. How do you square the circle? And they say, well, here's what we need to do.

We need to mobilize and inform voters on a very large scale. On page 165, you are quite skeptical about the our capabilities to mobilize and inform voters to a significant degree. Why is this? Well, I mean, you can't really inform people if they don't want to be informed. And majority of people. So like it requires time, significant time to be knowledgeable about political issues.

And it also requires effort. And like, one thing you have to do is try to overcome your prejudices, which isn't that much fun. So, you know, like, I don't know, there could be a politician that you like and then there could be evidence that he did bad things.

And then like, if you're trying to know the truth and you have to experience this, you know, negative of this negative experience of trying to accept that the guy you like did bad things or vice versa, the guy you hate might have done something good. OK. So, you know, it's just it's not fun and it's time consuming and there's no incentive to do it. Why would voters do it? Because, like, every voter knows that their vote is not going to

make a difference. And, you know, every, every time I say that, like, some people freak out, like every vote matters. OK. But what I mean is like, estimate the probability that your vote is going to change the outcome of the election, right? Like the election would have gone this way if you hadn't voted, but because you voted, it'll go this other way. What's the probability of that happening?

One in a million, one in 10 million, you know, something like that, OK. And everybody fucking knows that, including the people who say every vote matters. They know it, right? So that's, that's why I like half the people don't even bother to go, OK, so but you know, even the people who go like they're not going to, you're not going to spend 10 hours trying to learn about all the issues. And that's not even enough time to learn about all the issues, right?

If you wanted to actually learn about them it would be a full time job but like people are not even going to spend like a few hours for A1 in 10 million chance of making any difference. I've spent 30 hours on the Cuban Missile Crisis alone for the upcoming book. I don't know how long agricultural subsidies would take me, how long healthcare and

education and minimum wage. So one of the narratives that progressives have is under capitalism, doggy dog competition, everyone seeking profit, the poorer get poorer and the rich get richer. Is this true? And how can I go about finding whether or not it's true? How can we measure it? Yeah. So no, I mean, the poor get richer and the rich get richer. Now recently, in the last, I don't know, a couple decades, the inequality has been increasing, which is, you know,

freaking out the leftist. OK. But nevertheless, like, man, you know, you want to go back and live in 1950, you know, like, no, nobody wants that. Just like, you know, everybody is much better off. And OK, so, you know, how could we check that? I don't know, like, we could look up statistics on income from 50 years ago. OK.

And by the way, like when, you know, when people do this, like frequently people do this at a time when like, maybe we're in a recession and then they'll look at two years ago before the recession started and they'll say, see, everything's going downhill, OK. But so to avoid that because there are random fluctuations in the economy. So to avoid that, look a long time ago, OK? So look, 50 years ago, we're vastly better off, right?

And by the way, like the statistics don't even fully capture how much better off we are, right? Like, you're going to get that we have higher monetary income. But like when they do the inflation statistics, they don't necessarily count increases in quality, right? So like they'll they'll get, oh, so you can buy more bread, but

they won't count. Like in addition to the fact that you can buy more bread with your paycheck, the bread is better than it used to be and that, you know, most products are better than they used to be. So. So we can look at the quality of products because it's common for progressives to say, adjusted for inflation, the middle class has seen no increase in their income. The middle class hasn't gotten a raise since Ronald Reagan is a

common claim that they make. So how can I measure whether or not I am wealthier than my dad was when he was 28? Yeah, I mean, I guess you could look at, you know, since since it's your dad, you can just ask him about, like, what stuff he had. Hey, Dad, did you have a microwave? Bet he didn't you. Didn't have this computer I'm looking at. Yeah, it didn't even have any computer at all, not even a crappy one, but OK. Yeah, OK, fine. You know, did you have a car? Was it a good car?

Like all the cars were worse than. But you know the number? I bet the number of people who had cars at all was less. I bet. I haven't looked that up but. Just one of the things I like to do was look at the time price, so the number of hours you have to work in order to access a phone, a microphone, you know, a pound of chicken, a book. Do you think time price is a good way to measure a, a better way than like GDP to measure

actual economic growth? Because we're not even talking on the same terms as progressive so often. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's pretty good where I like, how many hours of Labor do you have to do to get and then, you know, some product that they had that everybody would want. How many hours of Labor did you need to buy a loaf of bread? You could look at that from 50 years ago versus today. I mean, it's going to be less.

I don't know what the numbers are, but now you know that again, that doesn't necessarily count increases in quality, quality of the product and may not count increases in sort of quality of the job, right, Because you're the jobs might have gotten less unpleasant like I'm I'm pretty sure they've gotten less unpleasant. Yeah, but men still have 90% of the workplace death, so they must not be pleasant at all. I'm kidding, of course, on the inequality plans.

That's a good thing to mention there that, you know, 'cause when you know, when the people are talking about, oh, men have all the high men dominate the high paying jobs.

Yeah, they also dominate the worst jobs, like if you, if you look up, you know, like a listing of what are the worst jobs in America. And like almost all of them are male dominated, usually massively male dominated, like like being a lumberjack, which has the highest chance of killing you, like the highest rate of workplace fatalities, Like it's almost all men, you know? Not to mention all the conscripts in Russia and Ukraine. I cannot find any female

conscripts. There are female volunteers but I can't find any female conscripts. On the topic of inequality, I don't know why they throw so many stones living in the glassy houses they live in. I don't see equality between any progressive country or the citizenry in general. Whether it's Hugo Chavez not being equal to anyone else in Venezuela, whether it's Kim Jong Un is not equal to anyone. Even AOC is far is very, very unequal to her average supporter.

What is it about inequality that the left gets wrong? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, yeah, you hear a lot of people complaining about inequality, but nobody, maybe I can't say that I was going to say nobody actually wants to have equality, but maybe there are some people who are that crazy anyway, just like, let's say no serious person thinks that we should

actually have equality, OK? But you know, the left wing, the smart left wing people are complaining that, yeah, OK, we have to have some inequality, but we got too much, OK? And you know, the reason why we need to have some inequality as well. Look, if everybody's equal and I guess we're talking about wealth, OK? Or income. So if you get the same income, well, if everyone has the same income, that means that I will get the same income no matter what I do.

So then why would I do anything difficult or like, why would I make the effort to be more productive? I hope because you're an altruist who serves the good of society. Great. You know, build your society on that assumption. Let's see how that works out. Oh, no, we tried that. It was it was a disaster. I've retried that many times and then the economy collapse. Oh, it turns out that people don't like to work for nothing. And, and it really is working

for nothing, right? Because like, if, if we really have equality, that means I, I get the same amount of money even if I don't work. And because right, there are people who don't work, they've got to have the same amount as the people who do work. So then I'm just going to sit around. I get it. It's like it every second a progressive watches Netflix, YouTube, or relaxes and is not building homes for homeless people, they're just proving that.

They're just proving the point that they prefer leisure to helping others at no monetary benefit to themselves. Could this position that people don't want to work without monetary compensation, could that be refuted by large amounts of volunteer work that is found? Cause Wikipedia is free to access and that takes a lot of work. Libertarian institute.org is free to access and we put a hell of a lot of effort into libertarianinstitute.org. There's a lot of volunteer firefighters.

Do any of these refute this idea? Well, you know, it depends on how you interpret the idea, right? Like, yeah, some people will, people will do some, some people will do some kinds of work for free, right? But you will not get enough people doing all of the kinds of work that we need, right? So like is, are people going to volunteer to clean out toilets and like, and you know, not for like a homeless shelter, but like volunteer to clean out toilets.

Like in this building doesn't look like I'm in a building. But anyway, you know, like whatever, whatever building you're in, just like some random building, somebody just going to come in off the street and volunteer to, well, they need to be clean. So how's that going to happen? Just like, OK, there are some things that people would volunteer for because it's rewarding. It's like they feel like it's spiritually meaningful or something like that. Or like they're, they're

committed to A cause. Like, you know, like maybe the Libertarian Institute might have volunteers because they believe in the cause, but not every job is tied to an ideology. And like, we can't, we can't have an ideology based economy. So how are we going to get people to do the other jobs, right? Or, you know, like, oh, maybe people feel sorry for the homeless, so they'll volunteer to work at the homeless shelter. OK, fine. But like, what about all the other jobs?

Because you can't have an economy where it's just people working in homeless shelters and think tanks. I want to talk about the experts. Have you ever talked to an economics expert that says it doesn't matter if the price of something increases, it will continue to be consumed at its regular rate? No. Well. Then how can progressives advocate the minimum wage with a straight face? Raise the cost of employment and there's not going to be downsides for people with no

skills and no experience. Yeah, yeah. So you're like, well, should I attempt to steal? Man it like like what would this what would the smartest progressive say? Well, you know, OK, like pretend, pretend I'm a smart progressive. I'd be like, OK, no, you can't raise it too much. I just like, but we if we raise it a little bit, you know, like they're people are being paid underpaid a little bit.

If we raise it a little bit, then they'll get paid more if we raise it too much and they'll get laid off. OK, There's a theory so that like there was a economic like famous economics paper, maybe this is Card and Kruger, which which said that, you know, like they oh, they they looked at a particular case in which somebody raised the minimum wage and it looked like there wasn't unemployment. And then the way it just went up. OK. And then and they have a theory

as to how this happened. And the theory was that consumers believed that the workers in this whatever in some industry were being underpaid. And then after the minimum wage was raised, maybe that caused consumers to think of the workers are not being underpaid and that made the consumers want the product more. OK. So that is like a theory that's consistent with, you know, standard economics about how that could work.

It's not going to always work. And you know it's not going to work no matter how high the wage goes, obviously. Assume my position is crime. Poverty causes crime. How could I go about falsifying that? Yeah, I mean, well, you know, it looks like we could look at statistics. I mean, you know, you need a social scientist to do a study, right? Like, look at when poverty goes up, does the crime go up? Poverty goes down, does the crime go down?

You can also look at what, like, who's committing the crimes? Are the people committing the crimes mostly poor people? Well, kind of, yes, they are, right. You could do, maybe you could do an intervention, like give a bunch of poor people some money and then see if they stop committing crimes. OK, so now and I think, you know, it's going to turn out, and I just say this because this appears to be widely accepted, that, yeah, there is some link

between poverty and crime. Some of the crime is caused by poverty. It's not all caused by poverty. There's also kind of like a philosophical issue, like you might say, well, I don't know, like people have free will. So like, it's not, yes, poverty, like, you know, if there's more poverty, there's going to be more crime. And there's a causal link there. But you know, if you're a criminal, you can't blame your poverty. Like, you know, it was your choice to commit the crime, so

it's your fault, right? It's just sort of like, I don't know, from the standpoint of blame, I don't think that gets you off the hook. Is it even true? Considering all the mass murder campaigns that very wealthy government officials are provoking and engaging in, couldn't it be? I mean, Dick Cheney is far from poverty, as is Rumsfeld, as is Bush Junior, and they engaged in

quite a bit of criminality. So isn't it more of a character issue than a we just need to funnel more money at these poor people and then they'll stop being violent? Yeah, Yeah, good point. Right. I mean, so, you know, like I was assuming we were talking about crime by citizens, not crime by the government. But yeah, yeah, I know. Of course the government is, you know, they kill a bunch of people or whatever, they steal a bunch of money. And that's not caused by crime.

That's caused by power. They have, they have the power to do it. So they're going to do it, you know, like, Oh yeah. And so, you know, your, your other suggestion, no, maybe it's caused by poor character. Well, yes, but so, you know, like there's a, there's a significant portion of criminals and it's, it's like around 1/4 of people in the prisons who are actually literally psychopaths, right. The psychopaths are something like 1 to 3% of the population, but 1/4 of the people in prison.

And so what's wrong with them is not that they're poor and it's not that they were oppressed and they're lashing out because of the oppression. What's wrong with them is that like they're psychopaths, like they're incapable of empathy, which means they never learn morality. They literally do not understand what terms like right and wrong mean. When they hear other people saying that they have no idea what they're talking about, but they don't admit that. They won't admit that.

So they'll try to use the words because they know that other people are using them. OK. So couldn't the best approach to just be have as much of A free market as possible because that makes it so evil? People can't get a penny out of my pocket unless they create value and I voluntarily give it to them. Wouldn't strong property rights be the best hurdle to psychopathy? Yeah, so, you know, and just about human selfishness in general, because like, all of us

are mostly selfish, right? The psychopaths are more selfish than most of us, but most of us are pretty selfish anyway. So. So like a good, well, how do we stop people from taking advantage of each other? Well, yeah. Like a good thing is like, a transaction only happens if both people agree to it. And then because both people are selfish, that means that usually a transaction doesn't occur unless it benefits both people.

That's what we want right now. You know, that's not perfect because, like, well, they're just going to be some people breaking the rules anyway. So like, we do need enforcers, right? We do need somebody going around like looking for the people who are breaking the rules and doing something to them. There was a meme that got quite a bit of circulation on Twitter. It is a man for the audio audience. This guy is sitting around looking in at a laptop and he says to his wife, walking away

reluctantly. Married to this scumbag. Honey, come look, I found some information all the world's top scientists and doctors missed. Can you walk us through what, if anything, is either wrong with the logic this is trying to convey, or how it is that so many experts can be wrong, yet the truth can be available to the masses through things like the Internet? Yeah, yeah.

Go. Well, I mean, so first, like, OK, yeah, it's really unlikely that you found some information that all the world's top scientists and doctors missed, you know, about something that's in their area, obviously.

So, so, you know, just as a side point, like academics, usually they have like, a lot of knowledge about a super narrow area, the thing that they work on, and they tend to know almost nothing about the rest of the world like the rest of us, like how the rest of us know almost nothing about most of the world. But anyway, OK. Like, yeah. So it's unlikely you found something that they all missed.

Like, so if you think that, you know, you've reviewed the theory of evolution and, like, all these biologists didn't notice these amazing arguments that you came up with, you're probably wrong. They probably know that. Now, is it possible? Is it possible for, like, the consensus of the experts to be wrong? Well, yes, that has happened. That has happened many times in the history of science. Like, you can even like, even mainstream scientists now will tell you that that happened.

Like, they know about times that that happened when most of the scientists were wrong. OK, now you know, how could that happen? And so look, one thing is sometimes people are lying, OK? So like, if, like if all the experts are telling you, hey, you need to wear masks, like, like actually happened. It wasn't that all the scientists were wrong. It was that a bunch of public health officials were lying. Like they it wasn't that they

didn't know about the studies. It was that they were lying because it was partly for political reasons. OK. So like if well, like if there's a particular claim that supports a particular political viewpoint and like most academics support that viewpoint, which you know, which would mean it's a left wing viewpoint, then you can get a bunch of people saying that thing, right.

OK. And then another thing that happens is, well, like you really need to have you need to have the right kind of culture in the particular discipline. OK. So I think, and this is not scientists, but I think like in most of the humanities, and I would not say philosophy, but in like literary theory or something or ethnic studies or something like that, they don't have a culture of truth seeking. They have a culture of

supporting ideology. And so you can get a whole bunch of people agreeing on something that's not true because they're not really trying to get to the truth, right? It's not that they're stupid and like, it's not that they don't have knowledge. The subject is just that they, they don't care that much about the truth, right?

And then, you know, another thing that happened, like there's a chapter about global warming and the scientific consensus value where, you know, I just described some other things that could happen. So like, well, because global warming is tied to a political issue, and like, the scientists think that there is overall pretty good evidence that we're contributing to go global warming and we'll have significant costs, OK. And, you know, most of them are

on a certain political side. They're on the left. Then you start to get to this. You get this culture where people think like it's bad, like it's morally and politically bad to go against the consensus because you could be, you're undermining the political 'cause that most of us believe in. So you get this culture where people don't want to speak up if

they have any doubts. Like and like, you know, it could be that you generally agree with the consensus, but you've got a few doubts here and there, but you suppress them, right? Or, you know, like, or somebody likes expresses some doubts and then they get shouted down by the other scientists or they get ostracized or something like that. OK. And so you can understand how this would happen. And like, they're not, they're not bad people, right?

Like they think that they're doing what's good for society. But then if this is the way the culture is, then it's no longer reliable. Like you could have, they could be wrong, and like you could see how the incorrect opinion could continue over time. Is this the reason that if I were to say I want to understand theology, so I go to theologians, if I want to know about what wars we should get into, I go to Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and the CIA.

And if I want to know about Scientology, I go to the head of Scientology, David Miscavige. Don't you have any criticisms of these things? You're not an expert. What is the flaw in that thinking? If I want expertise in that area, I go to the people who are currently experts in it. Yeah, yeah, OK. Yeah. So it would be true that those people have a lot of knowledge about the subject, but it's also true that they have a lot of bias.

Like, yeah, you go to the defense contractors, yeah, they probably know a lot about war, I guess. But they're also going to have like a pro war bias because they get a reward, like they get paid if there's a war, right? Or, you know, you go to the head of Scientology, you know, like, well, like obviously they're just going to say Scientology is great because they're trying to get more people to come in and give them money, right? So OK.

And you know, you might, you might think, oh, OK, so like, you know, maybe there's a similar thing about similar thing about drugs. Like, OK, well, the drug companies are just going to say that the drugs are great, like, and in so far as they're legally allowed, right? Because like there are there are limits. Like you get in trouble if they lie too much. When it comes to, I want to talk about the principal difference

between two things. Imagine in one case I send a woman an unsolicited naked picture, and in another case I send her an unsolicited picture of what I think is a nice building she'll enjoy. What is the moral difference between these two unsolicited pictures I sent? Well, is it a moral difference? I don't know. There's certainly an etiquette difference, right?

Like, you know, you know, in one of them you're being rude and whatever, you know, a jerk or something, and then the other one you're not in. What's the difference? Well, just like the anticipatable reaction. Anticipatable reaction. OK, Because you have a topic here on transgenderism, which I think frankly is very sickening and I don't want to see it anywhere, ever. I always scroll past it whenever I see it on social media.

So when it comes to what people like me can do without violating the non aggression principle, without ushering in Augusto Pinochet, those of us who do not like transgenderism, what do you think is a proper response for us to have? Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I think that maybe you need to, you need to see a conservative transverse. OK, so go go. Blair White still counts. Yeah, Blair White. So you still don't like you don't even like Blair White? I, I just hate the concept.

Every time I see it, I just see it's like, oh, look, another destruction on the family. The one hurdle to complete state power. Oh yeah, let let me fall for that real quick. So one, it's sickening. And two, it just evokes this emotion in me. So just as literally the reason I think it's wrong to send an unsolicited naked picture is frankly, it's gross. I don't want to see it, and that's fine, even though that might offend me as the person who it's the image of.

That's how I feel about this transgender agenda. When I see these double mastectomies that women brag about where they expose their chest, that to me is how it must feel when a woman gets an unsolicited picture like that. It is just so sickening. I'm looking for productive ways we could go about decreasing the likelihood that something like this will continue to flourish or be encouraged.

Well, I don't know. I mean, like, you know, usually like if you're on social media or on YouTube or whatever, it will select things to show you based upon what you've watched in the past. So don't watch any of that content and then they will stop showing it to you right now. You know, if you if you're running into people in person, we're like, there's hardly any transgender people in the country, OK. Or at least there used to be

hardly any. There's been like an explosion in the last several years or something, OK. But you know, like, you know, it used to be one in 10,000, maybe one in 100,000. So, you know, don't worry about it. And like, and also they used to not say anything about it now. And you know, like, I don't know, stay away from the LGBT parades, I guess, just on the letter. OK, when it comes to the climate change consensus, this is one, I know we touched upon it earlier.

Is there anything about the specific research you found that was faulty or actively misleading when it came to the claim that 97% of climate scientists agree it's a big deal and humans are the primary cause? Yeah. So it turned out that that wasn't really true, right? Like, that's a claim that's repeated many times. It's based upon there's an article that somebody published in a journal, but they didn't actually survey climate scientists.

They looked at articles and they looked at the abstracts of articles. OK. And that's different because like it could be that, you know, maybe maybe people who believe in climate change are more likely to publish on the subject. And so it's not it's not necessarily representative of all the scientists, but also like actually the great majority of the abstracts that they looked at did not apparently take any position on man made climate change.

So when they say 97%, what they mean is of the ones that clearly took some position on whether there is anthropogenic climate change, 97% of those were for it rather than against it. OK, but OK. But also, and then, you know, like, and one of the authors who worked on that paper later characterized the result. As, you know, 97% of scientists agree that humans are the main cause. But that's not what the original paper said, right?

It said 97% of the people who took a stand or of the abstracts that took a stand thought that humans played at least some role, not that they were the main cause, right. And and actually, like, according to that paper, they, they said that they did collect data on how many said that it was the main cause, but to simplify the analysis, they're not presenting that day. OK.

And well, right. Is it was it to simplify the analysis or was it because if you gave the data then it wouldn't make as good of a statistic? So is it climate change or global warming if a certain geographical area goes from an Ice Age in one period to non Ice Age in another? Is that what they're referring to as climate change? Or are they specifically talking about what human beings have engaged in since the industrial

revolution? Well, yeah, so there's, I mean, you know, the term that people like is AGW anthropogenic global warming, right? Which which set because there's other global warming, there's natural climate change. But then there's anthropogenic meaning man made climate change, right, which is whether people are complaining about now and they're not complaining about the the natural ones.

Although, you know, natural climate change has happened for a long time and it has often been good, you know, sometimes good, sometimes bad, right. But you know why civilization started? Like human beings were around for like 200,000 years or 2 million years depending on what you count. And then only in the past, whatever, like 6000 years or something has there been civilization. You know why that was just because of the Ice Age ended. It was because of global

warming, right? Like global warming enabled civilization to start because it became more viable to be a farmer. Anyway, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that all global warming is good, but it means that it could be good. You can't just assume that it's bad just because there's a change. So what are the economic lessons we can take from that? For 200,000 years up until like 1800? You add what would be referred to as like almost planetary

absolute poverty. And then we saw a drastic decrease in absolute poverty in many countries after 18119 hundred, even after 1950 in the case of India and China. What are some economic lessons we can extract extract from having a much longer view of history? Yeah, I mean, like everything has costs and benefits, right? But overall human society tends to get better, particularly in the last couple of 100 years, right. And I think like a lot of people just totally under appreciate

this. They, you know, they're, they're all these people like living in America and other Western industrialized nations who are basically living in paradise, OK? They're living in what earlier generations would have called a paradise. They couldn't even dream of the fabulous wealth that we're surrounded with. And that's not an exaggeration. That the average person is surrounded with, not just the

aristocrats. Yeah, just like an ordinary American is like better off than a king in previous centuries, and they totally don't appreciate that. But anyway, so there's some costs, OK. So like, global warming is one of the costs of industrialization, but obviously the benefit vastly outweighs it by, you know, orders of magnitude, baby, right? So how would you explain to a progressive the the reason behind the poverty difference in North Korea and South Korea and

East Germany and West Germany? Is there a causal connection between more voluntary exchanges, more freedom and wealth? Or is that more or less happenstance, which Richard Wolff actually says it's more or less coincidence? Coincidence. Yeah. Yeah. OK, Well, I don't know. You know, there's this thing called communism, right? The people in the communist countries called it socialist. You know, we in America called

it communism. OK, so there's this thing called communism that took over a large portion of the world in the 20th century, and they tried it in multiple different countries on different continents, you know, Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, OK. They tried many different and they tried different variations on it and they tried that different parts of the 20th century, OK. And every time the same thing happened, like every time was a total failure. Every time it reduced the

population to poverty. And, you know, you mentioned Korea and Germany because those are kind of close to controlled experiments. The closest that you can get to a controlled experiment in social science. Like the same society gets divided into a capitalist half and a communist half. And then, you know, 50 years later, the capitalist half is rich, communist half is poor and like millions of people starved, OK.

And, you know, And then so just like poverty, but then also like oppression, like, you know, in, in the worst case is 10s of millions of people were killed. And like that, just like there was mass murder in multiple, not, not every time, but multiple different communist countries. They were just like these mass murderers.

And then there's this political oppression, people can't speak their minds and so on. So I don't know, you know, is it coincidence or maybe this whole communism thing is a bad idea? Yeah well comparing government atrocities to even private atrocities, I think it took like the clan 100 years to have 3000 murders according to the Tuskegee Institute and the Japanese Empire was killing like 3000 people a day in China. Hiroshima by the American government killed like 100,000

people in a day. So even the atrocities of more free governments are just completely inexcusable when it comes to the concept of of results or principles. Historically it seems like the progressives will say Jim Crow laws and segregation were inherently immoral. Don't bug me with the costs or benefits, those should have been abolished immediately. Slavery should have been abolished. The sooner the better. There's no downside to having 3.9 million people go from

enslavement to freedom. National Socialism inherently immoral, but when it comes to all these other things, they're weighing the costs and benefits in the modern day. What do you think is more important to focus on or how could we bridge the two? Yeah. I mean, I don't really think that those are opposing concerns, right? Like what what's inherently immoral and what's impractical. I think the, the inherently

immoral things are impractical. And like, I don't know, I don't know if that's 100%, but that's like it's close to all the time, right? So like, OK, you know, Nazi Germany, that's that's it's inherently immoral. I know genocide inherently immoral. It's also like super harmful. I think just, you know, if you're a utilitarian, like, you know, utilitarians are not going to disagree with the ontologist about that one, right? Or, you know, slavery. Well, you know, like, yeah, so

it's a massive rights violation. And it's also like a huge utility sink, right? Like the North was doing much better than the South. And so it looks like, it looks like slavery held back the economic development of the South, Right. And, you know, like, why? Well, like you've got a whole bunch of people who you're not, like, maximizing their potential. They're just like they're working as slaves on a farm and like they don't get to use their talents because there's not a

free market for those people. So they don't get to do the thing that they're best at doing or whatever. Right. OK, So, and, you know, like, I don't know, just other example, OK, like, you know, Jim Crow laws, like just obviously harmful. So, you know, unfair, you know, like punishing people because of the color of their skin, but also like obviously harmful. And like just in economic terms, like, again, just like not making the use, not making full use of your population.

That's obviously foolish. And, you know, like, if you're an employer, like deciding not to hire good workers because their skin is the color that you don't like, like that's obviously shooting yourself in the foot. Well, because two things come to mind today. Progressives who want to empower the working class actively would like the working class's voice to be suppressed on social media, maybe by the companies, but especially by the

government. They certainly want laws that stop Elon Musk for making it an anarchic free for all on X. And in the case of Jim Crow, George Wallace famously said that we see more riots which end up hurting black neighborhoods in these desegregated communities. And in Alabama, where it's segregated, we have 15 Negro college presidents of colleges in California desegregated. You don't have any because when low IQ people compete with everyone else it doesn't really benefit them.

It what is missing in that analysis in the We have to suppress free speech, and even the oppressed can benefit from the oppression if their overlords are smarter. Yeah, well, yeah. Like I, I don't, I don't trust George Wallace. Like George Wallace. Like. Trying to steal man. One of the famous racist of Alabama.

So, so I, I don't know what empirical evidence he, he was looking at, but like, it just seems like, well, the, yeah, the way, the way to succeed as best you can is to participate in the, in the wider society, participate in the culture. And like it looks. So there's a casual observation. I'm not like a social scientist, but my casual observation is it looks like it's bad for black communities to be segregated. They like, those don't look to me like thriving communities,

right? Like the neighborhoods where it's like almost all black and like, you know, they, they're separated off from the wider society and just, you know, just theoretically that looks like that's a bad thing. It looks like it's super unwise, you know, like people with different abilities, different talents or different desires or whatever it might be. They can benefit by trading. It's like like you don't. It's not that you benefit by trading with people who are like you.

No, because like, why? Why do I want to trade with someone who's just like me? Like they're going to have the same stuff that I have, right? I benefit by trading with someone who's different from me. And then just like my, if my distribution of talents are different from your distribution of talents, that means that I can do the stuff that I'm relatively better at. You can do the stuff that you're relatively better AT. And then we have a profitable

trades. In your research on progressivism, did did you come across any literature which like really bragged about the effects of a government program on the poor? Because at the Libertarian Institute, we love saying Amazon and Walmart have increased the number of products and services that the poor have access to because of competition and free exchange. Do progressives have any of the go to government programs that they are really, really happy with and brag about?

I don't know of any. Thanks. So there is a, there's like some argument about whether welfare is beneficial to the poor, right? Because like Charles Murray says that it's not beneficial to the poor. But, and I think, and, you know, not that this is a left wing person, but Tyler Cohen has said, no, it's, it's a little bit beneficial to them. I think, you know, like they're a little better off than they would have been without the welfare.

And, you know, you, you know, once you account for whatever, like medical assistance, like Medicare or something, and you know, like that kind of makes sense. But of course there's also a cost. So did this small benefit for the poor outweigh the cost? So, you know, like it's, it's not obvious, right? Like, OK, there's, there's a bunch of people who are poor. Let's give them a bunch of money. They're going to be better off because money is good.

Like, so that's kind of true. But like the Charles Murray argument is, well, you're creating a cycle of dependency. So you're going to make it easier for them to not get a job or you know, like not trying to improve themselves, like finishing high school or fishing college or whatever. You're going to make it easier for them to continue in like low productivity life approaches or whatever. So like in the short term you benefit them, but maybe in the

long term they're worse off. And that's plausible. Like, I don't know that that's true, but it's plausible that that might be true. It certainly seems like it creates donors without love and recipients without gratitude. As Antonin Scalia said, I've still never been thanked by a welfare recipient for all the taxes I've paid. Three more questions. Thank you so much for your time. The book is Progressive Myths by Doctor Michael Humor. Cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Part 1 especially is just mind blowing. What is it about regulation that progressives need to appreciate? Yeah, I mean, they, well, they, the theory, like the progressive theory is, oh, so you know, regulation protects consumers from rapacious businesses. You know, we need like, probably most of the regulations are beneficial because that's why we made them, because the government is good and they

serve the people's interests. And like, one thing that you have to understand just in general is, well, OK, so like most people are selfish. And that's that, by the way, is the reason why you want the regulations, because the people in these businesses are selfish. But you have to understand is like the people making the regulations are also selfish. So let's think about how this is going to work out, right?

And So what was going to happen is so there's some Regulatory agency that's responsible for regulating a particular industry. And who is going to control that agency? Well, it turns out that it's frequently controlled by members of the industry. Frequently people who either are going to work in the industry or have worked in the industry will be staffing the regulatory agencies. Why would that happen? Well, because those people are the experts on the industry.

They're the ones who know the industry. And they're, that's one reason. And the other reason is they're the ones with the incentive to control that agency. Like, I'm not going to go and try and get in the FAA and control the regulations because, you know, I don't fly that much and like, it's not going to make that much difference to me. But if I was like an airline executive, it could make a huge difference to me. So then I'm going to exert

effort, right? Like, you know, rich people who control large corporations, they have the money and they have the incentive to do what it takes to control the organization. So OK. And so, you know, like, there's a bunch of regulations that, you know, like, the main thing you want to do if you're one of these businesses trying to influence regulations is you want to make things harder for your competitors. You want to raise prices and make it harder for competitors to compete.

And a lot of regulations do this kind of thing where, like, they favor one business over another. They won't say that in the text, but it'll be like, you know, they're requiring you to do a

particular process. And as a matter of fact, some particular large company was already doing that process, but some of their competitors are going to have to spend some money in order to do it. Walmart and two Walmart CEO's, Doug McMullen and H Lee Scott, came out and said we at Walmart support increasing the minimum wage because workers deserve it. Amazon has come out explicitly endorsing a $15.00 an hour minimum wage. This happens all the time.

Yeah, yeah. So if you're already paying over $15.00 an hour, but you have some competitors who are paying less, and maybe you have like smaller competitors and maybe they're able to pay less because workers like the small company better than they like the big company, OK? And because they're able to pay less, that's how they're able to compete with you. So what you would like to do is

outlaw that. Make it so that they have to pay the same amount as you and then they can't compete with you. Two questions on philosophy in general. Again the book is progressive Myths. Cannot recommend this highly enough. This is a classic book where I go Oh my God I wish I would have read this 15 years ago. It would have saved me so many headaches. When you have two people, one of them thinks they're smart and the other person's stupid. The other person thinks vice versa.

Can we come up with a litmus test to differentiate smart people from stupid people? Well, I mean, they're IQ tests. You could do that. You could take an IQ test. But you know, like when, when people are talking about politics, like intelligence isn't usually the problem. Usually the main problem is bias and just rationality. So like, is it, you know, you could ask, is there a test of bias? I don't know. There's like, well, do you spend any time trying not to be

biased? Because if you spend no time on that, then you're probably biased. You expend no effort, right? Or you know. The amount of So first we can determine the amount of effort they've put into seeing the other sides of the argument and not confirming their bias. What else can we do? Yeah. And, you know, just sort of like, yeah. Do you ever try to check on whether the thing you believe is true?

Like, so, OK, you heard something that confirmed your political beliefs, and do you check up on it, whether it's really true? Because if you never check up on it, then that suggests that you don't really care whether it's true. You just want to believe the thing that supports your side. Right. And incidentally, by the way, I think this is a test of whether you really care about benefiting society because, well, if you want to benefit society, then you have to make sure your

beliefs are true. But if you just want to make yourself feel good, then you don't have to do that. If you just want to feel good and self-righteous, then you just need strong beliefs. But they don't have to be the truth, so no need to check that. So if you find if you find a bunch of political activists who are not trying to check up on whether their beliefs are true, it's probably that they're just trying to make themselves feel good and not really trying to

help society. I love that metric. The other day, Howard Stern was interviewing Vice President Harris and he goes, how could people vote for this guy, Trump? I mean, he wants to end democracy. I just can't get it through to them. What is it? What is it that we can do? Vice President Harris and I go, you don't know how someone can support. There's 80 million Trump voters minimum. There's tons of Trump supporters in other countries who just see him as a savior of the West.

And you, Mr. Stern, haven't opened up the phone lines. You haven't googled the steel man for Donald Trump, Why I should vote for Trump, why you shouldn't vote against. It's like they literally put no effort in when it's so readily available. Yeah, I mean, did they put no effort in or did they listen and they didn't understand, right. You know, because it could be like, well, they they talked to some Trump supporters, but they didn't understand what the Trump

supporters were talking about. Like, so I don't. Yeah. What did Trump supporters say about why they like him? I know he loves America like that one I've heard. He's patriotic, he's standing up to the deep state is the second thing. Yeah. OK. So, you know, like, is it that the Democrats don't know that or they don't know why you think that he cares about America?

Because it's because it seems to the Democrats like he doesn't care about America. Like I don't myself think that he cares about America. Like I think he cares about Trump. Trump cares about Trump. Of course, he got out of the Open Skies Treaty with Russia, which is a great escalation and potential nuclear exchange. He's a piece of shit. OK, awesome. So how often do they seek out alternatives that challenge their viewpoint and challenge their bias?

Very, very good metric. Final question for the philosopher Michael Humor at University of Colorado. Assuming there is no afterlife, how can humans make the most of their scarce time on Earth? Oh, wow, it's, I don't know, very, very broad. And, you know, that would be hard to answer now. And that also tempts me to go talk about whether there is an afterlife or not. That would be the greatest news ever. Almost as good as refuting progressivism.

Is there an afterlife? Well, you could look at I have a paper about reincarnation which which proves that proves that there's reincarnation right you. Know of human beings. You know, probably all conscious beings. Yeah, all. Conscious. Beings. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing right here. OK, well, this is the shortest version of the argument. OK, I I assume that time is infinite in both directions. Future in the past are infinite.

So if time is infinite, then if persons could live only once, then what would be the probability that you would be alive specifically now? It would be 0. OK, so but you are alive now, right? So either time is not infinite or you could live more than once. All right, So all right. So that's a short version of the argument. It could be more discussion of that. But if I die, couldn't that be just as I didn't exist before I was born, I won't exist after I die.

And couldn't we verify that by looking at if a brain? If consciousness is completely correlated with the brain muscle being active, couldn't it be that when you die, you're just gone? Well, is that logically possible? Yes, but the probability of that being true is 0. Good to hear, Very good to hear. And yeah, you did exist before you were born, you just don't remember it. You know you had infinitely many lifetimes before before this because the universe goes back

forever, right? You know another way of thinking this is, well, you know, time is just going to continue forever, literally forever. So anything that has a non 0 probability will eventually happen if you have infinite time. So if there's a non 0 probability of you being created per unit time then it will eventually happen So. Well thank you, it's just been heavy on my mind. My mom passed away when she was

57 years old. So I always ask philosophers what I can do to make the most out of what I thought up until 2 minutes ago with my scarce time on earth. But now I don't even face opportunity costs anymore. I'm living forever, baby. Right. Yeah, but you know, I don't know when the next lifetime is, so it might be in a Google years on another planet, you know? I I think Joe Biden will still be alive and at, at at that time. Yeah, yeah, Joe Biden goes back

forever. The book is Progressive Myths by Doctor Michael Humor at University of Colorado. This book is phenomenal. Like I said, tons of empirical and principled approaches to refuting what I consider to be, since the days of Woodrow Wilson, the great hurdle to human beings engaging in free social exchanges, social cooperation, and achieving the Great Society that is possible. Thanks to everyone for watching Keith and I Don't Tread on Anyone and the Libertarian Institute Doctor humor.

Thank you for your time all. Right, thanks. Thanks for having me.