Dec. 15, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:09
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyne from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| So I'd like to talk about Paul Walker, a very interesting man, a movie star who recently died tragically and horrifically when his souped up car, driven by his friend who's a race car driver in a fairly abandoned industrial park, ended up crashing into a telephone pole, bursting into flames that we can only hope killing them. | |
| He got his start as a child actor and a child commercial modeler, but in 1999 he was in the movie Varsity Blues, which really launched his career, and then he was Vin Diesel's sidekick in the Fast and the Furious movies about cars going crazy. | |
| Fast, I believe, furiously. | |
| And they've made six. | |
| The seventh is in production. | |
| And I think they're going to get his brother to try and play some of his scenes because, you know, he's now dead and so on. | |
| And really, I think, quite an interesting life. | |
| And I think there's some stuff to talk about that is well worth examining. | |
| Saddest, perhaps, of all, of course, is that he left behind a 15-year-old daughter. | |
| He had been separated from her for quite some time. | |
| She grew up in Hawaii. | |
| He grew up in California. | |
| And she recently moved to California to spend more time with him, and he'd expressed a desire to his own father that, you know, he really wanted to quit acting, he really wanted to stop making movies, he really wanted to spend more time with his daughter. | |
| At the age of 15, you know, that train may have somewhat left the station, but, you know, kudos to him for thinking about it. | |
| But he was, of course, it's a new movie of his coming out called The Hours, and then, of course, he was working on this He knew Fast and the Furious movie and so on. | |
| Never quite got around to it. | |
| His father said he'd always get dragged back into another film or he'd be offered some insane amount of money. | |
| I think he was making $7 million for the Fast and the Franchise film, the last one. | |
| And he'd go back and do it. | |
| And, you know, I tell you, when people make a lot of money off you, it can be very difficult to resist That temptation. | |
| He was a key part of the movies, of course. | |
| And, you know, if his agent's making 10%, agent stands to make $700,000 if he does the film. | |
| So you're going to get some pressure. | |
| And that can very easily overwhelm what we all kind of know is the important stuff in life, time with our kids, time with our friends, time with our family. | |
| None of the movies are going to crawl out of their can or off somebody's hard drive and hold your hand. | |
| When you sink through your final deathbed mattress into the great inky beyond, you really want people around you in the last parts of your life who are there for love as a result of your continued investment. | |
| And we know, we kind of always know, don't we, that we really need to invest in our relationships. | |
| We really need to show our heart. | |
| We really need to bind ourselves to others with the ropes of love. | |
| But there's so many shiny things in the world. | |
| There's so much money, there's so much opportunity to wow the crowd and please the money men and women that it is so easy to be taken in with that and to sink into that quicksand of career and profit and miss out on what is really important. | |
| So I think that is really tragic and I hope that we can take something out of this tragic death to remind us that we don't have any guarantees for how long we're going to be here at all. | |
| I mean, I could drop dead of an aneurysm During this entire show. | |
| Probably we'll never see it then, but I could, right? | |
| And we just don't know. | |
| So love the people you're going to love. | |
| Speak your heart to them. | |
| Challenge them. | |
| Interest them. | |
| Excite them. | |
| Confuse them. | |
| Challenge them to be better people as they challenge you, I hope, to be a better person. | |
| But put down the Candy Crush and pick up the phone. | |
| Put down the Xbox and hug someone. | |
| I think that's a really important reminder. | |
| I mean, particularly if you're a parent. | |
| There's a lot of stuff that I did when I was young and foolish, skydiving and stuff like that. | |
| Now, I'm a dad, not so much. | |
| It's just something you have to take into account and sort of live your life by, but it didn't really work out for him, and that's another thing to remember. | |
| Now, One of the things that I think is a little under-discussed in Paul Walker's life is the fact that he had a predilection for dating underage girls. | |
| I don't mean to dump on the dead, but these are important facts to talk about. | |
| We need the full perspective on someone's life. | |
| So when he was 28, he dated his first 16-year-old, who, as you can imagine, was young, obviously thin, And beautiful. | |
| And then when he was 33, he started dating another 16-year-old. | |
| A little tricky in California where the age of consent is 18. | |
| So he actually probably would have gone to jail for a couple of years had this been prosecuted. | |
| This is a problematic thing, to say the least. | |
| It's sort of hard to argue that true love has struck you twice in your life, but they just both happen to be young, thin, extraordinarily pretty 16 year olds. | |
| I think that we may have another L word that has four letters that is not quite love, but ends in an ust. | |
| And so I think that is important because there is no 16 year old who is going to be able to objectively Judge or evaluate or figure the worth of a 33-year-old gorgeous, insanely rich movie star. | |
| I mean, it's just not fair in any way, shape, or form. | |
| Whose parents... | |
| Let's a 16-year-old date a 33-year-old man. | |
| I mean, that's just not right. | |
| I don't mean to be all Victorian on everyone, but that just plain isn't right. | |
| When my daughter's 16, that is not going to be happening around here in any way, shape, or form. | |
| I mean, if you want to go out late with your girlfriend and you're 33, but you have to bring her home early because she's got algebra and it's a school night, you may not be on the sunny side of an appropriate relationship. | |
| The fact that it happened twice means that obviously you had a predilection for dating underage girls and dating... | |
| Probably about the nicest way that that could possibly be phrased. | |
| It is a challenge and the fact that he was able to do all of this and frankly get away with this illegal activity with great harm, I assume, to the women and to their families, to the girls really and their families, it's indicative of his family, Of their families, of the entire Hollywood community, of his co-stars who would have known all about this and so on. | |
| Which also goes to show you, you know, that moral standards around you will generally crumble when you can be highly profitable for other people. | |
| Whenever you see people in the media, whether they're politicians or movie stars or investment bankers or heads of Goldman Sachs or the Fed, anybody who can make a lot of money for other people is going to have a whole phalanx of people around them. | |
| Keeping moral reality, basic human decency far at bay so as not to interfere with the cash cow that they are currently milking. | |
| So when you see people in the media, you have to be really aware of this basic reality and to remember that they do kind of live in a different universe. | |
| Nothing goes on their permanent record. | |
| It's kind of like being a left-wing politician, like a Democrat in the United States. | |
| The media will always be on your side and anyone who opposes you will be shouted down and so on. | |
| There is a phalanx of court toadies who protect the rich, the famous and the powerful. | |
| And it is really tragic the degree to which they don't protect people and tell people to stop with the bad decisions and the predatory decisions that they're undergoing. | |
| I'm sad the guy's dead. | |
| Obviously, I think it's a terrible way to die. | |
| It is a foolish way to die. | |
| His father had rung promises out of Paul Walker to stop the insane, fast-paced lifestyle. | |
| And I think it is terribly tragic what happened to his girlfriends and that their families let women whose brains were still nine years away from full mental development to date a 33-year-old. | |
| Relative to a 33-year-old, all 16-year-olds, myself included, are kind of functionally retarded, both physically and emotionally. | |
| So it really is not a fair comparison, and I hope that we can learn to be skeptical of the halo that surrounds the rich and famous because, as Nietzsche said, there are three kinds of people that will never hear the truth. | |
| The very powerful, the very rich, and the very beautiful. | |
| Because their power, their wealth and their beauty will always distort the perceptions and the honesty of all around them. |
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