May 27, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:52
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| But vanity is having an untested high opinion of yourself. | |
| I mean, I will not lie. | |
| I have a very high opinion of myself as a philosopher. | |
| I think I have realistic views of myself, but I have a high opinion of myself as a philosopher. | |
| And one of the challenges, you may disagree, I may be wrong. | |
| I'll just be honest and tell you what I think. | |
| With regards to what I do in this show, one of the reasons why I ask you all for your questions is that, I mean, I still have stuff to talk about for sure, but I think of the number of major problems that I have solved in the realm of philosophy. | |
| And I believe that I have solved them. | |
| I've debated them endlessly. | |
| I've gotten lots of feedback and pushback and refined them. | |
| And I've solved the problem of secular ethics, solved the problem of free will, solved the problem of love, solved the problem of simulation theory, solved the problem of metaphysics and epistemology, and solved the problem of morality in relationships and all of that. | |
| So I've just done, well, a lot. | |
| I've done a lot, and again, it won't be seen for a generation or two, everything that I've done. | |
| Philosophy is the slowest moving of the disciplines, by far. | |
| By far. | |
| Because there is almost nothing practical in philosophical advancements for anyone who's alive. | |
| If it's an advancement in physics, let's say, then that can translate to engineering, can translate to business, can translate to profits, and so on, like quantum mechanics allows for the modern computer. | |
| Theory of relativity allows for, equals mc squared allows for nuclear power and so on, right? | |
| So various chemical and physical formulas allowed for the internal combustion engine and trains, right? | |
| So physics, I mean, they do say physics advances, science advances one grave at a time, right? | |
| It takes a new generation. | |
| But philosophy is much slower, much slower, because philosophy is... | |
| Their relationships, their business, their friendships, everything is sort of embedded in a particular moral paradigm. | |
| And if that moral paradigm is proven to be false, people's lives are revealed to be conformist catastrophes. | |
| It's like the peaceful parenting thing. | |
| Oh, yeah, the philosophy of parenting, right? | |
| I'm the philosopher who's tackled the philosophy of parenting with the greatest depth and clarity that has probably been achieved. | |
| I've got a whole theory of mental health and psychology and self-knowledge and all that kind of stuff. | |
| Not that I'm a psychologist, but, you know, I have a theory of sort of how the mind works. | |
| So I've done so much that I don't want to just invent things, you know. | |
| If it's been, I mean, I've been almost 20 years doing this, right? | |
| And in public, I'm 20, I'm 40 years, right? | |
| So 40 years of pretty applied thought I've solved a lot. | |
| So I have a very high opinion of myself as a philosopher. | |
| And of course, my call-in shows how to take self-knowledge and apply it to practical decisions within the world that is, within the choices that people make in their life. | |
| I've connected abstract theory to Practical, empirical decisions in a way that has not been done before, at least in the way that it's sort of recorded and published before. | |
| I got a whole theory of dreams and their purpose. | |
| Like, really, I've covered the gamut. | |
| And I'm very humbled and grateful for my ability to do that. | |
| I did not earn my ability to do that. | |
| I have that ability, and I've tried to... | |
| And of course, you know, I've explained why disparate groups have disparate outcomes. | |
| And so all of this. | |
| And my predictions have been pretty good. | |
| So I've done a lot. | |
| And so I thought, when I was little, I thought, gosh, I have something really great to offer the world. | |
| And I tried for many years to offer my skills and abilities to the world. | |
| Finally, when podcasting. | |
| I came along, and the middleman, the middlewoman in particular, was removed between me and you, right? | |
| I didn't have to go through other people to get from me to you. | |
| I could, as I do right now tonight, talk directly. | |
| And so I felt or had an instinct or a thought that I was going to have great things to offer the world, and then the technology caught up, which I am again. | |
| I'm immensely humbly grateful for. | |
| I mean, I'm sure there have been plenty of smart and smarter philosophers throughout history, but like in my novel, Just Poor, Mary O'Donnell, right? | |
| They did not have any way to get their thoughts in a permanent way out into the world. | |
| I'm not smarter necessarily at all. | |
| I just have the right technology at the right time. | |
| And, of course, I've done my debates, I've done my public speaking, and I've put forward many predictions, and I've had, I mean, in many ways, every call-in show is a debate between truth and historical inflicted delusion. | |
| So, I have pride in what I have provided to the world. | |
| Because it's not vanity, because I've tested it, right? | |
| I've put the books out, I've had the debates, I've had the pushback, I've had the feedback, I've had the criticisms, and I've worked with them and all of that. | |
| So that is tested. | |
| That's not vanity. | |
| That has been put to the test. | |
| So vanity is when you have a high opinion of yourself that you refuse to submit to empirical tests. | |
| Oh, I could be a great... | |
| Well, you should go and audition, or if you can't get a part, you can write your own stuff or whatever and just try and find a way to sort of make it happen. | |
| I mean, one of the reasons why I ended up doing a couple of documentaries, and I would have done more except they were choked off from distribution through suppression, was I saw a hoaxedmovie.com. | |
| Mike Cernovich is great. | |
| And even more relevant now than it was when it first came out. | |
| But Mike Cernovich is... |
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