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Jordan Peterson Debates Destiny on Climate Policy, Nuclear Energy, and the Left's Sacrifice of the Poor
Jordan Peterson sits down with streamer and political commentator Destiny (Steven Bonnell) to examine the fundamental tensions between leftist and conservative ideologies. Their conversation explores the paradox of how climate policies intended to help the poor may actually harm them, why progressives oppose nuclear energy despite its carbon-free potential, and whether the dangers of economic gigantism apply equally to big government and large corporations. Peterson challenges the left's approach to externalities like carbon dioxide, questioning whether climate and economic models can accurately predict outcomes a century into the future, while Destiny defends market-based interventions and explains his ideological journey from conservative libertarian to center-left pragmatist.
An Unlikely Conversation Across Political Lines
Jordan Peterson hosts Steven Bonnell, known professionally as Destiny, for an extensive dialogue that bridges a significant political divide. Destiny, an American streamer and political commentator who rose to prominence through gaming before transitioning to political debate, represents a center-left perspective that Peterson finds worth engaging. Peterson notes the difficulty of bringing left-leaning figures into substantive conversation, making this exchange particularly valuable for understanding the philosophical rifts in contemporary politics.
Destiny traces his ideological evolution from a conservative, Bush-era Republican who defended the Iraq War in high school newspaper articles, through a Ron Paul libertarian phase influenced by Ayn Rand, to his current center-left position. The transformation came through personal experience—particularly becoming a father and experiencing both poverty and wealth—which gave him insight into how economic inequality affects opportunity. His combative, Type-A personality, more commonly associated with low agreeableness and conservative temperament, makes him an unusual figure on the left.
The Redistribution Debate and the Soviet Collapse
Peterson challenges Destiny's support for government-led redistribution by pointing to historical failures. When Destiny suggests redistribution wasn't the primary problem with Soviet-style economies, Peterson responds forcefully: "What the hell do you think they did to the kulaks? That was forced redistribution. It resulted in the death of six million people." This sets the stage for a fundamental disagreement about whether state intervention can ameliorate inequality without creating the problems that plagued command economies.
Destiny distinguishes between harmful command economies—where governments dictate prices and production—and mixed economies that use targeted interventions to address market failures. He argues that successful modern economies blend free market capitalism with government action to control negative externalities. Peterson remains skeptical, noting that Canada, with its high taxation and extensive redistribution, is now predicted to have the worst-performing economy among developed nations for the next four decades.
The conversation reveals agreement on one crucial point: free markets serve as distributed computational devices that centralized systems cannot match. Both acknowledge the "computation problem" that doomed Soviet-style planning—no central authority can gather and process information as efficiently as millions of individual actors making decentralized decisions. The disagreement centers on how much government intervention can occur before this computational advantage disappears.
The Gigantism Paradox
Peterson identifies what he calls a paradox: conservatives distrust big government while progressives distrust big corporations, yet both share an underlying concern about gigantic institutions wielding excessive power. He suggests this common ground gets obscured by partisan positioning. The rise of gigantism, whether in government or corporate form, creates opportunities for psychopaths to use compassion as justification for accumulating power.
This observation leads Peterson to express shock at the left's recent alliance with pharmaceutical companies during the COVID era. For decades, pharmaceutical corporations ranked among the institutions progressives most distrusted, second only to fossil fuel companies. That skepticism seemed to vanish overnight when vaccines became central to pandemic response. Peterson sees this as evidence that political tribes follow social groups rather than consistent principles—a point Destiny partially concedes.
Destiny offers his own observation about contemporary politics: the meaningful divide may no longer be left versus right, but populist versus institutionalist, or pro-institution versus anti-institution. Trump supporters and far-left progressives share more in common than either group shares with center-left liberals—both distrust large institutions, both lean isolationist on foreign policy, both oppose extensive immigration and trade, and both believe corporations and government have been captured by corrupt interests.
Climate Policy and the Poor
The conversation's most heated exchange concerns climate policy and its impact on the world's poorest people. Peterson argues that carbon pricing and restrictions on fossil fuel development have pushed hundreds of millions back into absolute poverty. He cites testimony from the head of the UN's largest relief agency, who claimed government interventions increased global privation dramatically over recent years. Energy costs in Germany have risen five-fold while pollution per unit of energy increased—the exact opposite of stated policy goals.
When Destiny argues that disproportionate impact on the poor isn't automatically a valid counterargument, Peterson pushes back: "The poor who are affected aren't all victims. Some are psychopathic perpetrators. But I'm making a specific claim—the fastest way out of absolute privation for the world's bottom billion is through cheap energy." He contends that ameliorating absolute poverty creates environmental awareness by giving people a longer time horizon, making cheap energy the most direct path to sustainability.
Peterson challenges the accuracy of climate and economic models: "There's nobody in 1890 who could have predicted what was going to happen in 1990 economically. If we think we can predict 50 years out now and calculate the potential impact of climate change on economic flourishing, we're deluded." He argues that margin of error in these projections grows until it subsumes any meaningful prediction, yet policy proceeds as if certainty exists.
Destiny defends the distinction between climate and weather—climate models predict average conditions over years or decades, not specific daily temperatures, analogous to how economic models can't predict individual stocks but do predict market averages. He points to observable changes: buildings in Seattle and London that never needed air conditioning now require it. Recent years have consistently broken temperature records as carbon dioxide concentrations increase.
The Nuclear Energy Mystery
Both Peterson and Destiny agree that nuclear energy represents a logical solution if carbon dioxide is genuinely the concern. Nuclear provides dense, reliable, carbon-free power at scale. France has demonstrated its viability. Yet progressives have opposed nuclear expansion for decades, often with the same fervor they oppose fossil fuels. This creates a mystery: why would those claiming to prioritize carbon reduction reject the most practical carbon-free energy source?
Destiny suggests the opposition stems from fear—nuclear energy evokes associations with Chernobyl, Fukushima, and atomic weapons. People don't understand the technology and don't trust it. Peterson counters that this doesn't explain policy choices by leaders who claim expertise. Germany shut down nuclear plants and started burning lignite coal instead. California is following the same path. These decisions make energy more expensive and more polluting simultaneously.
Peterson sees something darker underneath the surface: "The left will sacrifice the poor to save the planet, and the left will de-industrialize even at the nuclear level despite the fact that it devastates the poor." This pattern suggests motivations beyond stated environmental concerns. When people say "there are too many people on the planet"—a phrase Peterson has heard from ordinary, seemingly compassionate people for thirty years—he hears what he describes as "Satan himself taking possession of their spine."
Who Decides the Acceptable Casualties?
The question of motivation leads to Peterson's most provocative challenge: "Who are these excess people that you're so concerned about? Who has to go, and when, and why, and how, and who's going to make that decision?" Even if people don't consciously aim at population reduction, the words they utter reveal something operating beneath awareness. Genocidal societies typically emerge with utopian visions in hand, and they occur with fair regularity throughout history.
Peterson argues that pushing hundreds of millions back into absolute poverty—after decades of progress lifting people out—constitutes a moral catastrophe that demands explanation. The World Bank now denies loans for fossil fuel development to African nations, despite African leaders protesting that the West used fossil fuels to escape poverty but now denies the same path to others. This strikes Peterson as profoundly unjust and potentially motivated by beliefs about population that people won't state explicitly.
Destiny pushes back on the conspiratorial framing: "What do you think is the plan? What is the goal? Why push obviously horrible ideas for the planet and the poor?" He suggests people are more likely misinformed or misguided rather than deliberately malicious. The conversation reflects a fundamental disagreement about whether to attribute policy failures to error or intent, incompetence or ideology.
Constellations of Belief
Destiny introduces the concept of "constellation beliefs"—packages of positions inherited from social groups rather than derived from first principles. Instead of building beliefs from philosophical foundations combined with empirical understanding, people join tribes and adopt complete belief systems that function like Jenga towers: pull out any piece and the whole structure collapses. This makes rational evaluation of individual positions nearly impossible.
Peterson agrees with this observation about cognitive processing. Belief systems function to constrain entropy, and threats to fundamental beliefs trigger radical anxiety and loss of positive emotion. People will fight desperately against anything that threatens their belief structure's integrity. This explains why political discussions so rarely change minds—people aren't defending individual positions but entire identity-defining worldviews.
Both recognize this phenomenon affects left and right equally. Destiny maintains that his platform independence gives him some insulation—he breaks from progressive orthodoxy on Kyle Rittenhouse, indigenous issues in Canada (calling the mass grave claims a hoax), and Second Amendment rights. Peterson has similarly broken from conservative positions throughout his career. Yet both acknowledge the pull toward tribal alignment that makes independent thinking difficult.
The Limits of Externality Pricing
The discussion of negative externalities reveals deep disagreement about government capability. Destiny uses carbon pricing as an example of how markets can be made to account for costs they would otherwise ignore. Rather than command-and-control regulations, government simply attaches a price to pollution, allowing the free market to adjust. This approach, he argues, preserves market efficiency while addressing genuine problems.
Peterson's objection strikes at the computational heart of the issue: "All the externalities that a market economy can't compute are so complex that they can't be determined centrally by the same argument." If markets fail because they can't account for certain costs, how can central planners determine the correct price to attach? The computation problem that dooms command economies equally dooms attempts to price externalities accurately.
Peterson offers the example of Germany's energy policy: interventions meant to reduce carbon emissions instead made energy five times more expensive while increasing pollution per unit of energy. When policies fail this dramatically—harming both stated goals and economic prosperity—it suggests the externality either wasn't correctly identified or the intervention mechanism was fatally flawed. Either way, the poor pay the price for elite miscalculation.
Vaccines, Mandates, and Institutional Trust
A brief but pointed exchange addresses vaccine hesitancy and institutional trust. Destiny suggests the right opposes vaccines for the same reason the left opposes nuclear energy—it sounds scary, they don't understand it, and they don't trust the institutions promoting it. Peterson counters that the right has specific reasons for distrust following the COVID era: vaccines were imposed by force, creating justified skepticism about institutional motives.
The comparison raises questions about choice and imposition. Destiny notes that people don't choose whether they live near a nuclear plant, just as they didn't choose vaccine mandates. The power to impose solutions—whether energy infrastructure or medical interventions—inevitably creates resistance from those who feel their autonomy violated. This connects to the broader theme of gigantism: large institutions, whether governmental or corporate, exercise power that individuals cannot easily escape.
Peterson's concern extends beyond specific policies to the precedent they set. When institutions claim authority to override individual choice based on expertise and compassion, what limits exist on that authority? History provides abundant examples of utopian projects that justified coercion in service of the greater good, often with catastrophic results. The question isn't whether any given policy might work in isolation, but whether the power dynamic it creates opens doors better left closed.
The Paradox of Environmental Priorities
Peterson identifies what he sees as a fatal contradiction in progressive environmental policy: forcing the poor into short-term thinking through energy restrictions actually destroys the environment more rapidly. When people face starvation, they cut down forests, kill animals, and devastate local ecosystems without regard for long-term consequences. Prosperity and security allow people to care about environmental sustainability.
This creates a paradox for those claiming to prioritize both environmental protection and care for the poor. Policies that increase energy costs demonstrably harm the world's poorest people, pushing them into exactly the desperate mindset that leads to environmental destruction. By the movement's own stated values, current approaches fail on both dimensions—neither helping the poor nor protecting the planet.
Destiny maintains that the underlying logic remains sound if the facts support it: short-term suffering to prevent long-term catastrophe might be justified if climate models and economic projections prove accurate. Peterson's response centers on epistemic humility: "We don't know where the carbon dioxide is from. We can't measure the warming of the oceans. We have terrible temperature records going back 100 years. This isn't data, this is guess."
Conclusion: Principles Versus Tribes
The conversation concludes without resolution but with mutual recognition of the complexity involved. Destiny acknowledges that people largely follow social groups rather than principles, creating belief constellations that resist rational analysis. Peterson emphasizes the danger of allowing compassion-justified policies to cause measurable harm to the vulnerable populations they claim to protect.
Both agree that mixed economies—combining market mechanisms with targeted interventions—have produced the best outcomes historically. The disagreement centers on where to draw lines: how much intervention before computation problems emerge, how certain must predictions be before imposing costs, how do we distinguish genuine externalities from political preferences dressed in technical language?
These questions matter enormously as they determine the lived reality for billions of people. Getting answers wrong doesn't just mean inefficiency or wasted resources—it means starvation, poverty, and the foreclosure of human potential on a massive scale. That's why Peterson insists on epistemic caution and skepticism toward grand plans, while Destiny argues for pragmatic willingness to act on best available evidence even with uncertainty.
Video Transcript
hello everyone I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024 beginning in early February and running through June Tammy and I an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the US you can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on my forthcoming book out November 2024 we who wrestle with God I'm looking forward to this I'm thrilled to be able to do it again and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon bye-bye when you look at like the fall of the Soviet Union or you look at the failure of like socialist or communist regimes I don't know if the issue there was so much redistribution that was one of many issues I don't think it was an issue at all actually I was what do you mean redistribution wasn't an issue what the hell do you think they did to the Kola if you believe climate models or if you believe that we're heading in a certain direction I don't believe any of those presumptions people keep saying but we just got another one of the hottest years on record That's a classic leftist argument why wouldn't Putin why wouldn't Gan pink why wouldn't anybody else in the world call this out it was as horrible as it was there are plenty of people attempting to call no you really think that you're in a position to evaluate the scientific credibility of the trials for the vaccines do you hello everyone I'm here today talking to Steph banel known professionally and online as Destiny he's an American streamer debater and political commentator he really came to my attention I would say as a consequence of the discussion he had with Ben Shapiro and Lex fredman and I decided to talk to him not least because it's not that easy to bring people who are identified at least to some degree with the political beliefs on the left into a studio where I can actually have a conversation with them I've tried that more often than you might think and it happens now and then but not very often so today we talk a lot about well the differences between the left and the right and the dangers of political ideology per se and the use of power as opposed to invitation and all sorts of other heated often heated and contentious issues and so you're welcome to join us and um I was happy to have the opportunity to do this so I guess we might as well start by letting the people who don't know who you are get to know who you are with a little bit more precision so why have you become known and and how has that developed it's a pretty broad question um I think I started streaming around 15 years ago when it wasn't really a thing yet there were a few people that did it uh I started early on I was a well I guess back then you weren't a professional gamer yet because the game had just started to come out but there was a game called Starcraft 2 and I screamed myself playing that game I was a pretty good player was pretty entertaining to watch and then I kind of grew uh over I guess maybe the next seven years uh just streaming that people would watch streaming on YouTube um well back then I started on a website called live stream then I switched to Ustream then I switched to a site called Justin TV and then that turned into twitch.tv uh so after streaming there for like s or eight years I was a semi-professional Starcraft 2 gamer that game kind of came and went but I had a lot of other interests around 2016 I started to get more involved into the world of politics it's kind of a left leaning figure uh because my background on like Esports and internet gaming and internet trash talk I got I had more of a kind of like a combative attitude and that was kind of rare for left leaning people at the time so it's basically where my early political popularity came from I think from like 2016 to 2018 was debating right-wing people so was there a game likee element to the debating do you think and and is that part of is that part of why that morphing made sense no I wouldn't say so I mean if you if you get really reductionist everything in life is kind of a game but that's not very satisfying uh I think I grew up like very argumentative my mom is from Cuba so my family was like very conservative and then I grew up like listening to the news all day listening to my mom's political opinions all day and then I argued with kids in high school and everything and I've always been kind of like an argumentative type A aggressive personality so I think that probably lent itself well to the political stuff in 2016 yeah was that useful in gaming um that that personality in some ways yeah and some ways no um I don't know directly for the games itself I don't know how much it necessarily mattered uh but for all the peripheral stuff in some ways it was really beneficial I could kind of like cut out my own path and I could be very unique and I could kind of be on my own in some ways it was very detrimental uh I'm very I can be very difficult to get along with and I'm very much kind of like I want to do this thing and if you try to tell me what to do I don't want to have like a sponsor or a team or anybody kind of with a leash on me so yeah I guess it worked out it's interesting because that the temperamental proclivity that you're describing that's associated with low agreeableness and generally well and that's more combative it's more stubborn it's more implacable it's more competitive the downside is that it's more skeptical it's it can be more cynical it can be less Cooperative but generally a temperament like that is associated with is not associated with political belief on the left because the leftists tend to be characterized by um higher levels of compassion and that's low agreeableness so you know that element of your temperament at least is quite masculine and then a lot of the ideology that characterizes the modern left has a much more temperamentally feminine nature so so all right so why do you think the shift from your popularity to political commentary worked and you said that started about 2016 and why do you think that that shift happened for you like in terms of your interest I think I've always been interested in a lot of things like I grew up with a very strong political bend it was conservative until I got into my streaming years probably five or six years into streaming I slowly kind of started to shift to the left um I would say that uh I guess in around around 2016 when I saw all of the conversations going on with the election and all the issues being talked about I just I felt like the conversations were very low quality and in my naivity I thought that maybe I could come in and boost the quality at least in like my little corner of the internet to have better conversations about what was going on and so that was my basically my injection Point into of that was yeah fting about those political issues and then arguing with people about them doing research and reading and all of that yeah and so did you do that by video to begin with as well yeah it was all streaming yeah it was all streaming and so you I presume you built an audience among the people who were following you as a gamer first and then that started to expand is that correct basically yeah with without getting too much into like the business or streaming side of things basically um actually this probably carries over to to basically to all media I would imagine is you've got people that will watch you for special events uh so maybe you're like a commentator of the Super Bowl or maybe you're hosting like a really huge event then you've got people who will watch you every time you're participating in your area of expertise so for me that's like a particular game I might be playing um it might be when you're on like a particular show or something that people watch you for and then the fundamental fan like the best fan that you're converting to the lowest and most loyal uh viewer I guess is somebody that's watching you basically no matter what you're doing and these are the people that will follow you from area to area and I think because of the way I did game and I talked about a lot of other stuff whether it was politics science current events whatever I had a lot of loyal fans that kind of followed me wherever I went so quite a few of stablished the reputation so how would you characterize your reach now how would you quantify it uh I think my can you be more precise how many people are how many people are watching your a typical video that you might produce and and what are you doing for subscribers Say on YouTube and total any idea about total reach yeah well I mean I guess my subscribers on YouTube I around I think think now it's around 770,000 on my main Channel I think I probably do between all three channels I think around 15 to 20 million views a month um and then I live stream to anywhere from 5 to 15,000 concurrent viewers a day for hopefully around eight hours a day uh yeah okay okay so you have quite a substantial reach and so you said that initially you were more conservative leaning but that changed what okay what did it mean that you were more conser ative leaning and how did that how and why did that change uh when I say I was conservative leaning and I was writing uh articles for my school newspaper defending George Bush in the Iraq War uh I was like very much like um I don't I think it's like an insult now what people say like neocon but I was like very much like a conservative a bush era conservative uh so supported big business supported um traditional all of the conservative I guess like foreign policy you know hawkish policy uh for whatever that meant as like a 14 15y old um right was the whole elen Gonzalez in uh incident that was very big for uh Cuban Americans where um there was a Cuban boy that tried to come to the United States with several other people and his mother and their raft I guess crashed or something happened I think his mom died and some other people died and there was a huge debate on whether or not to send him back to Cuba and Clinton ended up sending it back to Cuba and I know that my mom was super irritated and all that um to say the least and then but once they hit College I think I supported Ron Paul in 200 would have been 2008 uh so was a big Ron Paul libertarian uh guy in high school when I went from I went to a Catholic Jesuit High School and I kind of became atheist in that process I started reading Ein Rand uh so I was very very very very very conservative um on the libertarian end it sounds yeah I would say so yeah initially on the like that makes more sense in relationship to your temperament libertarian yeah yeah yeah initially it was like Christian conservative and then it became like libertarian conservative um without my life kind of took like a wacky path and then as I I started working I kind of had to drop out of school I was working and then I got into streaming and once I started streaming I had a son basically around the first year I started streaming uh as I started to go through life and I went from kind of being in this like Working Poor position to making a lot of money uh especially through the lens of my child I saw how different life was when I had more money versus less and I guess like the um the differences between what was available to me and then my child as I made more money uh while I was really wealthy versus not as wealthy it kind of started to change the way that I I guess you got more attuned to the consequences of inequality isas it yeah okay and so that okay how did that lead you to develop more sympathy for left leaning ideas particularly I guess the my my core beliefs have never really changed but I think the way that those uh become applied kind of change uh so much the same way that uh you might think that everybody deserves a shot to go to school and have an education that might be like a core belief where as a Libertarian or conservative I might think that as long as a school is available everybody's got the opportunity to go and study but maybe now as like a liberal or Progressive or whatever you'd call me I might say okay well we need to make sure that there's enough you know maybe like food in the household or household or some kind of funding program to make sure the kid can actually go to school and study basically so like the the the core Drive is the same but I think the applied the the applied principle ends up changing a bit based on what is your concern essentially something like um the observation that if people are breed enough of substance let's say that it's difficult for them to take advantage of equal opportunities even if they are presented to them let's say yeah essentially yeah and and you're you you have some belief and correct me if I'm wrong you have some belief that there is room for State intervention I at the level of basic provision to make those opportunities more manifest yeah to varying degrees yeah okay okay how okay so let let let's let's start talking more broadly then on the political side so how would you characterize the difference in your opinion between the left and the conservative political viewpoints umof uh on a on a very very very broad level um if there's some I would say if there's some like good good world that we're all aiming for I think people on the left uh seem to think that a a collection of taxes from a large population that goes into a government that's able to precisely kind of dull out uh where that tax money goes uh you're basically able to take the problems of society you're able to scrape off hopefully a a not super significant amount of money from people that are that can afford to give a lot of and then through government programs and redistribution you target that uh that those taxes essentially to people that kind of need whatever bare minimum to take advantage opportun deci yeah and then for on the conservative end um I guess a conservative would generally think that why would the government take my money I think from a community point of view through churches through Community Action through families we can better allocate our own dollars to our own friends and family to help them and give them the things that they need so that they can better participate in and thrive in society basically okay so one of the things that I've always found a mystery I I think there's an equal mystery on the left and on the right in this regard is that the more conservative types tend to be very skeptical of big government and the leftist types tend to be more skeptical of big corporations right well you okay so following through the logic that you just laid out you made the suggestion that one of the things that characterizes people on the left is the belief that government can act as a agent of distrib can and should act as an agent of distribution okay a potential problem for that is the gigantism of the government that does that now the conservatives are skeptical of that gigantism and likewise the Liberals the progressives in particular we'll call them progressives um are skeptical of the reach of gigantic corporations and I've always seen a commonality in those two in that both of them are skeptical of gigantism and so one of the things that I concerned about generally speaking with regard to the potential for the rise of tyranny is the emergence of of Giants and one potential problem with the view that the government can and should act as an agent of redistribution is that there is an incentive put in place two kinds of incentives number one a major league incentive towards gigantism and tyranny and number two an incentive for psychopaths who use comp passion to justify their grip on power to take money and to claim that they're doing good and I see that happening everywhere now in the name of particularly in the name of compassion it's one of the things that's made me very skeptical in particular about the left and at least about the progressive edge of the left so I'm curious about what you think about those two first of all it's it's a paradox to me that the conservatives and the leftists face off each other with regard to their concern about different forms of gigantism and don't seem to notice that the thing that unites them is some antipathy this is especially true for the Libertarians some antipathy towards gigantic structures per se and so then I would say with regards to your antithesis between liberalism and conservatives the conservatives are pointing to the fact that there are intermediary forms of distribution that can be utilized to solve the social problems that you're describing that don't bring with them the Associated problem of gigantism and like this is a it's been shocking to me to watch the left especially in the last six years Ally itself for example with pharmaceutical companies which was something I'd never saw never thought I would see in my lifetime I mean for for decades the only gigantic corporations the left was more skeptical of than the fossil fuel companies were the pharmaceutical companies and that all seemed to vanish overnight around the covid time so I know the story that's a lot of things to throw at you but it sort of outlines the territory that we could probably investigate productively yeah so a couple things I would say that the current political landscape we have I think is less uh I understand the the concept of conservative supporting corporations and liberal support uh supporting like large government I think today the Divide we're starting to see more and more is more of like a populist uh anti-populist rise or even like institutional or anti-institutional rise so for instance I think conservative city in the United States are largely characterized with uh I would say with populism uh and that they're supporting like certain figures namely right now Donald Trump who they think alone can kind of like lead them against the corrupt institutions uh be them corporate or government I feel like I feel like most conservatives today are not as trustful of big corporations as they were back in like the bush era where we would you know conservatives would Champion you know big corations I think that's right yeah um I a strange because it makes the modern conservatives a lot more like the 60s leftists potentially yeah um I mean that brings us into the issue too of whether the Left Right divide is actually a reasonable way of construing the current political landscape at all and I'm not sure it is but right now it kind of is but only because so many conservatives are following Trump so like your populist anti-populist thing kind of maps on kind of cleanly to the left and right it doesn't work with progressives though or the farle because they're also anti-large everything so in a surprising way on very very farle people you might find them having a bit more in common with kind of like a mega Trump supporter uh than like a center left liberal so for instance like both of these groups of people on the very far left will be very doish on foreign policy probably a little bit more isolationist they're not a big fan of like a ton of immigration or a ton of trade with other countries uh they might think that there's a lot of institutional capture of both government and corporations so both all of the Mega supporters and the far farle might think that corporations don't have our best interest at heart and the government is corrupt and captur by lobbyists like yeah you'll see a lot of overlap there right um I think that sometimes uh there's a couple things one uh this is something I feel like I've discovered people have no principles uh I think that people are largely Guided by whatever is kind of satisfying them or making them feel good at the time I think that's a really important thing to understand because people's beliefs will seem to change at random if you're trying to uh imagine that a belief is coming from some underlying principle or is governed by some internal uh you know like moral or reasonable code or whatever I think generally there are large social groups and people kind of follow them along from thing to thing which is why you end up in strange worlds sometimes where uh you know like the the position on vaccines and being an antivaxer might have been seen as something you know 10 years ago as kind of like a hippie leftist and now maybe it's more like a conservative or uh it's Associated more with like Mega Trump supporters or whatever I think as a result of how the social groups move around um when it comes to the you mentioned this like gigantism thing that's another I'm not sure if people actually care about gigantism or if they're using it as a proxy for other things that they don't like like I could totally imagine a I care about it sure yeah you might yeah sorry just in general that's okay um cuz like I could imagine somebody saying that like they don't trust like a large government they think there's too much uh you know prone to tyranny or something like that but also be supportive of an institution like the Catholic Church which is literally you know one guy who has a direct to they can't tax um well I mean there and they don't have a military and they can't conscript you and they can't throw you in jail that is true yeah I mean well those are major those are major and significant I mean I get I get the overlap don't get me wrong sure but I'm saying like even if you had a local government like a local like if you had a state government or a tribe usually they've got some form of enacting punishment it'll be sometimes more brutal but they can throw you in jail uh conscription hasn't existed in the US since the Vietnam War um I mean yeah yeah true yeah yeah true um so yeah I think that um I guess when I look at so this is so let's go back well let's go back to to the redistribution issue I mean we pay 65% of our income at say upper middle class middle class to upper middle class level in Canada it isn't obvious to me at all that that money is well used in fact quite the contrary in my country now um our citizens make 60% of they produce 60% of what you produce in the US that's plummeted over the last 20 years as state intervention has increased I'm not convinced that the claim that the interests of people who lack opportunity are best served by state intervention and there's there's a couple of reasons for that I mean first of all I'm aware of the relationship between inequality and social problem there's a very well-developed literature on that and it it essentially shows that the more arbitrary the the the broader the reach of inequality in in a political institution of Any Given size the more social unrest so we're PE where all people are poor there isn't much social unrest and where all people are rich there isn't much social unrest but when there's a big gap between the two there's plenty and that's mostly driven by disaffected young men who aren't very happy that they can't climb the hierarchy there are barriers in their way and so there is reason to amarate relative poverty the problem with that to some degree is that most attempts to ameliorate relative poverty tend to increase absolute poverty and they do it dramatically and the only solution that we've ever been able to develop to that is something approximating a free market system I wouldn't call it a capitalist system because I think that's capture of the terminology by the radical leftists it's a free exchange system and the price you pay for a free exchange system is you still have inequality but the advantage you gain is that the absolute levels of privation plummet and I think the data on that are I think they're absolutely conclusive especially and that's been especially demonstrated in the radical decrease in rates of poverty since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 because we've lifted more people out of poverty in the last four decades than we had in the entire course of human history up to that date and that's not least because the statist interventionist types who argued for a radical state sponsored redistribution lost the Cold War right and that freed up after Africa to some degree and certainly the Southeast Asian countries to pursue something like a free trade economy and that instantly even that instantly made them Rich even China so well so that's an argument let's say on the side of free exchange but it's also an argument two-fold argument pointing out how we amarate absolute poverty which it should be a concern for leftists but doesn't seem to be anymore by the way and also an argument for the maintenance of a necessary inequality like I'm not sure that inequality can be decreased Beyond a certain degree without that decrease causing other serious problems and we can talk about that but but it's a complicated problem yeah let for one point of clarification when you say leftist what do you mean by that well we I was going with your definition like essentially that the this the core idea being something like the the central problem being one of relative inequality and distribution of resources and the central solution to that being something like state sponsored economic intervention I mean there's other ways we could Define left or right and we do that but but I'll stick with the one that you brought forward to begin with gotcha gotcha okay I I only want to be clear on that because um uh because people get mad if I call myself fpst um often times online or in especially in Europe or worldwide leftists will uh refer exclusively to like socialists or communists and anybody to the right of that would be considered like a liberal if you usually a fascist well depending very rapidly yeah yeah um I just wanted to be clear on that uh so I'm absolutely a pro capitalist Pro premarket guy um I'm not I'm never going to okay okay okay okay okay well that that's good it's good to get that clear why yeah um because uh I would argue that when you look at like the fall of the Soviet Union or you look at the fail failure of like socialist or communist regimes uh I don't know if the issue there was so much redistribution I think the problem that was one of many issues I don't think it was an issue at all actually I would say I think the issue was uh Commander wait a wait wait a minute what what do you mean redistribution wasn't an issue what the hell do you think they did to the kulac that was forced redistribution it resulted in the in the death of six million people so maybe I'm not understanding what you mean but that was redistribution at its at its like Pinnacle and forced redistribution was brutal when I when I think of the um when I think of the strengths of capitalism um the ability for markets to dynamically respond to shifting consumer demand is like the reason why capitalism and free market economies dominate the world when you've got socialist or communist systems uh command economies where a government is trying to say this is how much this is going to cost this is how much you're going to produce and make the this is a failed way of managing a state economy even in places where they still do it there are always Shadow economies and stuff they were in the Soviet Union that prop up where people tried to uh basically amarate the conditions that are resulting from said horrible command economy practices uh so I guess in a way you could argue a command economy is kind of like redistribution it's a form of it but no it's a worse problem I if you're if you're pointing to the fact that that's a worst problem I'm I'm I would say that's definitely the reason why these places uh failed because they just weren't able to respond to changing okay so what's the difference between going online without expressvpn is like leaving your kids with the nearest 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extra 3 months free that's expressvpn.com Jordan okay so what's the difference between a state that attempts to redistribute to Foster equality of opportunity and and a command economy is it is it a difference of degree like are you looking at models let's say like the Scandinavian countries or I wouldn't use Canada by the way because Canada is now uh what would you call predicted predicted by economic analysis analysts to have the worst performing economy for the next four Decades of all the developed world so maybe we'll just leave the example of Canada off the table Scandinavian countries are often the polies that are pointed to by I would say by people who at least in part are putting forward a view of redistribution for purposes of equality of opportunity like you are but they're a strange analogy because they're very small countries and up till now they were very ethnically homogeneous exactly and that makes a big difference when you're trying to flatten out the redistribution plus they're also incredibly wealthy which makes you know redistribution let's say a lot easier so so so so what's why why doesn't the government that's bent on redistribution fall prey to the pitfalls of command economy and and forced redistribution for that matter how do you how do you protect against that I I think you have to do is very very very difficult is people get very ideologically captured by both ends and they feel very uh I guess like committed or they feel very Allegient to pushing certain forms of economic organization and I think sometimes it blinds them to some of the benefits of what exists when you incorporate kind of multiple models or I mean you'd call them mixed economies which is really what every capitalist economy today is it's some form of free market capitalism combined with some form of like government intervention to control for negative externalities these are the ways that all economies even in Scandinavia in the world work and I think that recognizing the benefits of both systems are the best way to yeah make work fair enough and and the Scandinavian countries seem to have done a pretty good job of that like I said they have a simpler problem to solve let's say than the Americans have negative externalities that's a you know that's an interesting Rabbit Hole to wander down because the problem I have with negative externalities you made a case already that and again correct me if I've got this wrong but I I think I think that I understood what you said um a free market free exchange economy is a gigantic distributed computational device basically yeah right exactly enough one of the big problems for command economies is called the computation problem because no central body can actually compute you know the right exactly right that that's not yeah that's that's a fatal problem right because it doesn't have the computational power it certainly doesn't have the the speed of data recognition it doesn't have on the on the ground agents if if all of the perception and decision- making is centralized right it's way too low resolution it's going to crash okay so and I think that that's comprehensible technically as well as ideologically all right so but having said that with regards to externalities all the externalities that a market economy can't compute are so complex that they can't be determined centrally by the same argument and so there are ways to account for them though really that work with tell me how I can't see that because I can't see how that they they can be accounted for without the same computational problem immediately arising yeah and I understand that and I think that's a problem sometimes of people very far on the left when they want to deal with certain problems uh I think that they want to bring like heavy-handed you know like things like price controls in to say well we need less of this so let's just make this cost this particular thing which ironically enough introduces a whole other set of externalities that will happen when you get a lot of friction between where your price floor or ceiling is set compared to what a market was set it at but ideally if you're a reasonable person and you view economies as mixed economies what you try to do is you try to take these externalities meaning things that aren't accounted for with your primary system so in a capitalist system an externality might be something that cause a negative effect but it doesn't cost you any money pollution would be a good example of that and rather than saying like well no company can pollute this much or you know if you're a company you have to use these things because we the other things are making too much pollution all you do is you say okay well if we've determined that say carbon is bad for the atmosphere we're just going to attach a little price to that government is going to say that yeah if you pollute this much here's the price and then if you want to pay for it you can but that type of uh intervention in the economy basically allows the free market to hopefully do its job because the government has tacked on a little bit of a price that it tries to account for the cost of that externality yeah great that's a great example we can go right down that rabbit hole carbon okay so first of all um one of the things I've seen you tell me what you think about this something that I've seen that actually shocks me that I was interested in watching over the last five or six years I wondered what would happen when the left the progressives ran into a conundrum and the conundrum is quite straightforward if you pursue carbon pricing and you make energy more expensive then you hurt the poor and I don't think you just hurt them in fact I know you don't you just don't hurt them I heard a man two days ago who's fed 350 million people in the course of his life um heading the un's largest relief agency make the claim quite straightforwardly that that misappropriation on the part of inter interventionist governments increased the rate of absolute privation dramatically in in the world over the last four or five years and not and that has happened not least because of carbon pricing not just carbon pricing but the insistence that carbon per se is an externality that we should control now Germany's paid a radical price for that for example so their power is now about five times as expensive as it could be and they pollute more per unit of power than they did 10 years ago before they introduced these policies that were hypothetically there to account for externality and the externality was carbon dioxide I don't think that's a computable externality and I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever that it's actually an externality that we should be warping the economic system to ameliorate if the cost of that and it will be will be an increase in absolute privation among the world's poor so and here's a here's an additional argument on that front with regards to externalities you get that wrong and here's something you could get right in said if you ameliorate absolute poverty among the world's 1 billion billion poorest they take a longer view of the future and that means they become environmentally aware and so the fastest route to a sustainable Planet could well be the remediation of absolute poverty and the best route to that is cheap energy and we're interfering with the development of cheap energy by meddling with the hypothetically detrimental externality of carbon dioxide and so it's it's I think this is a complete bloody travesty by the way we are putting the lives of hundreds of millions of people directly at risk right now to hypothetically save people in the future depending on the accuracy of our projections a 100 years out and these these interventionists these people who are remediating externalities they actually believe that they can calculate an economic projection one century out that's utterly delusional so okay so just as a to be clear the first thing I was just giving an example of how you can use like a government intervention to make a free market track something which which is what C and trade or like carbon taxes would do um I wasn't necessarily speaking to the strength of that individual thing but yeah but that's a good thing to focus on externality we can focus on that as well so um the first thing uh this is going to sound mean uh but I'm you know I'm very realistic uh there needs to be a better argument than just it disproportionately impacts the poor classic leftist argument it might be right but it's the same argument you made to justify your swing to the left at the beginning of our discussion you said that you were looking at economic inequalities that disproportionately affected the poor so I can't see why and I'm not trying to be mean about this either I can't see why you could base your argument that it was moral it was morally appropriate for you to swing to the left from your previous position because you saw disproportionate effects on the poor and I can't use that ARG arent in the situation that I'm presenting it right now well because it depends on if we think it's a condition that ought to be remedied or not for instance if I walk you know around and I see homeless people and I'm like man this is really sad we ought to spend more home money on homeless people because it seems like they're disproportionately affected by their living conditions and then somebody says oh well do you think we should still lock up you know rapists and murderers aren't they disproportionately poor I'd probably say well yeah we probably should go well isn't that hypocritical well no I think that rapist and murderers should probably be in jail but we can also help the homeless at the same time I think that just helping the poor isn't an argument like a blank check to do every possible thing to satisfy poor people it's going to depend from that's fine because the poor everyone who's poor is not a victim some people who are poor are Psychopathic perpetrators and it's very useful to distinguish them but I was making a much more specific argument my argument was that the fastest way out of absolute privation for the world's bottom billion people is through cheap energy yeah I I understand what you're saying there so just towards that um yeah I just want to say that just because something targets the poor is not necessarily an argument against it another depends on how hard it targets them and it depends on whether Mass starvation is the outcome the outcome is important that I agree with so for instance like a syntax outcome will be masturation I'm get to it okay syntaxes on like cigarettes and alcohol are always going to disproportionately impact the poor or even sugar we might say right but just because that disproportionately impacts the poor is that a good thing or a bad thing these are probably the people that suffer the most from those particular afflictions right right and that is an immediate versus delayed issue too right because the reason I mean obesity is an immediate I don't think Al the reason for the tax is is to stop people from Pur pursuing a certain form of short-term gratification at the cost of their longer term well-being correct and that that that exact same idea if you believe climate models or if you believe that we're heading in a certain direction uh in terms of climate the overall warming of the planet would be the same argument you would make for climate change if you believe that you could model Economic Development 100 years into the future well we're not trying to model we we're more concerned with modeling climate development economic developmentally no well okay tell tell me how I'm wrong I don't believe that because what I see happening is two things we have climate models that purport to explain what's going to happen over a century on the climate side but we have economic models layered right on top of those that claim that there's going to be various forms of disaster for human beings economically as a consequence of that climate change and so that's like two towers of Babel stacked on top of one another and so because if if people were just saying oh the climate's going to change there'd be no moral impetus in that it's the climate's going to change and that's going to be disastrous for the biosphere and for Humanity but that's an economic argument as well as a climate based argument it's it's both but the the worst the worst projections of what would happen if the climate took a disastrous turn are worse than the worst projections of what is our planet going to look like economically if we hardcore police why would you okay but understand the distinction between the models well the argument would be that whatever pain and suffering poor people might endure right now because of a move towards green energy that pain and suffering is going to be short-term and far less than the long-term pain and suffering right but that's dependent on the Integrity of the economic models and the and and the climate models as well right exactly but that but in exactly the Stacked manner that I described and like there's nobody in 1890 who could have predicted what was going to happen in 19 90 economically not not a bit not a bit and and if we think we can predict like 50 years out now with the current rate of technology and calculate the potential impact of climate change on economic flourishing for human beings we're diluted no one can do that and then and so and it's worse so imagine that as you do that and you project outward your margin of error increases that's absolutely definitely the case and at some point you're certainly on the climate side the margin of error gets rapidly to the point where it subsumes any estimate of the degree to which the climate is going to transform and that happens even more rapidly on the economic side potentially right now I think right now this is a disagreement on the fact of the matter though not the philosophy of what we're talking about in terms of controlling externalities if we think I'm so I'm curious let's say that we think we can accurately predict the climate and the economic impact and we think that the climate impact would be far worse if we don't account for that both in terms of human conditions I don't believe any of those presumptions I think but but I mean like obviously if I agreed with that that factual analysis I would probably agree with you on the prescription here too right and like none of the climate models were accurate couldn't accurately predict well they're not sufficiently accurate that's the first thing and SEC because they have a margin of error and it's a large margin of error they don't even model cloud coverage well that's a big problem they don't have the resolution they don't have nearly the resolution to produce the accuracy that's claimed by the climate apocalypse mongers saying that but we just got another one of the hottest years on record how many times are we going to have another hottest year on record how many times are we going to have an increase of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere before we're finally like okay I don't know and the the reason I don't know is because it depends the scientific answer to that question depends precisely on the time frame over which you evaluate the climate fluctuation and that's actually an intractable scientific problem so you might say well if you take the last 100 years this variation looks pretty disal and I'd say well what what if you took the last 150,000 years or the last 10,000 or the last 10 million you can't specify the damn the time frame is incredibly important that would be like saying look at your you know uh let's say somebody developed cancer and they didn't realize it and the person is lost you know 40 or 50 pounds in in the past six months and like you you look very sickly and you're like okay well look at my weight fluctuation over the past 10 years say well it doesn't really matter what matters saying the time frame isn't important saying that it is important saying don't know how to specify it well you would probably specify with the beginning of the Industrial Age right why because when that's when carbon dioxide which is a gas is trapping uh more heat on the plan why is that relevant to the time over which you compute the variability because it seems like as carbon dioxide has increased in the atmosphere the surface temperatures have risen at a rate that is a departure from what we'd expect over 150,000 year cycles of temperature variations on the planet no not with that time frame that not the case absolutely the case no what do you mean you just flipped to 150,000 to your time span what I'm saying is that if if we expect to see a temperature do this in 150,000 year time span in a 100e time span seeing it do this that's very worrying Michael man's hockey stick the one that's under attack right now in court by a major statistician who claimed that he falsified his data mean that Spike the I'm talking about the record temperatures that are declared that have been declared for like the past five years that have also increased with the uh with the concentration of parts per million of carbon dioxide of the atmosphere um I mean I'm going to tell you that every model is perfect right now sure but right now we're like standing in traffic with our eyes closed saying the car hasn't hit me yet so I don't think there's any coming I think it's pretty undeniable at this point that there is an impact on climate across the planet I just I think that's highly deniable we have no idea what the impact is from we don't know where the carbon dioxide is from we can't measure the warming of the oceans we have terrible temperature records going back 100 years almost all the terrestrial temperature uh uh uh detection sites were first put outside urban areas and then as right and then you have to correct then you have to correct for the for the movement of the urban areas and then you introduce an error parameter that's larger than the purported increase in temperature that you're planning to measure this isn't data this is guess and there's something weird underneath it there's something weird that isn't oriented well towards human beings underneath it it has this guise of compassion oh we're going to save the poor in the future it's like that's what the bloody commun said and they killed a lot of people doing it and we're walking down that same road now with this insistence that you know we're so compassion that we care about the poor a 100 years from now and if we have to wipe out several hundred million of them now well that's a small price to pay for the future Utopia and we've heard that sort of thing before and the alternative to that is for is to stop having global level Elites plot out a utopian future or even an anti- dystopian future and that's exactly what's happening now with organizations like the wef and if this wasn't immediately impacting the poor in a devastating manner I wouldn't care about it that much but it is you know I watched over the course of The Last 5 Years the estimates of the number of people who were in serious danger of food privation rise from about 100 million to about 350 million that's a major price to pay for a little bit of what what would you say for for progress on the climate that's so narrow it can't even be measured I don't think the increase in in hungry people on the in the planet is because of climate policies why not because I don't think that countries in Africa are being pushed away from fossil fuels the most developing course they are they can't even get they can't even get loans from the World Bank to produ pursue fossil fuel development and there's plenty of African leaders who are screeching at the top of their lungs about that because the Elites in the west have decided that well it was okay for us to use fossil fuel for so that we wouldn't have to starve death and our children had some opportunities but maybe the starving masses that are too large a load for the world anyways shouldn't have that opportunity and that's that's direct policy from the UN fostered by organizations like the W wef they're going to have to turn to Renewables yeah well good luck with that because Renewables have no energy density besides that they're not renewable and they're not environmentally friendly and then one more thing there's one more weird thing underneath all of this okay well let's say if carbon dioxide was actually your bug bear and it was genuine well then why wouldn't the greens for example in Africa the progressives be agitating to expand the use of nuclear nuclear energy especially because Germany has to import it anyways especially because France has demonstrated that it's possible we could drive down the cost of energy with lowcost nuclear and there'd be no carbon production and then the poor people would have something to eat because they'd have enough energy and that isn't what's happening and that's one of the things that makes me extreme ly skeptical of the entire narrative it's like two things the left will sacrifice the poor to save the planet and the left will de-industrialized even at the nuclear level despite the fact that it devastates the poor and that's even worse because if you devastate the poor and you force them into a short-term orientation in any given country where starvation beckons for example they will cut down all the trees and they will kill down all the animals and they will destroy the ecosphere and so even by the standards of the people who are pushing the carbon dioxide externality control all the consequences of that Doctrine appear to me to be devastating even by their own measurement principles we're trying to fix the environment well boys and girls doesn't look like it's working all you've managed to do is make energy five times as expensive and more polluting you were wrong that didn't work and so and I can't understand you can help me that's why you're here today talking to me I can't understand how the left can support this just one quick thing let's say that everything you've said is true what do you think is the plan that what is the goal what is the drive like why push why push obviously horrible ideas for the planet and the poor that's a good question that's a good question do well because you're positive it right so what what do you think is the driver goal well I listen to what people say here's the most terrible thing they say there are too many people on the planet okay so who says that I've heard people say that for 30 years perfectly ordinary compassionate people well there's too many people on the planet and I think well for me that's like hearing Satan himself take possession of their spine and and move their mouth it's like okay who are these excess people that you're so concerned about and exactly who has to go and when and why and how and who's going to make that decision and even if you don't even if you're not conscious ly aiming at that you are the one who uttered the words you're the ones who muttered the phrase what makes you think that the thing that possessed you to make you utter that words isn't aiming at exactly what you just declared and so that's you know that's a terrible Vision but when you look at what happens in genocidal societies and they emerge fairly with Fair regularity and usually with the utopian Vision at hand the consequence is the mass destruction of millions of people so why should I assume that something horrible isn't lurking like that right now especially given that we have pushed a few hundred million of people back into absolute poverty when we were doing a pretty damn good job of getting rid of that and I just don't understand what's happening in Germany or in the UK like it's insane like look man if they would have got rid of the nuclear plants and made energy five times as expensive and the consequence would have been they weren't burning leg night coal as a backup and their unit production of energy of pollution per unit of energy had plummeted you could say well look you know we heard a lot of poor people but at least the air is cleaner it's like NOP air is worse and everyone's poorer so like the explain to me how the hell the left can be anti-nuclear okay I don't understand it at all gotcha all right um this is something that I brought up earlier that is concerning to me um I feel like when people people get political beliefs I feel like what happens is what we think happens what we hope happen is you have some moral or philosophical underpinning and then from there you combine this with some epistemic understanding of the world and then you combine these two things you engage in some form of analysis and your moral be nice if that was true yeah you start to apply like prescription so maybe I'm religious maybe I analyze society and I see that uh particular TV shows lead to premarital sex so my societal prescription is we should ban these TV shows right ideally this is how you would imagine this process works what I find happens unfortunately all too often is what people do is they join social groups and then with those social groups they inherit something that I call like a constellation of beliefs and this constellation of beliefs instead of rationally building on each of these you basically get this like Jenga tower that is like floating over a table and every block is like supporting itself and no real part of the tower can be addressed because you pull out one piece it all falls apart so people become like very stuck in all of this combined constellation stuff and none of it is really given like any analysis and you can't really push anybody from from one way or another uh in terms of like reevaluating any of the beliefs that are part of this constellation um I wish I would have I that's fine right sleep is the foundation of our mental and physical health you must have a consistent nighttime routine to function at your best if you're struggling with sleep you need to check out beam it's not just your run-of-the-mill sleep AIT it's a concoction carefully crafted to help you rest without the grogginess that often accompanies other sleep remedies several people on our team use beam's dream powder to sleep better through the night and show up ready for work other sleep aids can cause next day grogginess but dream contains a powerful allnatural blend of raichi magnesium Eline appenine and melatonin to help you fall asleep stay asleep and wake up refreshed now available in delicious flavors like cinnamon cocoa chocolate peanut butter and mint chip better sleep has never tasted better and today our listeners get a special discount on beam's dream powder their science-backed healthy hot cocoa for sleep with no added sugar better sleep has never tasted better just mix beam dream into hot water or milk stir or froth and enjoy before bedtime if you find yourself struggling to sleep give it a shot get up to 40% off for a limited time when you go to shop beam.com Peterson and use code Peterson at checkout that's shop bam.com Peterson and use code Peterson for 40% [Music] off that's fine that's right well you know there are models now of there are models now of cognitive processing belief belief system processing that make the technical claim that what a belief system does is constrain entropy sure that's not surprising at all okay so and now now the signal for for released entropy which would be a consequence of say violated fundamental beliefs is a radical increase in anxiety right and a decrease in the possibility of positive emotion and so people will struggle very hard against that which is exactly the phenomena that you're describing okay I agree with what you said although so here's here's my yeah so I'm not sure why it's relevant to what to the issue I was here here's my issue okay so when I'm trying to evaluate a situation like to think that I have some uh I've got some insulation from the effects of what liberals think or what conservatives think is because on my platform I don't necessarily have an allegiance to a particular political ideology like right now I'm like Center left to Progressive but I break really hard from Progressive on certain issues I think Kyle Rittenhouse is in the right I think basically everything you guys are doing with indigenous people is insane uh including the complete Mass grave hoax uh I think that I'm a big supporter of the Second Amendment uh I have beliefs where I can break from my side you know pretty hardcore because I am not like Legion to certain political ideology one thing that worries me with this constellation beliefs thing is that sometimes when it comes to evaluating a particular policy or a particular problem I feel like it's part of the constellation and sometimes it inhibits people from like taking a step back and reasonably thinking about the issue so when we're talking about climate change you mentioned the WF sacrificing tons of people the UN Global Elites uh five times energy cost in Germany uh genocidal people I feel like this is part of like a whole thing where it's like okay well let's take a quick step back and let's just like think rationally about this particular issue for one moment okay well you asked me what the motivation for anti-poor policies might be so that's why I was well I did but but I got all of those things before I even asked that question um because I think it's totally possible that somebody might say okay well when you put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere it seems to cause an increase in surface temperatures this has been happening from about the 1800s and as we've started to track surface temperatures whether the thermometer is on top of the Empire State Building or in the middle of the field it seems like there's an average rise in temperatures and people all around the world are observing this in some places more than others if you live in Seattle and 20 years ago your apartment building wasn't built with air conditioner units you feel that now if you live in place in London and you've never had an air condition before now that's not acceptable I think that people on the ground can see that there are changes and I think that scientists when they look in Labs can see changes it might be that some models aren't precise enough and it might be that for reasons we don't even understand well the economic models certainly aren't precise enough sure maybe maybe maybe they can't even use them to predict the price of a single stock for 6 months the economic model models are not sufficiently accurate to calculate out the consequences of climate change over a century not in the Le when you I I like the comparison because economic models can't predict individual stocks but they do predict the rough rise of the market if you invest in the s for the cataclysmic collapse nope even with the cataclysmic collapse accounted for you're going to see about 7% Returns on average with inflation over long call an average a very sophisticated model analogous to climate change that's the difference between climate and weather though right is that climate isn't going to tell you what the temperature is on a given day but it might tell you the average surface temperature over a period of 1 year or 10 years and I that's the difference between climate and weather that's like it is a hypothetical but again we're seeing more and more and more data every single year that getting let's jump out of our cloud of presuppositions for a minute sure now one of the things that no wait I want to say there are there are some things that we've gotten as a result of investing in green energy that have been good so for instance uh the power of solar energy has dropped dramatically in the United States faster than anybody thought possible such that uh uh solar energy is like competitive or beating fossil fuels in certain areas if as long as you can set the solar panels up you're literally beating fossil as long as the sun is shining well it's I mean it still is we're not a nuclear winter yet but it isn't when it's cloudy and it why depending on where you live there are places equatorial places if you're trying to set up a solar panel in uh in Seattle you know you might not have as much like or New York City might much or in Germany true also I think Canada there are also other issues that are coming up that I think are obfuscating our ability to evaluate what's being caused by Green energy works is not when we look at energy increases in Germany um I think there's a similar constellation around nuclear energy for instance people don't want nuclear energy because they think of nukes and they think of nuclear meltdowns and they think of Chernobyl and they think of Fukushima and they think of atomic bombs and that's it and that's stupid and I agree with you but nuclear energy is a totally viable alternative to other forms of why does the radical left oppose it you think it's just this m see you for for the for the same reason the right opposes vaccines because it sounds scary it's a big thing and they don't trust it it comes well the right has a reason to distrust vaccines in the aftermath of the covid debacle because they were imposed by force and that was a very you get to choose if you have a nuclear power plant that's imposed by force too no you don't get to choose where your energy comes from if you live in a country you just you turn the light switch and hopefully you don't have a Chernobyl that melts down in your particular town right well you get to choose it because you can buy it or not Choice it but the nobody had a choice with the vaccines nobody had a choice whether or not they lived near Chernobyl or not nobody's a choice there's a nuclear well how realistic is it to move like 500 miles that's like telling conservatives when uh Biden tried to do the ocean mandate for vaccines like well you just get a different job right I don't want to debate about whether or not large nuclear power plants are frightening they are and there are Technologies now where that's not a problem so so and and I think I don't I think that's a coun place for our disc to go because I also understand why people are afraid of it but what I don't understand for example is why the Germans shut down their nuclear power plants and The Californians are thinking and have doing the same thing when they have to import power from France anyways like it's complet burn coal which is a million times worse not just coal liite yeah right and then with regards to these Renewable Power sources they have a very they have a number of problems one is they're not en they're not energy dense they require tremendous infrastr structure to produce they're they might be renewable at the energy level but they're not renewable at the raw materials level so that's a complete bloody lie they're insanely variable in their power production and because of that you have to have a backup system and the backup system has to be reliable without variability and that means if you have a renewable grid you have to have a parallel fossil fuel or coal grid to back it up when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow which is unfortunately very very frequently and so again and so and I'm not going to say there's no place for renewable energy like solar and wind because maybe there are specific Niche locals where those are useful but the logical uh what would you say antidote to the problem of reliability if we're concerned about carbon but we're really not would be to use nuclear and the greens haven't been like flying their bloody flags for 30 years saying well we could use fossil fuels for fertilizer and feed people and we could use nuclear power to drive energy costs down in a carbon dioxide free manner that seems pretty bloody self-evident to me and so then it brings up this other mystery that we were talking about earlier you know what's the impetus behind all this because the cover story is oh we care about carbon dioxide which I don't think they do especially given the willingness to sacrifice the poor it makes no sense to me and I think it's relevant to the issue you brought up which is that people have these constellations of ideas and there's a driving force in the midst of them so to speak they're not necessarily aware of what that driving force is don't we isn't it more likely that people are either misinformed or misgui
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