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Dec. 30, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:15:07
950 Changing Others - A Conference Call
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Okay, well, I guess there was some stuff floating around in terms of preferences.
I think that's good.
Is my volume okay? I'm sorry to be asking.
I'm working with a new mic and I want to make sure it sounds okay.
Oh, can you call Ricky again?
He just PMed me. Yeah, so there was this question around preferences, which is good.
I'm sure I'm just readying the sort of the next part of the conversation thing, the sort of the big part three, right?
So part one of the FDR conversation was about the world and DROs, economics and politics and all that kind of good stuff.
And then part two was more about you, right?
You, you sitting right there.
About something else. And it's interesting the way this sort of works.
The Borg brain, the collective brain works because this is something that's worth, I guess, mentioning a little bit.
We can take it for a test run here and get your feedback.
You can let me know what you think.
But generally, this question of innate preferences is, I think, essential.
Just for myself, working empirically, I have...
I've had a large number of either slow or big eruptions of preferences in my life, both in terms of music, of thought, of art, sexual matters, and so on, just things which are, you know, You're sort of walking along the street, and it's like, bam!
Down comes this lightning bolt and hits you with a preference.
And it's like, oh, okay, I guess I'll do this for the next ten years or something.
And that happened with computers.
It happened with philosophy. Hey, Steph, would you let me interrupt one sec?
I think someone has their mic on, and it's fuzzing you up really bad, making you hard to hear.
Oh, okay, yeah. If you're not talking, if you could mute, that would be excellent.
So, yeah, so, I mean, this question of preference is really quite important.
Now, you can certainly train yourself to have better preferences.
I have trained myself to like foods that are better for me, and we all have to train ourselves if we're sensible to, you know, sort of shun, particularly as we get older.
To shun the food that are less good for you and so on.
But that is an ecosystem that you have to work with.
So desires cannot be manufactured.
They can't be created. You can't make yourself love a corrupt person.
You can't You know, my wife is, you can't make yourself love something you're allergic to.
You know, Christina hates meat.
It makes her gag.
And she just can't make herself like it.
Now, maybe if she spent 10 years, but what's the point, right?
And just work with the preferences that you have.
And the reason that I think this is so important is that we have a strong preference to try to make the world more rational and more philosophical.
And we seem to be largely alone in that preference, unless somebody's, you know, figured out a way of getting that across to other people that we haven't figured out.
So far, the people who've claimed to be able to do it haven't been able to provide much in terms of backup to their claims.
Like the guy who came and said, I've converted my whole family to ANCAP. Unfortunately, I was hoping to have a chat with his family, but he kind of bolted when I mentioned that.
We've had reports of a way of doing it that seems interesting, but it never seems to go very far when you ask for more details.
So as yet, it's a theoretical entity.
But... But yeah, so we have this very strong desire for rationality and for truth and virtue and integrity and all this kind of stuff.
And it's not like we're alone in that.
It's just that we have a methodology of approaching it that is, I think, a whole lot more rational and consistent than most people.
And they don't have a desire for it.
And that, of course, leaves us in a pretty difficult situation, right?
Because we have a desire to help the world, and the world does not have a desire to be helped, right?
So... So, to me, it's always been an ecosystem, right?
So, I have these eruptions of preference that I accept and try to work with, and deep down that has a lot to do with all of us from the careers and the people that we choose to have in our lives, people we marry or whatever.
We have these eruptions of preference that we have to work with, because you can't rationally command yourself to be You know, kind of virtuous or habit.
You just can't make yourself do these things.
But at the same time, you can't just follow every win, right?
So it's learning to work with an ecosystem of desire and goal and recognizing the limitations of both, right?
And that's why there's so many damn podcasts.
All this stuff is quite complex because personality is not a set of principles and it's not a set of experiences.
And it's not, you know, what your teacher did to you in grade 3 and what your mother did to you for the first 20 years of your life.
That is not what personality is.
Personality is not something that we're just born with because it certainly can change over time.
But personality is unbelievably stable.
When you think about it, I mean, personality is more stable than our bodies because pretty much you can look at somebody who's 80 and see very clearly the person that they were when they were 8, even though all of the cells and atoms in their brain have been replaced over time.
So, I was sort of taking the direction of just saying that we have these great desires.
We have these great desires for truth.
And the only real way to work with other people to get them to want to be philosophical is if they already want to be philosophical.
Because we're looking for, you know, what's that magic key?
What is that magic combination that's going to open up people's hearts and blow their foreheads wide open and let the streaming, you know, liquid of enlightenment pour in?
But that's not how it works, right?
A coach who wants to train an athlete finds the athlete with the greatest ability, but more importantly, the greatest desire.
Because ability and desire are very much interwoven, but they're not the same thing, but they're not completely separate.
They're sort of yin and yang. They're an ecosystem as well.
Like if I wanted to be an opera singer, I couldn't be an opera singer because I don't have a good enough instrument.
I don't have a good enough voice to be an opera singer or any kind of singer really other than a hacky internet joke singer.
And at the same time, if I wanted to be a hair model, unless it was armpit hair, then there would not be very far that I could go in that direction.
So, ability and desire go very much hand in hand, and Greg and I were having a chat about this on the weekend with regards to somebody in his life, that we have to find the people who want it the most, and because life is short, and we have to enjoy the process of being philosophical,
and the internet allows us to reach hands across the water to find people like this, Rather than trying to turn those around us into philosophers, we need to just keep moving and keep moving until we hit people who have a potential for philosophy within them that they don't even know that they have, right? So the first time I saw a computer that you could program and stuff, I just fascinated, loved it.
I would go in Saturdays to program and learn all this geeky stuff and so on.
And nobody could stop me, right?
I mean... I remember one day somebody didn't show up to monitor the computer lab and we weren't allowed to be in there on Saturdays without an adult present.
And so one of the few times I actually pressured my mom into coming to watch over us in the computer lab.
You could not stop me.
I worked nights and weekends to buy a computer and so on.
And there was just no way to stop me.
And those are the people that we need to get in touch with and stop wasting our time with the people where we're trying to get them...
Like, we're basically...
We're people with a great sense of pitch who love opera with great natural voices and we're wandering around the subway saying, join me in my opera company.
And people are like, opera?
I don't even really like opera.
And then we get mad at them and say, no, you must like opera.
But philosophy as it stands right now is sort of a talent, right?
And the people who are at the beginning of a discipline, and I think that what we're working with here is kind of at the beginning of a discipline, particularly around the argument for morality, UPB, and the sort of against me argument in terms of politics, it's kind of new, it's cutting-edge stuff that we're doing now.
The brilliance of this conversation spreads from the lips of brilliant people to brilliant people.
Let's just say talented people if the brilliant thing makes you uncomfortable.
People who are talented in terms of philosophy will spread the truth by talking to other people who are talented and who have a great desire for philosophy.
Not by talking to the average person.
And my parallel to that is if you look at the origin of the scientific method.
Now, just about everybody who's got any reasonable level of education and sophistication knows some of the basics of the scientific method, but that certainly was not the case in the 15th century.
The scientific method did not spread because Francis Bacon started yelling it out in the village square.
The scientific method spread because Francis Bacon Wrote and found all of those people who were dying for something like this and bypassed those who didn't, right?
And I think that's where we get lost and we're trying to turn people around us into people who have the same desires that we do.
And empirically, as we can see, again, we've all just got to go return back to the evidence.
Empirically, we can see that's just not the case.
It's just not the case, right?
So we really do have to, I'd sort of say, recognize that we have a desire that is built in within us.
We just have a desire for thought, for integrity, for consistency, and so on.
Oh, okay, so it must just be something with that other microphone.
Okay, sorry, I heard it sounded good, so I wanted to test it on Skype.
So did anyone get the gist of the approach that I was taking?
I'd sort of like to have feedback on that.
Yeah, but you've always said that you don't have to be a mechanic to drive a car.
Yeah, but you have to be brilliant to invent a car.
Which is pretty much what we're doing.
Right. You don't have to be Newton to figure out if you're told that gravity is constant and so on, right?
But you don't have to be a genius or you don't have to be the same order of genius to prescribe antibiotics as to create antibiotics, if that makes sense, right?
Right. Right, that makes sense.
But you also don't have to know how to create antibiotics to take the antibiotics.
Like if there's people out there that...
Are you saying that nobody that doesn't have a preference for inventing the car will have a preference for utilizing the philosophy or utilizing the car at this point?
Well, we don't have a car yet because we don't have a mass market yet.
You know, we're like 12 guys in Paris in the 14th century saying maybe we should invent a new methodology for learning about the physical world.
Right? Oh, right.
Right. We don't have 200 years under our belt of the scientific method working and being great, right?
That's true. I mean, I'm just going empirically.
Get your plans.
Sorry? We've got some sketchy plans and a direction, and that's about it.
Well, yeah, I mean, we're right.
I mean, we're not doing this because we just enjoy being contrarians.
I mean, we're right.
It's just that it's not only is...
I mean, the metaphors are very difficult.
But this is like very early atheism that's proven, right?
I mean, because this is different from antibiotics and so on and so far as, I mean, people actually hate this stuff, right?
Right. It gets rejected constantly.
But it also gets, I mean, it's about looking at your own experience and saying maybe this is really important, and I think it is.
The experience that I hear over and over and over again, and I just got a great email from a guy in Iraq, right?
What I hear over and over again is, this philosophy grabbed me like a freaking tornado.
Right? Right. And you could not tear that iPod out of my ears.
This was like water to a thirsty man, right?
To a man dying of thirst.
Oh, I know that feeling.
That's exactly how I am.
And this is how it has been the case for the people who are successful, because we all know this conversation.
It's a mother humper at times, right?
I mean, it's personally dizzying, it's challenging, it's scary, it's and so on, right?
What you're saying is very similar to a metaphor you've used in the past with the, if you're a doctor and no one knows they're sick and you start stabbing people with syringes, they're like, why the fuck are you stabbing me with a syringe?
They don't realize that you're helping them.
Yes, I think that's very true, but I think that it's sort of like drilling for oil, right?
I mean, you want to listen carefully, look at the geology, you know, drill a little bit, see if you find something, and so on, because, you know, we only have a certain number of conversations that we can have about philosophy in our life, right?
They're as fixed as our number of days, right?
Right, and using the plague analogy again, You wouldn't go into the areas of the city where you knew that it was the absolute worst, because you knew you couldn't do anything there.
You'd go where you'd know you could do the most good, right?
I think so, yeah, I think so.
Where you do the most good and where they're receptive to some sort of medication.
Well, yeah, and so because we have a fixed amount of capital, And we are trying to invest it in ways that are going to pay off.
There is a real challenge.
And what we need to do, I think, I mean, I think this is something to do with what we were talking about, what was going on in the chat room.
But what we need to do is recognize that very few people, and I said this sort of from the beginning, that very few people are going to make it this early in the game.
So let me see if I understand what exactly happened.
You guys were...
Upset that some statist didn't...
Oh, that wasn't related to this, Greg.
No, no, no. No, this was...
It started with a conversation this morning between me and Dom, and I think James was there.
But we were talking about identity and that it's personal preference, but it was kind of...
It went beyond what I had written on my LiveJournal earlier today.
And the question came up was like, well, how do personal preferences come about?
Are they conditioned? Are they genetic?
And it's like, I have no idea.
I really don't know the answer to that.
And Steph was pointing out that that's really not important.
Well, I mean, certainly there are examples.
If I had never been exposed to computers, I never would have ended up liking computers.
So obviously there's an environmental trigger, but I mean, I was exposed to a whole bunch of things.
I was exposed to accounting, right?
But that doesn't mean that I am now going to study accounting on my own dime for years, right?
I mean, that's not what happened when I was exposed to accounting or the cello or Mandarin or...
You know, Thai cooking or anything like that, right?
So you do have to be exposed to stuff, but you do have to have a latent mad desire for it, right?
If you're going to get to the realm of high quality in that.
Right. Maybe some influence on your upbringing early on gave you that Well, it could be, but my brother was raised in the same environment, and he didn't end up loving computers, and he certainly doesn't love rationality in the way that I do, and so on.
So that riddle we will not be able to unravel, right?
Because we simply don't have the technology or the testability to create null comparisons and so on.
Right. It's kind of irrelevant, isn't it?
Well, it's what we have to work with, right?
We have the empirical facts to work with that people could not pull us back from this conversation Right?
Because people are saying, well, you know, how do I gently lure people into, like, frightened little chipmunks into taking one little nut philosophy off my palm, right?
Whereas, to the metaphor, for some people, it's like, I held out a little nut, and I was eaten whole.
Right, right.
And that's around empathizing with the difference between our experience of philosophy and other people's, right?
And if we understand that what we want to do this early in the game is to find those people, like you keep tapping a little nail into the ground until oil just takes you to the sky, right? Those are the people that we want to find.
So, may I ask a hypothetical?
I don't know if this is relevant or if it's relevant to our lifetimes.
Oh, sorry to interrupt. We don't do hypotheticals here.
If it doesn't have traction, it just can't be part of this conversation.
Sorry, please, go on.
Well, just...
If we get, let's just say, with this conversation in 40 years, 30 years, I don't know a number...
A really, really well-spread-out, I guess, market penetration.
We've gotten most of the rational people in the world.
Most of these people you're talking about who are just these chipmunks who eat us whole for this conversation.
What do you think happens then?
Where do we go from there?
I mean, I know this is looking way out, but I'm just curious.
Well, we win. This popped out in my mind.
We win. And the way that we win is the way that every movement before has won, which is you make it embarrassing to hold the contrary opinion.
Oh, okay. Okay, that makes sense.
Right now, see, right now people can be perfectly comfortable because we're an outlandish minority, atomic minority, right?
So people can feel perfectly comfortable laughing at the strangeness of the idea, right?
And there will always be religious people, and that's the same way there are still people who believe that the world is flat, or claim to.
But that doesn't matter.
What needs to happen...
It needs to become embarrassing in intellectual circles to spout the kind of pomo gibberish that passes for intellectual thought in the modern world and has for most of human history.
It needs to be embarrassing in the same way that you're dating some girl and you bring her to your friends who are very scientific and so on and she starts spouting off about yogic flying tarot cards and UFO abdoctions.
You're embarrassed, right?
Isn't there a sort of confusion of cause and effect there?
I mean, once we're in a world in which people are raised with the capacity to think for themselves and taught to use reason and evidence to assess for themselves the reality of a situation, it's just going to be embarrassing by default.
Right, but what we need...
Sorry to interrupt, but the only way that we can do that is that we can find enough people so that you hear the opinion more than once, right?
Because let's say you only meet one person in your life who ever talks about anarchy, you're just going to assume it's some nutbag nonsense, right?
If you hear someone talking about anarchy at a dinner party and then you roll your eyes, right?
And then two weeks later, somebody in a coffee shop is talking about it.
And then three weeks after that, right, some guy in the line up to the movie theater is talking about it.
Suddenly, it's in the air, right?
Right, it's everywhere.
Well, everywhere is stretch, but it certainly is.
At least it's just like one guy's web page on the internet that talks about it, right?
I mean, it then becomes something that has momentum, right?
And it no longer seems as outlandish, right?
And this is just social metaphysics, and we can like it or not, but we still have to work with it.
So could a parallel to that be sort of like what in the past 18 months to two years has been happening with atheist literature, like with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, those guys?
It's becoming less of a fringe position to say there's no God?
Well, because those guys don't say there's no God, right?
Oh, okay. Well, not necessarily with us, but I was just saying it's becoming more okay to be an atheist, I guess?
It certainly is becoming more okay to be an atheist, or let's put it this way, it's becoming more okay not to be involved in organized religion.
Okay, yeah. Interesting.
I think anti-religious is more the appropriate term.
Right, or in a sense, anti-institutionalized religion, right?
I mean, if you pick on a Buddhist, people still feel that you're sort of a mean guy, right?
But this, of course, is not a great victory, because they're all arguments from a fact, and they're also arguments from doubt.
In other words, it can't be disproved, but highly unlikely, and so on.
And they still haven't answered the question of morality.
So, given that's what people believe that religion is for, if you haven't answered the question of morality, it's all very interesting.
So what, right? Right, right, exactly.
But it's certainly, it's more common now to, like, I don't get asked whether I go to church, right?
But certainly in some places in the world, that would have been the case.
And not that far in history, it would have been the case, too.
I think also that it's going to be interesting to watch this trend, because whether it's just a social fad at the moment, or whether it's actually a trend, I think remains to be seen.
The whole Dawkins, Hitchens slash whatever else is next.
There's not...
This is going to sound weird.
This is just my instinct.
We'll sort of find out. There's not enough magnificence in them yet.
I mean, they're great guys, great writers, and very smart, obviously, in ways that I could never imagine, but there's just not enough...
I mean, I was sort of disappointed with the Root of All Evil documentaries.
He was just too nice.
I agree. You know, he's just like, oh, okay, well, okay, I thought he was a very nice fellow, just a little odd.
It's like, no, no, no, come on.
Well, Christopher Hitchens thinks that some of what this big boom is, is anti-Bush.
Yeah, there's some of that, for sure.
So it's specific, right?
It's like, I don't like Bush, doesn't make you an anarchist.
And I don't like fundamentalist Christians, does not make you a philosopher.
Right, right, right. In terms of understanding innate abilities, I would say that, just based on my own subjective and also the experience I've had with others, that people walk around like time bombs or they have these amazing abilities that just lie dormant until the right stimulus comes along.
That was the case with me.
That's been the case with just about everybody I've known who's gotten passionate about something.
There are very few people who know from the age of two or three that they want to be a violinist or something, but they get exposed to something and that just ignites them in some amazing way.
And then you can't stop them, right?
Then what happens is you're the coach, not trying to drag people to come out to the track, but you're the coach saying, listen, you've got to slow down your training because you're going to pull a muscle.
Right, focusing energy.
But isn't that kind of the whole point in trying to find out why this preference, like why was I so attracted to this whole conversation?
But you can't answer that. And even if you could answer that, even if you said, well, it's because three red Volkswagens rolled past my crib when I was a baby.
Let's just say we could magically come up with some answer.
So what? You still can't change whatever it is that creates that in other people.
Right, but, I mean, only with respect to trying to figure out how we can approach people better.
Well, but this is what I'm saying.
I don't think that we need to try to approach people better.
I don't think that that's the right thing.
Like, the computer did not approach me in the right way when I was 11.
Right. Seriously, I mean, back when this conversation was just like me with five podcasts and a couple of articles, right?
I mean, there's no credibility whatsoever, right?
You guys didn't know if my next article was going to be, you know, Chickmonks Ate My Wife, right?
And I bet you there were times where that felt pretty likely.
But you didn't know how far this was going to go, but you still couldn't be stopped, right?
This had no credibility, but you still couldn't be stopped.
I think I understand what you're saying, though, is that if you can identify the sources, it might be easier to identify the right kind of people more rapidly.
But in objection to that, I'd say that you don't really need that, do you?
Because the minute you bring this stuff to the right kind of people, they just light up like a Christmas tree.
Yeah, you can't.
That's exactly right. I mean, if they were all redheads, that would help, but that's got nothing to do with it, right?
There are certain kinds of demographics that are worth noting, right?
That in general, young is better than old.
In general, single is better than married.
In general, pre-kids is better than post-kids.
In general, hamana hamana.
Even in general, you know, I mean, some guy who's 50 who's living in the basement of his mom's place, and we did have a listener recently who was a real problem on the board who said, Oh,
really? Yeah. Yeah.
Right? So learning who not to talk to is very, very important.
So just sort of cast our nets out.
Yeah. To the right groups of people, but not being disappointed when it doesn't work out.
Well, I mean, I don't know that you can control your emotions in that way, but being realistic, right?
Yeah, right. Being realistic and saying, most people aren't going to make it.
And there are certain markers that you can have in terms of talking to people, right?
I mean... Right.
Right.
Right. Because sort of part three of the conversation is not about understanding the world or saving yourself, but helping others, right?
Freeing other people. Not just understanding freedom and freeing yourself, but moving beyond this necessary hedonism of freeing ourselves and working towards freeing others, right?
And that is going to be a challenge for people that's going to make the t-shirts look like nothing.
But I would say that we are really going to have to start taking that approach because, you know, we all want to live in that free world.
And people always say to me, well, why would you want to do this?
It's altruism and so on.
It's like, no, it's just empathy, right?
I want to live in that free world.
I never will live in that free world.
But I sure as hell am happy that people in the past created computers and the Internet, right?
Because without that, we'd be that much further back.
So, in the future, people will live in this free world, and they'll look back, and they'll be thankful, and in the same way that I'm thankful that people, you know, got rid of the institutionalized power of Christianity in most of the West, right?
I'm happy for that, right?
I mean, glad they did, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to do the next thing.
Right, and there's...
There's quite a lot of emotion going on here, though, right?
I mean, the one is...
Looking for people who are just going to be interested in the conversation for their own sake, but then there's also looking for people who are going to be interested in the conversation for the sake of, referring back to the metaphor, for the sake of becoming a doctor.
Well, but I'm going to put something out there, which is, I guess, letting the cat out of the bag a little early, but that doesn't matter.
matter.
I don't even know if this will be a podcast, but we're all doctors.
Some of us aren't as good with the whole needle as others are.
Well, but that doesn't matter.
I mean, the fact of the matter is that...
And I told everyone at the beginning, right?
I told everyone at the beginning that this was going to mess up all of your relationships and this was going to rip your life apart and turn it upside down and so on.
But the reality is that...
You can't anymore gain satisfaction from people who aren't wise.
I mean, the whole point of gaining wisdom, and by this time in the conversation, we have wisdom.
That doesn't mean we're always living wisdom, but we have wisdom.
And once you have wisdom, you can't be content with unwise people.
So you have no choice, right?
You have no choice because you're not going to find satisfaction in any of the relationships that you have with people who aren't wise.
And you can, I don't mean that like you, oh my god, my groceries, the grocery guy isn't wise, I'm going to grow my own vegetables or something.
But in terms of like, you just won't enjoy it that much, right?
I mean, that's natural, right?
I mean, sorry? I've learned where not to...
I hear Greg peeping in.
Yeah, I was just going to say that I found that to be the case just as a natural matter of fact, not as a moral imperative, but just as a sort of experience.
It is, yeah. If you become really good at basketball, then you don't enjoy playing basketball with preschoolers, right?
Well, that's sort of what you were saying on the call-in show to me, wasn't it?
Yeah, it's not a moral imperative, it's just a natural fact, right?
Right, yeah. I mean, as you gain more skill in something, unless you become a coach, right?
I mean, if you're really good at basketball, there's nothing wrong with coaching the preschoolers, but to play against them competitively is just ridiculous, right?
Right. So you have to find other people who are really good at basketball to play with.
And if there aren't any around, then you've got to make people really good at basketball for your own selfish reasons.
Right. It's a little sadistic and narcissistic as well.
Like the analogy you were using earlier this year, the rugby team, right?
Yeah. Playing rugby with 80-year-old osteoporosis victims is kind of silliness.
Right, so we have to keep just reaching out and reaching out and reaching out and recognizing that just like everything else in the world, it's mostly composed of failure.
Just like everything else, right?
How many people do people generally date before they get married?
10 or 20, right? How many businesses fail?
19 out of 20 over a five-year period, right?
How many movies are remembered five years later?
Like 0.1%, right?
So, most of everything is failure, right?
And that's why people layer perfectionism on us, right?
To paralyze us. Because perfectionism is the opposite of what life really is, right?
They turn failure from a matter of fact into a moral virtue, right?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, look at a hockey game, right?
I mean, the damn game goes on for 19 hours, it seems like, right?
But, you know, how many goals are there, right?
Like, two, three, four, five, right?
Almost the whole game is not scoring, right?
I mean, that's natural.
That's just the way it is, right?
Right, but to take it from a matter of fact to...
It's bad to score more than five goals in a hockey game.
That's where it becomes corrupt.
Sorry, it's bad to score more than five goals?
Right. Like acknowledging the fact that failure is a matter of fact, that's one thing.
But then using that as a hammer over your head and saying, well, because, as a matter of fact, if you try to succeed, then you're committing some kind of a sin, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah. But normally what happens is that people are told, you know, failure is not an option.
But failure is an inevitability, right?
I mean, success is always the rare possibility.
I mean, we know this, right?
I mean, in terms of, you know, we just bought, like...
15,000 people to come to the website, right?
And of those, right, all but 1,500 leave within 10 or 15 seconds, right?
It's 90% or 89% bounce rate or whatever.
Of those, how many actually continue and listen and come to the board and end up donating?
It's like a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent of the people as a whole.
And that's entirely inevitable, right?
And that's entirely inevitable.
And so I guess sort of what I'm saying Is that just recognize that what we're doing is we're just trying to find the people who light up in the conversation and just don't waste time with people.
Because people are like, oh, this guy said this jerky thing, right?
How many times have we seen this on the board?
I was talking to a friend of mine and he said, there's no such thing as reality and hamsters run my brain, right?
What do I say?
Bye! Bye, right.
Because you're never going to convert that person.
And I use the word convert, but you know what?
You're never going to enlighten that person, right?
Never. I think you probably noticed that with me.
Halfway through my semester, I sort of stopped with the disgruntled stories about my philosophy professor because I just gave up.
You should. Giving up is empty in life.
Well, I mean, did you notice? They sort of stopped.
I was like, oh my gosh, this guy said this, this guy said this, and then I just...
Didn't care anymore. I just didn't give a shit.
I mean, I cared, obviously, that he was wrong in corrupting the youth, but there was nothing I could do, and bitching about it wasn't going to make it better.
Yeah, well, bitching about it because the entire point of that kind of personality is to frustrate and paralyze you.
These people are enormous gatekeepers.
They are enormous time wasters.
In our precious time, like if I was a competitor to an oil company, I would do everything that I could to get them to drill in the wrong place.
Right. And to keep drilling in the wrong places and then to go back and change their drill bits and say, you know, I keep drilling into this rock and not finding oil.
And someone says, oh, you need a new drill bit.
Oh, you need to change the angle that you're drilling in.
Oh, you need to drill when it's cloudy and shit like that.
It'd be like, perfect. You know, just keep them drilling in the same place.
They're never going to find oil. That's the best thing you could conceivably do to destroy your competition, right?
That makes sense.
If you're pursuing them, then you're not pursuing the truth.
And you're not helping the world, right?
Right. So these people are part of the...
The state is an ecosystem, right?
The state is not just a bunch of people who have got an ecosystem with its various layers and levels of defenses.
These people are key, key defenders because they waste the time of the people who can create change.
Right. They're frontline defenses.
They're meant to confuse and obfuscate and redirect to keep you from ever, not even getting to the center of the system, but actually just not even concerning yourself.
Yeah, like I knew a guy, this is going back a bit, right?
He was dating this woman who was in her early 30s, right?
And he was having a good time and this and that.
And he said, I care about her, but I don't know if I'm ready to, she was older than he was, I don't know if I'm ready to settle down or whatever.
And I remember saying to him, I said, well, but you don't have that luxury because she's in her early 30s, right?
So if you're not going to Date her and get married to her and she wanted kids, then you've got to let her go.
Because right now, she's just wasting time with you.
If you end up not getting married to her when she's 34, her chances of having kids are minuscule.
Right, you're committing a huge injustice against her.
Yeah, because how can you claim to care about this woman, and you know how much she wants kids, and you're ambivalent?
Set her free, if you care about her.
Now, if you really hate her, then get her to keep wasting her time on you, and then take away her chance for motherhood.
Well, and you know that people who say that really don't care, because if they did, they'd already be married.
Right, or if they really didn't want kids, and their partner did, and it was a deal-breaker, then they'd shake hands and part ways.
Right, right. That's exactly right.
But sentimentality and all sorts of other bullshit keeps them equivocating.
Yeah, well, this guy had some other issues, right?
Yeah, these people we keep finding, they're all over the internet.
I mean, I don't know of anywhere...
Sorry, Nate, which people? The people that we're attracting...
Right. But, I mean, I'm not going to find people like this to talk to in my closet.
Well, you need to move, though, right?
Right, I do.
I mean, I'm guessing, right? I mean, if everybody around you is staunchly anti-intellectual and that's the social environment that you're in...
I don't mean move to, you know, we're not going to have the free FDR project or something, right?
But, you know, move to a university town, right?
Or wherever. I mean, just making stuff up, right?
But just move, right?
Yeah, you're right. I mean, you of all people, right?
I mean, you've got nothing tying you down, right?
Well, you've got a business, right?
But, I mean, that's portable to some degree.
Yeah, I think my career is portable at least.
Your career is portable and your contacts, you can always, what happens is, right, if you've built up a business with contacts and contracts, you simply sell that as a lump sum and use that to build up your new business in the new place, right?
Yeah, it's not that big.
Right, but all I'm saying is that the solutions, and again, look, I mean, compared to Francis Bacon and Galileo versus the Inquisition, we have little to complain about, right?
Right. And I have a house.
I can sell. I can use that money to move.
You could, right? I mean, if you genuinely can't find people around you, right?
Life is short, right?
You're not going to look back and say, I'm really glad that I lived a lonely life in that house.
It's not finding friends and like-minded companions and wise compatriots, but staying in that town, right?
You're just not going to look back and say that, right?
No. No, I need to get the hell out of here.
You're right. What you're going to say is I wish I'd spent the $300 to move somewhere better.
Right. Sorry, say that again, Brett.
$300? Whatever the number is, some insignificant sum in the grand scheme of things, all right?
I mean, it's going to be in the grand scheme of things that your life makes.
It's going to be some insignificant sum.
You're going to look back on 30 years of wasted life and go, Jesus, you know, a few thousand dollars to move somewhere would have been way cheaper.
Right. Right?
I totally agree.
Yeah, that pretty much pushed me over the edge right there.
That's my decision.
But you know why you're staying where you are in age is because you think that you can turn people into people like you.
Right, I can't. I'm wasting my time.
Yeah, and that's why I'm sort of talking about recognizing that when you make that connection with someone, I mean, because Greg's on the phone, we were talking on the Sunday show, right?
And, you know, everybody gets, when they listen to that, they get, it's like, wow, he really got it.
Like, he was really digging in.
He was really, you know, and other people have, you know, they've said, they've called up and they've said to me, Steph, you said something at a post or an email.
I know it's going to be hard, but...
I want you to tell me, right?
I have to fight off sometimes the listener conversations, the queue up, right?
People who really, couples who like, I really want to get this stuff.
Like, I want to go through this ringer, you know?
Wait, pardon, Steph, you said listeners say he's really digging in.
Were you talking about you? No, you!
Oh, okay, like, I got it on, okay.
Right. And you were like, no, tell me more.
And you were like, oh, you just mentioned this thing last week and I've been thinking about it all week and here's what I've got back and so on, right?
I mean, nobody could stop you from doing that, right?
Exactly. Like, nobody could pay you enough to not do that, right?
Right. And that's what I'm talking about.
Right. The people like that, that just need it.
Gotta have it. Gotta have it, right?
I mean, again... It's as natural as breathing.
Yeah. And, you know, I'll give up breath before philosophy at times, right?
If I'm listening to an audiobook under the covers.
But that's the idea, right?
That we can't possibly or conceivably turn people into people like us.
Yeah, and as defeated as it sounds, and I don't mean it that way, but you just kind of have to accept the fact that people like us are about the rarest kind of people on Earth right now.
Well, yeah. I mean, without the internet, we would not know each other at all.
And then this movement would be another couple of centuries behind or whatever, right?
But it is just a natural fact.
And again, I'm not trying to make anything up.
I'm just working empirically, right?
Because, you know, the numbers of people who come on and say...
You know, I'd like to find some way of maneuvering this person closer to these beliefs, or I'd like to find some magic key that's going to open people's hearts to truth and reason and virtue and enlightenment and wisdom, and it's like, nope.
It's never going to happen.
They either already are, or they already are.
Yeah, they already hear it and they can't get enough, or they're not interested and dislike it.
I have a question as a follow-up to what you just said.
I think Greg Gauthier has actually...
Am I pronouncing that right, Greg?
Yeah, that's adequate.
Good enough, okay.
There's like five different pronunciations.
I take them all. Okay, Greg G said this, and I don't know if Steph has said this in a podcast.
I've never listened to a podcast on Rage.
Sorry, did Greg say something that I hadn't said in a podcast?
I'm just kidding! Well, I don't know if you've had any...
Greg, that's not in our contract. You signed that.
You said, that's it. I'm only going to reassemble sentences that you have used before in the podcast series.
I demanded that. Remember?
Well, no. One of Greg's...
Well, when I was feeling these feelings of anger and hatred one night, Greg made sure it wasn't rage, and he defined rage as wanting to change the other person.
Could a lot of this feeling of wanting to manipulate others into this conversation be underlying rage?
I mean, I think there is something in that.
Why don't you go on? Well, just sort of like...
Well, I don't know. It struck me as a parallel between what Greg said is rage is just wanting to control and change other people to change others' behavior not in a productive way.
Although this would be a productive way, but it's not productive to manipulate others, it seems to me.
Like if you show someone five minutes of a podcast of yours that's really, really...
Safe. And only show them the safe bits.
And you just ease them into it.
But you never...
And you're controlling what they're listening to in it.
That's very manipulative.
Well, it is. And my question is to the people who are listening, how many of you needed to be eased into it?
None of us. It's like if you say to the drowning man, I'm going to very slowly give you a stick, and I'm going to take it away then, and then I'm going to give it back.
You get that stick to him, he's going to clamp onto it with his teeth, right?
So I guess my question is, could it be rage at the world for being like it is?
I mean, sometimes I find myself falling into this, and I'm sure others do too, wanting to change it so much, even when it's irrational to change it.
I don't think so.
I mean, I think that what you're talking about is a very important element.
This is just my thought, right? From my experience...
We'll just call them for a moment hysterical emotions, right?
Like anger is healthy, rage is hysterical, right?
Fear is healthy, paranoia is hysterical, and so on, right?
Courage is good, foolhardiness, right?
And caution is good, courage is not, and so on, right?
So when we get to these excessive emotions, we almost always get there because we are facing a paradox of some kind or another, right?
So I think that people get enraged When they feel that they must do something, but they fear or know that they cannot.
That's when our emotions tend to escalate the most.
That makes sense.
That's the impossible situation.
Well, that is the impossible situation.
If we say, I must fashion an army of truth from the clay of those around me, Right?
Then you're stuck in an impossible situation.
So if Nate were to want to try to change people around him rather than just get the hell out of Houston?
Sorry, not one, just if he felt he had to.
Oh, okay. So if he felt this obligation, this altruistic obligation...
No, more than an obligation. He has to.
Okay, can you describe the difference?
Yeah, I mean, I'm obligated to pay my taxes, but I don't have to, right?
Oh, so this magnetic draw towards, like, you absolutely, okay, I get it.
The distinction. Yeah.
Okay. Right. Like, I mean, if a wolf is chasing you through the woods, you have to find a tree.
You're not just obligated to find a tree.
It wouldn't just be nice if you found a tree.
You've really got to fucking get to that tree, right?
That's what I'm talking about.
Pure fight or flight, right?
Right. But if deep down you know, if deep down you know that they're never going to change.
And also it's a paradox too because we all know that when we go into a conversation heavily invested in changing the other person, what happens?
It backfires.
Totally. So we're stuck in another impossible situation which is this.
I desperately want to change this person.
The more desperately I want to change this person, the less likely they are to change.
Right. You're putting all the power in their hands at this point.
Well, sure, and we all know what power does to people, right?
Yeah. Yeah, but why does it backfire?
Sorry, why does it backfire?
I said, boy, does it backfire.
Yeah, it sure does, right? You know this from your fiancé, right?
Yeah. So then we're stuck in the situation where we desperately want to change the person, but that very desperation makes it impossible.
So we're stuck. What are we going to do?
going to do?
We can't lower our desperation to change them, but that desperation makes changing them impossible.
So what we'll do is we'll come back to the FDR boards and say, maybe there's another way of arranging my words so that my naked desperation for change, changing someone else, won't shine through, right?
Maybe if I wear a different shirt, she won't think I'm a stalker.
Or we'll rant and rave about how implacable they are.
Yeah, for sure. For sure. I said this, they said that, and...
Yeah, no, we've all been there, right?
We've all been there. But the reality is that just based on our own experiences, nobody gave us the torch of truth gently and, you know, put stronger batteries in once a week and so on.
It's like it went off, it startled us, and then we're like, okay, hit me again, give me more, hit me again, right?
Right. So the answer is just to keep moving.
And that's kind of what...
Sorry, the answer is to keep moving?
Is that what you said? Right, to keep moving on.
Oh, sorry, I conflated that with moving houses.
Oh, no, no. Move from one to the other, right?
Like a nomad, like a space pirate, right?
Sorry, I just got confused.
That could be the case.
Oh, it doesn't work? Well, but we all know this from dating, right?
I mean, for the most part, right?
You can't make someone attracted to you, right?
And the more that you want to try to make them attracted to you, like that's that Groundhog Day thing, right?
The more you try to make someone attracted to you, the more grotesque and mutant you become, right?
I mean, it really doesn't work, you know?
To your ducky from Sixteen Candles or whatever that movie was.
Yeah, yeah, like if I could only find the way to make this person...
I bet it's manipulative, right?
Right. Yeah.
Go around and push the button and if you get the green light, then if you go, if you get the red light, you move on.
So if we just accept the reality, not only of what we've all learned from each other, which is that people are like us.
People are like us. And I find it incomprehensible that people want to be chefs.
I find it completely incomprehensible.
I find it incomprehensible that people want to play professional sports.
Myself, right? I just think that's a pretty brain-dead way to spend your life.
But, you know, so what, right?
I mean, obviously there's no problem with them doing it.
It's just people are incomprehensible in their preferences, right?
But the one thing that is true is that we all have preferences, right?
So the fact that people want to be chefs and basketball players and run around bouncing balls and plastic around for decade after decade, that's fine.
I mean, it's what they do, right?
I'm sure my preferences are as incomprehensible...
To them, but what is true is that we all have things that light us up, and you can't make something light someone up.
Right. It either happens or it doesn't.
And if it doesn't, to hang around trying to crank it, it's like you've got a pile of metal shavings together and you're blowing on it to turn it into a fire.
Blow more gently. Blow from a different side.
Blow in a different way. It's like, nope, sorry, it's not wood.
It's not going to ignite. This particular endeavor, unlike becoming a chef or becoming a baseball player or even becoming a scientist, this particular endeavor has implications for everyone, not just ourselves. Well, and that's why we have all of these other professions and not this one.
Right. Not only that, but those other professions, they don't completely upheave your entire life and blow it up.
Just completely...
Yeah. Right.
There's nothing in the Major League Baseball contract that says, and by the way, you can't talk to your mom anymore.
Well, and in a sane world, that would also be true for philosophy.
Of course. Of course.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Do any of you...
I can't relate to you guys who are upset by this stuff, but do any of you have any excitement for the time that we're actually in, being on the verge of this stuff?
To me, it's exciting. I think it's a great time to...
I'm glad that I'm involved in the first steps.
I suppose FDR is more than I could ever hope for because I was prepared for a somewhat lonely existence when I first got into these ideas, even with Ayn Rand.
FDR is more than I could hope for, to be honest.
I'm not sure. Are any of you excited to be part of this so early on?
There is no greater glory in history than what we are doing.
I swear to God, I believe that, and this sounds completely mad, and I'm fully aware of that, but I still will go to my grave believing that there is no greater glory in history than what we are doing.
Yeah, I agree with you.
That's my feelings.
For me, it's more than just excitement.
It's a gratitude I can't even express.
Yeah, I mean, I was just talking about this with Christina tonight.
Like, how amazing is it that we get to have lives that not only are intellectually, for me at least, and I'm sure for everyone else who's in this conversation this far, incredibly intellectually stimulating.
A wild ride, not just in terms of, ooh, I mastered another mathematical theorem, but finding a way to just play the harpsichord, like to play the harp of the soul to create a whole new music.
I mean, it's fantastic. And we get to communicate with each other, which was never really possible before, and we get to light this light that is going to illuminate the future in a way that will make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the Middle Ages are to us, right? And there's just no greater glory.
This is the greatest glory that you could conceivably have, not just now, but at any time.
I agree. So we may be in Wikipedia one day, listed along with...
I think it'll be a little more than that, because the other thing that's the case too, right, is that we...
It's all source material, right?
Nobody knows what Socrates said, right?
Nobody knows. But this is all source material that will be around forever, and they will look back and say, holy shit, if those guys hadn't got off their asses and started this, we'd still be where they are, or maybe worse.
I think the loneliness that comes from this, and I don't know if I experience it so much as loneliness as much as I... I mean, I don't feel lonely with you guys.
I think that in an ideal world, in the future, I don't think that we're going to have these thousands of friends.
I think that you're still going to have the few friends that I think that we're going to have in our time, too.
So I'm not sure if it's so much loneliness for me, but how do you guys feel with that kind of perspective?
Does it change it for you?
Sorry, do you mean the loneliness combated by a few friends or something else?
I missed that. No, I'm sorry.
I meant that I don't think that...
I mean, I can count my good friends on one hand, or two if I'm lucky, if it's a good day.
But I don't think that in the future when these things are more common, I don't think that we're going to have...
Bigger, grander social circles.
I think that we're still going to go through our lives.
This could be completely off the wall, but I still think we're going to go through our lives with the same amount of close-knit friends that we have the capacity for right now.
Even with the few people in our lives that respond to this stuff.
There's so much to get to know in another human being.
Right? It's like saying, I want to learn 50 languages in my lifetime and master them all.
But it's not possible. Right?
I mean, there's so much richness to get to know in ourselves and in other people that you just know the people who have a lot of friends.
It's like, okay, so you've covered a whole lot of nothing with one layer of paint, right?
But there's no masterpieces there.
That's exactly what I see.
That's really what makes this conversation so important, right?
Is that the depth and the quality and the richness of every single relationship you do have is going to be orders of magnitude better than what you could have ever hoped it would be before it, right?
And I would also mention as well, I mean, wouldn't it be the most amazing thing to have been able to listen to I don't feel so good about this whole slavery thing,
you know? Wouldn't it be completely fascinating to listen to how they put it all together?
And you know the answer, right?
It's evil, right? But seeing them struggle, wouldn't that give the people in the future who have to struggle just such an enormous degree of patience with their own struggles?
Well, also, just imagine in the future not having to ask questions to the degree we do about the morality of the state to people you're sort of feeling out as friends.
Like, you don't feel someone out whether or not they agree with the scientific method today.
Right, right, right. Right?
Like, just imagine it being sort of a generality and...
You don't believe, like, unless you have reason to believe otherwise, people are anarchists.
Sure, yeah. Or you don't have to ask.
I don't have friends like, are you in the KKK? I don't have to ask people.
You're not in the KKK, are you?
They'd be offended by asking them, right?
So that'll put the future people that we're working for, their relationships, so much more energy can be put to the stuff that's more personal, more rich than the use of force to solve disputes.
Yeah, I mean, all this is fundamentally about is to get people to stop pretending, right?
pretending they have answers, and to actually roll up their sleeves and start looking for answers, right?
It's just...
And to get...
To stop people pretending that they know what they're all about, and what love is, and what truth is, and, you know...
And that's all Socrates was trying to do as well.
I don't think, you know, because he was in the military, he did such a great job in many ways, but we're just trying to get...
I mean, and when you stop pretending, you can get really close to people.
But if you're pretending, you just plain can't.
And that, that is the real loneliness.
Like, I know that we feel that from time to time, that we feel this loneliness.
But, my God, compare it.
Compared to the people who go through their whole lives surrounded by a crowd, pretending to know things they don't know, to be things that they're not, to possess virtues that are the opposite of what they do.
There's no loneliness like a congressman, for instance.
Oh, wow. Seriously, there isn't.
Like, these people, there's no loneliness like a politician.
I mean, that is truly, truly grim stuff.
There's no loneliness like a soldier's.
Rick, let me ask you a question.
Your experience of loneliness, how has it changed since you came into the conversation?
Who were you asking? I think it was Ricky that asked the loneliness question in the first place, right?
Oh, yeah, that was me.
How has it changed?
How has your experience of loneliness changed since you came into the conversation?
Well, to be honest, it's much less.
I think I always had a kind of – I mean, honestly, I've always had an acute sense of loneliness since I was a kid.
And in growing up, I mean, I had acquaintances and friends and that kind of thing, but it wasn't until I met, I mean, even just my conversations with you, Greg, early on was enough to make my entire teenage years with people who I couldn't talk to seem like nothing.
Like, I would happily trade All that for just, you know, like one of you to have and to talk to and to get to know.
And so, it's not that I've gotten more lonely, it's that I've gotten less lonely.
And that's the truth of it.
So, I mean, that's why I was having trouble relating or feeling upset that people weren't responding to this because, I mean, this is more than I could ask for.
But, and I would like to, I mean, I know that loneliness is a terrible situation or state to be in, Ricky, and I would like to help you with that, and if you'd like, I can give you a tip.
Oh, yeah. Always.
I'm always up for tips. You need to put down the whoopee cushion.
You mean put it down and...
And not sit on it.
And not sit on it, right?
Sorry, I should clarify that.
That's important. It's a good point.
No, I think I know what you mean, but go ahead.
No, you go ahead.
I'm sure you know what I mean. You mean by the gesture?
The gesturing? Like with the J? Yes.
Go ahead. That's a very good way of putting it.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
No, I know what you mean. It's compulsive, right?
Oh, it's very compulsive, and I think what it was is I was, growing up, I mean, getting in the conversations I would, and I think that was my way of diffusing my own feeling of humility, of bringing up things that wasn't quite so popular with other people, so I'd have to make a joke of it, too.
Yeah. Kind of diffuse it.
Well, you know, you're a great guy, and you don't want to have to be guy plus jokes to be valuable, right?
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Just coming from Steph.
Right. Well, obviously, I'm not saying a sense of humor is bad, right?
It's just it should not be compulsive, that's all.
Well, yeah, the way it comes out of myself, I totally know what you mean.
Yeah, and it's not a criticism. Look, you're a great guy, amazingly sensitive, but it's just something that, it's more of an invitation.
Like, I know that it feels like, and you do get a lot of positive feedback from it, and you are very, very witty, right?
So, that's...
I'm not saying, like, don't be funny, because, you know...
Actually, I am, because you're funnier than I am.
So, just stop it, because you're...
Right. I'm sorry, I didn't...
Listen, I'm going to send you a...
Just something to shave the top of your head.
But... Oh, it's all done.
But... Yeah, but I'm just saying it's something that you want to, you know...
You want to have it as something that serves you, not something that you serve, right?
Gotcha. Yeah, it's...
Yeah, I see. I mean, it's a hard thing to know when it's that compulsive.
It's hard to take a breather between every time you want to shout something.
Well, you know enough about the real-time relationship now to know what you need to say in the chat window when you feel like making another joke, right?
Exactly. I mean, because it's not like the keyboard types itself or anything.
What do you say in the chat window when you feel like making another joke?
What do you mean? Well, if you're in the chat window, and look, I mean, we've done the kaleidoscopic rename like each other, which is actually really funny for some.
Right, right. The one Borg, you know, sort of flowing in and out of each other like the end of the Terminator movie.
But when you feel like, oh, when a more serious conversation is going on, right, and you feel the urge to cut in with a joke, right, what is it that you could type instead?
Right. That would be more like the real time relationship idea.
I could say that I feel a compulsion to say something funny.
Right, right. Right, right.
Now that may not be as funny.
No. But it would be more honest.
It would be honest. It would be honest.
You know what I noticed too is that sometimes when I'm like that, the conversation, it's usually when the conversation, I'm reading it, but I'm not like 100% interested in what's going on.
And so like if something comes up on the screen that Was it annoying to you that they were going off on tangents and making jokes?
Oh yeah, just a little bit.
And that was kind of a neat little situation for me to catch myself on.
No, and that's good, right?
That's good. I mean, that's also, I mean, and, you know, there's no particularly clear answers to all this stuff, right?
It's just that to be sensitive to what is going on because, you know, you...
It does, and I know this because I've used it too, right?
But it does keep people at a distance and it also does turn you into somebody who makes people laugh, which is great and you bring pleasure to them in that way.
But, you know, again, there's no loneliness in a sense like the entertainer too, right?
No, that's true. I mean, I guess I have a history of diffusing situations, especially when there's an overabundance of seriousness and drama.
Well, drama, yeah. Seriousness is good, right?
But scary drama is not so good, right?
So there's always one kid who does something goofy to break up the tension at family dinners, right?
Right, and that was kind of my role, or what I did to cope with it, I guess, as a kid.
So you've been doing this since you were a kid?
Oh, yeah. I think you'd be better at it then.
Yeah, with all the practice, right?
Just kidding. All right.
Okay, was there anything else that you guys wanted to talk about?
It's like quarter after two here, so I'm going to not write but get some sleep instead.
Yeah, it's 1.15. No, I hope that everyone isn't so...
I hope that all of you are kind of excited to be the people leading this on like I am.
I hope it doesn't make you too sad.
You can always message me on MSN if you want to talk.
Excellent. Well, I'm looking for places to move, so...
Doesn't make you too sad?
That's a pretty low estimation of the pleasure you're getting out of this conversation.
Just try and open one vein, not two.
Ricky's career as a motivational speaker still needs a little fine-tuning.
It's nil. So if we need a laugh, we can just IM Ricky on MSN. That's our consolation during the conversation.
Yes for a small donation, of course.
Every quart does need its gesture, so that may not be too bad.
Especially when they...
Anyway. No, that's a good way of putting it.
Definitely give Ricky a chat.
He's a pretty funny guy.
A very funny guy. Thanks, Seth.
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