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Nov. 3, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:45
491 Saving Freedomain Radio

Can FDR be saved from the random tangents of the Big Chatty Forehead?

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph 836 on November the 3rd, 2006.
Friday, Friday.
So I have a chatty couple of days coming up.
I'm doing a presentation at the Libertarian Conference.
On Saturday, and then Tuesday, I'm doing a business presentation at ChemWeek, a conference, which should be rather interesting.
I've now been six weeks in this industry, and off I am going to do a presentation to a bunch of senior executives about the chemical industry.
Hopefully there won't be too many questions, otherwise they'll be able to penetrate the thin ice of my knowledge depth relatively quickly, but we shall see what happens.
Anyway, I wanted to read a post that I got this morning, which I think is very interesting, and which we can use to illustrate a variety of principles.
So a gentleman wrote, I read and hear accolades about your podcast, and then I listen to a few, and I have to shut them down, because the same talk radio trivialities that drive me nuts and cause me to switch to a music station, even people chatting about the weather are more concise.
Get to the point! Instead of talking on and on about some guy posting and making puns about his username...
Say it something like this.
So-and-so called blank on my forums talked about how I talk about religion, brackets, Christianity, is evil and horrible and caused billions of deaths and that by focusing on this, all the Christians who are not serial killers and judgmental SOBs are instinctively going to run away and will never listen to you again.
He says that I should not attack Christians specifically and just talk about general concepts in where they will get the hint eventually.
Well, I disagree because...
I bet if you added a bit more focus to your podcasts that they'll fit into half an hour versus an hour, and the people who aren't stuck in traffic for more than an hour a day would actually have time to listen to your podcasts.
Very interesting. And there was somebody else who is a longer-time listener, or was, I guess, who's still on the forums and who said, I haven't listened to one of Steph's podcasts in a couple of weeks because of this issue of the fact that my rap moniker is Big Chatty Forehead, not Big Concise Forehead, or Short or Small Concise Forehead.
And that's interesting.
I think that it's important to sort of understand, I mean, if you want to, you don't have to understand if you don't want to, but...
The podcasts are not primarily designed to sort of entertain you for free.
And I don't mean this with any resentment.
I'm just sort of pointing out a fact, right?
I mean that I don't do these podcasts because I feel that it's important for me to hand out, you know, two hours worth of free philosophy every day.
And I certainly would be surprised if everybody who listened listened to all of the podcasts all the time.
There's other media out there that is enjoyable, and I certainly don't listen to all my podcasts except for the first round of getting them from my voice into my ears through the Volvo front seat.
So I don't sort of do it because I sort of want to be concise and entertain everyone, and this is sort of a good way of understanding something about economics, right?
When you have economics, so when you think about economics, I think it's very important, and this is one of the things that punctures the vanity of people, I don't mean this guy, but just in general, punctures the vanity of people about the realm of economics, which is that everybody has to have a motive for what it is that they're doing.
Everybody has to have a motive for what it is that they're doing, just as you have to have a motive, right?
And so one of the things that this guy hasn't talked about is my motive, right?
Why is it that I'm doing this?
And because he hasn't asked himself that question, why does Steph podcast in his car, and why does he rarely podcast outside of his car?
I do the Ask a Therapist show, which we'll be doing another one this weekend, and a few other things, and I do a Sunday call-in show, but for the most part, you know, 90% or more of my podcasting is...
I've done during the drive in my car.
And so the question he could ask himself, this can be a useful question to ask yourself just when you're looking at people and their motivations, and it can help avoid irritation.
I mean, this is very important, it can help avoid irritation.
So the question is sort of why do I do it?
Well, primarily, first and foremost, I do it because it really, really makes the time fly while I'm commuting.
There is an extraordinary challenge for me, at least.
I hope it's enjoyable for you.
I guess if you're listening to this, there's some value in it, but it's an extraordinarily exciting challenge for me to do without notes, without extensive or sometimes any preparation.
To do a speech or a lecture or whatever, a podcast, with no idea how long it's going to take.
At least half an hour and up to an hour, not having any idea how long it's going to take.
And then the question sort of could be easily raised, and I could understand why, where you'd say, well, I'd just make it half an hour and just, you know, wherever you are in traffic, then stop and keep it concise and always aim for half an hour and time yourself and do it that way.
Well, of course, that's an interesting question, and I'm not sort of doing this to illustrate my show, but to illustrate a larger principle in life that can be helpful, which is that, obviously, if I did fewer podcasts or the podcasts were less long, then it would be easier to listen to them, right? I mean, I can tell you I'm a fairly bright fellow, and I can understand that, and, of course, this isn't the first time that I have received criticism for either tangents, overproduction, or overlength of the podcasts.
And when it comes to understanding other people in the world, I think the important thing, this is somewhat related to the question of empathy, which was talked about a couple of days ago, I think it can be very helpful to put yourself in the other person's shoes and to say, well, why would the person do this?
Why would Steph do long podcasts and why would he do so many of them?
Well, the answer is not that Steph has no idea that he's going to put some people off with too much volume of information, that it might not be, you know, hysterically daunting to some people if they come and sign up on their podcast and they see, you know, I guess, damn near 500 podcasts in about 11 months.
And no, it's about 11, maybe a little less than 11 months.
That some people might look at that and say, oh my god.
Or they might pick up a podcast if they start listening out, or if they just begin listening out of sequence, that they might pick up a podcast that's one of the more rambly and tangential ones and so on.
And that they may be off-put by that or might consider it too rambly or something like that.
And, of course, I'm perfectly aware of all of this.
You know, one of the things that's very important in terms of getting connection with the rest of the planet, getting connection with people in the world, is to understand that other people are smart and other people have probably thought of the obvious questions first.
So, his thesis, which is that I want to produce a show that everyone is going to want to listen to that is concise and this and that and the other, that his thesis is that my goal is to produce a concise show and I'm failing at it.
And then he criticizes me for failing.
And again, this is not me taking this personally, I just sort of want to use it to illustrate a point that can be helpful in your life as a whole.
So he's listened to a couple of podcasts.
He finds them rambly. He doesn't like the fact that I made fun of Thorfinn by comparing him to a combination of a Norse god and a shark, which I thought was, you know, cutesy, if not terribly funny.
But he's got a sense, or he's got a belief, about what it is that is my goal, and then he criticizes me for failing to achieve that goal.
As if I wasn't aware that if my podcasts were shorter, it would take less time to listen to them.
I mean, it's kind of funny when you think about it, right?
That somebody is sort of not too patiently explaining to me that if my podcasts were shorter, it would take less time to listen to them.
And if I had fewer tangents, that they would be more focused.
That's amazing to me that somebody would sit down and tell me that with great solemnity and a certain amount of irritation because I hadn't grasped that more time on my side equals more time to listen and that more tangents equals less focus.
So what he's done is he's got an idea in his head, and you may have this about other people, I certainly do, right?
But you have an idea, he has an idea in his head about what my purpose is in these podcasts, or rather, what the podcasts should be.
They should be concise.
I should read them. I don't know.
I mean, I wasn't particularly impressed with the language he wanted to put into my mouth in terms of its, I don't know, level of energy and interest, and it seemed a little bit plodding to me, but who knows, right?
Maybe that's the way some people like it.
That's sort of Marvin the paranoid android reading out the back of a cereal box.
Maybe that's what people want in a podcast.
I don't know.
In which case, of course, this gentleman is more than welcome to compete for all of the money that comes in from podcasting.
He can go out there and get himself some.
But he believes that the purpose of my podcast should be to be concise and should be to be short.
and that I'm failing in my goal, and I don't know it.
Right? I don't know. Maybe I do know the goal in his mind of the podcast, the Free Domain Radio podcast, and I'm failing.
Or maybe I don't even know what a podcast should be, like what this podcast, that it should be concise, right?
So either I know it is and I'm failing or I don't know even what it should be.
And, you know, it's sort of like... A manager sitting down with a coder and a programmer and saying, you know, it's very important that your code compile and also that it's on the specification and also it's important that it run as quickly as possible and be concise and also it would be nice if it was easy to maintain.
And an experienced coder, not like somebody who's stretched straight out of school, right?
I mean, I'm an experienced philosopher and so on.
And if you've ever been sort of in a front line, I guess most people have, right?
Some sort of front line thing, right?
You will have managers absolutely sit down and tell you the blindingly obvious with no question about your level of knowledge, right?
So, you know, if I sit down with Jack Welch, one of the best CEOs in history, and say to him, you know, Jack, Jackie boy, Jackie dude, Jackie W., it's very important that you strive to maximize profit and to minimize waste in your organization.
And I sort of go on this fairly lengthy lecture and very hot-tempered, like, you know, whatever, right?
I mean, that's kind of funny, right?
The first thing that you want to do if you want to transmit knowledge to someone is you want to figure out what they know and what they don't know.
That's kind of important.
What it is that people know before I try and communicate something to them.
It's one of the reasons why I check the board like a dozen times a day to figure out what people are finding interesting, what they're not finding interesting, what they find obvious, what they find redundant, what they find tangential, and then I increase all of those things just to irritate this guy.
But if he really did want to, and I sort of understand that there's a bit of a paradox in what he's saying.
Like he's saying, your podcasts are really important and I can't stand them, right?
Because he's saying, look, if you could shorten them, then people could listen to them.
And so obviously he thinks there is value, and I certainly get the frustration that he feels he's got to cut through a whole lot of thickets to get to the gold statue or whatever.
But I sort of get that.
But if he really did want to sort of help me, then what he would do is he would ask me.
He would ask me, the first thing he would do is ask me.
This is a useful thing to do in general in your life.
So if you feel that it's valuable enough to sort of sign in as a user to Free Domain Radio and to post a criticism of the show, I'm perfectly welcome, perfectly happy to get those.
Then... What would be helpful would be if you sort of feel that the basic structure of the show and the whole way it's approached and so on should be changed in some fundamental way.
Fantastic! Let's hear all about it.
But if you've only listened to a couple of the later shows, which is what this guy has done, then it may be worth asking, what is your purpose in this show?
That's sort of an important thing.
If you want to change somebody's mind about something that they're doing, you first have to, if you want to really do it effectively, you first have to ascertain what it is that they're trying to do.
If you walk up to somebody who's trying to fix a pipe under a sink, And you hand him a pair of scissors saying this should really help with the haircut that you're working on, then you're not actually being that helpful, right?
Because you haven't ascertained what the person is trying to do.
And you are instead telling them what they should be doing in the absence of understanding what it is that they're trying to do.
Now, if you sit down and you see that they're working away on a pipe under a sink and you're a plumber and you see that they're doing something incorrectly and you know that they're trying to, I don't know, remove a clump of cat hair or something because someone's washed the cat in the sink or something vile like that and they're not doing the right thing, they're just trying to squint at it with the laser heating vision from Superman Or they're just tapping it randomly with a wrench.
Sorry, would that be a tangent?
Sorry about that. Then you can sit and say, well, if I understand it right, you're trying to get this unclogged, and here's what I would do.
Well, first we'd say, you're trying to get this unclogged, right?
And the person says, yeah. And they say, okay, well, here's what I would do to get it unclogged, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
But you sort of lean down there, watch them for a while, or watch them for about five seconds, and hand them the scissors and say, yeah, you're trying to trim your nose hairs, right?
Well, use these scissors. Maybe not scissors.
Pinking shears. No, wait, garden shears.
Lawnmower? I can't remember.
Anyway, so that's sort of the first thing to understand.
If you want to get someone to change something, you have to understand what it is that they're currently attempting to do.
Because if you can't get someone to change what it is that they're trying to do, then...
You'll have no luck changing the effects.
If you can't change the course, you can't change the effects.
So this is sort of a way to help you really get what you want in life if you want to change people's minds.
You have to figure out what their premises are first.
And then you can begin to change people's premises.
You work the big levers, not the little levers at the end, right?
Work the big levers. You garbage in, garbage out.
Doesn't mean that you refine the output, because the output's still going to be garbage.
So you want to make sure what's going into somebody's thinking at the base, at the root, at the axioms, before you start telling them what should come out at the other end.
And if you just sit there and tell them what should come out at the other end, it doesn't really help, and you don't really...
It's wasting time. Wasting their time, and your time, of course.
And they want you to be effective, right?
If this guy has a great insight...
In how my show should be changed and updated and so on, I want to hear it.
That would be fantastic. Wouldn't it be great to be able to improve the show simply by changing some of my premises?
Now, the premise that I work with, as I sort of mentioned at the beginning, and this is what he didn't ask about, is that I'm perfectly aware that I'm putting out far more material than most people can listen to.
People have this nasty habit of wanting to shower and shave and Eat and sleep and spend time with other people, not with headphones on and so on.
I understand all of that. So there's no possible way that people are going to be able to listen to everything that I'm putting out.
That's why the shows have descriptions.
Descriptions! And that's also why they have comments.
I don't know if you can see those in iTunes or whatever, but there are comments which give, at least in the later shows, rough categorizations of the shows.
And yeah, I would love to get around to...
Putting all the shows in clumps so that if you're interested in relationships or whatever, you can get those podcasts.
Love to do it. No time to do it.
Can't do it while I'm driving, right?
And that's where I get, you know, 90% of the work on Free Domain Radio done is while I'm driving.
So, I can't do it while I'm driving.
Let's say that for sure.
And so, what I also pointed out to this gentleman, again, it's important if you sort of want to know what the point is.
Well, the point is to entertain myself during my drive, and yes, I do think That there is a great value in what it is that I'm doing, for sure.
Of course. I mean, otherwise I just entertain myself and keep it for my own edification.
I post it because I think that there's value in what I'm doing to other people.
Not in everything that I'm doing, right?
Some people find, I don't know, I remember one guy writing to me and saying that he found the movie review of Fight Club unbearably tedious, right?
Which is pretty funny.
And I can certainly understand that if this stuff isn't to your taste, certain things that I talk about aren't to your taste, no problem.
And you buy an album, you don't like every song.
That's why we have mp3 players, right?
So, for sure, I would love to categorize, and it would be great.
And I did sort of try to show, it's not too subtle a manipulation, I hope, but I did sort of try to show, when I had a couple of weeks off between jobs, I did show what I would like The free domain radio show to be, which was I did a pretty thoroughly organized and to some degree researched introduction to philosophy, going from the introduction to the metaphysics, the epistemology, to the ethics and to the politics.
And I'd love to do more of those, but there's just no conceivable way to do those in my car.
I need whiteboard, I need props, I need research, I need graphs, and all this kind of stuff.
So... I did sort of try to show what Free Domain Radio could look like in the absence of me having to do it while I'm driving.
And of course the reason that I have to do it while I'm driving is because, and there's no criticism, it's just an economic fact, that the donations are not high enough for me to sustain my life, right?
It's got to eat! And so right now I make $160,000 a year and I would be willing to drop that down even to $40,000 a year And I would simply require that donations be high enough that I be able to do that.
So I'll sort of do my part, take a 75% drop in income.
And it's not quite 75% because I'd probably pay a little lower taxes.
I wouldn't have this long commute that seems to be the bone of contention for some.
But I would love to work on this full-time, of course.
I mean, who wouldn't, right? Wouldn't that be the best thing in the world, to be able to do philosophy on a full-time basis?
And I think I could do a lot, right?
I'm a sort of accomplished public speaker.
I'm a good writer. I have a fair amount of knowledge.
I have a good deal of confidence in the subject matter.
And I have a fairly engaging way of talking about these things that I can tell people things that they don't want to hear in a way that doesn't make them angry.
Well, for the most part, right?
For the most part. I can tell things to people that they don't want to hear that is painful to them.
Because I'm speaking with my true self, I can actually talk to people, true self to true self, no matter how buried their true self is, and I can actually get through to them in a way that only requires about 25 years of preparation.
So it's like, yes, I can split the board with my buttocks, but it takes a little bit of work to get there.
Yeah, I'd love to do it full-time, but there's not enough volume of donations to be able to sustain that.
So what choice do I have?
Well, I can do one show a week for sure, absolutely.
I can do a show a week and I can be bored during my drive.
That would be a net negative for me.
That would be a net negative.
Again, if you want to change somebody's mind, you have to understand their existing motivations.
This guy could make an argument to me, and he could say, look, I understand that you're killing time during your drive, and I think you do a fantastic job of doing that, but it's a little scattered, so let me make this suggestion to you.
If he wanted to really appeal to self-interest, which is kind of what you need to do, if you don't want to just be naggy and critical.
To appeal to somebody's self-interest would be something like this.
Steph, you know, interesting show.
You're a good communicator.
But man, it's a ramble fest.
And I can understand why you're driving in the car.
You don't know how long it's going to take.
And I assume that you understand that tangents irritate some people and that you produce more than people could reasonably listen to.
I understand that. You're a smart guy.
This I'm not going to tell you because you already know this.
But, you know, here's an example of something that probably won't work for you.
I've started listening out of sequence, and I find it kind of rambling.
And it turns me off, right?
Now, I haven't started listening to the...
And then what I did was I listened to some of the earlier podcasts where you're reading articles, and I found those much more engaging.
So let me make a suggestion to you, Mr.
Staff, which would be, if you wanted to be able to pursue this full-time, then you need to increase the focus, or it might be worth trying to increase...
The focus of your shows, right?
So I get, like I've looked at your board, I get that you've got almost 100,000 free domain radio media views last month, which is up 30%.
So obviously you're doing something right, right?
Obviously you've got, you know, 30% share growth or whatever.
For 30% eyeball, earbud, ear canal views increase in a single month is good.
So you're doing something right. Now I don't want to sort of mess with success, but...
If you wanted to do this full-time, which is your real goal, right?
If somebody could snap your fingers and say, you don't have to go and talk to people about the chemical industry, but you instead get to work on philosophy full-time, I get that that's what you want to do, so let me make a suggestion.
If you make your shows more concise, then you will get to that goal faster.
If you make your shows more concise, then you will get to that goal faster.
And here's a plan that I could come up with.
Maybe we can have a Skype chat about it because I really want to make sure that you get to your goal and maybe all I'll ask for is a couple of hours of personal chat about my personal issues or whatever, whatever, whatever.
So if the person then understood what my goal is, which is to go and work on this sort of stuff full-time, then they would obviously give me advice or feedback with reference to that final goal.
I've talked about this before.
If you're a salesperson, then aren't we all, at some level or another, involved in communicating to change others?
Then you have to understand what motivates the other person.
So you don't talk to somebody who's six months from retirement and say, if you buy this really expensive computer system, the payoff will occur in about eight years, right?
Because they go, well, I'm six months from retirement.
What do I care about eight years from now?
You don't talk to politicians about libertarianism because there's no way that libertarianism is going to be able to increase their political power.
Quite the opposite, right? So you have to understand what's motivating people and then give them advice on how they can better achieve their goal.
Or if you wish to change their goal, then it's important to communicate with them about how their goal is incorrect.
But it has to be incorrect with reference to a larger goal.
If I only did one show a week, let's say, Then I would be bored for eight hours a week.
So I do one half hour show a week or whatever, I'll be bored for eight hours a week.
And by the by, just sort of on the side, I certainly am trying to cut down the length of the podcast and I'm doing that by leaving later in the morning.
So that I can spend less time in traffic, right?
So I'm trying to leave a quarter to nine, get to work by twenty past nine.
That's a lot shorter podcast.
If I was leaving at ten to eight to get to work by nine, the podcast would be like much, much longer.
And I can't control traffic, right?
So it's sort of a basic... I mean, this is not an excuse.
It's just sort of a basic fact.
So, if I did sort of one show a week or two shows a week, then, you know, with music and sound effects and so on, well, then I would actually spend...
I'd have a lot less free time, right?
Because I'd have to do this not in the car.
As soon as I'm in the car, I've got to drive and so on, right?
So, if I did one or two shows a week, I'd have much less free time.
I'd be much more bored.
And so, there'd be a huge negative for me, right?
I'm thrilled to do these podcasts in the car.
They're fun. And...
So there'd be a lot of negatives for me to do fewer shows.
And that's fine.
There's no problem with negatives, right?
I mean, the dentist gives you negatives too.
It's just that the alternative to not accepting the negatives of getting your teeth drilled is significant amounts of pain, discomfort, and misery when your teeth go to haywire.
So it's not that we won't accept a negative.
It's just that it has to be discussed with reference to a positive.
And this has nothing to do with this guy might be entirely correct.
Maybe the absolute right thing for me to do is to sacrifice a couple of months of personal time and to accept hundreds of hours of boredom in the car simply to go for the crapshoot that people would give me more money if my shows were more concise.
And, of course, the shows are all sortable by length, right?
I mean, if you want short shows, you can get short shows.
I have some that are even five or seven minutes.
I think I did one on the Muslims that was shorter.
But, of course, then the problem would be, and this is a problem which is not insoluble, but something that would be a challenge, right?
If I said, well, the format of the show needs to change because I want to get more donations so that I can do this full-time, well, I do have the problem that, except for probably about 100 shows, we have almost 500 shows that are the rambly, chatty stuff from my car.
So I would have to wait for people to get through all of those, In order to get to the shows that are more concise.
Or I'd have to pull all of those and put them somewhere else.
I don't know where. There'd be Freedom Aid Radio chatty side and Freedom Aid Radio concise and focused side.
So there would be a fair amount of logistical problems.
I'd have to pull the feed. I'd have to reorganize stuff.
I'd have to pull out the ones that were shorter and more concise, the ones that were read from articles, the ones that are with research, the ones that I did not in my car.
So again, a huge time-haul.
And what's the payoff? Well, the payoff is that maybe at some point in the future, if this guy is correct, And this one guy is correct.
Or the two guys, because I'll say that there's another guy who hasn't listened to my show in a couple of weeks because he finds it too lengthy, or too rambly, or too chatty, or too tangential, or whatever.
That these two people, out of sort of the 100,000 people, or not people, but 100,000 show downloads, I don't know how many people there are.
But that these two people are correct.
I can give up an enormous amount of personal time.
I can be bored in my car.
I can spend all the time to produce a more concise show, the research, the preparation, all of the stuff that I had to do with the Introduction to Philosophy series.
And what might happen is that after I do this for 6 to 12 months while people chew through the existing ones or if I divvy them up between chatty and non-chatty and so on, right?
So I'm just sort of pointing out the other side, the objections that if you want to change somebody's mind, not that it makes it impossible, but you will have these objections to overcome if you want to change someone's mind about their approach, right?
You know, you kind of want to understand, right?
Before you walk into some manufacturing plant and say, dude, you need to change the way you do your business, right?
The first thing you need to do is to understand, A, how the person does their business currently and respect their knowledge and assume that they've made good decisions, especially if their plant is successful, right?
I mean, arguing with failure is one thing.
Arguing with success, and I would say this show is very successful.
It's not impossible, right?
This guy could be totally right.
But these are some of the problems that I would face if I wanted to change the format of the show.
It's the same problem that I face with the fact that the first, I don't know, 200 to 250 shows don't mention anything about donations.
The reason that there's a big lag in donations is that people have to chew through all that stuff before they get to the donation requests that are peppered in the later podcasts, which means that I would either have to go back and put a plea for donations at the beginning, Of the podcast, which people, I would imagine, would just fast-forward.
Just as I fast-forwarded through Harry Brown's odd request for people who want some sort of hard drive testing stuff on his show.
So I don't really think it would make much difference, because I'd have to put it in the same place.
And also, I'd have to spend a day or two recompiling all of the podcasts and relabeling them, because when you recompile them from the original files, you have to relabel all of the MP3 tags.
And so on. So it'll be a couple of days to do all of that, and I don't want to do it, right?
I mean, I don't want to do it.
And it's on the website, and it's on the footer of my signature on the website about donations.
So if people come to the website, then they're certainly going to see that.
If they come to the boards, they're certainly going to see that.
So I'm just, you know, I don't want to spend a couple of days to do it.
So, I just sort of wanted to point out some of the challenges that are involved in changing somebody's mind, and of course, I've run through about a million scenarios of how to make Free Domain Radio more profitable, you know, a fee-for-service, you know, you pay for the podcast in groups or in aggregates and how they could be organized, and I got all of that.
You know, I got all of that. I've worked on this.
I've been an entrepreneur. I've built a multi-million dollar business.
I currently have a, you know, pretty senior-level executive position at a very fast-growing company, and I kind of get all of that.
I really do. It doesn't mean that I get it all.
It doesn't mean that there's not something out there that I haven't thought of.
But if you do want to change someone's mind, it's usually good to begin with by asking questions.
And I thought I've shown this fairly consistently in the way that I question people who are opposed to our ideas, who post or who write me emails or whatever.
But it may be something that's sort of missing, right?
That what this guy's doing is he's arguing with a good deal of success for me, and he's not sort of understanding the challenges and the difficulties, and he's also not understanding my central goal at the moment, which is...
I mean, you could say, and it may be fair, of course, that I have two goals, right?
One is to entertain myself while I drive, and the other is to...
Is to become a full-time free-domain radio dude, right?
And this guy might argue and say these two goals are mutually incompatible.
You might sort of revisit that.
They're mutually incompatible because when you're entertaining yourself in your car, you're boring the pants off listeners, which will make it far less likely that you will get a sort of full-time gig because people will be turned off your show, they won't end up donating, and blah, blah, blah.
Perfectly willing to entertain that.
That's perfectly valid.
The only challenge with that, of course, is that the numbers keep going up, right?
So for me, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
And I'm getting more and more people listening to the show.
It hasn't resulted in a concomitant rise in donations, but I assume that that's due to the lag of the first large number of podcasts.
That's something which I should definitely solve at some point.
And when I have some time, perhaps, actually, I'm going to New York and I'll have some time Maybe I can spend some time at least categorizing and organizing some of the podcasts.
That would be, I think, the first step towards finding a solution in this area.
And, you know, maybe recompiling with some sort of requests for donations at the beginning of each podcast.
I mean, I could sort of get around to that, no problem.
I understand that could be a good thing to do.
And see if that raises, right?
That's still a lot less negative for me.
It's a lot less problematic for me to do that than it would be to do just one or two shows a week, have all the conciseness in the world, but have a lot more slice into my personal time.
And also I would then be bored of my drive.
So anyway, I mean, this is just sort of a way of approaching this sort of question of how it is that you change someone's mind.
I certainly don't expect that all of this stuff is intuitive.
This is not stuff we're generally taught, right?
I mean, we should be taught, right?
But unfortunately, when we're sort of chained up in state schools, our particular needs and desires are never taken into account.
We're just kind of, you know, people snap orders at us like we're sort of little soldiers.
Well, not sort of like our little soldiers.
And so we're just not really used to this idea that if you really want to change someone's mind, you've got to drill into their existing suppositions and premises and understand what it is that they're doing and why they're doing it, and then understand their major goals, their minor goals, and how you can better align them to further achieve their major goals and help, and all that kind of stuff. So...
It's not the easiest thing in the world to do, but if you do want to, and if this guy really does care about what it is that I'm doing and wants me to be more successful, which I would hugely appreciate, of course, then I would be more than willing to have a chat with him about how all of this stuff could be achieved and where his market research or deep understanding of podcasting or how to profit from it and all that, how he could enhance that.
And if there's anyone out there who has that, I would be overjoyed and thrilled and very happy to, and certainly would cross-market If you have knowledge about all of this kind of stuff and experience and sort of verified proof about how your advice has helped get people what they want, I'd be more than happy to listen.
Even if you just have a great idea off the cuff of your head, off your cuff, I'd certainly be happy to listen.
But in the absence of that, I think I'm going to stick with what works.
And certainly if you can find, you know, two hours or an hour and a half to two hours of entertaining and I think fairly deep conversational topics out there, commercial free for and with no required donations or subscriptions.
I think that I would then take more seriously the criticism because I would obviously have a very strong competitor if somebody else was out there doing what I'm doing and finding a way to make it pay and so on.
Then I would certainly, you know, the competition would be much higher.
I don't think there's a lot of competition out there for what I do.
And so the basic thing about economics, let me just sort of sum it up in a nutshell, because, you know, some people like the concise stuff.
You get what you pay for, and everything's a trade-off.
So yes, of course, my podcasts are more rambly, but what would happen otherwise is you're being paid for me to ramble.
Because the only way I avoid rambling is if you sign up for $10 or $20 a month off PayPal.
And then you pay, and if enough people pay, you end up not having to listen to rambles and tangents, because I'll sort of be sitting at my desk with prepared material and notes and so on.
And so if you're not going to do that, then you pay, or you pay either way.
In economics, there's no free lunch, right?
You pay anyway. Any way you cut it, you're going to pay.
And if you understand that, then you can, I think, be a lot less stressed about the choices that come up in your life, right?
So you've got, you know...
Free entertainment and philosophy here, and you pay in tangents.
And if you don't want to pay in tangents, then you should pay in money.
And if you don't want to pay in money, then accepting the tangents is a pretty good idea.
So thank you so much for listening.
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