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June 16, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:46
Wednesday Night Live! Jun 15 2022
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Hello, hello. Good evening, everybody.
It is Stefan Maloney from Free Domain, formerly of the Free Domain Radio, now just of the Free Domain.
Because I guess one of the first places I bought electronics was at a place called Radio Shack, which didn't look all too radio-ish when radio was passed.
Why? Like 2001 Audio Video, I guess, when they made the business.
2001 was a very futuristic date, and then it kind of came and went, and they had to change it all up.
So, free domain.
Now, I'm going to do the first...
I've got an hour and a half tonight, and I've got a lot of stuff to talk about.
I'm going to do the first 45 minutes.
This is trying out a new feature here on freedomain.locals.com.
So locals.com is a platform that I use to chat with people, to share information.
It's the place that you go to get my novel.
So hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux, just catching you up.
I am going to do the first, got an hour and a half tonight, got a lot of stuff to talk about, and I'm going to do the first 45 minutes for everyone, and then the second 45 minutes I'm going to be doing for subscribers on the Locals platform here on freedomain.locals.com.
This is where you come to get my new book called The Future, my new book, which you can get at freedomain.locals.com.
It's pinned at the very top.
And you can get it in EPUB format, Mobi format, audiobook format.
And I'm still listening to the audiobook when I get a chance.
I love it.
I love this audiobook.
And, you know, you try to bring to the world what is missing for you for the world, right?
So you try to bring to the world what is missing to you for the world.
And I love philosophical novels.
And, boy, did I write a corker of one.
So... Yes, good evening.
And now if you have questions, comments, issues, bring them up now.
I've got something that I wanted to get into, to ramble on about.
But if you have questions, I'm here for you for the live streams.
So yes, if you want to type them in, I will put them through the big chatty forehead before we get into the main topics for tonight.
And I said this on a couple of my platforms, wanted to say it to you directly.
Guys, guys, thank you so much.
Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to do this, to talk about philosophy to the world, for the world, for all time.
And I really, really thank you.
People are saying it was a great read.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
It really took about, well, over 35 years to write as a whole.
I've been wondering if you would be willing to create a logic course for children.
That's a very interesting idea.
It's a very interesting idea I have thought about.
Recently subbed to get access to your readings of the future on part six now.
Love it so far. Really interesting to hear parts of the process.
Well, see, I did a thing too where this is the first novel...
I've ever dictated.
So dictating has been a fascinating thing for me for many years.
When I first started experimenting with voice dictation back in the day, gosh, this would be close to 30 years ago, you had to pause between each word.
The joke at the time was most people had first heard about voice dictation by watching Star Trek, where William Shatner spoke like that.
Anyway, so I've always been fascinated by voice dictation, really grokked the amazing power of voice dictation, but it took a while for the computers to get fast enough for fluid voice dictation, and I've been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking for...
20 years or so, and I've got it well-tuned to a very high degree of accuracy.
And, of course, in Dragon as well, you can get it at nuance.com, N-U-A-N-C-E.com.
So when I say UPB, it types out universally preferable behavior.
If I say SBM, it types out my name.
So you can put in shortcuts and all that.
So I've used voice dictation for my non-fiction books, for my books on philosophy and so on.
But I've never used voice dictation for a novel.
Let me tell you what's incredible about this.
For me. So it really collapses a lot of my training together because my training in voice and in acting, right, I spent almost two years at a very elite national theater school in Montreal, Canada.
I initially went in as a playwright, but they liked my acting so much they said I should just stick with the acting program until they found out that I was anti-communist and things got a little hairy.
A little sticky, but... I used to, of course, sit and type my novels, which has a certain kind of rhythm to it and a certain kind of depth to it.
But this was the first time I dictated.
And when you dictate dialogue, it's a whole different thing for me now.
Like, oh my god, it's a whole different thing for me now.
Typing dialogue, kind of hunched over, although when I last wrote novels, and you can get my previous novels at adjustpoornovel.com, totally free, and almostnovel.com.
And for me, you get the right instrumental music and to dictate dialogue is a whole different thing for me.
Like, it has just blown my mind how amazing it is to dictate a novel.
Now, I first got actually interested in this, believe it or not, when reading Dostoevsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, the, of course, incredibly famous Russian writer of extraordinary talent and depth and power, So Dostoevsky was exiled in Switzerland, one of the Finnish countries, something like that.
Anyway, he got really addicted to gambling and his rather put-upon wife wrote an autobiography of their time when he was addicted to gambling, which was a pretty exhausting and horrifying process.
But he would dictate his novels.
And this is one of the reasons why the novels, while structurally they're kind of a disaster, Have the most amazing dialogue because he actually had a woman who would he would just pace around and he would dictate his novels and I always found that to be quite fascinating quite a powerful idea so this is the first one you can see it here in the quality of the dialogue and the quality of the arguments and the quality of the debates and the conflicts that to dictate dialogue is the most glorious thing in the known universe and I'll never go back you can't ever make me go back To merely writing a dialogue by typing.
It's just not going to work for me.
So yeah, you can get the novel.
Novels about the future tend to be incredibly dystopian or optimistic.
Optimistic in a way that rewrites human nature.
Optimistic in a way that rewrites human nature.
So you get Star Trek where human nature has been completely rewritten so that there's no genetic in-group preferences and no tribalism in any way, shape, or form, which is, you know, a fantasy and a very dangerous...
It's a communist star fantasy, although I know Roddenberry was a fan of Ayn Rand and all that, but yeah, yeah.
So I wanted to write a book about a glorious, positive, beautiful future that was believable in how we get there.
Just saying things will be wonderful in the future.
So yes, I'm glad that you are enjoying it.
I'm glad that you are enjoying it.
Somebody says, the last checked Bitcoin price in December 2017.
Checked again today. Looks like we haven't moved.
Yes, I believe there's been a little bit of movement in between.
But, I mean, somebody's asked me what's going on.
And it's the usual, right?
Which is that there are people who invest in Bitcoin because they just want to make some money.
They want to hedge against inflation and so on.
And those people, because they don't fundamentally believe in the mission of Bitcoin, which is the replacement of fiat currency...
They have paper hands, right?
So when there's a slide, when there's a sell-off, they panic and they sell.
And Bitcoin hash rates are at an all-time high and it's the usual process that happens with this kind of collapse, which is people who are in it for the money and not the mission panic when there's a sell-off and they sell like crazy.
And you can see this happening on the blockchain.
The money is simply moving from short-term holders to long-term holders and then that will be When that will change over time.
Alright, so let's see here.
Yeah, and of course, I remember when Bitcoin was 50 bucks.
So for me, it's like, oh no, it's only tens of thousands of dollars.
That's pretty funny, right? So, yes.
Fed raising interest rates.
Any guesses on how it goes?
Will it slow inflation or how do you think it ends?
I mean, it ends with the replacement of the fiat currency.
It always does. It always does. Fiat currencies last 150, 200 years, 225 maybe on the outside.
I think pretty much the only one that's lasted longer is the British pound sterling, which has lasted for 400 years, but at the cost of losing 98% of its value.
Yes, it will end the way it always does.
There's no need for prognostication when it has happened every single time fiat currency gets used.
It gets mad printed. It's used to buy votes and it drives the population insane.
Fiat currency drives the population insane.
And I talk about this in my novel, which I may have mentioned, called The Future.
It is out now. And fiat currency drives the population insane because sanity is when you recognize the limitations of resources.
That's sanity, right?
Insane people, what do they believe?
They believe that they live forever.
They believe that there's someone else, right?
In other words, they're themselves and someone else at the same time, which means they can multiply.
They believe they can fly.
They believe all kinds of...
They believe people are following them and watching them and gangstalking them and so on.
And they believe in...
A cessation of natural law.
And what is sanity other than the recognition that things are limited, right?
You're saying if you organize your life according to the principle that you're going to die, because you're going to die.
You're going to die.
And so you have an affinity, a finite number of days left, and you can actually go online and punch in a bunch of numbers and get these statistics of how long you're going to last or not.
So, based upon the affinity, the finite nature of your life, you organize yourself according to that.
Craziness is to some degree defined by a lack of belief in the finite nature of existence, right?
So young women go crazy and act really badly when they believe that their sexual market value will remain high forever no matter what.
And so when I used to be on social media platforms and constantly were nagging, nagging, nagging women, and I'm sure what became a kind of grandfatherly way was nagging women and saying, okay...
You know, your heart from 20 to 35 falls off a cliff after that, and after 40, you probably still have another half century to go.
And what are you going to do?
If you don't settle down, you don't have kids, what are you going to do with all that time?
And that's just reminding women that their sexual market value will die long before they do.
It's certainly true with men as well.
Jack Nicholson is in his 80s still looking for a romance, although he's not really going to get one because he's turned into a large sack of Irish-eyed potatoes.
So it happens to men, but it happens later.
Men's peak sexual attractiveness is often in their 40s and 50s if they have taken decent care of themselves and have accumulated some resources.
Men and women flip in their 40s, right?
They flip in their 40s to men becoming more attractive and women becoming less attractive.
So a 45 year old male versus a 45 year old woman is often like...
A 45-year-old male is closer in sexual market value to a 25-year-old female, whereas a 45-year-old female is just a 45-year-old female and not attractive as far as all of that goes.
So, yeah, just reminding people of the fact that while your desires are infinite, resources are finite.
When you are tempted into infinite resources...
If you're tempted into believing that you have a ridiculous amount of good fortune and nothing can really harm you, like, you know, John F. Kennedy Jr.
back in the day, he was like this gorgeous hunkasaurus of 100 million plus fortune, son of John F. Kennedy, the president.
And, I mean, he had so many warnings about danger in his life.
And nobody would go flying.
He became a pilot and nobody would go flying with him because he was such an insane driver.
Like when he wanted to get someplace in a hurry, he'd literally go up on the sidewalk.
Constantly got speeding tickets, constantly had issues and in fact he ended up dying because he was piloting a plane and he took off too late with a smashed up ankle and he had to go instrument only and he wasn't certified for that and didn't get help and didn't postpone and didn't even hug the coastline where you got some Lights and you could guide yourself according to that.
Went straight over the dark water on his way to Martha's Vineyard for a wedding, I think.
And six weeks before, he crashed his plane and killed himself and his wife and his wife's sister.
He'd actually been in a mini plane crash because he'd ordered one of these pedal planes with the big kites above and he'd smashed his ankle up that way and he'd just got the ankle cast off.
And so, yeah... The world is constantly saying to him, life is constantly saying to him, statistics are constantly saying to him, you're vulnerable, you're dangerous.
You're not certified for this, you don't have the instructor on board, it's dark, you showed up late, you didn't cancel, and you didn't even call for help, probably because he was embarrassed that recordings of him calling for help might leak to the media or whatever.
And it is...
It's brutal. So life as a whole is saying, hey, look, you just tried flying and you completely smashed six weeks before, but sure, go flying off into the dark when you're not rated for instruments and see what happens, right?
Because, you know, flying is weird. The reason why you have to be really well trained to fly on instruments only is the instruments are going to tell you something completely different than your inner ear is telling me.
You get into a slow turn and, you know, you don't really feel it.
I mean, if you fly in an airplane, a commercial airplane, you know, there's maybe a little bumpy jostly, but you don't get the sense that you're turning or even after your climb and all that.
So your inner ear can get completely messed up when you're flying into rain-soaked pitch darkness with no moon, right?
No clouds everywhere. And so he had this sense of, you know, he was very handsome, he was very wealthy, he was very fit, and so he had this illusion of infinite resources and infinite luck, and, you know.
So, yeah, if you look at all the strangeness that's going on in thinking at the moment, it's because reason is around finite resources.
People, like, you don't need to live on a budget if you're worth, I don't know, a billion dollars, right?
So, the more resources you have, the less requirement you have for sanity.
So, oh, this post-modernism and this rejection of rationality, this rejection of reason, this rejection of empiricism, this acceptance of every crazy idea under the sun, that's something else.
Something else, right? And so, yeah, people have lost their minds because they don't have any resources.
And, you know, when I was growing up, I had a fascination, which I'm just reading this book on, I think it's called America's Reluctant Prince, who...
You know, it's funny, too, because it's written by this guy who was John F. Kennedy Jr.'s friend for a long time and, you know, would constantly go to saunas with him and play racquetball with him and change with him, and then later on accidentally came out as gay.
Now, that's interesting to me, and I'm not sure super, super ethical.
Like, if you're hanging around with a guy naked, and it turns out he's gay, that's not the end of the world.
It's nothing wrong with being gay or anything like that.
But it's the kind of thing where maybe you'd want to know ahead of time if the guy's eyeing you with romantic intent or sexual intent.
It would just be something nice to know.
But anyway... So, yeah, Darwin Award winner.
I mean, it's harsh. I get what you mean, but it's pretty harsh.
I know he didn't fail the bar three times.
I don't think you can fail the bar three times.
He failed twice and then passed the third time.
And, you know, he got involved in this magazine called George, which was the intersection of politics and culture, like whatever that means, right?
And, of course, he only really got into the magazine and only really got investment because he was John F. Kennedy Jr.
and he was handsome and famous and the toast of the town.
So investors would meet with him.
And Cindy Crawford posed with a bare midriff, dressed up as George Washington, because it was all about the intellect, you see?
And so, yeah, I mean, he didn't have much to look forward to.
His marriage was completely failing because his wife was reportedly having affairs and she was a cocaine addict and things like that.
And his business was failing.
He couldn't get new investors and so on.
And his friend was dying.
It's really tragic because his friend had been battling cancer for like 10 years.
Well, actually, he'd had cancer, testicular cancer in the 80s, and then it came back in the 90s.
And he'd been battling...
And John F. Kennedy Jr.
was actually working on a eulogy for his friend who was dying.
And then his friend ended up giving one of the eulogies, I think, at John F. Kennedy...
Junior's funeral after he crashed into the water at 200 miles an hour and then died a couple of weeks later.
So I'm really, really, really quite sad.
So, yeah, it's...
Interesting. Let's see.
Are you familiar with the term debt saturation?
Where more than 50% of each newly created dollar goes into paying the interest cost of the previous dollar, leading to stagflation.
Oh yeah, now I'm for sure.
I've always had a truly paranoid...
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant relationship to debt.
That debt is something you just desperately want to avoid as much as humanly possible.
And I accept, you know, you go into debt to buy a car maybe, to buy a house, but just, you know, pay it off as hugely quickly as possible.
That would be something that really, really, really quite important.
Okay, so if you haven't heard this debate that I had with the...
Anti-empiracist. Yeah, there's no worse feeling than knowing money.
Oh, and especially when you, you know, you borrow a couple hundred K to buy a house and you got a 20-year mortgage, man.
The amount of money that you're paying on the actual principle at the beginning is so little.
It's just, it's really depressing.
You're just paying all this money for debt, interest payments.
It's just crazy. So, yeah, so I had a debate, and I'm going to touch on it briefly because it really had me thinking.
The debate is available for free at freedomain.locals.com.
I haven't put it into the mainstream because I'm working on show 5,000.
I mean, I believe we're coming up to show 5,000.
5,000, something else, man, something else.
So... If you want to catch the second half of this live stream, if you could sign up, freedomain.locals.com, it's here's where you're watching.
You can just open another window and you can sign up and then you can keep going on the more unusual stuff I'll be talking about in the second half.
But anyway, so I did this debate with a fellow about the validity of the senses.
Now... His argument was that there is something higher and better than the senses, that the senses are limited and that it's solipsisting or you only really reference...
In order to have faith in the senses, you have to already have faith in the senses.
You just have to assume that the senses are true and valid and that's circular and you can't ever prove it and so on, right?
Now, if someone tells me there's a better way of doing things...
Then I expect them to show me, right?
I mean, if you and I are having a tough negotiation on a voice call, and I say, or you say, oh, we should switch to a video call so we can at least see each other's expressions, because, you know, when there's a pause, you don't know if the other person is silently laughing or rolling their eyes or nodding or whatever, right? And I say, oh, I didn't know there was video.
And you say, oh yeah, no, there's video.
And it's much better if we switch to video because then we get sight as well as sound.
And then I expect us to switch to video, right?
Because you've made this claim that there's a superior way of communicating called video that's important and better than what we're doing, which is just audio, right?
So if you tell me there's a better way of doing something, first thing I expect is to switch to that thing, right?
First thing I do is expect to switch to that thing.
That's your claim, right?
Whereas if you say to me, we should switch to video, video is vastly better, and then I say, okay, let's switch to video, and you won't do it, then there's a problem.
Maybe the problem is that we're in 1980 and there's no video calls yet, or something, right?
But if you tell me there's a better way of doing things, a better way of doing what we're doing, And then I say, well, let's switch to that, but you won't do it.
Then I know you don't believe if there's a better way.
So with this guy, he was saying there's something superior to the senses.
And I said, okay, well, let's continue the debate there.
And then he would continue to argue just using audio, right?
He was on a microphone.
And I had to keep interrupting him, saying, no, no, no.
If you tell me that there's something better than the senses, let's use that.
Let's use that, right?
But whenever I would say, let's use something better than the senses, what would he do?
He would return to using the senses.
And it's like, okay, so what are you doing?
You're telling me there's something better, but you refuse to switch to it.
Which means you don't think there's something better, right?
Because if he believed, you know, like the true empiricism is the mind of God, right?
That we can all meet in the mind of God and we can communicate that way.
It's like, okay, then... Go to the mind of God.
I will try to go to the mind of God and we'll meet there and continue to debate there.
But he wouldn't do it. Now, I can look at this as, and I do sometimes, maybe it's a weakness, whatever, but I look at this as like, it's kind of annoying.
You know, when somebody makes a claim and says, oh, there's something vastly superior to the senses, infinitely superior to the senses, more true, this platonic form stuff, right?
Something infinitely better than the senses.
And I say, well, let's switch to that.
And then they continue to use the senses.
It's a kind of con, right?
It's kind of annoying. But I was thinking about it since we did the debate.
And the debate is well worth listening to.
But I was thinking about it since then.
And I think... Tell me if this makes sense to you.
But before we do that, let me ask you a question.
Let me ask you a question. Okay.
So... I think his argument was you already are using the kind of God, a.k.a.
logic. No. If you say you think his argument was, then that's you projecting, right?
You have to get his actual argument with quotes, right?
Let me ask you this.
So, just on a 1 to 10 scale, how...
Glorious and amazing do you find existing as a human being, right?
Able to think, listen, reason, process, watch these kinds of shows and interact in this kind of way.
So 1 to 10, right?
And let's maybe...
Sorry, I just asked this, but 1 to 10 is not quite enough because maybe we should do a...
Maybe there's a minus 10, which is like you hate the fact that you're conscious or whatever, right?
So we got a 9, a 10, a 7.
I assume most of you are positive, so we got a 6.
If you have a negative, that's fine too.
I'm just kind of curious.
How amazing do you find it?
That you are a biped with a brain, reasoning capacities, communication capacities, in the midst of this incredible technology to have these kinds of conversations.
10,000 maniacs!
I had a song just pop into my head from 10,000 Maniacs, which I used to listen to in theatre school.
So, yes, everybody seems fairly positive.
We've got a low of a 6 to a high of 10,000.
And so... Would be 10 and 500 years.
Yeah, well, if my novel's correct, that's true as well.
And it's funny, you know, they say you can't miss what you've never had, but that's not really true.
That's not really true. Because I desperately miss the world that I talk about in my novel, The Future, and it's not even around yet.
Except in our personal lives, I hope, in your personal life too.
Okay, so... A very plus, a very positive, right?
Now, how do you fit infinity into a finite space?
How do you fit infinity into a finite space?
Right? It's remembering the debate I had when I was a teenager with my friends about, is infinity divided by infinity, infinity?
Right? And he said, well, yes, because if you get infinitely long In an infinite universe, you can fit an infinite number of infinitely long pipes in an infinite universe.
And I said, but that's not valid because that's not infinite in three dimensions.
That's only infinite basically in two dimensions, like width.
So you would have to have an infinite universe into an infinite universe.
But how do you fit infinity together?
How many roads must a man walk down?
How do you fit infinity into this four pounds of wetware we've got going on between the years, right?
The skull prison of merely human consciousness.
How do you fit? Now, I am aiming and have been aiming for ever since I started this 16 years ago.
I have been aiming to lay down the mind tracks that pass the test of time.
My ambition has been very clear and very consistent from the very beginning that I aim to put down the kind of philosophy that will last the test of time.
I'm not fast food.
I'm once on the lips, forever on the hips.
Once in the mind, forever in the behind.
So UPB, universally preferable behavior, the rational proof of secular ethics, will last the test of time.
That is the rational proof of secular ethics.
The arguments that I put forward, the data that I put forward, all aims to pass the test of time and to be as relevant a thousand years from now or five thousand years from now as it is now, with hopefully the goal of, wow, they really did pull it off, get into a sane universe from the crazy world that gave them birth, right? So...
I want to last forever. And of course, we still use Aristotle's source of logic.
We still use the Socratic method and so on.
And the arguments for universality that Jesus put forward are still very compelling and very powerful and rather unique in the annals of the history of thought.
So, if you're aiming to last forever, but it's coming from a finite brain, how do you fit infinity into a finite brain?
This sounds like a very esoteric question, but I really don't think that it is.
Now, let me ask you this.
How many people do you know take, absorb, and understand the glory of having a thinking mind?
In other words, how many people honor the unbelievable thinking Incredible, astonishing, wildly improbable, winning the cosmic lottery that comes from being in possession of a human brain.
Of all the matter in the universe, right?
God is fond of two things.
In biology, he's fond of beetles, and in matter, he's fond of hydrogen, right?
You know one person, somebody says, only my mom, my father, when he was alive, four people you know.
One. Most of the time, is that one person you?
When you say one, does that mean you?
Nobody? You don't know anyone? I think it's everyone, as they have to use it to live.
I don't know. I don't think they do have to use it to live.
Okay, so I'm not sure that it's possible to have a great life unless you're surrounded by people who appreciate life.
I'm not sure it's possible to have a great life or a meaningful life or a powerful life if you're surrounded by people who don't listen.
I've seen this to my daughter the other day.
Probably a thousand people across the world win the lottery every week.
You know, some country, some place.
I don't mean like some tiny little Sanford and Son lottery.
I mean some big-ass lottery, half a billion dollars or more.
Probably a thousand people across the world win the lottery every week.
Now, if you think of all of the matter in the universe, I'm sure there's intelligent life out there elsewhere.
I'm sure it doesn't travel.
Otherwise, the first job that intelligent life would be doing would be saving us from ourselves, saving us from our addiction to politics and coercion and lying.
So they haven't come here and they're not taking care.
There's no prime directive, right?
And they would come to liberate us, right?
They would come to liberate us. From coercive institutions.
And delusion. So, I'm sure there's intelligent life elsewhere out there.
I don't think you can crack...
See, you can't crack the speed of light.
So, Alpha Centauri is the closest star 4.3 light years away.
I don't think there's anybody there.
But... 100 billion stars times 100 billion galaxies.
Yeah, there's stuff that's out there, and they can find M-class planets rotating around other stars, and they can figure those out, I think, from the wobble of the gravitational attraction from the M-class planet to the star.
They can figure out it's in the Goldilocks zone, right?
Not too hot, not too cold, so somewhere between Venus and Mars.
So... There's intelligent stuff out there, but it remains theoretical.
Statistically, it's inevitable, but it remains theoretical until we find it, which we may never do.
We may never do. Maybe no intelligent life passes the test of statism.
The test of slavery, we've passed, right?
The elimination of slavery and the resulting Industrial Revolution and modern market capitalism, but we don't look anywhere close to solving the problem of the state, right?
Of statism. Of the addiction of violence, it characterizes our form of social organization or social disorganization.
So, of all the matter in the universe, 100 billion stars, 500 billion planets or whatever it might be, around 100 billion galaxies on a universe that's 14 billion light years across or whatever, I don't know, right? Of all of that matter, you get four pounds of thought.
That's an incredible thing.
It's an unbelievably incredible thing.
My capacities have always been driven by wonder and humility.
So the wonder is that we can do any of this stuff at all.
The wonder is that we can formulate these thoughts on the fly, communicate, argue, debate.
That's wonder to me.
The humility is if...
Evolution can grant me the gift of this four pounds of unbelievable wetware between my ears.
Who am I to say, based upon insecurity, insecurity is just a kind of vanity, because insecurity says, well, I know what I'm capable of, and I'm not capable of that.
It's like, you don't know what you're capable of.
You don't have a clue what you're capable of, and neither do I. Neither do I. You just keep pushing, assuming that there's no resistance, and by golly, you'll find very little resistance in terms of what it is that you can achieve.
So the wonder that I have a brain And the humility to say, I have no idea what my brain is capable of, so I'm just going to keep doing stuff assuming that I can do it and wait until events prove me otherwise.
So how do you fit the goal of eternity and infinity?
Which is the same, of course, in philosophy as it is in physics.
In philosophy, you're looking for...
Accurate metaphysics, nature of reality, you're looking for valid epistemology, theories of knowledge, you're looking for universal ethics, purpose of morality, and in physics, of course, you're looking for physical rules that go across time and space for all eternity across all environments, right? That's what your goal is. So, a physicist formulates the law of gravity or strong or weak forces or electromagnetism and so on, and that's everywhere.
That's everywhere. So, Infinity is about as close a concept as we could possibly use to describe the universe because it's really impossible to fit anywhere close to 100 billion stars and 100 billion galaxies in your brain.
So, a physicist has universality and infinity in his four pounds of wetware in the skull prison of the human head, right?
How do you fit infinity into a finite space?
You can't. If you create something of enduring beauty, whether it's art or music or something like literature, painting, you create something of enduring power and beauty.
Shakespeare's long dead, Dickens long dead, Dostoevsky long dead, died young, many of them.
You create something of enduring beauty and Then you last as long as people last.
Like, as long as there are people, there'll be Shakespeare.
Dickens has fallen a little bit out of favor.
Not so much Dostoevsky, though, because he has so much to say about the post-God universe.
But you create something of enduring beauty.
You gain immortality.
But you can't fit immortality into a mortal flesh suit of skin and blood and bone.
You can't fit it. How can we still read the mind of people long dust?
We can. We can read Plato's thoughts on Socrates, who's been dead for 2,500 years.
We can still read the Gospels.
Jesus was murdered 2,022 years ago.
People will be watching this long after I'm dead and dust.
I'm gone, but I'm still here.
You can get eternity into mortality.
You can get infinity into the finite space of the human brain.
So how do people process that?
In other words, when people say that they do things for the glory of God, when they connect themselves to universality and divinity and eternity and infinity, when they take the mere mortal, limited, finite human experience and connect it to something, Universal and divine and eternal and infinite.
How do they process that in their minds?
They say that there's a higher reality that the human brain partakes in called eternity and infinity which we refer to as the soul.
The soul is the denominator that gets infinity into a finite framework called the human mind and the human body.
How do you get How do you get undying into a dying immortality into a faltering flesh frame of the human body with the soul?
How do you get the infinity for which you aim if you wish to provide quality Of thought and particularly of morality to humanity.
You must aim for that which is eternal and universal.
But we are neither eternal nor universal in that we are mortal and finite.
So how do you release yourself from the inhibitions, insecurities and vain limitations of mere mortality to partake of infinity without rejecting the senses and accepting the Platonic divinity.
Because it's always amazed me, and I've really been thinking about this since the debate, and I really do thank the young man for participating in the debate.
It really gives me some really good thoughts, which I'm trying to share with you here.
It's never made sense to me, at least until this kind of formulation, it's never really made sense to me, I mean, why would you reject the senses and all of the rules and laws and logic that come from the evidence of the senses?
Why would you do that? It wouldn't make any sense to me.
Now, my refusal to reject the finite and the mortal, but still to aim for the universal and the eternal, To aim for immortality knowing that I'm going to die.
To aim for infinity while knowing that I'm finite.
To aim for the universal while knowing that I am still in the sense cage of the skull prison of the human mind.
This gives me UPB, a commitment to universal's, well, full recognition of the transitory nature of my own existence.
To attempt, in a sense, to create the soul of thought in the universal mind of the future.
Despite knowing that I won't be there to participate in it or in fact really to reap the rewards.
And my children and grandchildren probably won't reap the rewards either but someone will if we're going to survive at all.
So I think that people I think that people want to partake of eternity because we can.
They really want to partake of eternity because we can.
And the way that they give themselves permission to partake of the universal, of the eternal, of the infinite, of the immortal, is to create a realm which their minds can hook into that goes far beyond the transitory mortal nature of our existence.
And this is one of the reasons why some enormously beautiful things are created by people who believe in the soul and who believe in God.
And because I have recognized, I failed to recognize, well, I failed to recognize many things, things, but one of the things that I fail to recognize is that philosophy gave me universality without giving me immortality, which has given me significant ambition, knowing that I don't have forever to create the works that I'm incapable of. knowing that I don't have forever to create the works
And the works that have the greatest value that I am capable of are to do with universality, things which are true in all places, under all circumstances, at all times, universally preferable behavior.
And I would say that most people, in order to realize the full potential scope of their ambition, which we never fully realize, it's something that I think it was Michelangelo, it haunted me that he said, no, Leonardo da Vinci, I think it was, not DiCaprio.
Leonardo da Vinci said, towards the end of his life, he said, I regret how little...
Use I put my talents to.
Now, he's considered to be just about the most talented person in all of human history.
And even he went to his grave regretting how little he'd used his talents.
So... It's how you create works of enduring depth and beauty...
Is to hook yourself into the eternal, in the infinite, to leap out of your decaying flesh suit and the limited wet wear of you between the years, skull prison.
It's how you leap out and create and touch eternally.
It's how the minds meet across thousands or tens of thousands of years.
It's how we can reach out of the grave and touch people with the electricity of our thought, though we are dust and they soon will be.
So I really do thank the person.
It's a great debate. Somebody says, I think Stefan missed the point of the empiricist debate.
See, here's the thing, man. Here's how...
To be a little bit of a douche.
Just a little bit. A little bit of a douche.
So, if you say, I missed the point of the debate and I've thought about these issues for 40 years.
Now, it doesn't mean I'm right. But the idea that you, who've not thought about these issues for 40 years and who haven't had the world's biggest and most successful philosophy show...
The idea that I just missed the point of a debate that I've been having in my mind and I've had countless times with other people both on the show and off the show that I've written entire books about that I just missed the point of the debate it's possible but here's the thing if you start off with a conclusion that That I missed the point of the debate.
I just missed the point of the debate, even though I was in it and have thought about it considerably since then, and have thought about it for 40 years beforehand, and again, done tons of shows, written books and all of that, and done an entire Introduction to Philosophy series proving all of these things.
One of the first things I did was a 19-series show called An Introduction to Philosophy.
So, just saying that I missed the point of the debate, that's a lot of vanity on your part.
And listen, you might be right, but if you start off by saying, I think Stefan missed the point of the empiricism debate, you are starting off with a statement of significant vanity without any proof, because you're just starting off with that statement.
Like, it's one thing to say, well, I think that Einstein missed the point of physics.
Okay, okay. Now, you can say that, but you have a lot of proof to go ahead.
If you just say that at the beginning, or if you were to say, I don't know, I think Shakespeare missed the point of drama.
Okay. I know I'm putting myself in elevated company.
I simply do that for dramatic effect, right?
So... It's a statement of considerable vanity, and it will...
I say this because, you know, if you are that smart, that you can see something about something I've thought about, like a pretty premier philosopher, I've thought about these things for 40 years.
If I've missed something completely obvious...
Then you are, like, super, super smart.
Fantastic. And if you're that smart, I really want to help you contribute to the world rather than just annoying people.
And the way that you contribute to the world is if you've got a case to make that somebody, you know, with a big successful show in philosophy who's influenced, you know, tens of millions of people...
I just missed the point of the entire point of the debate that I was in.
If you want to make that case, feel free to make the case.
But make the case and let me come to the conclusion that I missed the entire point.
But if you just start off by saying, well, Steph missed the entire point of the debate, I'm certainly not going to listen to you or be interested in anything else that you have to say.
And I'm just saying that because if you are this kind of stone genius, and I hope that you are, and I hope you do better than me in the realm of philosophy, because that's the important thing as philosophy gets advanced, nothing to do with my ego...
So if you can see something very clear in a debate that I've been having with myself and others for 40 years, then you're way better at this than I am, which is fantastic.
Wonderful. I think that's great.
So go do a show.
Go make the case, right?
Anyway, so he said, the guy was arguing that the mind-sense can be used to extrapolate and understand things that the worldly senses have no direct access to.
He was saying this was the process of logic, right?
The guy was arguing that the mind sense, I'm not sure what the mind sense is, can be used to extrapolate and understand things that the worldly senses have no direct access to.
He was saying this was the process of logic.
Well, no, but we debated this We actually debated this very specifically and clearly in the debate because he said, well, you can't look out the window and see logic.
And I said, yes, I can because the evidence of the senses is where I get logic from.
So every time I go out there and see a tree being a tree and nothing else, something being a tree or a non-tree, all of Aristotle's basic laws of logic, I look out into the world and I see logic because that's where I... We actually had this exact debate and you're saying that I missed the point of the debate.
Oh my God! It wasn't a conclusion, just my perspective.
No. No, that's not just your perspective.
I think Stefan missed the point of the empiricist debate.
No, that's not your perspective.
That's making a truth statement about me and the debate.
So, if you're going to make something...
If you're going to make a claim like that, and then when challenged, just say, oh no, I wasn't making that claim, that's just straight up gaslighting.
That's really, that's just jerky behavior.
Like, and I say this with, you know, sympathy and affection.
You're a listener to this show, so I really want to help you not be annoying to people, because if you're going to be out there talking about philosophy, it's kind of important that people like or respect you to some degree, right?
Not everyone, obviously, but if you say, I think Stefan missed the point of the empiricist debate, and then I challenge you on it, And then you say, oh, no, no, that's just my perspective.
Well, no, you were making a truth claim.
Steph missed the point of the empiricist debate.
That's a truth claim. And it's not a subjective truth claim.
It's an objective truth claim. So, yeah, if you kind of insult someone, and then when they call you out on it and provide counter-evidence, you say, no, no, no, I wasn't insulting you.
I wasn't saying you were right.
No, that's not good, right?
I mean, this is a Nietzsche thing, right, which I thought on long and hard when I was younger.
Don't leave your actions in the lurch.
If you genuinely believe that I missed the point of the debate, which is kind of an insult.
It could be true, but it's kind of an insult.
If you genuinely believe that I missed the point of the debate, that's fine.
Look, I don't mind if you believe that.
That's totally fine.
But if you're going to publicly call me out for missing the entire point of a debate I've had for 40 years, it's not going to provoke a lot of positive response unless you make some fantastic claim with evidence.
You could give me timestamps.
You could send me an email saying, listen to this, listen to your response.
Analyzing a debate like this is kind of time-consuming, just this off-the-cuff statement that, oh, Steph missed the entire point of the debate.
It's like, okay, it's a little off-putting.
It doesn't mean you're wrong.
But then if you get called out on it and you can't provide evidence, don't just leave your actions in the lurch.
When you make a truth claim, Steph missed the point of the debate, and then I call you out for that, don't then say, oh, I wasn't making any kind of objective truth claims.
Like, no, you were. You were claiming that I missed the point of the debate.
That's an objective truth claim.
A subjective thing would be, I like the guy's accent.
He had a pleasant tone of voice.
That would be a subjective statement, not, Steph missed the point of the debate.
Never assume what you want to prove, or I will kill you, my math professor.
Never assume what you want to prove.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Like tautology or begging the question.
Anything against empiricism is self-refuting.
It's like saying there's no such thing as English while using English.
Well, it's not self-refuting if you can switch to Something superior.
If you say there's something superior to the senses, then you should switch to that.
But if you say there's something superior to the senses, but continue to use the senses, even when challenged to switch to that superior form of communication, that superior form of insight, then you are self-contrading in your behavior.
A true statement would be to say, Steph missed the point of the debate.
Well, no. When you say I think, that doesn't make something subjective.
If I say I think that two and two make five, and somebody says...
Well, no, two and two make four.
And I say, hey, man, I was just talking about my subject.
I said, I think. It's like, no.
If you say, I think the world is flat, right?
And then somebody proves to you that it's a sphere, you don't get to say, oh, no, no, I was just, it was just my subjective interpretation.
It's like, of course you think.
Everybody thinks. If I say, I think it's raining and it turns out to be sunny because somebody's just listening to a movie with rain in it, do I get to, oh, no, I was just a subjective.
It's like, no, no. When you say, I think, of course you think.
Everybody thinks. If I say I think UPP is true, of course it's a thought.
I think Stefan missed the point of the empiricist debate.
Yeah, that's a thought that makes a truth claim about the world as a whole.
Things in the real world.
You don't then get to jump and say, oh, no, no, but I said I think, therefore it's totally subjective.
It's like, no, no, that's not, you know, that's not, that's not, that's not even fair at all.
Not even fair. All right.
Let's see here. Okay, so I'd say something like logic develops in relation to empiricism, otherwise it's basically untethered in unrelatable madness.
Yeah, so logic is when you make a truth claim about the objective world, right?
And the objective world is not self-contradictory.
That's how you know it's different from the dream world or the dream experience at night.
So, yeah.
Let's see here. Can a deaf, dumb, and blind person be taught to reason?
I read a conspiracy that Helen Keller was a fraud and used a mouthpiece for her Marxist teacher's ideas.
I don't know. I think that you could teach a deaf, dumb, and blind person to reason by touch.
Touch is consistent, right?
Steph should watch What is a Woman.
It would drive him mad. Yeah, I'm kind of avoiding it for that very reason.
I try not to, you know, I didn't enjoy visiting my mother in the mental asylum and I would not enjoy watching that either.
Helen Keller wrote 12 books on communism.
Did she? This is my truth, is their whole argument.
Yeah, so this is my truth.
It's a very interesting post-modernist statement.
Okay, so we'll get into that.
We're also getting into Canada dropping its travel mandates, which I find quite fascinating.
But here, we're going to just switch to supporters.
So, again, I just...
Love the fact that you guys are supporting what it is that I do.
I've handed out my novel to all the supporters, and I really appreciate your support there.
If you would like to help out the show, you can go to freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Of course, here if you sign up, you get 12 months for the price of 10.
It can be real cheap, a couple of bucks a month, freedomain.locals.com.
So I'm just going to switch this to supporters now, and I really do appreciate people dropping by.
I hope that you will You know, help a brother out.
You know, I've taken a lot of bullets for philosophy, made a lot of sacrifices for the course of philosophy, and if you could help me out, I would really appreciate it.
I mean, you're consuming value through this process, so I'm going to switch to supporters.
You can join me again if you want to sign up at freedomain.locals.com, but I'm going to switch over now, and thank you guys as well for just these amazing comments and questions.
All right, let's switch to supporters.
Okay, oh yeah, you get a minute.
Okay, so you get a minute if you want to go to freedemand.locals.com.
You can just open up in a second window and sign up there as well.
Stefan, are you ready to make millions betting against the U.S. dollar, just like Sauron did with the British pound?
Very interesting. I don't know what that message means.
I don't know why you would ask me if you believe that you can make millions better against the U.S. dollar.
I'm not sure why you'd share that with other people.
What about 2,000 Mules?
Have you seen that one yet? I have seen that one yet.
I had him on the show a couple of times, Dinesh D'Souza.
A guy makes some pretty good documentaries.
2,000 Mules, I've mentioned this before.
It is... I mean, it's very powerful, very powerful information.
It's very powerful information, very powerful arguments.
And, of course, if people believe that you can't track people using geolocation, then what's Gen 6 all about?
Who knows? Your documentaries are amazing, Seth.
Your California documentary was brilliant.
Thank you. All right. We now continue with this.
So this is supporters only.
So, you know, it's a little bit more of a private space.
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