Brett Hall Knowledge Creation & Human Potential

(0:00 - 0:10) Coming up in this episode. It's the culture that we're living in, unfortunately. There's been decided there's something inherently wrong with people, that we are a virus on this planet. (0:10 - 0:23) And so we are swimming in this culture, which is anti-human. I think that the only reason to preserve any of the wonderful environment that we have here on planet Earth, and more broadly, is for people. I think that people are central to this. (0:23 - 0:38) And a person is this entity that can create explanations about the rest of physical reality. We are categorically different. And if we continue to use this power to understand the rest of physical reality, we gain control over more and more physical reality. (0:38 - 0:54) And any problem is solvable. You are now listening to the Year for the Truth podcast, hosted by Joel Rafiti and Yerasimos. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to Year for the Truth. (0:54 - 1:05) I'm Joel Rafiti. I've got my co-host Yerasimos with me, as always. And today we have Brett Hall with us to discuss epistemology, which essentially means the theory of the knowledge. (1:06 - 1:24) He's the host of Topcast, which I think was rated the number one epistemology podcast in the world, where he dives into the work of the philosopher David Deutsch. His work is also built upon the work of philosopher Karl Popper. And this is a very interesting conversation, in my personal opinion. (1:24 - 1:42) We dive into how these ideas translate across different aspects of reality, be it science, physics, philosophy, politics, morality. And you might not agree with everything that's shared on this episode. And that's okay, too. (1:42 - 1:52) We're here to have the conversations. And there's no doubt, in my opinion, that there's a lot of gold to be mined here, for sure. So with all that being said, here's Brett Hall. (1:52 - 2:17) And please enjoy this conversation. Brett Hall is the host of Topcast, a program focused on the work of physicist David Deutsch, philosopher Karl Popper, and associated thinkers. Brett works as technical advisor to the original angel investor, Naval Ravikant, and the Conjecture Institute, where he specializes in epistemology, physics, and the promotion of a humanistic philosophy of rational optimism. (2:18 - 2:22) Brett, welcome to Here for the Truth. Fantastic to be here. Nice to meet you guys. (2:22 - 2:36) Yeah, absolutely, man. One way we always like to kick these podcasts off is diving a little bit deeper into your personal hero's journey. I think you have, what, 230 episodes dedicated to these ideas and philosophies now. (2:36 - 2:57) What are some of the major catalysts along your own personal path that led you down this kind of road that you found yourself on today? So I suppose I was a nerdy kid growing up, little boy interested in dinosaurs, that kind of thing, which immediately led to what happened to the dinosaurs? They got wiped out by an asteroid or a comet. And so that led me into astronomy. And I thought, I really want to be an astronomer. (2:58 - 3:16) So throughout high school, I was like, how can I learn more about this stuff? How can I learn about ancestors? Big questions. How big is the universe? How many galaxies have got? What is the truth of all of this? And so I went off to uni, started studying an astrophysics degree, was led into philosophy. Every time I got an answer, I wanted to go deeper. (3:17 - 3:43) And just by coincidence, as I was studying all of this stuff about quantum physics and the nature of mathematics, the limits of logic, the limits of our understanding, I stumbled across The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch. And so it was just really fortuitous that on the one hand, formally, I was studying all this stuff. And on the other hand, I found a popular account or what I thought at the time was a popular account covering all of it. (3:43 - 3:55) But the difference was I'd been reading a lot of popular science up until this point. This was like 1997 when that book got published. And especially when it came to things like quantum theory, notoriously difficult to understand. (3:56 - 4:07) I was being told both in lectures and in other popular accounts, if you don't understand this, it doesn't matter because no one understands this. And you're not supposed to understand this. As long as you can do the mathematics, that's all that matters. (4:08 - 4:15) And that to me seemed like they were trying to pull the wool out of my eyes. They were lying to me. Someone was hiding something and it just didn't sit well with me. (4:15 - 4:38) And when I read The Fabric of Reality, it was then that I realized someone does understand this. There's a group of people who actually have the answers, who can cleanly explain what's going on. And they can cleanly explain it because they had something that the other people, the other physicists lacked, which was a good epistemology, a good way of understanding what knowledge is, a good philosophy of science about how science worked. (4:38 - 4:53) And so I immediately basically fell in love with the work of David Deutsch, which led me to Karl Popper. And also at that time, 97, you'll remember, there wasn't much happening by way of the internet then. It was blogs, it was email exchange, it wasn't any social media. (4:53 - 5:07) But there was a group of people there, very small group of people at the time, who had coalesced around The Fabric of Reality. And so we were sharing emails and David Deutsch was part of the community as well. And so we began to explore the book in depth, unlike any other book. (5:08 - 5:23) I've said before that although if you're looking for the book, you're going to find it categorized as popular science. It's not really a popular science book. It's an entirely new way of looking at everything from science to mathematics, philosophy, morality, and all of this stuff. (5:23 - 5:48) And so for about the next decade after 97, I just continued with formal studies in physics, philosophy, astrophysics, still thinking maybe I'll become an astrophysicist or something like that. I was teaching along the way, doing high school teaching. And we were all waiting, this group of people who were reading The Fabric of Reality together and just discussing it constantly and all the offshoots of it, because it's just so deep and broad. (5:48 - 6:08) We were waiting for David Deutsch to publish his next book, essentially the sequel, The Beginning of Infinity. And so when that happened, again, that was another huge change to our little community of people where, wow, we didn't think he could top the last one, but he did. So then there was a new flourishing of people interested in the work of David Deutsch. (6:08 - 6:30) But again, it was still just email kind of stuff, and a few people wrote blogs and that kind of thing. But when social media began, when YouTube began, podcasting began, I thought, well, why don't I try and explain The Beginning of Infinity? Because this needs to be more widely known. There's so many famous scientists out there on social media doing interviews. (6:30 - 6:42) This David Deutsch guy, I find him an order of magnitude better than the other thinkers that are out there. He's only got two books. Other people have a catalogue of 20 books. (6:42 - 7:16) In some cases, I'd read them, like Paul Davies, famous physicist who worked in both Australia and the United Kingdom, sort of a contemporary of David Deutsch as well. He published many, many books, and I'd read all of them. And although they were fantastic and you get a wonderful understanding of the mainstream view of science, it wasn't the same kind of thing, the earth-shattering change that you get from not only reading, but discussing, absorbing, challenging, trying to understand what is going on in the work of Karl Popp and David Deutsch through those two books, Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. (7:16 - 7:38) So I just started the podcast trying to think out loud what I understood the books to mean. And like you say, 230 episodes later, people seem to have found it useful for them because there's one of three ways I think people can go when they read The Beginning of Infinity. On the one hand, they read it and they're like me, they get really excited and they want to talk to other people about it. (7:38 - 7:53) And so TopCast serves as a place where people can coalesce and form other communities. Or they can read it and go, oh, I already get all of this, I understand it and I think it's false. Or they read it and they really don't understand and they really need help with it. (7:53 - 8:16) That second group of people, the people who think that it's false, generally what they're doing, and I've talked to David about this, is they're reading into the book what they expect to already be there. So especially if they are someone who has been schooled in traditional philosophy and physics, they just think, well, I already know everything there is to know about physics and philosophy. So David Deutsch is a smart guy, he's going to agree with me. (8:16 - 9:07) And so they don't realize that actually it's challenging just about every single mainstream view of physics and of epistemology that exists out there in academia at the moment. So yeah, I guess that's my backstory. Amazing, man. I love the passion. So you never had, I guess, a quote-unquote formal career or job in this realm. It was just your pure interest, which led you to being a podcaster, and then that led into different avenues? Exactly. As I say, school teacher for a long time. And so I would shoehorn in these takes on philosophy and physics into lessons with higher level students, you know, year 11 and year 12 students and stuff. But at some point, although I thought what I was doing as a teacher was good, I thought I was a reasonably good teacher, a competent teacher, a well-educated teacher, all of this kind of stuff. (9:07 - 9:26) At some point, the collision happened, the collision between what I was passionate about in terms of teaching and delivering these lessons on everything from physics through to epistemology. There was actually a subject in something called the International Baccalaureate, which is what many year 11 and 12 students take around the world. It's an international program if you want to get into university. (9:26 - 9:39) There is actually a subject there called Theory of Knowledge. It doesn't exactly resemble what I'm talking about on TopCast, which is Theory of Knowledge cast, but there was some crossover. And so again, I was trying to insert it into that. (9:39 - 10:03) But the collision I'm talking about is, on the one hand, I'm quite enjoying this teaching stuff, love talking to kids, all of this. But on the other hand, one of the very deep fundamental principles, for want of another word, in Popperian and David Deutsch's epistemology and worldview is non-coercion. And coercion is just central to the way in which high school students learn. (10:03 - 10:12) They're forced to sit in rows. They're forced to all listen to the same thing. What Popper said, being given answers to questions never asked. (10:12 - 10:28) I didn't want to be in that position anymore. And happily, I had the opportunity to basically devote my time to spreading these ideas. Spreading sounds bad, but trying to help other people understand these ideas and share the kind of passion I have for it. (10:28 - 10:41) How they can be useful, not merely in science, not merely in trying to understand physics, but everything from the nature of what a person is through to liberty. And as I say, non-coercion, the raising of children. I know you had Aaron Staple on recently. (10:41 - 10:54) That's just one. People are using this in business, in exercise science, all of it. It's a way of revolutionizing what it means to learn and to understand and what it means to be a person in this magnificent reality that we call the physical cosmos. (10:55 - 11:08) I love it, man. Brad, I just want to start with the grandest question of them all. Like, according to you and everything you've learned, what's the meaning of life? The meaning of life, I agree with Popper here, is all life is problem solving. (11:08 - 11:20) What you're trying to do is to move from one problem to the next. You're never going to have an unproblematic state. In fact, as David Deutsch famously says, and I think it's in The Big Ear Infinity, an unproblematic state is also known as death. (11:20 - 11:30) That's the only thing that the unproblematic state can have. What you want to do is to move from less fun problems to more fun problems. And if you're constantly solving your problems, you're having fun. (11:30 - 11:44) If you're thwarted in solving your problems, you tend to get agitated, depressed, upset, angry. And so a lot of our psychological distress comes out of the fact that we have this problem that we just can't surmount. And it could be disease. (11:44 - 11:52) It could be a relationship issue. It could be business, making money, whatever it happens to be. But if you're being thwarted, then you're unhappy. (11:52 - 12:00) So the meaning of life is, of course, we want to have joy, and we want to solve our problems. We want to continue to make progress. So that's what I would say the meaning of life is. (12:01 - 12:16) But that's the universal meaning of life, what it means specifically for any one person. No one can tell you. You have to figure out what are the problems that really animate you, and what is going to drive you to get up every single morning and just work on that thing doggedly with curiosity and with passion. (12:16 - 12:23) I like that answer. That's one of the best answers to that question I've ever heard, to be honest. Well, you're a credit popper for that. (12:23 - 12:28) Credit popper. Yeah, man. So let's talk about it. (12:28 - 13:04) Because you come across as incredibly optimistic when posed with the challenges of life and the challenges of reality and living out who Brett Hall is. Why do so many people seem to, I guess, shrink when it comes to solving the problems or feel overburdened and kind of shy away from the problems that are presented to them in their lives? It's the culture that we're living in, unfortunately. 99% of us, I suppose, especially in the West, but globally, go through a very similar life for the first 18 years. (13:04 - 13:34) We go through formal schooling. And for whatever reason, over the last few decades, it has been decided, maybe before that, but at least the last few decades, it has been decided there's something inherently wrong with people, that we are a disease, that we are a virus on this planet, that we, by virtue of our existence, using energy, we're causing pollution, that having children might not be good for us or for them. The planet is the thing you need to protect. (13:34 - 13:54) And so we are swimming in this culture, which is anti-human. Every move we make, it's like, how are we going to affect the animals, the forest, the environment, insofar as you care about these things? And I do. I was talking to a philosopher about this recently, and I was sort of saying dismissively, I care about people. (13:54 - 14:01) I don't really care about the forest and preserving the forest. Of course, I was being kind of snide about that. I love going for a walk in the forest as much as the next person. (14:01 - 14:18) I love looking at nature and going down to the beach and seeing pristine beaches that are not polluted and that kind of thing. However, I think that the only reason to preserve any of the wonderful environment that we have here on planet Earth and more broadly is for people. I think that people are central to this. (14:18 - 14:42) And once you accept the fact that there is something very, very unique about people, unlike all other species, then you'll recognize that it's almost a spiritual, that the traditional religions had it right. The traditional religions talked about the sacredness of human life and that human life was something different to every other life form on planet Earth. Now, I don't think you need to believe in anything supernatural in order to endorse this idea. (14:43 - 15:15) You simply have to understand what it is that a person is. A person is this entity that can create explanations about the rest of physical reality, which is an astonishing fact about us because it means that inside of this thing, our skull, the darkness of our skull, our minds running on these brains is a model of the rest of physical reality. We come to resemble over time, the more that we understand, the rest of everything that's absolutely out there, not just the physical stuff, but the mathematical stuff, the moral stuff, the philosophical stuff, economic stuff, whatever it happens to be. (15:16 - 15:27) The more that we understand, the more our minds begin to resemble the rest of physical reality. That's got a technical name called self-similarity. And no other creature that we know of is able to do this. (15:27 - 15:38) No AI that we've developed has been able to do this yet. No other animal has been able to do this yet. If there are alien intelligence out there, they will be able to do this, and they will be people just like us, even if they're a different species. (15:38 - 15:55) So that's why I'm optimistic because we are categorically different. And if we continue to use this power to understand the rest of physical reality, we gain control over more and more physical reality. And any problem that we have, any individual problem is solvable. (15:55 - 16:07) It's soluble because the laws of physics don't prohibit us from solving things like disease, cancer, unhappiness, and even death, ultimately. Man, thank you for that. Thank you so much for that. (16:07 - 16:56) So, okay, there is an obvious demoralization problem that we are experiencing in culture all around us. So if we can venture, I guess, into a conspiracy realm, do you think that is something that is intentionally being conditioned for us to view ourselves as lowly, to view ourselves as not fit for planet Earth, not fit for life, to see ourselves as a stain on the planet? Or where do you think that kind of arose from, if not? Yes and no. I say yes and no because on the one hand, I don't think there is this secret cabal of people globally that is dictating to all of the school teachers and university lecturers and thought leaders and C-suite executives at various companies around the world, politicians. (16:56 - 17:30) I don't think there is this cabal of people necessarily who is dictating what all of those people will teach the next generation coming through, or anyone who turns on the nightly news or anyone who happens to work in a large corporation, something like that. But nonetheless, they are being fed these pessimistic ideas about what people are and about the damage that we're causing. That said, you do tend to hear people in the World Economic Forum or the United Nations, quite often when a speech is given there, there does appear to be very powerful, influential people talking this way. (17:30 - 18:22) Unfortunately, the recent Pope just died, but he was emblematic, the Catholic Pope, Pope Francis, despite the fact he was a Catholic and believed in the safeness of human life, would never stop talking about the pollution that people were causing and the evil that people were doing on planet Earth, and that God was instructing us to look after the planet. In the Bible, God, of course, says, if I remember, I'm a lapsed Catholic, but he did say that the planet was here for us, that the other animals were here for us. If even the Catholic Church can forget that, can forget that people are, in a sense, the center of the cosmos—I don't mean physically the center of the cosmos, I don't mean that we are physically located at the center of the universe—but rather, we're a hub of knowledge creation, that this one place is the center, in a sense, of where progress is being made. (18:22 - 18:55) So far as we know, again, there might be alien civilizations out there, but for all we know, we might be the first, we might be the only, and if we are, we are a little tiny spark here in the entire universe that we want to set fire to other civilizations around the universe by spreading ourselves out. Elon Musk is suggesting the first tentative steps over to Mars, and a few other people have thought about that, but ultimately, that's just the first baby step. We want to proliferate throughout the solar system, the galaxy, the cluster of galaxies around us, and the entire universe. (18:55 - 19:22) But that's a long way off. Before then, we really have to deal with the problem of education, which is a thing, I think, holding many of us back. Children—as I say, I was a schoolteacher for a while, but since I've left teaching, I've just noticed in the media, when children are interviewed, when they're spoken to about their hope for the future, they're depressed, they're frightened, they're told that the world is going to literally catch fire. (19:22 - 19:34) What was his name? I forget. The Secretary-General of the United Nations said something abhorrent like, We've left— Yeah, I think that's his name. That's W.H.O., right? Oh, sorry. (19:34 - 19:47) Yeah, I'm thinking of Gutierrez, I think his name is, or something like that. And anyway, he said, we've left the period of global warming, we've entered the period of global boiling. Now, of course, that is an absurd statement to make. (19:47 - 20:26) What specifically is boiling unless you put the kettle on in order to make yourself a cup of tea? But children will hear that. Here is the leader of this global organization saying that things are getting worse than ever, and we are being told this by academics, politicians, and everyone else, that just when things are better than they ever have been, and they are, they're better than they ever have been, when would you prefer to be alive? In the 40s? The 20s? Last century? The century before that? You would want to be alive now. Things are never better than what they are now, but we're being told by everyone, things are worse than ever, and that any moment, what's going to happen is that we're going to go extinct. (20:27 - 20:43) Now, a short break from the episode. Hope you're enjoying this conversation. If you'd like to dive deeper on a broad array of subjects and really connect with a community who just really gets it, our membership community, Friends of the Truth, is an amazing hangout. (20:44 - 21:21) In the private Telegram group, we have amazing people just striving to really live the best version of themselves, communicating on a bunch of incredibly important subjects, such as parenting and education, health, geopolitics, money, relationships, love, the meme zone, where lots of laughs are taking place. And not to mention, it's not just a private Telegram community where you get to connect with us directly. It's also five calls a month, two community calls, and yeah, it's pretty incredible value for only $17 a month, and our members are really, really loving it at this point in time. (21:21 - 21:45) So, if you're down to explore that a little bit further, you can head to hereforthetruth.com forward slash F-O-T-T or hit the Friends of the Truth button in the brief. Hey, guys, just a quick note for something that will only affect those that are watching, not listening to this podcast. At this point in the conversation, I actually accidentally unplugged my own internet source and I was able to plug back in and continue the conversation. (21:45 - 22:02) However, when we looked at the video in post-production, there was some weird silhouette effect happening on all our videos, and it kind of just is what it is. So, don't be too thrown off by it, but you'll see the video change from this point on. Back to the episode. (22:03 - 22:33) Yeah, I love that. Have you ever watched an interview between Yuri Bezmenov and a gentleman named G. Edward Griffin? Yuri Bezmenov was essentially a Russian KGB de facto who escaped to America, and he kind of made the claims back in 1984 that there was going to be a systematic demoralization attempt of communist ideologies to be perpetuated throughout America in the coming generations. I was going to bring that up. (22:33 - 23:10) Now that you mention it, I have heard that, and I think I have seen — there's a YouTube clip that goes around, isn't there, of him talking about that? There's a YouTube clip that's gone a little bit more viral that's the last bit of his interview. It's about 14 minutes, but the full interview is about an hour and 20 minutes with G. Edward Griffin, and it pretty lays out things pretty specifically where you go, this happened in 1984 and it feels like the interview could have been done five years ago. No doubt that this happened, that the KGB, for example, did have this plan to demoralize the West, and they were talking about all the ways in which they could make people more pessimistic. (23:10 - 23:32) I have no doubt that that happened. Now, whether or not they were that influential, I'm not sure. What might have happened is that they simply shared the same ideology as people in the West who were also anti-liberty, anti-freedom, wanted people to be more anti-human because they valued things like the environment, they thought we should use less energy, or they thought we should not be capitalist, all this kind of thing. (23:32 - 24:01) There are still such forces throughout, especially, as everyone complains about, throughout the university systems all across the West. None of these academics or professors who teach the next generation of teachers, who teach the next generation of school students, any of this stuff would necessarily say, oh, I'm supportive of the KGB, or I wish the Soviet Union would continue. But they share the same deep, as I keep on saying, a bit of a mantra, anti-human ideology. (24:01 - 24:40) Is it like an anti-collectivist, anti-individualistic ideology? Yes, yes, exactly, exactly, exactly. So I see this manifest itself in many ways. We're trying to explain, for example, something as simple as the history of science, and you try and explain how Galileo did this particular thing about having a Copernican sun at the center of the solar system, or you talk about Charles Darwin as being the person who revolutionized understanding of the evolution of life, or you talk about Einstein revolutionizing understanding of physics in terms of space and time. (24:41 - 24:58) The anti-human impulse, even within the history of science, is to say, none of these people worked on their own, they weren't really that bright, they also were standing on the shoulders of giants, and it was a team effort. It's always a team effort and collaboration. We shouldn't be holding up these people as geniuses. (24:58 - 25:11) Now, on the one hand, that's a trivially vacuous statement. Of course, Einstein was relying upon mathematics that had already been discovered. Newton said of his own work, for example, that he was standing on the shoulders of giants. (25:12 - 25:38) But this impulse to try and downplay the fact that there are spectacular individuals out there is a denial of this individual creativity that we have. Everything always with these people is, let's muddy the waters and turn everything into a grey goo of collectivism, permeates ways of thinking about just about everything. The truth is that each of us can be heroes. (25:39 - 26:02) You talked about hero's journey, we can be heroes in our own life and heroes for a lot of other people as well, just by pursuing the thing that we're really interested in. But the collectivists would have it that you have to be a cog in a wheel to some extent, and no matter what you do, really, you have to share it with everyone else. And no matter what you achieve, really, it's due to someone else who gave it to you. (26:03 - 26:17) I love that you said that, man. It is very anti-heroic and by essence, it's very anti-self-esteem as well. We're conditioned to feel guilt to reap the fruit of our own efforts and to reap the rewards of our own discoveries. (26:19 - 26:39) There's not a culture that leads towards more innovation, more growth, more discovery, etc. And on that note, in your view, what is the significance of the founding of the West in human history? Because it really appears to be the first kind of bulwark of freedom and liberty. Real quickly, I just want to jump in to what we're talking about here. (26:39 - 26:56) It reminded me of a quote that I know Joel and I are a fan of, I say that lightly, of Lennon. All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero. And here it comes up again, the glorification of one personality. (26:57 - 27:02) This is not good at all. I feel like that sums up what we were just talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. (27:02 - 27:25) I suppose that, not that I'm going to defend Lennon very much, but I guess the most generous thing that you could say about him is that it might be an appeal not to go down the road of tyranny. Of course, he was someone who tried to implement tyranny, but he was probably trying to say, we shouldn't have the kings at the top. Of course, communism is one, so you have a committee of people. (27:26 - 28:09) But in terms of the West and what separates the West and what this phase change between things prior to the existence of the West, or maybe to put a more precise point on it, the Enlightenment is what David Deutsch and Karl Popper refer to as a tradition of criticism, which is a really key part of this worldview. Can you go a bit deeper as well into what the Enlightenment period is, please? That's the defining characteristic. So we're talking about a period that began somewhere around the 1600s, 1700s, associated with things like the scientific revolution when Copernicus was one of the first people to say, hey, maybe – well, it wasn't actually. (28:10 - 28:25) They would go back to the Greeks for the technical point that the sun is at the centre of the universe and not the earth. So we had a flourishing of science. We also had a flourishing of political ideologies that talked about how people had individual rights. (28:25 - 28:43) We had a flourishing of things like a renewal of democratic institutions. So all of this was going on. And the thing that united progress across science, morality, technology, ultimately with the industrial revolution, is this tradition of criticism. (28:43 - 29:07) Now, that's a really key phrase, because up until that point, and even today, when one hears the term tradition, what they hear is a set of practices or customs, a culture that continues to do the same thing over and over again. That's what a tradition is. We celebrate Christmas every year, or we celebrate Hanukkah every year, or whatever it is that you happen to celebrate in your particular culture. (29:07 - 29:18) You just do the same thing over and over again. Every Halloween, people get dressed up and they hand out candy, that kind of thing. But a tradition of criticism is an absolutely unique kind of thing. (29:18 - 29:33) It says that what we are going to do from now on is to have a tradition of change, of progress. How? By criticising what we did in the past. And criticism needs to be denuded of this pejorative sense. (29:33 - 29:43) We shouldn't criticise people. Yeah, it's not a good idea as soon as your partner gets up out of bed in the morning to criticise how they look. We're talking about the criticism of ideas. (29:43 - 30:00) And the only way that you can improve ideas is to find what's wrong with them, to find a flaw, to find the error, to correct the error, and to make something better. So that is the ratcheting up of the West and of the Enlightenment, the tradition of criticism. It says that nothing is off limits. (30:00 - 30:18) You can change anything, because prior to that, in non-Enlightened societies, what you have is an authority telling you, this is the way things are going to be, morally, politically, even scientifically in certain cases. We can't change it. We've already found the truth, the perfection. (30:19 - 30:31) And so therefore, there's no need to criticise. And in fact, if you do criticise, like North Korea, we're going to throw you in jail, or Russia, or China, where it happens to be. They are anti-criticism. (30:31 - 31:11) So therefore, they are anti-Enlightenment, which is one of the reasons why today, there is this split politically, as no doubt you guys will have noticed, and anyone listening to this, watching this, will notice. There's this split on the conservative side of politics between people who've become sort of nationalist isolationists, who say, we should just be defending, in some cases, if you're in America, the United States, if you're in Australia, just Australia, if you're in the United Kingdom, just the United Kingdom, or just England, in fact, I've seen some podcasters talking about. And they think that by being isolationists and nationalists, that somehow, this is the moral thing to do. (31:11 - 31:27) But they don't realise that all of those countries exist within the one culture, the one tradition of criticism, the Enlightenment. And so that is why I get animated with arguing with conservative friends, for example. No, it's not just about defending your own borders. (31:27 - 31:40) There's something more important than that. And that is why we get very worried when big political figures sort of start to talk about old alliances aren't that important anymore, we're just going to focus on our own nation. That is a complete dead end. (31:40 - 32:24) And that is very anti-Enlightenment, because the other side out there, the forces that are anti-Enlightenment, don't have any such compunction in uniting around this common set of beliefs that tyranny is good, that censorship is good, that anti-democracy is good, and all this sort of stuff. So we have to be very aware that we need to find where our allies are, to stick with our allies, and to fight not merely for the nations that we're inside of, but for the Enlightenment itself. How would you define yourself politically, Brett, if someone were to ask you? I guess a traditional kind of libertarian. (32:24 - 32:49) I certainly have ideals. I think the ideal is to remove coercion and authoritarianism as much as possible from politics. Now, the logical endpoint of that, and I always have to quickly make a caveat as soon as I say that, but the logical endpoint of that is what's known as anarcho-capitalism. (32:50 - 33:07) But I'm not going to say we should institute anarcho-capitalism, this idea that we just have to have free trade with no government. That won't work. But it's the logical endpoint, because it's the only such system where all of the coercion has been extracted out of politics, and out of trade, and out of interactions between people. (33:08 - 33:16) But I don't think that's possible to do. The reason I don't think it's possible to do is because we don't know how to do it. We lack the knowledge of how to do it. (33:16 - 33:44) And so, therefore, we have institutions which protect individual rights, which protect free trade, which protect our democratic process. And so, I'm more like a Javier Millay-type minarchist, the smallest possible government that allows for the protection of all of those freedoms and all of that liberty. And so, therefore, yeah, we fund the military, fund the police, fund the court system. (33:45 - 33:53) But I think you had Yaron Brook on. I'm basically aligned with – I actually caught up with him in Sydney. He was here recently. (33:53 - 34:04) We did a public event together, and we're basically aligned on all that stuff. We're not aligned on epistemology, by the way. I've had serious disagreements with the objectivists about the nature of knowledge and how it works. (34:04 - 34:23) But otherwise, politically and economically, that's where I'd place myself, whether that's called – and I think it's really called conservative. I know that conservatives sort of contend to be a little bit authoritarian, but I'm also definitely not collectivist. I'm more, you know, let's celebrate the individual. (34:23 - 34:41) Yeah, well, I mean, Ayn Rand's perspective was that the only role of government should be to protect individual rights and to protect – and then that means ultimately protecting individuals from physical force and coercion, ultimately. Yes, yeah. The anarcho-capitalists have a point morally. (34:41 - 34:53) It's like, well, we shouldn't be coercing anyone. Everyone should be free to do whatever they like all the time, so long as you're not hurting anyone else, so long as you're not infringing on someone else's rights. So therefore, why do we need a government? It is naturally coercive. (34:53 - 35:03) But my argument against that is we don't know how. If only we knew how. If everyone was perfectly rational all the time, then that would work. (35:03 - 35:15) But we aren't. There are people – all of us live in cities or towns where you've got the crazy person walking down the street who possibly needs to be locked up now and again. Totally. (35:16 - 35:25) I mean, it's a process. People think that we can just minimize government, everything disappears, then we're going to have kumbaya all of a sudden. But that would be disastrous if that was to take place right now. (35:25 - 35:40) Like what you said, Brett, we're looking at the state of consciousness of the individual across the board. And it's like, are they ready to even have something like that? Like you said, do they know how to operate in that manner? And I look around and it doesn't seem that way. No, that's exactly right. (35:40 - 35:55) Yeah. Do you think that the populations of the West generally take the inherent freedom that we have for granted, even just simply the freedom to think? Absolutely. Absolutely. (35:55 - 36:30) We're not taught – again, this goes back to the education system – we are not taught what a privileged position we happen to be in. Except insofar as children are taught to regret – you mentioned guilt, which is the perfect word for it – or feel guilt for the wealth they have, for the wealth their parents have, for the wealth their nations have. And so whenever they see a documentary about the poor denizens of some other country who might be starving or living in filth or not have the same sort of economic opportunities that we have, we're blamed. (36:30 - 36:52) They're told that it's because of Western colonialism. It's because of the exploitation of the British Empire or the United States more recently. That is why people in Africa or parts of Asia or South America, that's why they're living in poverty. (36:52 - 37:04) It's all because of us. It can never be because of decisions made politically in those places. Oh no, it's always because we're the ones who have raped, pillaged, and murdered, like old Vikings, all of these places. (37:05 - 37:17) And if only we hadn't have brought disease to South America, Bolivia, for example, would be a wonderfully thriving, wealthy place. But it's not. By the way, Bolivia is a really interesting case in point. (37:17 - 37:41) It sits atop almost more natural resources than just about any other country in the region. It's been described as, I visited there quite a while ago, but described as being a pauper sitting on a king's throne. Now, why isn't it a king sitting on a king's throne? It's not because the West had anything to do with hurting Bolivia or Bolivians. (37:41 - 37:59) It's because the political class over there have been collectivist, socialist, Marxist for decades. And they've been involved in military coups and that kind of thing, and so have failed to exploit everything that they have over there. They have among the largest lithium reserves, for example, on the Lake of Uyuni. (37:59 - 38:26) Now, why hasn't that been exploited to make people more wealthy over there, given there is such a demand around the world for lithium? Political decisions, nothing to do with the West. But you'll be told, if you're a child at school or a university student, that anywhere you see poverty, anywhere you see starvation, which is extremely rare now, anywhere you see pollution, it's all because of us evil Westerners. And so what you need to do is to sacrifice in some way. (38:26 - 38:35) You need to use less energy. Possibly you need to stop eating meat and go to a bug-based or vegan-based diet. And so this is what children are being told. (38:35 - 38:53) And so it's an awful, yeah, I feel sorry for kids being brought up in this. At the same time, I understand why young people, and indeed people my age and older, have this view that we need to regret the situation we're in. We need to feel guilty about the situation we're in. (38:54 - 39:10) We don't have much hope. And the only way that things are going to get better is if we reduce the effect of humanity on the planet, perhaps by even reducing the population of the planet. This was another conversation I was involved in recently, is that there's too many people were being told. (39:10 - 39:28) And although I noticed Elon Musk put out another tweet saying, we're going to go extinct because birth rates are too low. I think both of those positions are false, by the way. Both that we have too many people and that we're about to go extinct because birth rates throughout the Western world, so the civilized world, are going down. (39:29 - 39:38) I think Elon single-handedly is helping out with the birth rate. Yes, absolutely. I love what you're sharing. (39:38 - 39:54) We're very much so aligned. The end claim of that is basically, the more we hate ourselves, the more moral that we are, which is a disaster. Well, that's one of Ayn Rand's great gifts, I think, through her philosophy in particular. (39:55 - 40:16) And Euron Brooke has such an eloquent way of putting this. He likes to use the example, I think, of Bill Gates. Bill Gates, genius technician, programmer, developed Windows, set up Microsoft, made billions upon billions of dollars, changed the lives of billions of people around the world. (40:16 - 40:35) Anyone who's got a PC is basically owes something to Bill Gates. And the reason why he is so wealthy is because he created value for everyone who bought a Microsoft product. Now, everyone denigrated him as an evil billionaire, just as they do with Elon Musk now, just as they do with Jeff Bezos now. (40:35 - 40:45) The billionaires are evil. Let's get rid of the billionaires. So Bill Gates took on that philosophy that there was something wrong, that he was morally culpable in some way for being a billionaire. (40:46 - 41:21) So what did he do? Well, he set up a foundation in order to do any number of things, spread vaccines around the world, help the environment, help disease. He planned on giving away his money, in fact, almost all of his money. And Yaron Brook makes this point following Ayn Rand that it's only at this point, once the billionaire, once the wealthy person gives away their wealth, do they then become the hero? They should have been regarded as being the hero at the time when they created the new technology and created all this wealth and the wonderful facilities that simply didn't exist before for humanity. (41:21 - 41:38) But everyone denigrated them for that, for making money, for turning a profit, generating wealth. And once they started giving away, it's then that they become heroic. And more than that, it's when they give away so much money that it begins to hurt them, just like Jesus. (41:38 - 41:53) Once you start to sacrifice and actually hurt yourself, you start to whip yourself sort of thing by giving away so much of your wealth that you become much less wealthy. It's then you become a hero in the eyes of the culture. And it's just all back to front. (41:53 - 42:10) And it's amazing that some billionaires themselves take this on in a very deep way. There's nothing wrong with donating money to medical technology, to doing the good charity work that Bill Gates is doing. That's not my point. (42:11 - 42:28) My point is that he only becomes a hero once he does that. But the only reason he can do any of that is because he generated the wealth in the first place to allow him to do the things that people regard as heroic. But he should have been regarded as a hero before that, rather than just as a hero for simply giving away his money. (42:28 - 42:52) Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with you in terms of innovation and wealth creation and the demonization of the billionaire class. But I mean, in his own words, Bill Gates is a depopulationist as well, right? Yeah, that's so common today, this idea that it happens everywhere. Degrowth was the big thing that was happening last year, the year before. (42:53 - 43:04) Academics publishing papers that were even getting published in scientific journals like Nature. Although, to be fair, I think the one that was published on degrowth, although it appeared in Nature, it wasn't a referee journal. It was just this article. (43:04 - 43:35) But the scientific institutions, including journals, are publishing very much anti-human stuff. This idea, I was speaking to the philosopher Peter Bacosian about this recently, because his argument, and I'm probably going to straw man his argument a little bit here, was the more people you have, the more problems you have, which on the face of it is logical, and to a certain extent, I can agree. But by the same token, the more people you have, the more solutions you have as well, was my argument. (43:35 - 44:22) The more creativity you have, the fewer people you have, the less creativity you're going to have, the less wealth you're going to generate, the less powerful civilization as a whole becomes. So therefore, when the inevitable problem comes, problems are inevitable, we may have insufficient power and wealth to do anything about it. The most glaringly obvious one that's talked about in science fiction movies all the time is what happens when the asteroid starts heading towards us? I think there's a split in the astrophysics community at the moment, and amongst people who do proper rocketry like Elon Musk, as to whether or not, if we did see the 200 meter across asteroid heading towards planet Earth, whether we could, at the moment, do anything about it. (44:24 - 45:01) Theoretically, we have an understanding of what it would take. You just send a rocket up and nudge it a little bit. But would, in fact, we have sufficient wealth, sufficient technology, enough rockets that were powerful enough to actually do this, to get up there and to deflect the asteroid? Are we looking enough? The only way we're going to avoid both that case of the asteroid crashing into Earth and wiping out all life on Earth, almost, just as it did with the dinosaurs, or the next pandemic, or whatever the next disaster happens to be, the supervolcano goes off in Yellowstone National Park, any number of things could happen. (45:01 - 45:23) The only thing that prevents us from being wiped out from these disasters is having the knowledge of how to fix this thing and the wealth, which means the physical capacity to enact a solution. A fewer people means fewer opportunities to generate the wealth that is going to be required to solve those problems. I am certainly not a degrowth or a depopulationist. (45:24 - 46:12) If you're focused solely on this one problem, which I think Bill Gates and Greta Thunberg and various other people are, namely that the warming Earth is the only thing we need to focus on, it's just like putting blinders on and you don't recognize that it's the problems not yet known about that are the scary ones. I think also, too, what individuals need to realize is that a person can be very skillful in one area and do amazing things, but they need to have the discernment to not then just apply like, well, they're a genius, they're amazing, so let's just listen to them with everything else that they say. An individual mind needs to be like, okay, I really appreciate that you changed the world in this arena, but maybe we shouldn't be giving you the keys to the castle to solve all these other problems. (46:12 - 46:22) That's just my opinion. No, I agree with you entirely. I mean, there are cases, small cases of this and then larger cases of this. (46:22 - 46:48) I can't remember which of the billionaires it was. It may have been, I can't remember who it was, but one solution that was suggested by a billionaire for combating climate change was, let's start spreading aerosols throughout the atmosphere to reflect some of the sunlight. Now, that may very well work, but it's a huge risk to take, a huge experiment to do across the entire globe that maybe this one billionaire shouldn't have the power necessarily to do. (46:48 - 47:26) But even in the small scale case of that, returning all the way back to the work of David Deutsch and to people who don't have necessarily general understanding of the principles that are at work, except those that work in the narrow field, is just that understanding of quantum mechanics that I was talking about. Every professor that I'd listened to, almost a genius when it came to doing quantum mechanics. However, in explaining quantum mechanics, couldn't do it because they didn't have the epistemological or philosophy of science understanding of things. (47:26 - 47:59) Even a genius, a great hero of mine, a great hero of David Deutsch's, who is Richard Feynman, had that quip that we often refer to, which is that if you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory. And so, this was a complete abrogation of reason. One of the few occasions where Feynman just sort of threw up his hands in the air in a moment of irrationality led a generation, a generation of professors and students to pass on this ridiculous idea that no one understands quantum mechanics and therefore you shouldn't understand quantum mechanics. (47:59 - 48:08) If he had a better epistemology, then he would recognize that problems are soluble and we can understand anything, literally, because we are universal explainers. Yeah, totally. Yeah. (48:09 - 48:23) I'll make one final point on this. Generally speaking, I agree with you that entrepreneurs and wealth creators, that is a sign of competence and that is something that is positive for sure. And everyone's open to criticism, as this culture is kind of suggesting, obviously. (48:25 - 48:38) I want to dive into what, in your perspective, as you came into his work, made Deutsch so groundbreaking and revolutionary. We haven't gotten there yet. So, the first thing was, as I say, in the fabric of reality. (48:38 - 49:08) I was reading that just at the time when I was doing an undergraduate degree in physics and so I was struggling to understand quantum mechanics. And so, the story I always tell is when I opened up chapter two, which is titled Shadows There, he simply lays out the argument as to what is going on in this twin-slit experiment, the most famous experiment, I guess, in quantum mechanics, where you're firing single particles through these two slits. And what happens is a so-called wave pattern of interference appears on the screen. (49:08 - 49:37) Now, how can a wave pattern appear if you're firing particles at this apparatus? Well, many scientists at that point simply give up, many physicists give up, and they say things like, oh, things like electrons or photons, these particles actually have wave-particle duality. Simultaneously, they are isolated at a point, that's what a particle is, and also spread out throughout space. So, it's a denial of logic, simple logic. (49:37 - 49:45) You can't both be at one point and spread out at the same time. That doesn't make any sense. And in fact, some physicists went so far as to say, well, this is possible. (49:46 - 50:11) All we have to do is to re-understand what logic is, where logic no longer means that we can both be doing this podcast and also not doing this podcast at the same time in the same place. That's called the law of the excluded middle, right? Both X and not X can be true at the same time. So, David Deutsch lays out why all of these attempts to deny what is really going on in the experiment are dead ends. (50:12 - 50:34) And so, he explains how, well, really what's happening is when you fire the single photon, there is another photon that comes out at the same time. It happens to occupy another universe, and so that leads you to this many-world interpretation of what is going on. Sometimes called the Everettian interpretation after Hugh Everett, who was the first one, I think, in 1957, to come up with this way of understanding quantum theory. (50:34 - 50:50) And many people think, oh, you're suggesting parallel universes, and that's ridiculous. We don't observe these parallel universes, and what a crazy lunatic idea. The first thing to say about that is no matter how you try and understand quantum mechanics, you're going to have your intuitions challenged about the nature of reality. (50:50 - 50:58) Some people say that it's consciousness that causes the strange effects in quantum mechanics. Some people say you can't understand it. Some people say you shouldn't try and understand it. (50:58 - 51:08) You should just do the mathematics. And then others say the universe, physical reality just happens to be a lot bigger than what you initially thought it was. And this is the history of science. (51:08 - 51:18) We used to think that the planet Earth was all that existed, and there was a sky above us. And then we figured out there was this thing called the solar system. And then we figured out there was this thing called the galaxy, and everything was inside the galaxy. (51:18 - 51:32) And then we realized some of these sort of cloudy things that you could see at night, were actually whole other galaxies. And ever since, the history of science has been an expanding view of how big reality happens to be. And this is just the next step in that. (51:33 - 51:49) And there are various ways of coming at this idea of the fact that the multiverse exists. But that is why that fundamental reading of that chapter was the thing that made me go, okay, David Deutsch is different because the fabric of reality is clear. It makes sense. (51:50 - 51:58) He's just laying it out in simple terms. I don't know what it was like. It was like there was some sort of conspiracy at university in not telling me about this. (51:58 - 52:33) And so, when I'd come to do exercises or write essays about how to understand certain experiments in quantum theory, I would be able to refer to the work of David Deutsch and say, this is the way I understood it. And I'd get good marks for it, but still, it didn't change the way in which I was being taught this by lecturers and tutors. And then from there, from an understanding of quantum mechanics, David Deutsch then keeps dropping these knowledge bombs, so to speak, where I always compare it to a form of vertigo, where you think you understand something, and then the floor falls away beneath you. (52:33 - 52:57) And it's like you're on a roller coaster going, wow, I never realized that things were like this. So, for example, one of my favorite chapters is chapter 10 of the fabric of reality, where he talks about the nature of mathematics. And everyone thinks that mathematics is this pristine area of certain truth, that this is the one area where even if you think you could be wrong about other stuff, here in mathematics is the perfect knowledge. (52:57 - 53:23) David Deutsch talks about the hierarchy that most people have in their minds, where the deepest fundamental level is mathematics, absolutely certain truth. How could you possibly ever be wrong about 1 plus 1 equals 2? Okay, so that's certain truth. Now, slightly above that, you have the theories of science, where although you can't be certain, you can be highly confident, because each experiment gives you more and more evidence that, in fact, your theory is correct. (53:23 - 53:31) So you might not be certain, but you'll be very, very confident. And then above that, you have philosophical ideas. And philosophical ideas, well, it's just a matter of taste. (53:31 - 53:43) Take it or leave it, if you like. This hierarchy that everyone walks around thinking is correct is completely wrong. Number one, that hierarchy is itself a philosophical argument. (53:43 - 54:03) The claim that, for example, mathematics is absolutely certain pristine truth is a philosophical claim. It's not a mathematical claim. Now, how could it possibly be wrong? Well, David Deutsch has this wonderful line in Chapter 10 of The Fabric of Reality, where he says, necessary truth is the subject matter of mathematics. (54:03 - 54:17) It is not the reward we get for doing mathematics, which is a really profound statement once you meditate on it for a while. Unpack that for me, if you can. Yeah, so let's compare it to something like particle physics. (54:17 - 54:30) So in particle physics, what you're doing is looking for the fundamental constituents of matter. And it used to be thought, okay, the most basic building blocks of matter were these things called atoms. And so there were atoms of carbon, atoms of hydrogen, atoms of oxygen, whatever else. (54:30 - 54:42) And they were the fundamental things. And then the more that physicists look, particle physicists look, they found that the atoms themselves weren't fundamental. They were made of these things called protons and neutrons and nucleus, and then electrons going around the nucleus. (54:42 - 54:52) Okay, so now we have the fundamental things, the protons and the neutrons and the electrons. Then they looked even closer. And inside of the protons and the neutrons, you have quarks, so these are not fundamental either. (54:52 - 55:09) So what's the lesson there? The lesson there is that particle physics, the subject matter of particle physics, is the fundamental constituents of matter. However, all you have at any given moment in time is our best understanding of what the fundamental constituents of matter. You don't get the reward. (55:09 - 55:22) You don't get the final answer. What's the final answer? What really truly is the fundamental constituents of matter? Well, you might very well say, we'll never know. All we'll do is we'll find ever smaller particles inside of ever smaller particles inside of ever smaller particles. (55:22 - 55:39) Our knowledge of particle physics is different to what the particles really truly are, the fundamental particles really truly are. So now let's turn over to mathematics. Mathematics is a study of these platonic, ideal, perfect things. (55:39 - 55:54) For example, numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, and all the more complicated structures that exist in mathematics, geometry and sets and all this sort of stuff. They have a real ontological, the technical word, real existence. We study them. (55:54 - 56:15) Prime numbers, at the moment you can go to Wikipedia, you can look up what is the biggest prime number that is so far known. Now, there is a proof by Euler, all the way back, or Euler, however you want to pronounce it, the Greek mathematician, you know, 500 years before Christ or something like that. He had a proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers and many people know this proof. (56:16 - 56:37) So although you can go to Wikipedia and you can look up what the current highest known prime number is, we know that there are more prime numbers than those. Now, where are they? Where are those prime numbers? Well, we haven't found them yet, but that's the subject matter of mathematics. The subject matter of mathematics is numbers, geometry, sets, shapes, and whatever. (56:37 - 56:57) But when we do mathematics, we do not get the necessary truth. We get knowledge of the necessary truth, and the same as in physics, we get knowledge of the particles. So the subject matter and our knowledge of the subject matter are two quite separate things, and we can never get to the ultimate final truth where there are no errors. (56:57 - 57:11) We just get to a deeper and deeper, more profound understanding. That's true in mathematics, as it is true in philosophy, as it is true in science. And that conjectural understanding of what knowledge is comes to us from Popper. (57:11 - 57:18) He says that we can always make mistakes. We're fallible human beings, and it doesn't matter if you're doing mathematics. And so this hierarchy sort of dissolves away. (57:19 - 57:25) There is something special about mathematics. You can do proofs in mathematics, but a proof is a kind of computation. The proof can go wrong. (57:25 - 57:36) When anyone asks me, they always say, how can you possibly doubt something like 1 plus 1 equals 2? Are you saying that's not true? I'm not saying that's not true. I'm saying I can't possibly criticize that. I can't think. (57:36 - 57:44) I cannot imagine a way in which 1 plus 1 equals 2 could be false. But that's not to say that I'm infallible. Suddenly I'm infallible. (57:44 - 58:00) Just because I can't imagine or you can't imagine and no one can imagine how it could possibly be false doesn't mean we're suddenly gods, that we are infallible, that we could not possibly be mistaken. I can't imagine how. But that's just a failure of my imagination and your imagination and everyone's imagination because we're limited human beings. (58:01 - 58:21) So far from being a proof that we're gods because we can't imagine how it could be false, it's proof that we are not gods. Yeah. So is this kind of the essence of knowledge extending out to infinity, the fact that we can always be wrong even if we don't know the ways that we can be wrong, so therefore things can improve infinitely? Perfect. (58:22 - 58:42) Exactly right. Because we never have the final truth in hand, it means that whatever we do understand at any particular moment in time can be improved. Everything that we understand about reality, all of our scientific theories, all of our mathematical conjectures, all of our philosophical understandings contain some error even if we don't know what the error is now. (58:43 - 59:00) And that's a wonderful thing that we're always in error because by correcting the errors we make a little bit more progress, things get better, and things can invariably, not inevitably, but invariably get better. We just have to try. This vision as well is often misunderstood as meaning that progress will be inevitable. (59:00 - 59:03) It's not. Anything could go wrong. The disaster could strike. (59:03 - 59:34) We could make a terribly egregious error that takes us back a thousand years or something like that. But so long as we're committed to reason, to error correction, to the flourishing of human beings, then we have a better chance of trying to survive. If we do the opposite, and if we say we've got the truth in hand now, this is the final best political theory or the final best scientific theory, we will cease to make progress because we don't think that any progress can be made. (59:34 - 59:45) And that is a recipe for extinction and disaster. Yeah, so it's almost like certainty is akin to death and stagnation in that regard because there's nowhere else to go. Exactly right. (59:46 - 59:53) Yeah, exactly right. So I endorse the idea that truth absolutely exists. It's real. (59:53 - 59:59) It needs to be preserved. It's different to falsehood. I defend the existence of truth and reality. (59:59 - 1:00:18) It's just that I don't think that we ever have it in hand. And anyone who thinks that Popper actually has the saying, the doctrine, the truth is manifest, is the root of all tyranny. And so once a political person thinks that they have the truth in hand, then there begins the political tyranny. (1:00:18 - 1:00:32) Once a scientist thinks they have the final truth in hand, they're going to browbeat all of their students about this particular thing and coerce them into understanding it rather than saying, hey, look, attack my theory. It could be wrong. You figure out how. (1:00:32 - 1:00:46) So anytime someone claims to possess the truth, you need to get really worried about that person because they haven't thought through ways in which they might be wrong. Yeah. Before you called it the pandemic, I call it the scamdemic. (1:00:48 - 1:01:03) But obviously, that was a period of time where a group of people thought they had absolute truth and it was tyranny that ensued as a result, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yes, I agree. And I disagreed with some of my Popperian friends on what happened at that time. (1:01:03 - 1:01:32) I think there might be a place for, for example, government wanting to spread vaccines to people. Let's say you knew, you had a good explanation, that the vaccine was near as possible 100% effective and near as possible 100% safe. And also you knew that this particular disease was near as, we're making up complete fictions here, near as possible 100% fatal. (1:01:32 - 1:01:37) Okay. So we're in a different situation there. But we weren't in that situation, of course, in the last pandemic we had. (1:01:37 - 1:02:05) And in fact, what we did in the Western world and the democracies and the great failure of our system at the time was to ape exactly what China did, to ape what a tyranny did. And so it just seemed absurd to me that before we knew, before anyone knew what was going on, before we had a good explanation of the contagiousness of the disease, the lethality of the disease, the effectiveness of the vaccines, we immediately started enforcing lockdowns and vaccine mandates. So yeah, absolutely absurd. (1:02:05 - 1:02:29) I agree with you that that was an abrogation of everything that we should cherish as part of an enlightened society. Hey, Brett, where does the burden of proof lie? Where does the burden of proof lie? You know, does it lie in the person making the claim, in your opinion? A burden of proof? Yeah, yeah, it must. It depends upon the circumstance. (1:02:32 - 1:02:51) I'm stumbling over this notion of proof because I always use that word very advisedly when it comes to things like mathematics. You know, proof is a computation that is done within mathematics where you start with a certain set of assumptions. So I guess what we mean by burden of proof is the burden of providing a good explanation, is what I would say. (1:02:51 - 1:03:25) So when it comes to something like the scientist comes to you and says, ah, there's going to be a pandemic, we've discovered a new coronavirus, then they need to provide a good explanation, a good account of themselves. It can't be on everyone else to say why it is that there's falsehood there because there's very few ways to be correct, but there are always an infinite number of ways to be incorrect. So if you're claiming to be correct, absolutely, it is on you to explain why it is you're correct. (1:03:25 - 1:03:48) The rest of us who don't yet know, it's not our job. We can't be coerced into the position of trying to figure out why you're wrong because more than likely, all of us are wrong most of the time. And so, yes, as a shorthand, burden of proof is always on the person who's making the claim because otherwise, what you're doing is actually, you're demanding time of everyone else. (1:03:48 - 1:04:17) If you're the person who's just standing up there and going, hey, I encounter these people quite frequently, I've got this new theory of physics which is going to unite quantum theory and general relativity. It's not incumbent upon the rest of the community of physicists to spend time reading through your theory and trying to figure out where it's wrong because more often than not, it's up to you to figure out a way to explain it so that everyone can understand it very quickly. The burden is upon the person making the claim. (1:04:18 - 1:04:46) Yes. Well, thank you for that. So what constitutes a good explanation? Okay, so it depends upon the domain, but as broadly as possible, David Deutsch has this TED Talk, and of course, at the beginning of Affinity, he talks about this as well, where a good explanation is one that is hard to vary while still accounting for the phenomena it purports to. (1:04:47 - 1:05:27) Prior to this explanation of explanations, Karl Popper did talk about and use the word explanation very, very frequently, and one of his great contributions was in distinguishing between science and non-science by saying that scientific theories need to be falsifiable, testable. You need to be able to do an experiment to figure out whether or not the theory is false, and in fact, the purpose of experiment is to distinguish between competing explanations on any given thing. That was a great insight by Popper because prior to that, no one could really figure out why should we rely upon these scientific theories. (1:05:28 - 1:05:49) David Hume, a philosopher in the 18th century, I think, yes, he talked about this problem of induction. Everyone understood that mathematics—again, going back to this old vision of what knowledge is and what explanations were—people understood that mathematics could give you certain pristine truths. It's a misconception, but that's what they thought. (1:05:50 - 1:06:11) Now, science can't quite do that, they admitted. All science could do was to observe the same thing over and over again, and the more you observed it, the more likely it was to be true on this particular account. And so, the famous example that's always used is throughout Europe, people would always observe white swans, white swan after white swan after white swan, and conclude that therefore all swans are white. (1:06:12 - 1:06:22) Of course, all you need is the one black swan to show that not all swans are white. But this misses the point entirely, that that's not what science is about. Science isn't about trying to become more confident or gathering up more evidence or anything like that. (1:06:22 - 1:06:30) It's to begin with a problem. The problem is, what is a swan? Well, a swan's a kind of bird. Okay, what colors can swans come in? Well, perhaps any color. (1:06:30 - 1:06:36) Who knows? You know, some of them in Europe are white, some are black. We're not observing things over and over again. We're beginning with a problem. (1:06:37 - 1:07:07) And so, Karl Popper figured out that what you're not after is repeatedly observing the same thing over again, but you're trying to show as wrong a particular theory. And then David Deutsch builds on that and says, well, not only that, in science, for example, does a testable explanation constitute science? Because there are many kinds of testable claims that would be ridiculous. The person with the sandwich board claiming the world will end next Tuesday has a testable claim. (1:07:07 - 1:07:12) All you have to do is wait till next Tuesday, and if the world doesn't end, ah, there you go. He's wrong. But that doesn't make it scientific. (1:07:13 - 1:07:24) In the fabric of reality, David Deutsch talks about the grass cure. You know, if someone says, eat one kilogram of grass, it's going to cure your common cold. Well, that's a testable claim, but it's not scientific. (1:07:24 - 1:07:51) Now, why isn't it scientific? Okay, so then we get to, not only does it need to be testable, it also needs to account for the phenomena that you want in a hard-to-vary way. And what hard-to-vary, it's very difficult to pin down precisely what hard-to-vary means. But basically, like any scientific explanation, but this works for morality, it works for politics, economics, but science is just a very clean way of doing things. (1:07:51 - 1:08:09) It means that every part of the explanation serves a functional role, and you can't arbitrarily swap it for something else. I was talking about atoms earlier on. If you're trying to explain what an atom is, well, an atom is protons in the nucleus, which are neutrons sometimes, and electrons orbiting. (1:08:09 - 1:08:27) Okay, why are the electrons orbiting the nucleus? Well, because positive attracts negative, and the electrons are negative, and the protons are positive. So, there's an attraction there, holding the thing together. But then you ask the question, well, then why would all the protons be gathered together in the nucleus? Shouldn't they repel? Ah, yes, they should repel, but they don't, because there's a different force. (1:08:27 - 1:08:47) The force that causes the electron to be attracted to the proton is the electrostatic force of attraction, but there's another stronger force in the nucleus, inventively called the strong force, that bonds together all of the protons. And so, all of that account that I've just given you is hard to vary. You can't just say that electrons can be positively charged. (1:08:47 - 1:08:57) You can't just say that in the nucleus of the atom is an electrostatic force. No, it's a strong force that is holding those things together as well. And this is characteristic of science. (1:08:57 - 1:09:23) It's characteristic of good explanations in epistemology, and politics, and economics, that all of the parts of the explanation aren't arbitrary. Whereas something like a mythological account of why it is that the seasons happen—you rely upon the Greek gods, for example, to explain why spring happens when it does—is easy to vary. Why is it easy to vary? Because there's a pantheon of Greek gods. (1:09:24 - 1:09:27) So, you could pick any one. Like Zeus could do it. He's the most powerful of all the gods. (1:09:27 - 1:09:46) Or perhaps Apollo could do it, because he's the god of the sun, I think. And so, any number of these gods could serve the purpose of explaining why seasons happen. But the true explanation is, of course, the Earth's on a tilt, and it's going around the sun, and some parts of the Earth receive more sunlight than other parts of the Earth over the course of the year, and so, therefore, you have seasons. (1:09:47 - 1:10:03) That's hard to vary. And so, that is the fundamental thing, is this hard-to-vary characteristic of an explanation that makes it a good explanation. Not an appeal to the supernatural, not arbitrary, and no kind of magical thinking is involved. (1:10:05 - 1:10:17) Interesting. And yet, at the same time, any explanation that we currently consider to be amazing or good is open to fallibilism. Yes, yes. (1:10:17 - 1:10:34) And this is one of the wonderful things, and one thing that demarcates people who seem to understand this worldview from traditional academia. Many in traditional academia think that we can get to an end of science in particular. Sorry, I keep coming back to science, but again, as I said, it's the cleanest example. (1:10:35 - 1:10:55) The overwhelming majority of physicists, I would expect, it seems to me, think that we are going to end up with what's called a theory of everything. That once we have this unification of general relativity, gravity, with the theories of particles, quantum theory, then we'll have what's known as the theory of everything. Once you've done that, that's the end of physics. (1:10:55 - 1:11:09) A fellow called John Horgan wrote a book called The End of Science. And people do have this idea that there can be an end point to knowledge. There's only so much we can possibly know, and then that's the end, and you'll have nothing more to do. (1:11:09 - 1:11:36) Sam Harris, the great podcaster, talks about, in fact, that in the future, when we've got more powerful AI, the AI will have found all the answers to things that we need to find, and what will be left for people to do? Nothing but lay on our backs, drinking cocktails and basking in the sun, because there'll be no creative work left to do. Because the AI, I think it's so completely off base. It misunderstands what a person is. (1:11:36 - 1:11:57) It misunderstands what AI is. It misunderstands the nature of knowledge and how there's infinite depth in all directions, both looking down into ever smaller things and looking out into outer space, and even looking into our minds and looking into what life is. Every time you solve a problem, you don't end your search for problems. (1:11:57 - 1:12:10) Your solution allows you to reach a higher point on the mountain from which you can view even more problems that are more interesting. The number of problems we have increases. It's just that they become better every time we find a solution. (1:12:10 - 1:12:16) Yeah. I find that so inspiring, personally. Yeah. (1:12:17 - 1:12:41) But why do I find that inspiring, and someone might consider the future of AI and feel completely like, oh my god, this is going to be the end of humanity, we're all going to become redundant, et cetera? Because you understand it. You understand it. I used to have this conception of philosophers, scientists, going through university. (1:12:41 - 1:12:45) They were heroic to me. I looked up to them. I wanted to be a person like that. (1:12:46 - 1:13:03) I thought these people have the answers. They wouldn't make silly mistakes like I was making. And slowly, my confidence and my deification of professors and philosophers and physicists was eroded away just by understanding that they are very, very fallible. (1:13:04 - 1:13:19) I don't want to come across as denigrating in any way, shape, or form, because he is one of the most accomplished philosophers on the face of planet Earth. The Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, highly celebrated. He has written about the simulation hypothesis. (1:13:19 - 1:13:40) And famously, he wrote one of the first books, which I think really set the scene intellectually for the way in which people talk about, understand, debate AI and AGI now. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, published way back now, about a decade now. I read the book, and I listened to the audio book as well. (1:13:41 - 1:13:51) I say that because the way in which it's read is scary. It's like a science fiction book. Whoever the narrator is has this very robotic way of reading the book. (1:13:51 - 1:14:04) It is a dystopian view about superintelligence. It doesn't have a special place for human beings, for people. It talks about AI as gradually getting more and more powerful. (1:14:05 - 1:14:31) And almost of necessity, that we're going to slide into this future where the AI will take over. Where, for example, an AI that has been programmed to manufacture, the famous one is the paperclip argument. If the superintelligent AI has been programmed to make paperclips, then unless you're very careful, it will turn all of the planet Earth into paperclips. (1:14:31 - 1:14:40) And there'll be nothing that a person can do to stop it, because it will be able to outthink you at every time. If you want to try and switch it off, it'll stop you. If you try and change its code, it'll stop you. (1:14:41 - 1:14:53) It's superintelligent after all. So if it's been programmed to turn everything into paperclips, it will turn everything into paperclips, and your puny human mind will not be able to do anything about it. Now, I thought that this was so epistemologically flawed. (1:14:53 - 1:15:21) I was completely shocked that Nick Bostrom, being a philosopher and expert in epistemology, among other things, could make such egregious philosophical errors. And so I end up coming away from superintelligence thinking, that was an entertaining, dystopian, science fiction book. But almost every other intellectual that was talking about the book was talking about it in terms of, this is a very, very important warning about our circumstance. (1:15:21 - 1:15:34) And I just didn't get where they were coming from. But still, that appears to be the prevailing view, is that AI is an existential risk, and that we really have to put the brakes on. Now, happily, there has been a movement recently. (1:15:34 - 1:15:53) There's a number of people who are talking about effective acceleration, for example, effective accelerationism. Now, I'm on their side against the doomers, the doomers who say that AI is going to take over, but the effective accelerationists also have this problem where, number one, they use jargon. Number two, they talk about the inevitability of progress. (1:15:54 - 1:16:15) I don't think, for reasons I said earlier, I don't think you can ever rule out the fact that we can make an error of whatever size. So progress is not inevitable. And also, the effective accelerationists try and invoke strange physics and thermodynamics to say that the laws of physics, in the form of the second law of thermodynamics, mean that we're going to become increasingly more powerful and make all this progress. (1:16:15 - 1:16:34) So I think there are errors being made on both sides. Forced to choose, I'm with the effective accelerationists, again, against people like Nick Bostrom, Max Tegmark, Sam Harris, who want to say that people aren't particularly special, that whatever we're doing, we're a version of AI. We are gathering evidence together. (1:16:34 - 1:16:49) We're pattern matching and extrapolating. I think they just don't understand. Well, they don't understand what knowledge is, which is the shocking thing for me, that knowledge is useful information, and because it's useful, it tends to get itself copied. (1:16:49 - 1:17:12) And it's useful by virtue of the fact it solves a problem. And the wonderful way that David Deutsch talks about this is that knowledge is information that, once instantiated in a physical substrate, tends to cause itself to remain so, which is a very poetic way of saying, once it appears in matter somewhere or other, because it's knowledge, which is useful, it tends to be copied. And so it becomes resilient. (1:17:12 - 1:17:24) And there are all sorts of knowledge that we can talk about. One kind of knowledge is, for example, biological knowledge. Now, Chiara Maletto, who's a worker in constructor theory, wrote a book called The Science of Can and Can't. (1:17:24 - 1:17:58) And she has this magnificent example about knowledge, and she calls knowledge resilient information, which is also another way of coming at this concept. And talks about how bacteria contain within them, some bacteria contain within them, DNA strands that are three, three and a half billion years old, billion years old. That age of that DNA strand is longer lived than any rock that you're going to find, any mountain, any continent, any physical structure that's out there. (1:17:58 - 1:18:13) It's approaching the age of certain stars kind of thing. So that's biological knowledge. Now, our knowledge, for example, let's say of Newtonian mechanics, it gets written into books, it gets passed on orally, it gets stored on computer memory. (1:18:13 - 1:18:28) That may very well last for millions, even billions of years, as long as our civilization does. So this is what knowledge is. It's not what these other philosophers claim it to be, which is just justified true belief of a kind. (1:18:29 - 1:19:28) And because they think it is justified true belief of a kind, and you can have the truth, that the AI will have the truth within it, then the AI won't want to change its mind, which is one of the things that I don't understand the obvious refutation to something like Bostrom's claim that if you've got a superintelligence that is going to outwit any human being and is going to be dogmatically committed to turning all of physical reality that can get its hands on into paperclips, for example, why it can't think to itself, why the hell am I doing this? Why aren't I doing something else than turning the rest of the world into paperclips? It's the one thing it's not allowed to do, apparently. But why? No arguments given. And there are many such examples of this, that people ascribe to artificial intelligence at times the same things that other cultures in the past have ascribed to gods, both evil and good. (1:19:28 - 1:19:43) And again, reduce people to nothing but, I don't know, a slightly more intelligent ape rather than something categorically different to either AI or other animals. I like it. Bro, where do you think we're heading? No. (1:19:43 - 1:19:57) Oh, you go, you go. You go, you go. I was going to say, where do you think we're heading? Like if you take the world that you see, the observations, the education that you have, what track is humanity on, according to you? I mean, you are more optimistic. (1:19:58 - 1:20:10) I tend to be a little bit more optimistic. I'm going to give a cop-out answer here, which is that I can't prophesy. No one can tell the future. (1:20:10 - 1:20:19) We don't know what the content of our future theories is going to be. This isn't actually an epistemological law. People think there's only scientific laws, but there's laws of epistemology. (1:20:19 - 1:20:34) And one law of epistemology is you cannot predict the growth of knowledge. After all, if you could predict what next year's theory of physics is going to be, then you'd have that theory of physics right now. Therefore, it wouldn't need to be created in the future. (1:20:35 - 1:20:44) So we can't predict the growth of knowledge. However, having said that- Leave the caveat. Yeah, because of what people are. (1:20:45 - 1:20:59) People are universal explainers that want to solve their problems. I see no reason why people will stop wanting to solve their problems. And one of the problems that we want to solve is how to solve problems faster, how to accelerate. (1:20:59 - 1:21:20) That great term that's been thrown around all the time on X and social media now, let's accelerate, let's accelerate. I see no reason why people don't want to be more wealthy, more healthy, to achieve the things that explorers of the past were excited about doing, like going to the moon and going to Mars. And all of that requires more computation, more technology. (1:21:20 - 1:22:06) It requires improvements in medicine. It requires improvements in political systems and moral systems. So because of what people are fundamentally as problem solvers, knowledge creators, the future to me, if I was to guess, seems more like a future of improved health, wealth, wisdom, knowledge growth for everyone across the planet, more people, rather than a dystopian slide into authoritarianism, where governments of the world are passing legislation to prevent us from using fossil fuels for fear that it's going to increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, causing a warming of the planet or something like that. (1:22:07 - 1:22:39) I feel as if there are hints now, although there are issues with the right, nonetheless, there are hints now of a renewed sense that individuals and wealth creation is so important that we don't want to give up rights to centralized authorities, that there is something fundamentally wrong with systems like North Korea and China. And we want to be more democratic. We want more free speech, for example. (1:22:39 - 1:22:50) We want more free trade. We want generally non-coercion. I think there is a movement now that is finally reacting against what we've had for the last 20 years. (1:22:51 - 1:23:06) And I expect, I shouldn't say expect, I hope that continues. And I see every reason to think that there are glimmers. There are glimmers in all that stuff that I was kind of pessimistic about, namely educational institutions and the way in which the children are being taught. (1:23:07 - 1:23:35) The simple dismantling of something like the Department of Education in the United States, that seems to me like a great idea, a great first step in suggesting that there's something wrong with curriculums around the world. The same thing is sort of happening in Australia to some extent as well. People are questioning, what the hell are some of these kids being taught in school? Why are they being taught to hate themselves, hate their own culture? Regret and feel guilt. (1:23:35 - 1:23:57) To read books about butt plugs in primary school. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And worse, and worse about how, for example, indigenous science is just as valid as Western science, or that the only reason that we are here is because we've stolen all of the wealth. (1:23:58 - 1:24:08) This concept of stolen the wealth or stolen something that wasn't created yet is absurd. Wealth is one of these things that needs to be created. It's not a fixed pie. (1:24:08 - 1:24:38) I think you guys know this very well. I have a sense that podcasting like this, for example, is a great glimmer of hope because there are more channels of information, even though we've been hearing recently about how podcaster Stan is a leading purveyor of misinformation. I don't mind if there are crazy podcasters out there saying crazy things, so long as there are more podcasts like this, where we actually get substantive discussions about things. (1:24:39 - 1:24:46) And that hasn't happened before much. There used to be a narrowing series of channels, and so this could be the beginning of a flourishing civilization. So that's my hope for the future. (1:24:46 - 1:24:58) Also, we should be able to argue these ideas. We should be able to be open to receive misinformation, so then we can use our critical faculty to go, hey, no, that doesn't resonate. I mean, we talk about misinformation. (1:24:58 - 1:25:14) How many times have we been lied to by the mainstream media for the last however many years, and yet podcasters are the ones dishing out misinformation? I mean, it's kind of ridiculous. And since 2022, we were permanently banned from YouTube for quote unquote misinformation. Seriously? Yeah, man. (1:25:15 - 1:25:28) And that wasn't that long ago. It wasn't that long ago where we were headed towards this complete dystopia. I have at least 20 friends of mine that got deleted off Instagram, probably five times each, got completely de-platformed on YouTube. (1:25:28 - 1:25:40) So again, it's like we want ideas to be put out there. But at some point, there are people pulling the strings that determine whether or not things can be seen. That being said, it's up to the individual to go, hey, I can go out to libraries. (1:25:40 - 1:25:43) I could read books. I have so much information here. I have my computers. (1:25:43 - 1:25:52) It's up to the individual to go through and go, listen, let me take a look at this idea. Let me read this philosophy. Let me explore what this PhD or MD or just a layperson has to say. (1:25:53 - 1:26:10) I mean, just because you have an MD after your name or a PhD after your name doesn't mean that you can't be criticized and that some person who just doesn't have letters after their name, who reads thousands of books and has intuition and can come up with an idea that makes more sense. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. (1:26:11 - 1:26:47) There's been a discussion recently after, I don't know if you saw the eruption of discussions around Douglas Murray's appearance on Joe Rogan, and there was a huge discussion there about the nature of expertise, and a lot of people seemed to get the wrong end of the stick where they were saying, well, on the one hand, people are claiming, well, what an expert is as someone who's credentialed, which I just completely disagree with. I think an expert is someone who has a lot of knowledge about something. How they come by that knowledge may be through a formal system, but it may also be through informal discussions. (1:26:47 - 1:27:04) There are many people, even in physics and science, for example, who don't have the PhD. Freeman Dyson, a very famous physicist, never got a PhD, for example, but no one would deny that he was one of the greatest physicists of all time, certainly in the 20th century. There are many such examples of this. (1:27:04 - 1:27:13) Isaac Newton, I don't think he had a PhD, for example. But expertise is a real thing. It's just that you don't necessarily need to be credentialed to do it. (1:27:14 - 1:27:43) And on the misinformation, disinformation thing, what an unholy alliance of two nonsense words there are. It used to just be the word was lies, okay? So if someone is deliberately trying to deceive you, and they know what they're doing, they know they're telling the truth and they're trying to pull the wool out of your eyes, they're lying. But misinformation or disinformation is characterised as simply being stuff that could be false, which is literally everything. (1:27:44 - 1:28:01) All good explanations are going to contain error. Therefore, in the final analysis will be false. And any new scientific idea, any new idea at all that's been tried out, is going to be characterised necessarily as a form of misinformation because it's yet to be tested. (1:28:01 - 1:28:49) But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be talked about quite the opposite. So, yeah, I agree with you that the many people who want to put brakes on or constrain the channels of information because they think they know better, because they have expertise, especially where these people have bad epistemology, and there are certain prominent podcasters out there at the moment saying that, well, the algorithm, this great all-powerful algorithm is boosting misinformation and people need to be protected from it. It's like, as you say, as you rightly just said there, the individual is the one who ultimately has to figure out for themselves whether or not this thing is something they agree with or this thing is something they reject for their own reasons, why their own lies. (1:28:49 - 1:29:02) It's simply relying upon the authority of other people is not going to help them understand things in the future. So, this is why I think that, for want of another term, critical thinking is just so important. The ability for people to assess information. (1:29:02 - 1:29:08) You're still going to make mistakes. That's inevitable. But whether or not you have a reliable way of figuring, sifting truth from falsity is another thing. (1:29:08 - 1:29:24) It's like, I want the opportunity to be exposed to all sorts of ideas, to see what I'm made of, to see what that kind of brings up within me. So, it's almost like an act of disrespect, I feel, on some level where it's like, no, don't take that away from me. But that's me. (1:29:24 - 1:29:35) Some people are like, they don't want to critically think. Just hand me things wrapped up in a bow so then I can go repeat this to my neighbor and my friends and then we're all good to go. But I like grappling with complex ideas. (1:29:36 - 1:29:48) Yeah. And this is kind of why I'm so passionate about kind of applying this philosophy when it comes to children, as in Aaron Stupple's Sovereign Child and taking children seriously. Because when you limit knowledge, you limit the development of human reason, period. (1:29:50 - 1:30:05) Yes, yes, absolutely. And it all comes back to coercion of any kind, anywhere, anytime. And so, Aaron's applying this non-coercive idea to parenting, and that is possibly the most important. (1:30:06 - 1:31:06) Non-coercive parenting, non-coercive education, more broadly, is maybe the most important civilizational challenge because the next generation of people, we want them to have new ways of understanding how to learn that can improve on our own, which causes this exhilarating rate of learning. But coercion also, when it comes more broadly to things like so-called thought leaders in social media or technology or, you know, the talking heads on all of the big channels saying that, listen to this person, don't listen to that person, giving their opinion about what needs to be censored and that censorship in some way, in some circumstances is good because they think they already know. I would never want to be in a position where I'm saying that because someone is saying X, Y, and Z, that me, Brett Hull, oh, I've studied epistemology, oh, I understand flow, therefore I'm entitled to decide who should be listened to and who shouldn't be. (1:31:06 - 1:31:16) There are all sorts of people I disagree with that I think have quite evil ideas, and I don't think they should be given a megaphone. But at the same time, look, this is such an old trick. Why people have forgotten this, I don't know. (1:31:17 - 1:31:49) The answer to terrible speech is not less speech, but more speech to correct the errors. The whole point of correcting errors is that you need to be able to identify and say, hey, that thing is wrong. It's like even many quite, I shouldn't say even, but many sensible Jewish people are very much against, for example, legislation against Holocaust denial in places like Germany because, as we say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. (1:31:50 - 1:32:21) So you're not supposed to be able to deny the Holocaust in a place like Germany, but all that does is generate a kind of conspiracy theory where the real Nazis go underground and say, see, look, the Jews are in charge of controlling the speech that we have here in Germany, and so therefore it exacerbates the problem. Now, that's just one example, but you can port that particular example, the fundamental idea of that particular example, to anything like talking about the pandemic, talking about the legitimacy of lockdowns or anything like that. Because anytime you obfuscate freedom, you're obfuscating truth. (1:32:23 - 1:32:58) Yes, yes, and so therefore it's anti-human. Yeah, and you're just creating pathways for conspiracy, for more wild conjecture, which might be missing the point completely because you're intentionally keeping something in the dark. And so, of course, it's like hiding something from a kid, and then the kid being like, why is dad hiding this from me? Then coming up with all these wild ideas as to what I might be thinking, whereas if there is no obfuscation of freedom or knowledge or information, then there's no need to hide anything, ultimately. (1:32:59 - 1:33:18) And if you're hiding something and people find out you're hiding something, it's the exact thing they're going to go looking for, right? So that's the thing that's going to be animating them. So yeah, I couldn't agree more. The more channels of information we have, of course, the more misinformation or unreliable information or indeed lies that we're going to get. (1:33:19 - 1:33:34) Okay, very well. But we want to expose these people. I like watching some of the ridiculous eruptions of absolute nonsense that are out there at the moment that are going around social media, because again, as an optimist, I'm optimistic that it's not necessary. (1:33:34 - 1:33:56) Popper actually talks about this as well. It's not necessary that the truth will out, that the truth always wins in the final analysis. After all, religions have existed for thousands of years, so there's a particular situation where sometimes things that people understand just aren't correct, and so sometimes the truth won't out. (1:33:56 - 1:34:56) But the perfect way of ensuring that bad ideas remain in place, uncriticized, is to hide them away, to partition them off, because then they're protected, and we don't want them to be protected. So if a bad idea becomes really popular, and no doubt there are many such bad ideas right now, antisemitism is rife at the moment, what we want to do is to expose the people who are espousing these terrible ideas, so they are criticized, delegitimized, and ultimately everyone can sit back and go, well, ridiculous, right? They're silly ideas, just as we would have when it comes to the pandemic, just as we would have when anyone has a pseudo-scientific idea or any other conspiratorial idea. I am as close as possible to a free speech absolutist as one can be, stopping short of, let's all go and kill X if you've got a political platform. (1:34:57 - 1:35:01) Yeah, man. Thank you so much for that. You've actually just connected so many dots for me. (1:35:02 - 1:35:30) I think about the exacerbation of this Jewish conspiracy of the Jews being the top tier, evil puppeteers behind everything, and I really feel like what's given rise to that more than anything else is probably the Jewish urgency to want to quell any rise of it in and of itself, which seems to actually make a lot of sense to me. Man, it's been an amazing 90 minutes. I really appreciate this conversation. (1:35:30 - 1:35:49) I really appreciate the way that you articulate these ideas and your personal perspectives through your own process. So thank you so much, man. I guess in closing, where would you like to direct our audience at this point in time, if they're interested in some of what they've heard and they want to go explore things further? Well, thanks very much. (1:35:49 - 1:35:57) An amazing 90 minutes. I was sitting here thinking to myself, oh, how long has it been? It's probably been about 30 minutes or something. So really, one of the most fun interviews I've ever had. (1:35:57 - 1:36:09) Thank you for that. If you want to find out more, go to Naval's website. Just type in Naval Rabakan, and there's a whole series of podcasts that Naval and I have done with David Deutsch recently. (1:36:09 - 1:36:27) If you want to take a deep dive into David Deutsch's work, because what we're focusing on is, again, trying to spread this particular optimistic worldview. Just type in my name, Brett Hall. BrettHall.org is my website, and all the links are there. (1:36:28 - 1:36:57) And if you want sort of a beyond David Deutsch, into Karl Popper, Associated Thinkers, I've been doing some—if you go to YouTube, I think there's a—the event I did with Jeroen Broek was an interesting one. And the event I've been doing recently with the philosopher Peter Bacosian, because there I'm challenging some traditional academic ideas. And so people have wanted to see, for want of another word, a debate between the David Deutsch-style worldview and more traditional-style ideas. (1:36:58 - 1:37:03) And so that's been happening as well recently. Awesome, man. Honestly, I've got so many more questions for you. (1:37:04 - 1:37:20) Time doesn't allow at this point, but perhaps down the road, we can do a 2.0 to address some of what's still left on the table. Everyone else, thank you so much for listening. If you feel inspired, I highly recommend you to go follow these threads, read Deutsch, listen to TopCast, head to Naval's website, and just follow your interests. (1:37:20 - 1:37:29) Because what else matters than ultimately you pursuing your interests? That's what we're all here for, right? So take care. Brett, thank you once again. Fantastic. (1:37:30 - 1:37:32) Catch you later. Bye-bye. Thank you so much for listening. (1:37:32 - 1:38:06) If you're down to give value every single week, Erasmus and I are sharing articles on subjects incredibly important to us and coherent to our current evolutionary process, speaking into the things that we feel really need light being shed on them, distilling powerful ideas, and really just sharing our perspectives on the ideas that matter most to us. Every single Friday, members of our email newsletter, they receive an article fresh in their inbox. You can join that at no cost at hereforthetruth.com forward slash Friday.