What are the pillars of our civilisation? with Rafe Champion - The Shape of Dialogue #48

He might be right and I might be wrong, and if we back an effort, we might get closer to the truth.

Getting back to critical rationalism is all about maintaining a critical approach and exchanging our ideas with people of different views,

but if people are cancelled, they can't speak. I have no voice. It eliminates criticism, and as I've said many times, our heritage is all a mixture of good and bad,

and we must retain the ability to apply imaginative criticism to all aspects elements of our heritage, and if we lose that capacity, the bad will drive out the good.

Welcome to the Shape of Dialogue. Today, I'm talking to the Australian Philosopher, Rafe Champion.

Rafe is a Tasmanian farm boy, turned a Pistomological Philosopher, and is a proponent of cow-poppers' ideas on how we know what we know and the best pathways to knowledge.

Rafe is one of the world's leading preparing philosophers, and at the age of 80 is still sharp as a tack.

We discuss what Rafe calls the five pillars of peace, freedom, and prosperity upon which a thriving civilisation is based.

Critical rationalism is articulated by Karl Popper, the principles of classical or non-collectivist liberalism in politics,

in economics the importance of free trade, entrepreneurialism, and a market underpinned by the rule of law.

A moral framework founded on honesty, compassion, civility, personal responsibility, community service, and enterprise, and finally, energy, an abundant, reliable, and cheap source of energy.

And now I give you Rafe Champion.

Welcome to the Shape of Dialogue, Rafe. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Well, I'm delighted to be here and make science a society.

Yes.

Well, it is a true honour to be speaking to you.

But before we get into the meat of what we're going to be talking about today, who is Rafe Champion?

And what's his history? What does he do if you can just briefly outline?

Well, a Tasmanian farm boy, or a dairy farm, went to a private school through Tasmanian University doing agricultural science.

I did postgraduate work, I've received an Adelaide, and I've changed the social sciences, and I did a lot of work in policy and planning in health and welfare.

With a passionate interest in popper on the sides, I popper was always boiling and wiring the background.

And in return, I've been able to get really thoroughly involved with popper and the Austrians and climate and energy issues.

Right. Right. And you have a website.

It's the rat house. The gnane came from the Great Hall in Vienna, which was one of the venues for the popper centenary conference.

And it's called the Rath House.

So that train of those in an Australian fashion into the rat house.

Right. Yeah, I was wondering why the name, you know.

Okay, that's great.

So we're going to be talking about essentially the foundational principles,

independent well functioning societies, which is actually the premise of the shape of dialogue.

That's what I'm most interested in.

And you've written a subset article called Five Pillars of Peace Freedom and Prosperity, which articulates those principles.

So what are those five principles?

Well, they're all foundational principles because they like vitamins and you've got to have all of them.

Like you can't just miss out on one and make up for it by having more of the others.

And it gets to be the four until I got involved in energy.

And our ability is that abundant and affordable energy has to be included as a pillar.

Because it's all about energy in addition to everything else.

And also because that pillar is under deep threat from forces that are determined to make us go down a road towards wind and solar, which is what isn't going to work.

So that's how they had to come in as a fifth pillar to be protected.

Yeah. So starting from the beginning, which was called Popper's Critic Rationalism,

that's the common factor of his science and his political philosophy.

Many people say it wasn't force of occasion and revolutionary science advances, not at odds with piecemeal engineering or reform in society.

But yes or no, because critical rationalism underpinns them both.

Well, can you start by telling us what critical rationalism is?

If it's summed up in one of Popper's two nutshells, it's the attitude that you might be right and I might be wrong.

And if we make an effort, we might get closer to the truth.

There's a wealth of epistemological argument behind that, but that's a simple, that's something you say that to anyone.

You have to go into a test, you have to go into a technical philosophy.

That's what you're going to say to someone, if you're going to have a really serious, useful discussion.

So yeah, so it's an awareness that we both can fall short of the truth, but in a sense our collective endeavours.

And we'll collect it in the larger community.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, and so we can't have to first fill up.

Yes, no, but we're just drilling down on that.

So give me an example of the society that doesn't have that.

Well, practically any type of territory in society, and also any person that's in a grip of some dogmatism.

Which is most people would invite or clearly go, we're all in it to some extent.

So we're all out to admit to human frailty and falling short as just of the best.

But typically, totalitarian societies and fanatical people are the ones we most clearly exhibit the lack of critical rationalism.

Yeah, yeah. So I can't feel like Iran wouldn't be steeped in critical rationalism.

And of course, it's also a matter that you get to the religions and face.

Christianity at its best will make allowance rather than people's frailtries and follies.

Some other religions are quite unforgiving.

Islam.

That's the one that screams tomorrow.

Yeah.

You don't go against Islam.

And what's the state of our critical rationalism in the West?

There's no.

There's no.

It's particularly in the universities where you most expect to find it.

Well, that's, isn't that the point of the university? Shouldn't that be the fundamental point of the university?

It'd be to be rational and critical.

Absolutely.

I read Miyemun on the function of a university or something, as an undergraduate.

And I read Barzone on the house of intellect.

Which is about what universities are about.

And today, I just wondered how far you have to go back to find the point where our places like the academies of science and the uni's stopped.

And hearing to those principles, you go, it's probably 50 years ago.

They got off the track.

They were taken over by a large content-free managers with ideological agendas.

You were almost saying that your cohort back in the 70s was one of the last cohorts to all universities to be functioning.

Oh, sorry.

In a rational fashion.

If you talk to younger people who even went there in the 70s,

and they had lost sight of what a university could be like ten years earlier.

What's your, what are you basing that on?

Are you involved in the universities?

Well, I was there.

I was at Tabart, you know, Tazioni through the early 60s.

Adelaide University in the later 60s.

And the University of New South Wales in the early 70s.

So I got the full, pretty well, a ten-year moralist, continuous exposure.

And so the change was going on at the moment of food.

Right, right.

So when did you leave the universities?

Well, in the 80s.

I went back and did another course in the 80s.

And I did another course, history and philosophy of science at Sydney University in the late 90s, in the 90s.

So I've never been far away from the university course.

So when you did that in the 90s?

I mean, you did a course and that was a legitimate course?

Oh, no.

It was good.

No, that's not the whole university.

Yeah, there's this, that's like the cure at the end.

It's good and bad in patches.

Right.

And I stuck a good patch at Sydney University because the course was led by Alan Charmers.

Charmers came to Sydney in the 70s and he was a full-on popperie and when he turned up,

hadn't been directly taught by popover.

He had fully incorporated poppers and ideas.

And one of those things was when you meet people so slowly to say, what's your problem?

What are you working on?

But he found in the social circles here that saying, what's your problem?

It was a very aggressive thing.

So he quickly learned and he soon stopped taking that.

But he also found out that the world was full of people who didn't know popper that much.

Right, I didn't know him at all.

He went through a period of all those zeroing Marxism actually.

He moved and we hardly avoid moving in left wing circles because it was all going to the left.

So he turned up in a department and there'd be split between them.

So you're, you're undermining that the universities are moving or have moved.

They moved long ago.

Right.

So the monolithic and the way they think.

I know, as I say, this stand out scholars here and there.

There's some departments here and there.

As I said, it's good and bad in patches.

If you were going to put a percentage on the divide, what would it be?

It's also about 4 to 94.

Right.

So it basically is monolithic because it's hard to function.

It's a minority.

The practical purpose is it's monolithic.

Well, that is not great news.

Now, politics.

The principles of classical and non-collective liberalism.

Well, that is a suite of freedoms.

All the equal freedoms, speech, movement, association, belief, particularly speech, association.

Why is speech so important?

Well, because it's like the energy supply, it's under deep and profound threat.

No, but why is it important as a foundational principle?

Why should a society have free speech?

Well, getting back to critical rationalism is all about maintaining a critical approach

and exchanging ideas with people who have different views.

But if people are cancelled, they can't speak.

They have no voice.

So if I say something wrong and I'm in power, you can't criticize me and I can't correct.

And let's say I have control of policy and you're not allowed to correct it.

It eliminates criticism.

And as I've said many times, our heritage can intellect your legal institution.

It's all a mixture of good and bad.

And we must retain the ability to apply imaginative criticism to all aspects, elements of our heritage.

And if we live that capacity, the bad will drive out the good.

Yeah, I like that term imaginative criticism.

Yeah, because you have to be creative in the way you engage with arguments.

On big on the creative function of criticism.

The exciting in the creative function of criticism, what do you mean by that?

It comes about from my or proper theory of evolutionary epistemology,

where you make progress by generating variations in nature.

The variations of form and structure, intellectually we get to generate variations on our ideas.

And typically we need new ideas.

And one way of getting new ideas is to effectively criticize an old idea.

So you create a problem.

So the problem becomes a niche to be occupied by new ideas, a ton of new ideas.

Yeah, I like that concept of worst case scenario.

You just take an existing idea and criticize it.

And that is a creative process.

Absolutely.

And as I've looked by people who think criticism is done on boring,

and people are critics are like school teachers, they can't actually do anything.

It's a conceit of the so-called creative people.

Right, right.

So I mean, this is from your article.

Under the principles of classical and non-flective liberalism,

set of freedoms including freedom of speech, assembly movement, religious belief, etc.

Equal opportunity under the law.

So that's fundamental.

Yeah.

Why is that fundamental?

Well, we don't want any groups to be marginalized.

But everybody has to have a go.

Black, white and brindle, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

At due process, protection and protection of property rights.

Yeah.

I mean, as soon as you lose the right to your own property, what's left?

So you don't think, say, an extreme Marxist situation

where the government has rights over your property and can take it.

It doesn't have to be extreme.

We got to Australia where farmers, land rights have been eroded, left and right,

on so-called environmental grounds.

Right.

Candleously.

So one side is instrumentalizing environmental philosophy

to actually remove property rights from farmers.

100%.

Yeah.

Okay.

Laws applied to individuals, not groups.

Yes.

But if some race or class got a bad deal some time, the descendants of those groups have

no particular rights.

I mean, they get the same rights as everybody else.

But they've got no reparations.

Yeah.

And the other thing is if someone is bad or good in a group, well, that's them.

You just attempt to create a whole group.

You just a band and group think.

Or race thinking as Barz is called it.

So again, race thinking.

Yeah.

Barz is coined the term of race thinking, which was a way of stigmatizing some groups

and elevating others like the chosen people.

So you think of the Aryan race as a chosen people.

And you think of the say the Jewish race as vermin.

And that way all the Germans are going to be good and all the others are going to be bad.

It's happening in China, in the cultural revolution, reds and blacks.

So you can go black here, but vermin, if you're red, you're okay.

And that can ignore the move with the blacks.

How good, virtuous and industrious or helpful I wear those blacks.

Would you say the similar thing is going on?

I'm not saying it's to the same extreme, but indigenous cultures around the world are considered sacred.

And non-indigenous particularly the European descendants of colonialists are considered bad.

Well, it's a replication of the cultural war in China and it's just different groups.

It's absolutely the same process.

Same process.

Laws should not discriminate for or against people in any social, ethical, religious group.

I mean, that's pretty much what we've been talking about.

That's just foundational to a decent society.

And the classical liberalism, the individual, is the key unit of a society.

Yes, the unit of a society.

Yes, I've actually heard mothers criticize that, saying that it's unsurprisingly male perspective.

Because when they say when they have a baby, they realize they're not just an individual.

Oh, well, a lot of politics, the mother and child.

Except when the child is dependent.

But they're in it.

Yeah, they're in it.

And economics, free trade, tempered by sensible regulations that don't reward rent seeking by special interests.

So why is free trade important?

Well, it's just like free speech.

You want to be able to buy, sell and swap across boundaries.

Yes, and across anyone, in the sense.

Yeah.

And why is that good for society?

Well, you just maximize the gains of trade.

People, we buy it when to sell and swap.

And in a good deal, both a buyer and seller will be happy, so happy with the deal.

Free trade is like free speech.

You're given tokens and coins and stuff to get stuff you want.

And I'll say you're better off.

So if I sell you this computer, you're better off because you have a computer.

And I'm better off because I had the money and I value the money more than I value the computer.

If that's an uncovered transaction, it means that transaction is free.

What comes to mind for me about free trade is creativity.

It allows people to be creative.

And as I see it, the more creative people can be, the more productive they're going to be,

and the more benefit they're going to be to each other.

If the evolution thing again, an opportunity to trade is a niche.

You go to the market and there's opportunities there.

And they're there in front of you, but there's another level of creativity,

where you create stuff.

You can, and it's good on that.

But the point is that you create value by making and trading.

And put everybody's entrepreneur to some extent and trying to improve their situation.

And you just maximize entrepreneurial flair by giving people the opportunity to trade.

The opportunity to trade.

I would say you make value for other people.

Absolutely.

It's not an uncovered transaction that you're creating value out of you.

And so that's adding to the general value in society.

And that translates to material value.

We live in better houses, we live in better communities, better cars, everything's better in a sense.

So in the crude terms of, for the enterprise economists, we create wealth.

And if you've got a puritanical background like I, there's some species of wealth.

But it's a wealth is just something you can use for a good or bad.

And if you ever want more bridges or hospitals or disability services,

you just better get more wealth to provide them.

The question is, do you want to be richer or poorer?

And I would say most people would want to be richer.

And you know, do you want more infrastructure or less?

Do you want better roads or worse roads?

Absolutely.

Austrian economics.

Now, I would say, even people who are interested in economics, even economists, don't know what Austrian economics is.

I think the class I looked was about five percent of economists could be classified.

So you could spend a whole career in economics and never see or even hear about an Austrian economist.

Yes, well, I've met economists and I've mentioned Austrian economics and they've got, no, and these are very smart people.

And they've got no idea what I'm talking about.

Of course.

So what is Austrian economics about?

Well, I started in Austria, but it's mostly in America these days.

But Austrian economics, you can almost describe it in evaluation returns,

where it's about entrepreneurs going about their business in a framework of social institutions.

There's a subjective theory of value, but in a sense, if we're buying and selling your computer,

well, at that moment in time, some money has more value to you than the computer.

So that's your evaluation.

It's your evaluation. It's up to you to decide what things are worth at the moment.

And you trade on that basis.

Other economists try to create, there's a labor theory of value, where the value of that computer is,

somewhere rather, the aggregated value of all the human inputs to it.

And I worked that out on the farm.

You could see that if you're building a barn, you buy iron for the roof,

and then you go into woods and you chop poles.

It says there's a cost to the iron, there's a cost to the time in the poles.

And then there's a tractor.

I thought, this is harder to work out the cost of all inputs to that tractor.

Now, most regrettably, I did try to work out the cost of a cow.

But Minga, the founding father, used to go to the sale yards to report on the markets.

And one of his examples is the cost of cows and farm produce.

So I was only a whisker away from inventing Austrian economics at the age of eight.

He writes when you were a child.

Yeah, right, interesting.

And what did you, I'm interested at the age of eight, what did you conclude?

That was too hard.

Well, the reality is that the cost of a cow or a cost of a tractor, it's infinitely hard.

Too many parts.

There's too many parts and those parts have too many parts and those parts have too many parts.

That's what we're filming then.

Have you ever read the essay, Ipensal?

Yeah.

Here's it by again.

Has what?

Yeah, I'll put it in the show notes.

No, I'll tell you.

What I should have done was go under the sale yards with my father.

And I went there but I didn't pay any attention to a lot of noise, like the frantic bidding.

But I'm whatever I was there, the price of the cow or the father was the price he attached to it.

He decided it was a value.

Subjectively.

Subjectively.

Yeah.

So he wasn't doing any specific calculations in his head or if he was, they were in a sense

subjective.

Well, they were located in where he wanted what he wanted to do with the cow.

Did he want to breed or did he want to fatter?

So it would have been decided on the basis of the context.

This is another thing.

These things are context dependent.

Yeah, expand on that.

The price of water depends whether you're dying or not.

Or you're dying a certain amount.

Or in a dire thirst.

Yeah.

So water has a different, similarly diamonds normally have a lot of value, but if you're dying

a thirst, you don't have the water than the diamonds.

Yes, yes.

You would pay a million dollars for the water.

This thing about context dependency is very important because as a student, I thought of

the idea of human behavior as a series of context dependent rituals.

Yeah, I like that.

I like that.

Context dependent rituals.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's when it comes there.

In cricket.

And I just, you know, they were ritual.

Yeah.

Barbaros are ritual.

The empire is a ritual.

Everybody has rituals.

Yeah.

And I mean, we're participating in a ritual now.

Yeah.

In the sense.

Exchange.

And then, I mean, another word could just be an activity in the sense.

Yeah.

But it has its own contextual rules.

Of course.

And I think this gets us back to the Austrian economists that you're trying to go on in a

framework of traditions and institutions, including the law.

And the Austrians were the first to really get on to that institutional, or I had to

dismiss this properly.

But they're more serious about it, whereas here after the Second World War economist made

on mathematics in the Austrians, the Austrians were right up there in the 20s and 30s.

But when you say right out there, there was an end government policy.

They were thought they thought they were part of the orthodoxy.

And they were considered the orthodoxy.

Well, a part of classical economics, and it's overlapped, so some people call them classical,

stroke, economic, or Austrians, but the Keynesian revolution and the rise of mathematics and

agrogates.

And I was like, agrogates.

So we'd be back to agrogates.

So collectivism came in through Keynes.

Right.

So essentially an aggregate is a collectivist mindset.

Yeah.

Right.

Interesting.

Well, the Austrians were just disappeared.

It was overnight as a force in modern economics.

Particularly when the universities put up like mushrooms after World War II.

And that was all mathematical economics at that time.

What do you think of this theory?

Keynesianism, it has a synergy with government.

Yeah.

It's in government's interest to have Keynesian economics.

And vice versa, it's an economist who followed the Keynesian principles to have an interesting

government.

Perfect.

Million, you call them.

It's a synergistic relationship, I suppose.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Simbiotic.

Simbiotic, that's the word.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, I could go on all day about Austrian economics.

I suppose the one thing we haven't mentioned is Austrian economics is based on axioms.

Yeah.

That's difficult territory.

Yeah.

That's great.

But rather than sort of, in a way, Keynesian economics tries to predict the future in a sense.

Yeah.

They get all the numbers.

They crunch numbers.

And they will say, you know, XYZ is going to happen.

Which is happening all the time.

We hear what the expected inflation rate will be.

And, you know, as far as I'm aware, it's very rarely that they're actually correct.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, well, yeah, well, again, we could do a whole podcast on that, so we should move on.

Entrepreneurial initiatives in driving economic progress.

That gets back to the creative function of individuals.

In a sense, it's sort of a thawland connected, isn't it?

Yeah.

Because you start with the individual.

You allow them freedom.

Humans are naturally creative, you know, to different extent.

Right.

But even at a very basic level, you know, most people are creative in some way.

And then you allow that creativity to flourish by creating value.

Which then adds more opportunity to other individuals.

Yeah.

So it's a virtuous cycle.

As long as there's no coercion in there.

Yes.

Well, you know, we talked about coercion in a sense because you do talk about free trade.

But a tempered by sensible regulations.

I mean, regulation is, in a sense, a coercive act.

So what do you mean by sensible regulation?

Well, I mean, I took the using a traffic laws as a paradigm.

You will, you want to basically drive on one side of the road.

Now, like there's any number, the traffic laws are designed to get people around quickly, quickly and safely.

And they're good to the extent that they enable safety and efficient movement.

Similarly, in economic activities, good regulations will facilitate trade and exchange,

whereas bad regulations will make it very difficult.

Give me an example of a good regulation and a bad regulation.

I'm not good enough strong enough in economics to come up with that.

I can convert to the traffic movement analogy.

Yeah.

But if you're more involved in economics, you can very quickly identify things like tariffs.

The tariff would be a bad one.

And I'm quite important with you on tariffs.

Given that the Chinese have made such a meal out of free trade or cheating.

Let's not get in that trade there.

So there are things like licensing arrangements where local councils notoriously impose the most reconcered licensing restrictions.

Like if a teacher is a school kid, they want to set up a lemonade stall at the street and a council closes it down.

Is that actually happening?

It's happening.

It's obviously.

No, of course.

That type of thing goes on all the time with councils.

One of my experiences was when the Christchurch earthquake happened, I got some of my students and we went down onto the main road in the city to busk and into money and give it to the fund.

We had to get a license to do that.

Of course.

And then people can just sleep in the streets.

So yeah.

So you don't want to reward rent seeking.

That's where people get, get, get favors from government to do things other people can't do.

It's essentially to establish monopolies.

So governments can hand out favors that advantage chosen people, it's expensive others.

Yes. So going back to the licenses, essentially, there were times when governments gave out licenses to do this activity or that activity.

And in a sense, if you think about the contrast of what we're doing here, and what, in say, 50 years ago, we're broad radio and TV, you had to have a license to do what we're doing.

So that's restrictive because it only allows a certain click to do that one activity.

And so you may have someone skilled in that activity, but they're not allowed to do it because they don't have the right connection, the right funds or to get those licenses.

So another type of license, we just think is okay, like a fishing license, where if the proceeds are used, usefully, to a sense maintain the waterways or do something that actually helps the fishermen as opposed to just raising money for the government.

Right. Yes. So if, yeah, the, it goes back into the industry rather than being diverted to other, other uses.

Yeah. And the final and under economics, the relationship between markets and the framework of the law and other institutions.

So can you explain what that means?

Well, that gets you into the property rights, patents, copyright.

The point is that the legal transaction doesn't just involve changing money. There's usually a legal documents have to be signed off.

And that's where the, the legal framework. And again, you want a legal framework which facilitates.

One example now would be if you want to invest money, apparently, I don't do a lot of investing, but apparently you need to get, or buy some property, you need legal advice to do the most simplest type of negotiations and transactions.

Simply to take account of the tax laws or whatever else has been application of it.

So you sort of saying the legal environment has got so complex.

Yeah. So it's a maze in which you have to, to spend quite a lot of money on lawyers and accountants and other consultants.

For sure.

To get through. So I suppose one way of describing it is you want the government to provide the least friction.

For people to express their creativity and what the format it is, whether it's in the arts or whether it's in business or it's in sport.

So your concern, I suppose the Austrian concern is that governments have a tendency to add friction.

Because we always have, I love the R&S, we always have more and more laws. We generally don't have less and less laws.

Well, Trump reversed that, you know, you're bringing a regulatory flow to out.

And that doesn't turn to have traction when he was most office.

But in Australia, the organization here called Institute of Public Affairs.

And they have count on a page count of legislation and regs passed each year for about 1940.

And the curve is so steep.

Is it parabolic?

Absolutely. Parabolic.

Right.

When they are going through, it was now, you've got dark and foreign mental.

Well, put it this way, the tax laws about volumes about this thick, like the books.

And what is long before the environmental legislation is that thick.

Or in industrial relations, this government previously produced a new industrial relations code,

which is like 750 pages.

So you've got someone running a fishing chip shop or employing a few people in a small business.

They're supposed to get on top of 750 pages.

And we are a little bit like the weather.

If everybody complains about it, nobody ever does anything about it.

Well, you can't do anything about the weather.

It's very hard to say what to do about the regulations.

Until you get some of my Trumps that just come in and type, tipping stuff around.

It's a very hard thing to do.

It's very hard to undo these institutional constraints.

Well, when you say this current government has...

It's the Australian government, Albanese, yeah.

Federal government.

80% of the jobs created in recent times were public service jobs.

80% of all jobs in the economy.

New jobs in the whole economy.

80% of all jobs in the economy were created by the government.

New jobs, yeah.

Isn't there a word for that?

It's a concessionism.

Pretty well.

And the point is that it wouldn't be that bad if I just hired people.

And I just sat there and did nothing.

We could live with them, not do anything.

But what they actually do is they basically destroy the productivity of the private sector.

But they create more friction.

It comes back to moving the traffic.

You want laws that promote the movement of traffic.

And sensible laws do that and silly ones die.

Yeah, my analogy I use is a sports game.

Yeah.

Peck rugby.

No particular reason.

Rugby league.

Well, no rugby union, sorry.

Anyway, I'll pick rugby league.

You know, there are risks who blow the whistle frequently.

And there are risks who do the oxide.

Now, you have to have some rules.

Every game has to have some rules.

But you want the limited amount of rules.

Or just the right amount of rules for the game to be able to function well to flow for it to be entertaining.

You don't want so many rules that it is literally stopping every three minutes.

We have to talk about league.

Yeah.

Because I absolutely can't understand the rules in union.

So I've got absolutely no idea why he's blowing his whistle most of the time.

Yeah, yeah.

But I could sort of vaguely get no idea in rugby league.

Yeah.

But you can, I mean essentially.

I take the point.

Yeah, if you think of game theory.

You're talking about everything's original.

And another way of looking at everything's a game.

Yeah.

And for games to function optimally.

Like you think of chess.

You can't have 4,000 rules.

And you couldn't, you know, you don't want to ref blowing the whistle every now and then.

Because then the game will just stop.

Yeah.

What I'm hearing you saying is that is the trend that government is going towards.

Yeah.

So the government is actually slowing the game down.

Yeah.

And that's it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Number four.

I would almost say this is the most important one.

Morals.

I might argue.

Yeah.

I mean, it's sort of, it's a ridiculous thing to say.

But this chair has four legs.

Which one's the most important one?

Yeah.

They're all important.

No.

But Morals has got to be on the top child yet.

Yeah.

Just moral framework, including honesty, compassion, civility, personal responsibility,

community service and enterprise.

The way Morals important.

Well, that's how we live.

We live as moral beings.

And if the moral framework goes bad, everything's going to go bad.

One way or another.

And it's not at a great shake right now.

Why do you say that?

What's normally a great shake?

Well, do we have honesty, compassion?

Which one are we missing out on?

Has our Western society become less honest, less compassionate, less civil?

People are taking less personal responsibility.

Doing less community service and then there's less enterprise.

Yeah, unquestionably.

On all levels.

In terms of community service, so much used to be done by voluntary agencies.

But in the West, it gets to decline of Christianity.

It's as simple as that.

Well, yes.

As I was reading those, I thought, well, aren't they...

I was actually going to lead with that.

Aren't they Christian values?

I mean, I'm not a Christian.

Are you a Christian?

Well, I had a Christian...

thorough a Christian upbringing through a Christian...

that Anglican boarding school.

Incidentally, the oldest continuous private school in Australia.

Just launched this programmer.

The King's School opened earlier, but it was mainly...

It took credit for Grazie's sons.

And during a massive drought, the Grazie's kept their sons at home.

So, the King's School closed its doors for a few years.

And so, Grazie, my school clicked, stuck in as the oldest continuous.

But...

Are you...

It's out of interest, are you actually Christian?

No, I'm not band of the phoenix, but...

You band the phoenix.

But the more is...

Do you continue?

Yeah.

So, this is a little bit of attention, but I can't help it.

Do you think, you know, our western societies,

like New Zealand and Australia and Britain and America,

are they based on Christian foundation?

Yes, historically.

It's unquestionable.

Yeah.

And going back to this concept of friction,

in a sense, if the moral state of the community is strong,

there is less friction.

Because when I meet you, it's the first time I've met you,

I can trust you.

I know that you're not going to do me any harm,

or you're not going to steal one of my iPhones or anything like that.

Well, you don't know that.

We will see.

But that makes this interaction...

Freer.

Easier.

And less friction.

If I'm walking down Dark Alley,

and there's some people there who, obviously, I'm concerned about,

it'll make it, you know, more difficult.

Right?

So it has a lubricant function.

Well, yeah.

A small thing.

I never walk along behind people close at night.

Who I don't like every people walking close to.

You're afraid to look.

Yeah.

To be really to look.

So, for me, that situation,

I'll either slow down and let them get my head or across the road.

Okay.

You're AC.

So, over your lifetime, how have you seen morals change?

Assuming that you think they have,

and you've sort of intimated that they have.

Well, civility...

civility has become optional.

And debate.

These things are terribly hard to quantify.

Can I give you an example?

Yeah.

When you were a kid, did you...

I imagine you had a bicycle.

Yeah.

When you...

If you went to Rodney Town,

or I don't know if you lived near a town or whatever,

would you lock it up?

Oh, in the town, I went to.

You never locked your car.

Never locked your car.

We went in the 70s.

We never locked your house.

All the house.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, you never locked your car.

Never locked your house.

That's correct.

Right.

Do you lock it?

Okay.

But you were living in a rural community.

Yeah.

Did you know people in a city like Sydney,

one of the big cities,

would people lock their houses in the big cities?

I'd say they did.

Because in the big cities,

I was probably well known

as people who make a living out of crime,

and they're professional criminals.

So, even in the...

What you might call them,

War of Moral, 1950s,

you'd still have to be on the other side.

Great.

Right.

I mean, one thing I heard that in the

bombings in London,

and the blitz says the word I'm looking for,

there was a lot of looting.

Oh.

So, you know, like it is,

it's easy to think that

people have become less honest,

but maybe, maybe they...

when there's an opportunity,

they will still take it.

As long as I'm so hard to quantify,

if you lose, you probably

might lost my wallet,

so it's just got tainted into the police.

You have to be lucky for that to happen.

No.

Yeah.

Well, it depends who picks it up.

I picked up a wallet once,

and found the owner.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it is very hard to quantify.

I still think we live in a very

civil society.

It's still pretty good.

It's pretty good.

Yes.

It could be a lot worse.

Oh, well.

Well, it's not worse in Melbourne,

actually.

So, there's a case of things

that can happen in Melbourne.

Yeah.

Let's move on to energy.

So, abundant, reliable,

and cheap energy.

Now, what I say is,

energy is the foundation of civilization.

Without energy,

we're living in mud-hut spaces.

It's a bit like moralism.

It's a bit like moralism.

Provide your life,

but so do you,

and supply of energy.

Yes, but just, I mean,

morals are,

in the conceptual realm,

realm, I mean,

they do have a material effect,

but energy is just purely material.

I mean, there's the difference

between living in extreme poverty

and living as we live now.

Yeah.

It's like I paint a scrub

because the lifeblood

of, it's a lifeblood.

It's as flowers for everything.

Yeah.

And so if you reduce it,

or you stop it.

Yeah, or you stop it.

So, you start quickly.

Now, you have concerns.

What are those concerns?

The concerns

that we've added

a phase of our evolution

of energy supply

with more and more wind and solar in it.

Well, I once jokingly said

that my next book

might be written about

how wind droughts

killed Western civilization.

The wind droughts.

It appears when there's no wind.

And that was a joke

when I first said it.

We know that.

About three years ago.

But the more I thought about it,

and also the more wind and solar

has been forced into the grid,

and the more coal

is driveled out.

It's more and more true

that when we get to a point

where there's not enough

conventional coal pair

to kick the lights on at night,

we'll be start to depend

on wind and solar to make a contribution

in the night.

Well, comes a windless night

and there's no wind and solar

regardless of how much you've built.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, I've heard

it being described as

renewables as unreliables.

I don't

I don't use the term renewables

at all,

except by accident,

because I call them unreliables.

So you call them and they don't always do it.

And what's actually the data on that?

So is,

okay, maybe I'll back the truck up.

Do you know what percentage

of Australia's energy is supplied

by wind and solar?

Well, changes.

Well, the average right now

is over 40%.

Over 40%.

Well, maybe that includes hydro.

But the amount of wind and solar is

definitely shocking.

I mean, hydro is not unreliable.

It's highly reliable.

It's not conventional.

But limited in supply,

because of the diversity of the dams.

Yes, and you don't have much hydro in Australia.

No.

It might be about 5%.

We're in New Zealand, we have quite a lot.

Yes. Yeah.

Now, the point is,

you have to look at the worst

case scenario, which is,

which is the windless night.

The average, if the average

of wind and solar is over 40%.

Well, that looks very smart.

And it gets, and it's,

it'll grow. The more you build,

the more, the higher the average gets.

And the higher the maximum penetration gets.

But the thing about

power, because we have to be absolutely

continuous, and it has to be

adequate. It's just like a

farmyard fence.

It's got to be continuous.

And it's got to be whole enough, so

it can't step over it.

So your electricity supply

has to be continuous.

And it has to be whole enough to make

the demand from minute to minute.

Now, on a windless night, if you are

a windless night, basically stops

the supply of wind and solar.

So what the over 40% on the average,

comes the windless night at zero.

And that's the worst case scenario.

And you have to have a system

to handle the worst case scenario.

Namely, a sequence of windless nights.

Yes, so you actually have

enough conventional

to have to back up the unconventional.

Actually, the unconventional.

It seems to you need to keep 100%

of conventional power.

Yeah. So with

with a load of 40%.

Is that being for a decade or

two decades or what's the

difference? Oh, I think that's

just over the last few years.

So have you had any catastrophic

catastrophic events?

Well,

January 2019, there's

Rodding Blackouts in Victoria.

The catastrophic, the catastrophic

events have been deferred

or kicked down the road

by cunningly

losing power intensive industries.

Right.

Which has been documented.

So you take a past year

away? So the overnight

base load, which is

around about 20 gigawatts

has been under.

That hasn't changed since I started

looking at this stuff eight years ago.

In other words, over eight years

there hasn't been an increase

in demand for power

because population in growth

and stuff has been

matched.

This is more or less precisely

by the loss of industries

that use a lot of power.

All right.

It is not as intricate

and with what sort of industries

you're talking about snoutering?

Oh, snouting is the most obvious

but steel or brickmaking.

So we've seen those

China or something like that?

No, they got a USA.

Well, the job, the investment

investors shift their plant

to the USA.

Right. And primarily because the power

is too expensive here.

And unreliable.

It's more than doubled in

years. Is there a correlation

over 20 years? Yeah.

So there's a correlation between

price or increase of price

and the

percentage of

the solar and wind.

Not strictly.

As the solar and wind

have penetrated more,

the price has gone

up.

People argue about

why it's gone up.

Because it costs to

bring a whole lot of extra wires

around the place.

And driving at coal,

which is the cheapest.

So the cheapest source of supply

which is coal is being driven

out by subsidized

and mandated

unreliables,

which make a fortune

for the people

who have got control

of those assets.

So the most expensive

billion to people

by subsidizing and mandating

their product

while the most cheapest source of power

is just filing

files in the marketplace.

Because of the government

subsidy. So again,

going back to those two

words that

Socialism and Coventism

don't sound extremist

but

they don't know those words.

So a

New Zealand in the 70s

mid-70s

government

New Zealand government had

this program called ThinkBag

where they picked winters.

And they did it in bolder

in bolder in yeah.

They didn't end well.

Because governments

aren't good at deciding.

markets they

markets

markets are

that are good at finding the most efficient forms of production and governments tend not

to be. So they're not picking soil and wind for their efficiency, they're picking it

because...

I want to reduce the supply of plant food in the air.

That is a whole other conversation which hopefully we'll have.

So those are the five pillars. Maybe just to wrap up, how strong are those five pillars

at the moment in your opinion?

I think they're creaking. They're not strong.

Did they have been stronger in the past?

What were you saying?

Hard to say with the critical rationalism side. It's hard to...

Apart from the powers of most obviously the weakest, the moral framework is just hard

to get at, except we are importing cultures that have a war, that have a cultural framework

and war with our own. And that's obviously going to get worse as time goes by and there's

something done about it.

Oh, you're the regularity here. The economic system over regulation is burgeoning.

We're looking at... On the political side, the restrictions on freedom are all out here.

Freedom of speech is deeply under threat.

Give me some examples.

Well, in Australia.

Well, the most obvious example is this, a commissioner person who has instituted limited,

like actually now exists to social media for level 16 and under, which is just a thin

end of a wedge of more restrictions on everybody.

Right.

So they've actually... Instantiated.

It starts in 10 days.

Right. So if you're under 16, you can't go on social media.

Correct.

Right.

Well, I guess as some of you, the kids will find a way around.

But it's an integrity.

And as our liberal included, comments got Prime Minister endorsed that.

So what's alarming? It's bipartisan.

So the liberals are the conservatives, aren't they?

Yeah, yeah.

It's sort of confusing.

Yeah.

So it's quite partisan.

You can't trust either of them.

Right.

Right.

So you've got grandchildren?

One.

One.

Everybody poor if it's if we had four boys.

Are you hopeful for your grandchild?

Yeah.

But he's got smart parents, so he will be brought up.

Sorry.

You know, I see the environment in which the culture, you know, they...

No, not in.

No, no.

No, he'll do.

I'm not confident.

No, no, no.

Right.

I'm confident you'll do well because of the backing you'll have.

But in terms of the milieu, he's kind of living.

I don't like it to cross-grace.

Yeah.

So there'll be more and more friction for them.

There'll be more and more constraints.

Less and less freedom.

And he won't be able to...

It'll be more difficult for him to maximize his potential.

Yeah.

And live a flourishing life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, depressingly.

I always like to finish on something optimistic.

But have you got any optimistic?

Yes.

I'll tell you what.

The good guys have been fighting this battle forever.

But the last 30 or 40 years, it's like you want to put your best team on the paddock

to win a grand, to put in a premiership.

We've been playing without Karl Popper and Jacques Barzone

and the Austrian economists on the field.

But haven't been selected.

But one of my mission is to get them back on the field.

And then we can win.

So I think why Grand Standard is going to be OK?

Because I'm going to get their best training back on the field.

Well, that's a positive way to finish.

Thank you so much for joining me.

And when I did my podcast,

an Oxford with David Deutsch, which was a great honour.

I said, who asked would you recommend I talk to?

And he said, Grace champion.

So, yeah, it's a great honour to speak to you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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