Live from Sydney, Yaron Brook and Nikos Sotirakopoulos join me on stage to discuss capitalism, liberty, personhood, energy policy, Israel and antisemitism and much more. Rough timestamps are here:

00:00 Brett’s welcome and introduction

02:32 Nikos on “What is Capitalism?”

04:21 Yaron on “What is Capitalism?”

07:33 Brett on the relationship between personhood and capitalism.

10:02 Nikos on why progress is not inevitable.

12:06 Yaron on humans vs other animals

15:14 Yaron on why capitalism is retreating in the West.

19:56 Brett on the self similarity of the mind

25:40: Yaron on Israel and her allies

32:33 Brett on protectionism and nationalism

33:17 Nikos on defending your allies and nihilism.

37:01 Yaron on faith, collectivism and nationalism.

42:13 Brett on “concentrated losses, dispersed gains”.

43:50 Yaron on free trade and tarrifs

49:52: Yaron’s iPhone

54:52 Brett invokes Deutsch’s pattern, anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism.

56:01 Nikos on Marx’s role as an antisemitic anticapitalist and “secondhandedness”.

1:02:21 Brett on environmentalism and anti humanism

1:05:22 Nikos on energy policy

1:07:25 Yaron on saving the planet.

1:11:21 Brett on the death trap that is planet Earth 

1:13:15 Question 1: What is an Objectivist foreign policy?

1:18:21 Question 2: Is democracy necessary for protecting individual human rights?

1:25:31 Question 3: What explains the anti-ANZAC phenomenon in Australia?

1:30:01 Question 4: Should the government protect individual property rights? Remarks on “the minimum wage”.

1:32:53 Question 5: Should we be pessimistic about “woke”, “DEI” and the state of universities?

1:41:33 Question 6: Has China managed to achieve a beneficial separation of their political and economic systems?

1:47:02 Question 7: What is the role of the Fed in the USA? Is it necessary?

I discuss the point of philosophy and how "concrete" the work of Karl Popper and David Deutsch are in marshalling examples taken directly from science in order to illustrate how philosophy solves problems in other areas. Then I have some lengthy remarks on some recent criticism of Popper and Deutsch which is found here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-152605209

A long "ask me anything" episode live and off the cuff. Apologies for the audio quality.

Julian Barbour is an independent British Physicist and the author of technical and popular books including the best selling "The End of Time" and most recently "The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time". In this lecture, Julian shows just how interesting Newtonian Mechanics can get. Can it be a fundamental theory of space, time and physical reality? This is a tour de force of the history of ideas in physics by an iconoclastic scientists working at the deepest foundations of his subject.

The video version of this lecture can be found at https://youtu.be/VzZbjL_Jvwk which may be helpful. 

This is not a regular ToKCast episode - it is highly technical in places. We will return to regular programming for episode 225 when we will have passed 1 million downloads. Thankyou to all fans! If you would like to support ToKCast, go to my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/c/tokcast or paypal via https://www.paypal.com/donate?token=qyzc2PwQaXf2XNAZS8g5Ke9eRfYfUs73xlBzXNfM8Bnjdm__ETUCyw86HKQ9wd1jBQ4zVKLsW0uRmB53

After a short introduction by me, the remainder of this episode is a reproduction of "The Deutsch Files IV" the latest in a series of conversations between myself, Naval Ravikant and David Deutsch about a wide variety of topics including, and sometimes going far beyond the contents of "The Fabric of Reality", "The Beginning of Infinity" and Constructor Theory. Go to https://nav.al to access all the other "Deutsch Files" as well as earlier content Naval and I produced about all the Big Questions of Life, the Universe and Everything and, helpfully, the transcripts to all our discussions.  

Is time travel into the past and the future possible? What is time dilation? Subjective and objective senses of "time travel". David Deutsch's own documentary on Time Travel from the BBB (192) https://youtu.be/C6_gxoLwrWw?si=8vw8cwbP49XkY6e8

Here I present a "positive vision" of the kind I complained was absent in the episode right before this ("Criticism is never enough"). Here I am riffing off a line which contains a deep truth out of the Beginning of Infinity where Socrates is speaking with the god Hermes. In that passage David links a moral injunction "Do not" to an epistemological concept (error). From this stepping stone I explore some of the institutions which emerge from such a commitment, but which themselves can also be regarded as fundamental features of a dynamic society.

Another response episode. This time to Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson. Douglas and Jordan are seeking a way to construct a positive vision for society, but they seem at a loss for what in fundamental terms, this might include. Part 1 of 2.

Parts 1 and 2 were, admittedly, long. So if you could not persevere through those, this gets the major points out serving both as an appendix to tie up some loose ends and as a summary of parts 1 and 2.

Here I get to the part of the discussion Peter has about my own "airchat" explanation of "anyone can understand anything". I go through arguments based on the Church-Turing Principle, computational universality and how denials of explanatory universality are appeals to the supernatural and other topics.