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Nov. 5, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:36
How to be CERTAIN! Listener Question
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Righty.
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
A letter from Fiona.
Fiona, she writes, Hey, Steph, I've been listening to you for about a year.
This is the first time I've disagreed with you.
So I'm probably wrong, but I can't see the flaw in my thinking, and I'd love your taking it.
So it's around your discussion about what is truth.
And if someone, say, a madman, says something that happens to align with reality before it can be proven, is that a true statement?
My argument would be yes, it is a true statement.
However, this cannot be known until it can be proven.
And the statement itself has no value other than vague interest.
So to take the example, given a madman happens to be recorded in, say, 500 AD saying the Earth orbits the Sun.
He's dismissed as a lunatic.
Was this random statement true?
I would argue that it was true.
However, that could not be known until the point at which it was shown that the Earth orbiting the Sun fixed the irregular orbit issue.
At that point, however, the madman would be proven to be speaking a true statement.
However, it would be the first person to actually prove the theory that would get credit for the discovery, not the madman, who happened to guess correctly.
At the point the theory was proven, knowledge of the truth propagates both forwards and backwards in time, and whoever said it, it would now be known to be true regardless of when and where they said it.
It is still the case that although we now know that the statement was true when said, they could not have known this as it was not yet proven.
So we have two things, objective reality that exists and a knowledge of it that can only be interpreted from evidence.
Another example is university exams.
After the exam is said, the result is set.
However, the exam result cannot be known until the exam has been graded and the result communicated to you.
If you came out of an exam and say, I got 68.5%, then that could be true, but it's just a guess.
You would not, for example, be able to get a job on that assertion as it cannot be proven.
When you open the envelope, it does not change the reality of how you did in the exam.
It simply collapses the probabilities, both backwards and forwards in time.
At that point, you know what your result is at that point, you know what your result when you took the test was.
It has not changed since that point.
However, you can only know it once you get the result, at which point you can start using the result to say apply for jobs.
So, in summary, my argument is objective reality exists.
Our knowledge of reality does not change reality.
Things are true and false based on agreements to reality.
Statements are therefore true or false based on their alignment with reality, not our knowledge of it.
However, we cannot know what is true and false until it is proven.
We can only say of a statement true, we can only say of a statement was true or false.
I think, sorry, I think you mean to say we can only say of a statement that it was true or false after we have proven the reality, but when a statement was said, does not change the truth.
Right.
It's a great, great email, and I really do appreciate it.
It's a tangled but exciting topic, and really, really, really, really important.
Really, really important.
So, you know, this Nostradamus thing, Nostradamus was this mystic from centuries ago who made a bunch of predictions in fairly metaphorical or allegorical terms.
And people say that he had something of value to offer and so on, which is all a bunch of mystical nonsense.
I'm sure he got some things accidentally correct.
But you have to think of all the people who got things wrong, right?
Millions of people have made tens or hundreds of millions of predictions throughout history.
You would simply expect one person to be the most, quote, accurate or the most coincidentally true or accurate.
If you said a great German power will arise in the 20th century and wage war and blah, blah, blah, right?
Okay.
But then there's lots of people who say, you know, the Inuit are angels descended from whatever, right?
And so let's go back to the madman.
And let's say that he says 500 AD, the Earth goes around the Sun.
Okay.
Is that a true statement?
The question is, is truth a statement or is truth a methodology?
This is an epistemological question.
Is the truth a statement or is the truth a methodology?
Now, if the truth is a methodology, then the final result of proving that the Earth goes around the sun is that you know that the Earth goes around the Sun.
So saying the Earth goes around the Sun is the result of a whole series of reasoning, right?
So some of the reasoning, of course, would be that I am drawn to the Earth a lot more than the Earth is drawn to me because I am much smaller, obviously, than the Earth, except around Christmas or maybe Thanksgiving.
And so because I'm drawn to the Earth a lot more than the Earth is drawn to me, larger things attract smaller things.
And the Sun must be very large because it's on fire, right?
In other words, planets are not on fire because they are too small to start igniting nuclear reactions.
And so it's on fire.
And the moon is smaller than the Earth.
And the Moon goes around the Earth.
And the Earth is smaller than the Sun.
Therefore, the Earth must go around the Sun.
It explains the retrograde motion of Mars and so on, right?
So sort of we can go through a whole bunch of reasoning to understand that the Earth goes around the Sun.
Some of it's reasoning, some of it is observation, and so on.
But it accords with our general experience that things that have more mass are heavier.
They are more drawn.
So things that have more mass are heavier, they are more dense, and they have more gravitational pull and so on.
So there is a bunch of reasoning you can go through to sort of understand this stuff.
Also, when you understand the evolution of life, you would know that the heat and energy of the sun must have predated life.
Life cannot survive without any energy.
And the sun being the source of energy must have predated the Earth.
The Sun was formed, thus, more likely before the Earth.
And therefore, if the Sun was formed before the Earth, it is more likely that it is the center and the requirement and that the Earth goes around the Sun and so on.
There's lots of different ways you can sort of reason this sort of stuff out, but we can come to that understanding.
So if the truth is the final stage of a process of reasoning and empirical evidence, the Earth goes around the Sun is the final stage, then saying the statement without the methodology is not true.
Let me give you an example.
So I started playing tennis about the age of five or six.
I remember when they raised the rates of the tennis club in England, the public club we went to.
It's not really a club.
It's just they raised the rates to play.
My mother would get us up super early in the morning and we'd climb over the fence to play tennis before she went to work.
And like all, you know, average tennis players, you experiment with fast serves.
And I played for a long time before I got any lessons.
And once I got lessons, my serves got better.
And I still remember I was in Vegas with a business colleague.
We were playing tennis, and I served a perfect serve.
Like I whacked it really hard.
It went into the perfect spot.
I aced him and so on.
And that was a really great serve.
If I could do that consistently, I would be a really good server and so on, right?
That'd be really good.
It would really improve my tennis game because the serve is kind of the key.
Now, I had taken a little bit of training, but I hadn't really practiced.
And I played recreationally.
I'm not particularly interested in sports and leagues and so on.
I get enough excitement from my job.
I don't need anything else.
Now, if I had trained consistently, and let's just say there's a certain magic ingredient of skill or ability or muscle reflexes or whatever it is, right?
So I'm like okay to maybe slightly above average at sports, but nothing particularly spectacular.
But let's say I had, you know, the Bjorn Borg, Andre Agassi magic dust, and I trained, and I had a really good coach and all of that, then I would be able to do that serve consistently.
Now, if I ripped off that great serve in Vegas many decades ago, that was a great serve.
Am I good at serving?
No. Because I can't do that consistently.
In other words, a man who's good at serving, a tennis player who's good at serving, is a tennis player who has trained consistently and can reproduce it consistently.
We can imagine, of course, a blind man being given a racket and a ball and being told roughly what to do, who could, I mean, it would be rare, but it could happen, that he threw the ball up, hit it, and it happened to be a perfect serve.
Is he a good tennis player?
I would argue that he is not a good tennis player because he can't reproduce it.
So what is a good tennis player?
A good tennis player is not someone who accidentally randomly hits a good serve and can't reproduce it.
And then the next serves go completely wild and so on, right?
That is not a good tennis player.
It's the same thing.
You know, I think I've played golf maybe three times in my life for business purposes.
But let's just say mini golf, right?
Everyone's had that thing where they take, if you have kids, right?
You take your kids mini golfing and there's some wild shot that just goes really well and they jump up and down and we all cheer and all that kind of stuff.
Are they good at mini golf?
Like if they're four or five years old, they whack the ball kind of randomly.
It bounces off four things and sinks into a hole.
Are they good at mini golf?
No, because they can't reproduce it.
So can you be right without being good at being right?
I remember silly little things that have stuck in my mind, probably as unconscious bookmarks for conversations, just like this one.
But many years ago, a friend of mine played a golf game on his computer, and he showed me that his wife had made the most ridiculously improbable shot using the golf simulator.
It was like not a physical one, but just like keyboard or mouse.
So, you know, it went through trees, it bounced over a little pond, and then it sunk into the hole.
A great shot, right?
And he had saved the recording of that.
And he said she never, never did anything like that again.
Is she good at that computer game?
No.
Because can't be reproduced.
has no methodology of reproduction.
It's the old are monkeys great writers if they type a haiku that's beautiful or they type out some sonnet or some psalm or whatever it is, right?
If a kid who's randomly banging away on a keyboard or his xylophone puts out dum dung dum dung dung dung, right?
The opening bit of Bohemian Rhapsody after the a cappella stuff.
No, they're not writing music.
They're not creating a great song.
It's just random notes.
If a child doing random scribbles writes E equals MC squared, have they independently discovered Einstein's most famous equation, right?
Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.
No.
No, they have not.
They have simply made some doodles.
Now, it is certainly true that E equals M C squared, but truth is not the relationship of the statement to reality, because that does not take into account the accidental nature of statements.
If you've got a madman who says belugas are secretly physicists and the stars are pinpricks in the giant colander known as the sky beyond which there is a beluga god, that's where all the light comes from.
He glows, and the earth goes around the sun and right.
Then he is saying a whole bunch of statements that are not true.
I'm pretty sure that belugas are not secret physicists.
He's saying a whole bunch of things that are not true.
And then he accidentally says something that turns out later to correspond with reality.
But the truth is not in the statement.
The truth is in the methodology.
It's really important.
There is no truth without methodology.
If you can imagine the blind tennis player who, or not tennis player, the blind guy handed a tennis racket and a tennis ball and spun around three times, happens to throw the ball up with his foot right on the center line and delivers a perfect scorcher of a serve to the opposite diagonal.
If he did that, would you then say, if you ran the tennis club, you're hired as the tennis coach?
You would not.
You would not say that, right?
You would not say you're hired as the tennis coach because you would recognize that this was an accident.
This is not skill.
This is not reproducibility.
This is not any consistent ability.
So truth is not the relationship of the statement to reality.
Truth is the relationship of the mind to reality.
I can write out E equals M C squared.
I cannot do the math by which that equation is derived.
It is true that E equals M C squared, but the truth is in the methodology, not in the statement.
Truth is not accidental any more than being a good tennis player is a blind guy randomly hitting a good serve.
Truth is the relationship between the mind and reality.
And if some guy who's crazy, as you say in 500 AD, who says among a whole bunch of other random, crazy stuff, and the earth goes around the sun, there is no truth value in his statement because he has no methodology.
He is the blind tennis player accidentally hitting a scorching serve, not even knowing where the ball went.
Is he playing tennis, the blind tennis player?
No, he's not playing tennis.
He can't even see the court.
There's no braille for tennis.
So truth is in the relationship between the mind and the methodology and reality.
Now, the question is, and this is a good question that came up: can we accept the truth without proving it ourselves?
I accept that E equals M C squared.
I do not do the math.
I do not understand the fundamental physics and so on.
I mean, I accept it because there is nuclear power, and physicists as a whole accept it.
Even those, like, I discard people who have financial interest, like who have a conflict of interest, right?
So, I know, of course, that people who refused to affirm catastrophic anthropogenic global warming got their funding cut and all other kinds of terrible things happened.
And so, I don't accept any of that as true because it's too compromised, right?
It's like asking the advertising agency that gets all of its money from Coca-Cola to be objective about Coca-Cola.
Whoever pays the piper calls a tune.
But, of course, Einstein was working at a patent office when he worked on this sort of stuff.
He had no particular financial interest, and there was, of course, something that changed in physics because we got nuclear weapons and nuclear power, so something changed in terms of our understanding of these things.
And I accept that.
And, of course, we've all seen, you know, the relationship between mass and energy is interesting, right?
I mean, I know that very little of firewood gets converted into energy, but we all have had the experience of, as kids, lighting a match, and you see the match burn to almost nothing, and you get heat and smoke out of it.
So, that's an example of the relationship between matter and energy.
We have all seen sunlight, which is energy, of course, being transformed into matter, which is plants and fruits and vegetables and all of that grass grows from the sun.
So, we all have an intuitive understanding of the relationship between matter and energy.
A human being is a great way to turn a pig into a poem.
You eat the pig, you have the energy to write the poem.
The poem now exists because of the energy consumed through the destruction of the pig, assuming you're not eating it live, which would be gross.
So, we all understand the relationship between matter and energy.
I am tired.
I feel weak.
My hands might be a little bit shaky, you know, for people who are a little bit more hypochondriac or my blood sugar is collapsing.
Whatever, right?
So, we are low on energy.
We eat food, and lo and behold, we have more energy, right?
So, that's an example of matter being converted into energy.
And then the energy of our intestines and bowels and so on discards the aspects of the food we cannot eat, giving them a noxious smell so that we avoid them in terms of eating, and we poop, right?
And that's an example of turning energy into matter, right?
So, we eat the pig, we get energy, we discard that which we also go from in sort of base equation.
Obviously, not 100% because that would be matter antimatter and we'd be a sit stain in the universe, but to a small degree, we experience that, right?
We experience that just as we experience kinetic energy and potential energy, right?
If you've ever had those little toys that come for kids, it's a it's a like a little roller coaster style thing with ball bearings, and you build it with these spirals and loops and so on.
Put the stuff at the top of the balls.
So you lift the balls to the top and then the balls go down to the bottom and they sit there.
So the kinetic energy is then going down.
The potential energy is you're lifting it to the top, which then releases the potential for, well, the kinetic energy.
So we all have this sort of vivid experience that conforms with the idea that there's a relationship between mass and energy.
I remember as a kid, my friends and I used to get a box of matches, a lot of smokers back in the day.
We used to get a box of matches and we used to get a nail and a hammer and some scuba masks.
And we would hammer into a sidewalk and we would scrape the match heads in and then we would put the nail in, hit it, and watch the resulting explosion with great delight.
And the masks, of course, were essential to protect our eyes.
Apparently, the rest of our face didn't really matter, but that's the way we did it.
So it accords with our experience.
It is accepted by people with no financial conflicts.
It has produced new energy in the world, which is nuclear energy.
And so, yep, I accept that.
I accept that.
So the truth is the result of a methodology.
It is not the result of a statement.
So, and again, I know these are a lot of analogies.
I'll get to the reasoning at the end.
So, let us say that my neighbor studies for 20 years, practices three hours a day, and produces a beautiful painting.
It's a lovely painting of a sunset.
Now, he owns himself, he owns the effects of his actions, assuming that he did not steal all the materials as he bought the materials.
He paints the picture of the sunset in his basement, and it's quite lovely.
And then he sets it outside of his house to dry.
And he goes for a walk.
So it's his painting, right?
He owns himself.
He owns the effects of his actions.
It's his painting.
Now, that ownership is the result of a process, right?
The process of creation.
And in this case, the beauty of the painting is the result of his skill and ability and training and so on.
He spent 10,000 hours learning how to be a good painter.
And so he's produced a beautiful painting of a sunset.
Or dogs playing poker or a sad clown or something like that.
It's his head sunset, right?
Now, I look out my window and I see leaning up against my neighbor's house this beautiful picture of a sunset.
And I am a bad guy and I steal it, right?
And I hang it in my basement.
So I can go and admire it, rub my mustache, and rub my hands in avaricious glee.
Now, is the painting mine?
Nope.
I've stolen it.
It belongs to him.
I have it, but it's not mine.
And I am honor-bound to return it.
Or if he finds out about it, he sees it through my basement window.
He can call the cops and say, that's my painting, and so on, right?
And let's say he has a video of me taking it and whatever, right?
So it's proven.
So ownership is the result of a process.
And truth is the result of a process.
For someone to say, my statement is true because I said something random is saying that truth is in the moment.
It is not in the process, which is like saying that the painting is mine because I'm in possession of it.
Not the painting's ownership is the result of a process of studying and creation.
Ownership is the result of a process.
You can't just look at who has something and say that's who owns it.
So given that truth is the result of a process, a random statement cannot be considered true any more than a stolen good can be considered owned.
You're in possession of it, but you don't own it.
You are in possession of some random syllables that later are proven to accidentally correspond with the truth, but the syllables themselves have no truth value because there's no reproducible methodology by which the truth can be obtained.
You cannot be accidentally right any more than you can be accidentally a great golfer or a great tennis player or accidentally own things or legitimately own things by stealing them.
In the same way, a person who is a thief, a rapist, and a murderer, like just the worst of the worst, right?
A thief, a rapist, and a murderer, or a Hollywood actor.
No, no, let's stay up from the bottom.
Thief, a rapist, and a murderer, who one day has an attack of conscience and decides to give $100 to charity.
Has he become a good man?
If he goes right back to thieving, raping, and murdering right afterwards, he has not become a good man.
The cycle of abuse is kind of well known that take the typical example, right?
There's a man who beats up his wife and then he apologizes and stella and right, all of this sad stuff.
And he's, I'm so sorry, I'll never do it again.
I'm the worst guy.
You're the greatest woman, blah, blah, blah.
It was the alcohol.
It was whatever.
Has he become a good lying, a good, good, kind, and loving husband when he is in the sorrowful apology stage of the cycle of abuse?
He has not.
He has not.
Because it's setting the stage for the next round of abuse.
So is he a good husband when he is apologizing and not hitting her?
And then he is a bad husband when he hits her again and then a good husband?
No, he's just a bad husband.
Because his sorrow, his kindness, his whatever, it's not at all consistent.
It's not at all consistent.
A murderer is a murderer who we put in jail, even when he or she is not currently in the act of murdering someone.
So we can accept things as true if they accord with our general experience.
Experts who are not bought and paid for generally agree, this was the COVID thing too, that there was, of course, a massive conflict of interest between the scientists and the pharmaceutical industry and the media and the government.
And there was just every incentive, known to man, God and devil, to lie your ass off, which people somewhat gleefully did.
So I accept E equals MC squared as true for various empirical reasons and reasons of personal empiricism.
I accept that the Earth goes around the sun because of my own empirical experience and the fact that there's reason and evidence, and I can see sped up pictures, sped up videos of the retrograde motion of Mars and so on.
So, and there are scientists who have nothing to gain or lose in the matter who accept it.
And so I accept it as true.
Now, if you get to the radical skeptical position of, ah, but it could still be, it could all be a big conspiracy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Then that's just paranoia.
Like, I'm sorry to say it.
Like, that's just paranoia.
I've never been to Japan, but I'm pretty sure Japan is not a conspiracy theory.
The existence of Japan is not, because it corresponds with reason and evidence that there are countries that exist that I have not been to, that when I go there, like I'd never been to Hong Kong, I went to Hong Kong in 2019 to film a documentary.
And lo and behold, it was there, right?
There are flights that go there.
I see them all over the airport.
So, in my experience, there have been countries that I've been told exist.
I have been to a large number of them.
And lo and behold, they do exist, right?
So, Japan is not a conspiracy theory.
Ah, but it could be, right?
And it could be.
Well, that's just a position of radical skepticism.
And, you know, this is the appeal to insecurity.
Isn't it?
Isn't it even the tiniest bit possible?
Isn't it even the tiniest bit possible that Japan is a conspiracy theory and that the earth is indeed flat and everything goes around the earth and the sun is closer to you than Australia, which in Florida does actually feel to be the case.
So that's just, isn't it possible that?
And this is an appeal to humility that is actually very destructive.
And it bothers people, right?
So if you've been raised by people who are both wrong and certain, and this is just psychological stuff, right?
If you've been raised by people who are both wrong and certain and tend to be quite bullying and aggressive about them being both wrong and certain, then certainty is dangerous to you.
And if certainty has been dangerous to you, right?
I mean, my mother was certain that she was psychic.
And when I would point out things to the contrary, she would get angry.
And so I stopped pointing out things to the contrary because my mother could be extremely dangerous when angry, like, yea, verily unto death.
So if you've been raised by people who are both wrong and certain, then certainty is a danger to you.
And so what you do is you try to sow seeds of doubt because of your anxiety about having been brutalized by certainty in the past.
Certainty has become a predator.
And not you, this lady who sent in the question, I'm just talking about people in general.
So certainty has become a danger.
So then, because certainty makes you anxious, what you do is roam around in life trying to sow seeds of doubt in people because people who are certain are very dangerous.
And of course, there are people who are certain who are very dangerous if they're wrong, right?
So in Cambodia, or, you know, sort of pick a totalitarian hellscape.
But in Cambodia, they were certain that people should go and work on farms.
So they herded all the intellectuals out of the cities and dropped them in farms where there were endless waves of mass starvation events killing millions and millions of people.
So that's certainty to the point of causing the deaths of millions of people, 100 million people killed by communism in the 20th century.
Well, they're very certain and they're very dangerous.
But the way that you solve irrational certainty is not through an appeal to humility, because people who are narcissistic that way don't have the capacity really for humility or self-criticism.
So it is saying the criminals are well armed.
Let's disarm the good people.
Let's disarm the police.
Let's disarm the law-abiding citizens because the criminals are really dangerous with their guns, right?
It's the same sort of thing.
Is that people who are irrational and certain are dangerous.
So your enemy there is not the certainty, but the irrationality, like you're missing the hostage-taker and shooting the hostage and thinking that you've helped in some manner.
The problem is not the certainty.
The problem is the irrationality.
In a way, too, by sowing seeds of doubt, it's sort of a sibling thing, right?
And it's an elder sibling thing, too, for the most part.
And the elder sibling thing goes something like this: Bob is the older sibling.
Johnny is the younger sibling.
And the mother is a crazy mystic.
And Bob, the elder sibling, has realized that if he pushes back against the mother's mysticism, the mother becomes violent.
So the problem is that Johnny hasn't figured this out yet.
But Bob, the elder sibling, either wants to protect himself or protect his sibling or both or something like that, or just avoid some horrible blow-up.
And so what does he do?
Well, he can't criticize the mother's mysticism because that produces violence.
So what he does is he tries his very best to get little Johnny to stop criticizing mysticism, to stop saying, oh, mama, that's crazy.
That doesn't make any sense.
What about all the dreams that didn't come true?
And if you're so psychic, why did you marry dad?
You know, all these sorts of things, right?
Dad was a bad guy, right?
So what Bob does is he says to little Johnny, you don't know for sure.
And, you know, just hold your tongue and just think about it.
And maybe it's true.
And he's doing this because he's afraid of the violence of the mystic.
And so it is both missing the point, which is the danger, is not the certainty, but the anti-rationality.
And it is in a twisted way trying to protect people.
If you're certain and moral, well, people who are both certain and moral often come to a very bad end in society.
And I've been skating that ragged edge for 44 years.
So people, in a weird way, they're trying to help me, right?
They're trying to protect me.
Don't be certain and right because you'll come to a bad end.
And I don't know, maybe, but I mean, that's the gig, right?
It's like saying to a surgeon, well, you can't operate because you might get an infection.
You might make a mistake.
It's like, well, that's part of the gig, right?
I mean, don't be a surgeon if you don't want any of that.
So that, I think, is the issue.
And when people say things that are crazy, and saying, if you're a madman in AD 500, saying that the earth goes around the sun is not a true statement because there's no methodology in it.
Truth is not the statement.
Truth is the methodology.
Truth is the relationship, not between the statement, which cannot think.
Somebody writes out, because how would we know?
So we discover some mad monk's diary, and he says, you know, the beluga are physicists, and Aristotle has been reincarnated as a cockroach, and I killed him yesterday.
Like, he says all this crazy stuff, and he says, and the earth goes around the sun.
There's no truth in the statement.
Because truth is the relationship, not between the statement, because his book cannot think.
There's no truth in the book.
There's no truth in the sentence.
The truth is in the relationship between the mind and reality.
It is in the process of pursuing truth.
And also, of course, the mad monk who writes about the reincarnation of Aristotle and that the earth goes around the sun.
We only know that his statement is true because people have proven it subsequently.
And the fact that he didn't prove it means that he was accidentally right.
As I've mentioned before, we don't, if the wind blows particles of sand into the shape E equals MC squared, we don't give it a degree in physics.
We don't say, oh my God, the truth.
The wind is sentient, right?
It's just an accident.
There is no truth in the wind blowing sand dunes into the shape of E equals M C squared or a bunch of coconuts that fall in a pattern that's somewhat reminiscent of 2 and 2 equals 4, like the equation.
There's no truth in that.
The tree isn't doing math and the wind isn't a physicist.
It's an accidental aggregation of things.
And it is really important because it allows us to avoid being conned and lied to.
So if somebody says this is true, whatever it is, X is true, right?
You say, oh, that's interesting.
And how do you know?
You know, source, trust me, bro, is not a philosophical statement, right?
How do you know?
The earth goes around the sun.
Oh, how do you know?
I don't know.
The voices told me in the same way that they told me that Aristotle had been reincarnated as a cockroach and I killed him yesterday and beluga whales are theoretical physicists, right?
Okay, so the same words that told you crazy things are now saying the earth goes around the sun.
There's no truth value in that.
Because people show your work.
Show your work.
You ever have this, right?
You're a kid, and you provide an answer to a complex math question, and they always want to say, show your work.
Right?
A kid randomly scrolling on a math test might accidentally scroll out the right answer.
That doesn't mean that the answer is right.
It's just a coincidence.
It's accident.
Any more than the blind tennis player hitting a perfect serve the first time is a good tennis player.
A good tennis player is one who can reliably reproduce good tennis shots, and a blind tennis player cannot.
Truth is a methodology that reliably produces accurate information and validates rational theories about the world, the universe.
The scientific method produces reproducible facts and validating our theories and accurate predictions about the world.
So truth is in the relationship between the mind, the methodology, and reality.
Now, after you produce a whole bunch of innovative and creative mathematical and physics proofs, you can say equals MC squared, and you show your work, so we can accept that that's true.
And Einstein, of course, was someone who said that here's how we will know whether the theory is true or not.
It was actually kind of refreshing, right?
Because there were these ideologues in the early part of the 20th century, communists and so on, even though Einstein was himself a big fan of Lenin.
But there were these people who said, oh, this stuff is true, it's accurate.
And they were ideologues and manic and crazy and insistent and entitled and narcissistic and you name it, right?
And Einstein said, well, if my theory is true, then we should see light bending around the sun during an eclipse.
And if it's not true, then we won't see that.
And lo and behold, that's so they did.
They saw an eclipse and they measured the position of the stars and light itself was being bent by gravity, right?
And of course, it's been proven now.
They take an atomic clock and they get a really fast plane flying around the world for a while and time has slightly changed at a microscopic level for the fast plane that's been proven and established and you can see all of those experiments and read the results and so on, right?
So a certainty bringing anxiety is what drives people to try and say, truth is in the statement, truth is not in the mind or the methodology.
If it's not proven, it's not true.
If it's not reproducible, it's not true.
If there's no theory behind it, it's not true.
If there's no reasoning behind it, it's not true.
If a toddler, you know, when kids learn how to speak, they make a whole bunch of incoherent sounds ahead of time, right?
I remember when my daughter first discovered her voice, it was great.
It was great.
And I'm sure you've seen these videos where kids occasionally make a swear word.
Well, you don't punish them, right?
Because they don't know that they're making a swear word.
And theoretically, when a kid is just putting together random morphemes into practicing their words, that they could say two and two make four.
Just an accident, right?
But they don't know.
It's not true.
Because you're looking at the statement that is a result of methodology and you are then backtracking it to something without a methodology.
It is true that good tennis players serve well.
It is not true that a man who randomly serves well is a good tennis player.
So truth is a methodology and a reproducible, consistent way of getting to the truth.
And the truth results from that.
Just as a painting results from study and practice and actually making the painting.
Taking the painting and saying it's mine is like looking at a statement and saying it's true when the person who created it has no sense of it being true, has no reproducible methodology for it being true.
So then when people say things or make claims that things are true, we can't say, well, it could be.
It could be.
I don't know yet because in the future, in the future, you know, this is what people say.
Well, people used to believe things were true in the past and then they were found out they were wrong and so on.
It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So what?
So what?
That doesn't, right?
When I was born, I didn't know that two and two made four.
Now I know that two and two make four.
Does that mean that because I went from a state of lesser knowledge to greater knowledge, that my new knowledge is invalid?
Nope.
Because there's nothing beyond two and two make four.
There's nothing more true about two and two makes four than two and two makes four.
It doesn't get more true, right?
This sort of binary, right?
Oh, two and two makes 3.999 repeated, rounded up.
Right.
But anyway, so that's, I think that's the way to put it.
So if people say this is true, say, oh, how do you know?
What's your methodology, right?
And that is going to create something, it's going to create some hostility.
And listen, that's fine.
If you don't want that hostility, that's fine.
Like if you don't want people say, oh, this is true, right?
I mean, I had a woman get mad at me in a relationship, right?
She said, I'm psychic.
And I'm like, oh, well, let's go down to Vegas and pick up the million dollars that the amazing Randy had at the time for anyone who could prove psychic abilities.
I didn't look that way, right?
She got mad at me, right?
So it's true that if you go to bullshit artists and you say, you have a, you have it, it's not true.
You don't have any proof.
You don't know that.
It's like, I do.
There's no truth in your statement because truth is the result of a strict methodology.
Truth is not accidental, random statements.
There's no truth value.
Yeah, but it is true.
It's like, no, it's only true when it's proven.
It is not true when it is stated.
And there is no going back.
Somebody who's in a mad fever dream or has Tourette's and say, the earth goes around the sun in AD 500.
It's not a true statement.
You say, well, later we found out to be true.
We can go back and put truth in.
Nope.
No, you can't.
Because there was no methodology at the time.
It was not a true statement.
And it's confusing because we've seen the product.
We know that the earth goes around the sun.
So we think that somebody in the past who said it.
But again, that's like saying, well, we know what a good tennis player is.
So a guy who randomly hits a ball well is a good tennis player.
Nope, it's not reproducible.
So I hope that helps.
I'd love to hear more about your thoughts.
And thanks again, Fiona.
It's a great, great set of questions.
Nothing negative I'm saying about people in con men applies to you, of course.
But I really do appreciate these questions.
Keep them coming.
Mmm, freedomain.com slash dinner.
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