Stefan Molyneux and Jeffrey Tucker talk overcoming Cancer, loving McDonalds, eating cheesecake, Justin Bieber hatred, intellectual property and frozen creativity at the Texas Bitcoin Conference.
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|---|---|
| I can just hold it. | |
| Yeah, no, it's fine. | |
| It's less awkward that way. | |
| That's exactly how we should do it. | |
| Oh, man. | |
| It works. | |
| All right. | |
| So how are you doing? | |
| Are you tired out? | |
| Um, no, I'm good. | |
| I mean, yeah, I'm back to normal. | |
| Other than this little vampire wound, I'm good. | |
| Oh, it makes me look tough. | |
| You know, from my days on the streets. | |
| You should see the other virus. | |
| But no, it's good. | |
| That's the first time I've seen you since they've become people like this. | |
| Well, I finished treatments in September and was back to strength very quickly. | |
| Is there anything about them that you shocked you? | |
| No, other than how easy they were. | |
| Really? | |
| Yeah, I think chemo's come a long way, you know, because the stories from our parents' generation are like, they bring you to death and then they come in a bit bad. | |
| For the most part, other than, you know, I napped a little bit more, I was a bit tired, but it was not this, you know, kind of thing, right? | |
| So, yeah, it was not bad at all. | |
| Well, and to tell you the truth, I mean, this was potentially a life-threatening situation. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Yeah, no, the statistics could have been bad. | |
| I mean, a third of people don't make it a year. | |
| So, it's because it's blood-borne, right? | |
| So, it can go anywhere. | |
| It's not localized. | |
| Yeah, but you were looking up statistics online. | |
| You're like, okay, where am I? Where do I fall in this distribution curve? | |
| It's a little strange, isn't it? | |
| Because you're an individual. | |
| You know, your case is individual, and yet you feel like you're part of it. | |
| I was absolutely certain it was not going to be fatal. | |
| I was absolutely... | |
| I never had any death. | |
| I mean, obviously, I was scared, right? | |
| Because, you know, I'm a sentient human being. | |
| Do you think there's anything to the idea that attitude actually matters? | |
| I think it helps. | |
| If, you know, as we talked about, if the horror then starts to take you over, and then you can't sleep, and then you can't eat, and then you're just stressed the whole time, then your body is going to have fewer resources to fight what it needs to fight. | |
| So I think... | |
| But I'm cautious about that, because some people have a great attitude and die anyway. | |
| Of course! | |
| So I never wanted to be like... | |
| And you don't want to say what he's got, that's a bad... | |
| He had a bad attitude. | |
| If he'd had a better attitude, he'd be with us right now. | |
| Right, no. | |
| So I think it helps. | |
| I don't think it's decisive, but I think it helps. | |
| And I think... | |
| Yeah. | |
| But I... You know, I just... | |
| That was not how I was going to go. | |
| Like, it's from my own mind. | |
| Like, that just was not how I was going to go. | |
| Well, you always look healthy and well on camera. | |
| But now, seeing you in person, you look just amazing. | |
| I mean, your skin's very nice. | |
| Your eyes are blue and beautiful. | |
| I was working out and back to my full workout schedule and all that. | |
| So, no, it's... | |
| And I'm a better person for it, you know? | |
| It's not how you want to grow, but there is growth in it. | |
| And I feel more relaxed. | |
| So, is it like that situation where people are like, Do they see the possibility of death and suddenly every day matters a little more than it did before? | |
| Or is it like that? | |
| Worries don't really exist. | |
| You know, like this morning we were trying to get Mike and we think, oh, what if we're going to miss the speech and something like that? | |
| I didn't care. | |
| Look, I mean, I cared because, you know, there are conference organizers and so on, but it just doesn't matter, fundamentally. | |
| And criticism doesn't matter. | |
| I mean, if it's useful, use it. | |
| Like, it just... | |
| It's not like I don't care about anything. | |
| My family matters. | |
| My friends matter. | |
| But the negative detritus that floats by, it just doesn't matter. | |
| In fact, I would say that since you've emerged out of this, your videos have become a little edgier. | |
| Would you say that? | |
| I am really trying to work the language muscle to see what I can do. | |
| Because I've always sort of felt like I have more... | |
| felt like I don't want to appear crazy. - Yeah, right, don't worry about that. - come up with the most astounding stuff off the top of his head. | |
| And I would like to, and I've talked about this with Mike, I'd like to work more of startling and original forms of communication for what we're doing to help the breakthrough. | |
| So I have really tried to let myself go a little bit more and be less self-censorious. | |
| Because there is that fear. | |
| Like if I just say whatever's on my mind, I'm going to appear insane. | |
| But I think I can trust that that's really not going to happen kind of thing. | |
| Or just like he's gone off the deep end. | |
| I knew this would happen. | |
| I can't believe it took this long. | |
| The whole world's falling apart. | |
| So I definitely want to work more self-expression into what I'm doing. | |
| So that I don't feel like, you know that old thing, I just don't leave anything on the table when you're playing your cards. | |
| I want everything to go on the table. | |
| Everything that I'm capable of doing as a communicator, I just want to have on the table without self-censorship, without fear of appearing this or appearing that and so on. | |
| And not feeling like I have to manage the horse, but just kick the heels and see where I can go. | |
| And I'm really, really trying to let that happen. | |
| Would you say that's helped your business or your career or your presence in a way? | |
| Yeah, I think so. | |
| Yeah, I mean, Mike, what have we been doing for... | |
| Tripled in the last year, as far as downloads. | |
| Yeah, so the downloads of the show have tripled in the last year. | |
| Well, I know myself that, you know, when my feed comes across with a new video of yours, I pretty much have to watch it. | |
| Oh, thank you. | |
| You know, even if you end up saying absolutely nothing of any value whatsoever. | |
| Which, you know, 50-50. | |
| 50-50, you know? | |
| It's a code. | |
| Every third word. | |
| If you take every third word, the most important thing in the universe is there. | |
| And it's also helped me to be more productively impatient. | |
| Because growing up British, you've got to be so polite all the time. | |
| But now, you suffer fools less gladly when you realize your time is not infinite. | |
| Because there's this weird time for me. | |
| Between 30 and 50, men, we don't really change that much. | |
| It's true. | |
| There's nothing much. | |
| But for women, fertility goes down, boobs sag, and this kind of stuff. | |
| But for men, I weigh the same, I kind of look the same. | |
| I look at pictures of myself when I'm 30. | |
| It's like, yeah, I still kind of look the same as that guy. | |
| So there's this weird 20-year no-time span for men. | |
| Unless you get sick. | |
| And then you get, oh my god. | |
| I'm not in cryogenic freeze. | |
| I'm not in stasis, you know? | |
| Even though nothing's particularly changing, things are moving forward. | |
| And so I guess the one thing is molasses. | |
| But yeah, so I feel much more relaxed and I'm more conservative with my time, which I think is a really good thing. | |
| And yeah, definitely there is that save of the little things a lot more, like your Big Mac story, which is going to have the vegans picketing your ass or something, you know? | |
| Come on, what's wrong with a lot of boys once in a while? | |
| I know, I know. | |
| And I'm always cautious, too, because I don't want to whip up people into a present. | |
| That meal last night was unbelievable. | |
| Well, it's engineered to be as tasty as humanly possible without actually killing you on the spot. | |
| 12 minutes later, you're toast. | |
| You know, they basically, once the pay window is closed, you're on your own, but they need you to pay for the meal. | |
| And then, you know... | |
| You know what, it was like music driving on the road because I was starving. | |
| And there were the M's. | |
| That's it, you know. | |
| They're going through the drive-thru and just marveling at the speed, and it was five bucks, and then the... | |
| You know, the aromatic, you know, the smell out of the bag and then putting the french fries in the mouth and then the burger. | |
| It was absolutely mind-blowing. | |
| And McDonald's fries are amazing because I don't know, I taste, I don't taste any potato anymore. | |
| No, no. | |
| All I get is salt and fat. | |
| And you have every incentive to eat them as soon as possible because, you know... | |
| You don't know! | |
| We'll also have to go cold. | |
| You know, you can't break them. | |
| They're solid in room temperature. | |
| The minutes are going to be something horrible. | |
| They become tiny javelins you can use to hunt hummingbirds in the back long pants about it. | |
| Tiny clubs you can give to the ant men to take over the world. | |
| I'll tell this funny part of it. | |
| So, I walked up to the window. | |
| I always sort of chat about these people anyway. | |
| But they have a new thing called the Homestyle Burger. | |
| And I said to the guy, I said, listen, I've never seen this before. | |
| I mean, what is the story with that? | |
| He goes, wow. | |
| It's basically a quarter pound with salad on it. | |
| With salad on it? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, they put lettuce and tomato on it to make it like... | |
| Oh, okay. | |
| The quarter pound doesn't, you know, I think it has a little chopped honey on it. | |
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | |
| But there's no like... | |
| It's the least possible vegetables you can put on it without putting no vegetables on it. | |
| So the Homestyle puts like tons of vegetables on it. | |
| Right, right. | |
| And I said, achievement. | |
| Would you recommend that? | |
| He goes, I think I prefer the quarterback or something. | |
| That's right. | |
| Wow. | |
| So I went, yeah, I'll tell you the quarterback. | |
| It was a funny exchange, you know. | |
| It's like, you know, it's a fast food place, but I like to talk to these people with microphones as if they're the major D of a fancy road show or something. | |
| Could I get to Booth the Saints, please? | |
| Somebody near the jazz band. | |
| That's nice. | |
| That's nice. | |
| But I've just never seen that on the media before. | |
| It's just interesting. | |
| They're constantly adjusting. | |
| You know, say what you will about McDonald's. | |
| I mean, they love the consumers. | |
| I mean, they're desperately reinventing themselves all the time. | |
| And they're successfully solid. | |
| Yeah, well, they've lost, I think, one or two points in market share over the last year. | |
| So they're currently... | |
| Is that right? | |
| Yeah, they're being hit hard. | |
| By whom? | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I assume that there's just some prevalence of always people trying to claw into that market. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And they have, of course, received a lot of negative press. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know, the pink slime and the fear that it's not meat and all this kind of stuff. | |
| Oh, I know. | |
| And, you know, I get overly emotional about this because, I mean, the chicken are negative. | |
| And there are real chickens out there. | |
| People who raise those chickens, everybody's working hard to make this good stuff. | |
| It's like cheesecake. | |
| I mean, if you have a steady diet of cheesecake, you're going to get sick. | |
| But what's wrong with cheesecake? | |
| Did you know that happened to me one time? | |
| You what now? | |
| Did you know that actually happened to me? | |
| That you had a steady diet of cheesecake? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Oh, you didn't know the story? | |
| Yeah. | |
| No, so I had a friend who was in the cheesecake business. | |
| And gosh, you didn't have any customers. | |
| So I decided to become one of my top customers. | |
| And so I said, I want to cheesecake everywhere. | |
| I'm not there. | |
| Now, like, not a piece of cheesecake. | |
| Like a full-on, heart-busting wheel. | |
| Like mortality. | |
| I think I might have had too many at the time, you know, like too many drinks or something when I ordered this in perpetuity, you know, a cheesecake a week. | |
| Until I'm dead. | |
| So, nine weeks. | |
| That's a self-limiting contract right there. | |
| It actually happened to me. | |
| The doorbell rings on Monday morning. | |
| Here's my cheesecake. | |
| Wow. | |
| Thanks. | |
| And it's important that it comes in the morning. | |
| Yeah, right. | |
| Because you wouldn't want that as an absolute snack. | |
| Breakfast, lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner. | |
| And I found I had to eat a lot of cheesecake. | |
| And there's a big cheesecake. | |
| And then the next money would come, ding-dong, here comes a little cheesecake. | |
| Well, sure about that. | |
| Now, this sounds like heaven that turns into hell. | |
| You know, like, it's like the devil. | |
| It's like, oh, you like cheesecake, do you? | |
| We have more, and we have devils to insert it into you, and we don't care how. | |
| And, well, and she would also, you know, she would, like, talk the cheesecake into a peanut butter tree. | |
| Mix it up, yeah. | |
| Yeah, I know, I would have flavors and things like that, but they're always gigantic, and I don't really, you know, have anybody share them with anything like that. | |
| So I would eat a full cheesecake and wait, well, sure about that for six months, you know. | |
| Six months? | |
| Yeah! | |
| Wait, wait, wait, wait. | |
| Okay, stop the story right there. | |
| You waited to check in on yourself until six months. | |
| Was I going to cancel an order from this nice woman? | |
| I mean, how am I going to cancel this order? | |
| You could donate it to charity. | |
| You could give it to homeless people. | |
| It was also really delicious. | |
| Oh, yeah, okay, okay, okay, okay. | |
| So, but, you know, lo and behold, after six months, you know, wouldn't you check yourself out for... | |
| I kind of puffed up very well, and so I finally got the courage to call her. | |
| My insurance company called. | |
| Yeah, this has just got to stop. | |
| They've insisted. | |
| But she was sad. | |
| She was really sad, you know. | |
| And maybe you're right, she's going to share this with you. | |
| But you know, here's the funny thing, right? | |
| You want to help your friends succeed. | |
| And this is how people, we are irrational about money. | |
| Because if you, I don't know, what's 20 bucks, 30 bucks for the cheesecake? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| But if you said, I'm going to send you 30 bucks a week, don't send me a cheesecake, she'd be offended. | |
| Oh, I think so. | |
| Even though she'd make more money for that, because she wouldn't have paid for the ingredients, right? | |
| The idea was to provide a demand for her... | |
| As a chef, you know? | |
| To believe in the thing that she made, that's why I placed it for her. | |
| Just to kind of show up her sense of confidence about who she was and what she used to. | |
| But it became a problem. | |
| Now when you start, Was it tough? | |
| Like your body wasn't used to that much sugar and fat? | |
| Yeah, and also I had to take the money I previously used for a cheesecake and apply it to a gym membership. | |
| Oh, right. | |
| And I had to lose all that. | |
| How much did you gain, do you know? | |
| I'm not sure, but I mean, it was three or four inches around the waist. | |
| Oh, wow. | |
| Just like that. | |
| Wow. | |
| Yep, really happened. | |
| Bigger trousers, you know. | |
| And you get in denial for a while. | |
| These have just been washed, so naturally they're going to be a little smug. | |
| I'm developing a preference for looser clothes. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That's right. | |
| My mod days are behind me. | |
| I don't need the pipe stamp pants anymore. | |
| Just let it all hang out. | |
| That's right. | |
| It was the one time that I really puffed up in my life, and it was all because of that damage. | |
| Well, and good for you for losing it, because it's tougher to lose later in life, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| And so I was thinking about exercising. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| No, but this was some years ago. | |
| Now I'm better. | |
| I know I'm better than to do that. | |
| So now I just need to make a good job. | |
| No, I don't even dance all the time, you know. | |
| I mean, it's nice once in a while. | |
| Oh, at just the right time. | |
| I don't know what it is. | |
| As you say, the stuff is manufactured. | |
| Oh, I mean, they experiment. | |
| Like, until your tongue has an orgasm, they keep mixing the sauce, you know? | |
| Like, until you actually have an out-of-body experience, hopefully not viewing your own bloated corpse in the grave. | |
| But, like, when you have an out, then, okay, we're done. | |
| You know, you read maximum human satisfaction. | |
| And these people, you know, whenever I post these things, there's many people who get so excited and they say things about McDonald's that are a little too extreme. | |
| I can see, as you said, not even all the time, or maybe just to be against it, there are people who call it the most disgraceful, disgusting food on the planet. | |
| I mean, that's an implausible thing. | |
| Well, you know, I mean, I did a video talking about Justin Bieber and the number of music hysterics That like, I tried listening to his music and it was like a cat attacking my ear and I couldn't, it's like, it's a song. | |
| Like maybe you don't like it, but it's not like evil, it's not like possession, it's not like... | |
| You're so right, there's a kind of hysteria. | |
| It's complete hysteria. | |
| I'm so sorry, Mike, we just added juice. | |
| Yeah, but this idea that, you know... | |
| I mean, the guy... | |
| There's a video of him on... | |
| His movie is wonderful, by the way. | |
| I don't know if you've ever seen it. | |
| I know, I'd like to. | |
| It's brilliant. | |
| It tracks his career from being a young kid. | |
| You know, people just assume these people were manufactured by some sort of corporate power or whatever. | |
| No, I think he's... | |
| No, he was like an early YouTube star when he was a kid. | |
| Like 12 or 13, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| And he's got real talent. | |
| I mean, serious talent. | |
| You know, they say, well, he's not a musician. | |
| It's like... | |
| Oh, that's just such nonsense. | |
| He's a breeze music. | |
| No, and I see him playing piano with Carlos Santana in New York on New Year's Eve. | |
| I mean, Carlos Santana is a real musician, and if you're doing a band with Carlos Santana, you are a musician as far as I'm concerned. | |
| He's a fanatic musician. | |
| I recognize the type. | |
| I grew up in a musical family. | |
| I watched this movie. | |
| I mean, I know this kid. | |
| I know who he is. | |
| He's a multi-talented player. | |
| He plays guitar. | |
| And his shows are really, like if you watch his live shows, he is working hard. | |
| You know, the dance moves, I mean, that is hard stuff to do. | |
| That is hard work. | |
| Any musician on tour who's got nightly gigs like that, oh my god. | |
| And even the guitarist, you know, but the dance moves and singing while you're dancing is really hard. | |
| Breath control, and you have to be in tip-top shape. | |
| In the movie, I forget what it's called, Believe or something. | |
| Believe, I think it is, yeah. | |
| So, they have him, and he's like, this is before his voice changed, so he's like 12, or something like this. | |
| They have him in a heart-shaped thing, with like a bench, that he sits in and raises up over the stage, and then floats out into the middle of the audience, so there are like 30,000 people here. | |
| And he's like in the middle, and kind of lowering it. | |
| And he's playing guitar and then he stops singing acapella. | |
| Sitting, you know, like, I don't know, 200 feet above the crowd. | |
| And he has a glorious voice. | |
| It's beautiful. | |
| He's moving around, his voice is beautiful. | |
| He doesn't make a single mistake. | |
| You know, I mean, that, and people put down that kind of talent. | |
| I mean, that's an inconceivable level of personal mastery. | |
| Yeah. | |
| To do something like that. | |
| Well, and courage. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, he's 13 years old for God's sakes, you know? | |
| I mean, that's amazing. | |
| And, you know, as I said in the video, like, so if you want to do music and they call you and say, come down and record a song with Usher and Ludacris and... | |
| I mean, are you going to say no? | |
| No, I'm above that and so on. | |
| And plus... | |
| You know, he's a kid. | |
| I mean, he's got a long career ahead of him. | |
| Who knows what he's going to do down the road? | |
| And all of this, you know... | |
| It's sweet that you mention him, because I actually, on the flight over here that didn't have the internet, and my battery and my iPad ran out, so I pulled out my phone, and I actually had the whole album, believe. | |
| I listened to it from top to bottom. | |
| Many different styles, many different approaches. | |
| You know, he's got some samba in there, some rap, you know, some just hard-edged sort of techno pop, and... | |
| It's just a fun album. | |
| I think it's alpha male envy. | |
| No, I do. | |
| I think he is the guy that the women are screaming for and all the other guys are like, he sucks. | |
| And it's like, no, this is what the women, the girls, this is what they like. | |
| He's gorgeous, he's talented, he's rich. | |
| So there's a lot of beta male envy that goes on with this stuff. | |
| That's a very interesting theory. | |
| It's sort of like the way women feel when guys look at the supermodels on Sports Illustrated. | |
| And they say, well, that's what the guy likes. | |
| But he'll settle for me. | |
| Who doesn't look like that? | |
| So women feel that, and they felt that for, I think, approximately 250,000 years. | |
| Yeah, right. | |
| And so the ideal female form is something that most women feel they can't possibly achieve, and that the men will settle for them and kind of resent that, right? | |
| I see, right. | |
| That's the standard we can't achieve, so I resent the standard. | |
| Yeah, that actually explains a lot of things. | |
| Like, there's another group called One Direction. | |
| Do you know them? | |
| I mean, it's a boy band. | |
| Well, their music is pretty darn good. | |
| I'm sure they do a fantastic show, like the Backstreet Boys before them and all those guys. | |
| I didn't know, and I'm a little naive, until I watched the One Direction movie, which I did, that basically 100% of One Direction fans are girls. | |
| I did not know this. | |
| So you have that same effect. | |
| The guys are like, oh, One Direction, no, they're all good. | |
| You know, because they're looking at that and saying, well, that's not me, and that's what the women want, so of course they're going to feel sexual envy, right? | |
| They're young, they're looking, they're fun, they're rich, they're talented, you know. | |
| And I don't look like that, I don't sound like that, and, you know, I mean, Justin Bieber is an incredibly handsome guy, like, from every angle. | |
| He is. | |
| He's just a perfect-looking guy, and, you know, I think he's blossomed into an attractive young man, and, you know, he's still working hard at his music. | |
| These guys are also the subject of a lot of envy, too. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know, it's like people want them to fail. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| The more successful people become, there's more people out there rooting for them. | |
| They're like, oh, you know, let's just hope he goes down in flames. | |
| You know, look, he threw an egg at his neighbor. | |
| What a jerk. | |
| You know, whatever. | |
| Yeah, like nobody ever did stupid things as a teenager, right? | |
| And this whole thing, like his blood alcohol level, that was all nonsense. | |
| I mean, now, they say, well, he pled guilty. | |
| It's like, well, of course he did, because he's got a plea down because it's the government system. | |
| Nobody gets to trial, right? | |
| That's what you do. | |
| You do. | |
| You plea out, you get down. | |
| We all plead guilty every time we get a traffic ticket. | |
| Yeah, of course we do. | |
| Instead of fighting it, we pay it. | |
| I mean, Unless you're in New Hampshire. | |
| Then I think you go to the wall against sense and reason. | |
| And you arrive with 300 other people. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That's easier. | |
| That's easier. | |
| But, yeah, I think the success envy is tough, you know? | |
| Although I do have a theory. | |
| Tell me what you think. | |
| I do sort of have a theory I'm working on about how almost all great achievement starts as resentment. | |
| You know, like you... | |
| You sort of look at someone doing something great when you're not, right? | |
| And to some degree you want that, and you don't have it, and you present that gap, and then you try and close it off, right? | |
| This is a history of enterprise. | |
| I used to hate public... | |
| I used to hate speeches that were good, because I always felt, I could go and do that. | |
| It bugs me that they're... | |
| Why aren't I up there, you know? | |
| It would be better if we sort of admired achievers and just tried to emulate them based on sort of, you know, love and virtue and that sort of thing. | |
| But that's often not the case. | |
| As you say, a lot of times it's just resentment. | |
| You know, you look at me and think, oh, to hell with that guy. | |
| He thinks he's such hot shit. | |
| I can beat that. | |
| Yeah, now if you're willing to do the work, great. | |
| You know, if you just sit there and stew in resentment, then you're paralyzed, right? | |
| But I do think that a lot of great stuff comes out of society because you just resent all the success, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, and we look at success, and at least we have the models around us. | |
| It's one of the... | |
| Great, great things about free enterprise. | |
| We're surrounded by examples of success and examples of failure all the time. | |
| You don't have to do anything. | |
| You just look around. | |
| You see who's successful, you see who's failing. | |
| That gives you a lot of information on how to live, what kind of profession to pursue, how to go about living your life, what models to copy, what ones to avoid. | |
| That's a free gift we all enjoy. | |
| Just by living in an enterprising world. | |
| That's great stuff. | |
| That's like capital. | |
| That's being dumped on us every day, into our brains. | |
| That's fabulous. | |
| And there is also... | |
| I think the really successful people are the ones who end up mentoring. | |
| And this is a very... | |
| I didn't really understand this until I got into the business world, the degree to which you can take enormous pleasure in helping other people succeed, not for monetary gain, but just as a knowledge transfer. | |
| You know, all of our knowledge is going to die with us, but the more we can transfer before we go, the better, I think, for humanity as a whole. | |
| Well, this is part of what's driving, for me, Liberty Without Me. | |
| I mean, this is not just, like, my platform. | |
| This is a platform of inviting other people to come in and do exactly what I'm doing with me and alongside me. | |
| Right. | |
| And the idea is that maybe I can help other people sort of become better writers. | |
| And if you create a community, it will outlast you whether professionally or personally. | |
| You get contacts with people that can outlast you. | |
| Oddly, to me, that's a source of your own value. | |
| If you can ultimately step away from a project and see it flourish, I think it's to your credit in a way. | |
| If you step away from a project and it just collapses, that's not so satisfying. | |
| Well, it means you haven't done the knowledge transfer that's necessary. | |
| Whenever I was in business, I would never hire anyone who I never thought could replace me, because then you can't move up, right? | |
| I mean, you need someone to groom to be, and the company that I founded, co-founded in 1990, is still running. | |
| I haven't been there for, like, over a decade, and it's still running and doing its thing. | |
| Well, and this happened to me also. | |
| When I took on Liberty Let Me, and you know this, I mean, when you're a CEO, basically, that's what you do, right? | |
| I mean, I'm Like, all in. | |
| So I had a lot of other projects I was involved with that I had to kind of Put on the shelf or just put aside or just step away from them. | |
| Most of them have gone on. | |
| That's great. | |
| And I love that. | |
| It's very satisfying. | |
| It's too much a burden, really, to believe that you're sustaining something by your... | |
| Well, there's a... | |
| I think vanity and hoarding go hand in hand. | |
| You know, like you hoard information, you hoard contacts, you hoard customer relationships, you hoard processes, because you feel that makes you more valuable. | |
| But it just means you basically... | |
| The whole organization depends on you and it dies with you, which is, I think, pretty tragic. | |
| Well, I think it's very interesting that you talk about hoarding. | |
| My mind immediately went to companies that are very mature and successful that turned to IP litigation as a way of sustaining their profitability. | |
| It hardly ever works. | |
| I was doing some research on the history of some of the big computer manufacturers and how they went belly up. | |
| Almost all of them resorted to IP in the year or two before their bankruptcy. | |
| IP litigation. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Now, whether or not they saw their fortunes declining and jumped on IP as a possible source of salvation, or they jumped on IP and got distracted from profitability and consumer service and over to litigation, and that caused their failure, I don't know. | |
| It changes the culture. | |
| It does. | |
| The intangible culture of a company fundamentally alters when you go legal rather than creative. | |
| Yeah, and it's because enterprise is naturally sort of... | |
| Outreaching all the time. | |
| Enterprise is about broadcasting your information out there and evangelizing, finding more people to consume your product. | |
| I mean, there's an outwardness and a social dimension to enterprise. | |
| But IEP litigation It's all about internal. | |
| It's all about this is mine. | |
| Don't take it from me. | |
| That's it. | |
| You're right. | |
| That's a completely different defense. | |
| And they have to stifle innovation because whatever you inflict, you fear. | |
| So the companies that start launching against other people IP-wise, they have to have all these internal policies about be careful what you create because we don't want to be treading on anyone else because this sword is now out and we're in this fight, right? | |
| That's it. | |
| And so a lot of people become... | |
| And in the iOS world, this has happened too. | |
| People become scared of patent trolls and just stop developing for it. | |
| And that happens to companies as well. | |
| And then you get all these stacks of books on what you can create and what you can't and how much legal has to go through stuff. | |
| And how many creative people want to stay in that environment? | |
| And then you get overly invested in the technology that you're using right now. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| That's our value. | |
| No, throw it away. | |
| Your last book is useless. | |
| It's your next book that counts, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Yeah, I mean... | |
| That was a transition for me about seven years ago or so. | |
| Oh, as a writer? | |
| Yeah, so as a writer. | |
| So I first started by giving away the podcast but selling my books. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I realized I was spending about as much on advertising as I was making for my books. | |
| Right. | |
| And so I thought, well, if I give the books away for free, then they'll be handed out. | |
| It's like free advertising, plus my ideas are out there. | |
| And then you don't have to pay for advertising. | |
| And so I don't have to pay for advertising. | |
| So I made that transition. | |
| And I think, Mike, what are we doing? | |
| 150,000, 200,000 book downloads a month? | |
| I agree. | |
| A month. | |
| 150,000 to 200,000 free domain radio book downloads a month. | |
| And that must give you enormous satisfaction. | |
| Oh, it's incredible. | |
| But you were going to say something about how your next book, like you got over the investor in your past book, you were going to say something about that? | |
| Well, when you have IP, the value is in the past, right? | |
| Of course. | |
| What we made before. | |
| Whereas if you don't have IP, it's your next book that counts, right? | |
| IP just keeps you focused like an obsessive-compulsive at the past. | |
| You're right. | |
| And it's a change of mentality. | |
| Suddenly you realize... | |
| I don't have to fear that tomorrow I'm not going to have a new idea. | |
| I'm going to have a new idea and I'm going to put it in bed and then I'm going to move on that one and then I'm going to count on the fact that I'm going to have yet another idea. | |
| You've got to have confidence in the future and confidence in your ability to generate. | |
| How many bands would not have been one hit wonders without IP? Because when you have a one-hit wonder, you've got so much money, and you can tour on that, and no one else can play it. | |
| And imagine how much human creativity would be there. | |
| It happens all the time, doesn't it? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, some people, they're obsessive about creativity, like Queen or whoever. | |
| They just keep making new stuff. | |
| Right. | |
| But there's a lot of people who are more reactionary. | |
| A lot of bands in the 70s, 80s, 90s. | |
| Yeah, the one-hit wonders. | |
| It's because they've got so much IP, and all they do is focus on their old hits and get stuck in that rut. | |
| Oh, it's terrifying. | |
| How many great songs never got written because people are focused on protecting past value, dead value, created and done. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I really am not of the mentality, like, whatever books I've written in the past, I'm not impressed by that. | |
| I'm not even impressed by when people introduce me and talk about all the things I've done in the past. | |
| I'm like, you know, when I stand up and speak right now... | |
| The past doesn't matter. | |
| I'm either engaging now or I'm not, right? | |
| What happens in the next 45 minutes is the way I'm going to be judged. | |
| And that's right. | |
| That's the way it should be. | |
| We have to think about that. | |
| Yeah, I mean, if you give a bad speech, it doesn't matter how many good speeches you gave before. | |
| I mean, what does that matter, right? | |
| And it's a little terrifying, but it's also invigorating. | |
| I mean, it's a wonderful way to live. | |
| For God's sake, we wake up in the morning for a reason. | |
| There's some reason we open our eyes and start moving our legs in the morning. | |
| And the reason is so that we can do something spectacular. | |
| You know? | |
| It's not so that we can reflect on our past glories. | |
| It's so we can do something today. | |
| It's so we can do something amazing tomorrow. | |
| This fierce guarding of frozen creativity, which is around IP, it kills. | |
| That is a really interesting insight. | |
| I don't think I've ever quite thought of that before. | |
| But it is a totally reactionary, backwards-looking way of thinking about the world. | |
| Well, and of course, then the desire to create the one-hit wanderer makes music much more conservative, which is why the radio kind of sounds the same these days. | |
| It's the same thing with movies. | |
| They're so expensive now for government reasons and union reasons and to some degree free market reasons that everything gets so conservative. | |
| It's like, well, let's just make 21 Jump Street again or let's make the third sequel or whatever because that's much more guaranteed and let's dumb it down to a worldwide audience so that it's less language-based and so on. | |
| For a while, it seemed like every movie I was going to was more or less one of three or four types of movies and it became just ridiculously predictable to the point that I didn't want to... | |
| I love the flexibility and freedom of, basically, past creativity is something I flush. | |
| It goes into the sewers and it's got to be what I'm cooking for the next meal that counts. | |
| No, I think that's a brilliant insight. | |
| Certainly as a writer, I've learned to do that, too. | |
| When I'm finished with the project, I put that last period on there, I submit it, I'm on to the next one. | |
| That's the only way I've learned to think, and it works for me. | |
| Well, I hope that people get that. | |
| There's always this fear you're never going to have another good idea. | |
| But if you focus on the past, you lose that muscle, right? | |
| I mean, new ideas are just a muscle that you have to work. | |
| And if you focus on protecting your past creativity, you don't get to work that muscle. | |
| And it is, you know, I mean, I was still working on trying to figure out what I was going to talk about late last night, you know, because trying to stay present. | |
| I used to do these speeches where I'd just rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, and they just came out all kinds of work. | |
| I believe we're done. | |
| Thanks, Jeff, as always. | |
| A real pleasure. |