April 24, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:44:27
2957 Statists Gonna State - Call In Show - April 22nd, 2015
Question 1: What is the secret to staying well-informed about what’s going on in the world - but also maintaining your sanity and avoiding depression? | Question 2: After bringing philosophy into my romantic life, my friendships, and my family relationships, I am struggling to bring philosophy into the career side of my life. What are the benefits of bringing philosophy in the space of making money? | Question 3: Where do Christianity and philosophy intersect? What goals and principles do we have in common and how might we relate to each other in a way that is mutually beneficial? | Question 4: I'm in my final year of college, studying for a Bachelor's in screenwriting, but I've completely lost my motivation and drive - how can I stop procrastinating and get the work done?
22nd of April, 2015, it is time for our Wednesday Night Philosophy Fest, the part of the week where we talk, we listen, we grow, we learn, and hopefully we go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
So, Mike, who do we have on first?
Alright, up first today is Mr.
Jeff!
Jeff wrote in and said, I have a great desire to be well informed, and I really like the videos from Freedomain Radio and other sources that discuss what's really going on and what's really important.
The problem is that the truth can be so damn depressing.
Some examples are your recent video on the truth about school, another brick in the wall, and the California water crisis.
Very informative and very important, but this stuff really gets me down.
And this is to say nothing about how frustrating it is to live in a society where hardly anybody else even knows how to think.
What is the secret to staying well informed but also maintaining your sanity?
Well, the key, Jeff, is to stop being such a selfish bastard.
That's my suggestion, if that helps.
Now, I could amplify that.
Would you like me to go a little further in that, or should I just basically gratuitously insult you for no philosophical purpose?
So when you said the key is to not be a selfish bastard, you weren't kidding?
No, I'm not kidding.
Oh.
Cool.
But I have reason behind what I'm saying.
With the caveat that I'm also a selfish bastard sometimes, so, you know, that's sort of what I'm trying to point out.
Yeah, no, lay it on, man.
Okay, now you live in the States, right?
I do.
Okay, so the great Brontosaurus dying empire of heavily machine-gunned ancient dinosaur-ness is kind of falling by the wayside, but I don't know if you know the degree to which the world outside the empire is doing pretty well.
It's doing pretty well.
So, like, a couple of decades ago, one out of every two people in the world lived on $1.25 a day.
Right now it's down to one in seven, which is really, really incredible.
It's down to one in seven from one in two.
In other words, just over the last couple of decades, there has been the greatest elimination of human poverty in the planet's history.
That's cool, right?
That's pretty sweet.
Yeah, I mean, again, does that help you with the California world of crisis?
Well, I hope a little bit, right?
Because there's a world outside the West, right?
And just, I mean, this is a lot to do with China and it's a lot to do with India, but basically there's just been this unbelievable revolution in human wealth.
Hard to say more, $1.25, whatever, right?
Hard to say wealth, but that's been an amazing and astonishing thing that has occurred, right?
Yeah, I would agree.
What about crime?
Down.
Down, baby.
Down, down, down, down, down.
Right, so FBI's counter-violent crimes declined from 747,100,000 people in 1993 to 387 in 2012.
That's like the last year that we have data.
Homicide rate has fallen by 51%, robberies by 56%, aggravated assault cut by 45%, property crimes also way down.
The rate of violent victimizations down 67% since 1993.
70% decline in rape and sexual assault.
66% decline in robbery.
77% decline in aggravated assault.
And a 64% decline in simple assault.
And that's astounding, right?
So that's good.
And I think that has a lot to do with people sort of slowly getting the hang of not crapping violence and aggression all over their kids and the fact that it's been also – corporal punishment has been banned in a lot of places and so on, right?
Now, part of that also I think is that – I think it's what?
31 states as of the 90s had had concealed carry laws and that the prevalence of concealed weapons has diminished crime.
But – and nobody knows, at least according to an expert I've talked to recently, nobody knows exactly why crime is diminishing to such a degree.
I mean, that's like 20 years, less than 20 years.
That's pretty significant.
Which leads me to believe that there's a huge market opportunity for a motivational speaker for criminals.
Because, I mean, they're out there.
They seem to have lost their oomph.
So if you're looking, I throw this business idea out to all the listeners.
I don't think I'll get a chance to pursue it.
But motivational speaking for criminals Lazy criminals.
I think that there's just a pent-up demand for, you know, get off your butts and go do some harm to society.
And so that, I think, is an amazing thing.
Infant mortality.
Right?
Just 50 years ago, more than 100 children of every 1,000 who were born died within a year.
50 years ago?
That has gone down 50 years ago.
Holy crap.
That figure is down 80%.
80%.
In the 1500s and 1600s, the world's great powers were constantly fighting and fighting and fighting.
And great power conflict, you know, after the Second World War, probably because of nuclear weapons, but it shifted to proxy wars, and even that seems to have diminished, right?
Yeah.
And from the beginning of humanity until about 1900, global life expectancy was about 30 years.
Now, I mean, a lot of that was skewed to infant mortality.
Like, if you made it to 18, you could probably go on quite a bit.
So, in 1900, it was 30 years.
Now, globally, do you know what it is now?
Much higher.
I have no idea.
Excluding Detroit, it is 67.
And it's almost 68.
So, it's gone from 30 years to 67.
Or 68.
Isn't that astounding?
Yeah.
According to the Center for Global Development, more than half the world's people live in places where the GDP has increased more than five-fold over 50 years.
India's economy has gone up tenfold since 1960, China's 17-fold.
And even in sub-Saharan Africa, From 1990 to 2012, daily caloric intake went up 200 calories a day, which, you know, pretty significant.
In 1980, mean number of school, years of schooling an adult got 4.7.
By 2011, 7.6.
So, if you sort of look outside the empire, the world is undergoing a renaissance and A loosening of the bonds of disease and poverty and ignorance and so on that has never before occurred in human history.
I mean, just astounding, astounding, astounding stuff.
And even within the empire, there's some cool stuff going on, right?
Because even within the empire, there's a vast reduction in rates of criminality.
Now, I mean, to be fair about the rates of criminality, they bulged quite a bit, you know, from the 70s to the 90s, and there is a decline.
But the decline, nonetheless, is occurring and is huge.
I mean, it's not like 5% or 10%, but, you know, 50, 60 plus percent.
The fact that you listen to this show, I would assume, right?
Regularly enough to get depressed.
Is that right?
I didn't mean to.
The show with the greatest masochism per WAV form that you can conceive.
No, I shouldn't say that.
I mean, because we do talk about, you know, solutions.
I mean, to be fair, everybody demands that I provide solutions and then ignores the solutions.
You know, doctor, I keep coughing up half my lung.
Maybe you should stop smoking.
What?
That's wrong.
Why would you tell me that?
You're crazy.
And so, you know, it's libertarians.
Pick up libertarians.
Love me some libertarians.
But, you know, they get mad at me for saying what I said about the Walter Scott shooting and so on.
Cops are nasty, malicious, mean, whatever, right?
Thugs and so on.
Okay, well, I mean, I don't really, I think they're propagandized, but let's just say that that's true.
Well, I've already given everyone the recipe on how to breed fewer cops, which is to spread the message of peaceful parenting.
And are libertarians really devoting themselves to that?
It would seem not, because it's a lot easier to complain than improve.
So, yeah, so I would say that even things like divorce has leveled off and is beginning its decline.
And yeah, there's things that are still terrible, and I'm not going to sort of ignore those.
But the world as a whole, it's like this weird, you know, bicycle thing.
You know, like in a bicycle, one pedal goes up and the other pedal goes down?
The West falls!
But everywhere else, you know, it's doing, not everywhere else, but vast sections of the rest of the world are doing staggeringly fantastic.
Like, and I'm not trying to exaggerate.
This is not hyperbole.
The last couple of decades for the world's poor have been unbelievable, unprecedented, staggering, unprecedented, incomprehensible.
Simply because they have, you know, delved into a wee tad or smack of free market opportunities.
Now, I get, you know, and I can already hear people saying, and I get it, I get it.
Some of the Chinese economy is growing because of fiat currency and because of ghost cities and because of currency manipulation.
I get all of that.
I get all of that.
But not all of it.
I was in China for business just after Y2K. So, I guess, what, 15 years ago...
Sorry, time flash.
I think my ball's just hung a little heavier.
You know those by-the-knee castanets that old guys have?
It's like slowly winding out a fishing rod.
Anyway...
But, and it was just, it's just really beginning to take hold then.
And I would go down to the market and I would, for things that I wanted to buy, I would go down and haggle.
Of course, nobody spoke each other's language really, but we would use a calculator, hand it back and forth and punch numbers in.
And that's what we would haggle by.
But the idea of haggling, you know, even five or ten years before in an open market in China was incomprehensible.
And so, it is...
It is truly astounding stuff that is happening in the world.
And outside of the Industrial Revolution, which did not do a whole lot for India, per capita income in India was lower in 1950 than I believe it was in 1850.
And so this is what I mean when I say, and I say this to myself too, there's a world outside Of your darkened door where blues won't haunt you anymore.
Oh, sorry.
I was like, whenever I start these phrases, I would end up the songs.
But there is a world outside of the West, and there's a world outside of the Empire.
And it's unbelievable.
Now, of course, the media doesn't want to talk about this, right?
Because it's not a government program.
Because there's this massive instruction on, hey, we know how to eliminate poverty.
Do everything the exact opposite of what you're doing in the West.
That's how you eliminate poverty.
And so the media doesn't want to talk about it because it's not foreign aid.
It's not a huge government.
It's not redistributionist policies.
It's simply loosening the shackles on free trade.
That's what's doing it.
And so it goes against poverty.
The narrative, which, you know, I mean the left certainly has and the right seems to be hard.
It's hard to fight.
The right always loses because they don't fight dirty.
The left always fights dirty and the right has this sort of fastidiousness about fighting dirty.
Whitaker Chambers said after he broke with the Communist Party in the 1930s, He said that the battle for the future is going to be fought by the communists and the ex-communists because only the ex-communists have seen as deeply into the evil that is communism and people on the right, the conservatives, simply don't understand the enemy that they're facing.
They don't understand the depth of the evil of the enemy that they're facing and they don't know what means and necessary to win against it.
And so it's the ex-communists who are going to have to fight with the communists and the people on the conservatives are just going to mouth platitudes and That does seem to be not a wildly off prediction or synopsis of the situation.
But if you look at the world outside where you are, I mean, look at violent crime and all that.
I think that's fantastic.
Rates of child abuse.
Mike, if you can get me some statistics on that, there are drops in rates of child abuse.
Now, I mean, some of that, again, who knows?
Who knows?
I don't, you know, I just, I don't run across a lot of parents who Who hit?
You know, there's still some yellers and so on.
I just don't.
And I mean, it's not like they're not out there and I'll see them and I'll talk to them and all that, but it seems to be kind of falling away.
I mean, back in the days of, oh gosh, what was that show?
Little House on the Prairie.
They'd still take kids out to the woodshed and Whoop their asses, but the idea of anything showing up in Modern Family, something like the, I mean, not the demographic group, but the television show.
I mean, it's just not going to show up.
On Little House of the Prairie, they used to beat the kids?
I mean, they would say that they were...
Well, it was off camera, but yeah, they used to take the, you know, time to take you out to the woodshed, Little John, and pick up a belt.
Now, of course, it was described in an earlier time, but you couldn't really imagine that even now.
So here we go, 1990.
To 2010, substantiated cases of sexual abuse dropped from 23 per 10,000 children under 18 to 8.6 per 10,000.
It's a 62% decrease in substantiated cases of sexual abuse.
Now, there's caveats, of course.
I mean, is it perfect?
Of course not.
But nonetheless...
Even if they made a show like Little House on the Prairie now that takes place in the same time period, they wouldn't include, you know, the disciplining, if you can call it that, No, they wouldn't.
That hasn't been around since the 80s.
And so we've had a 62% decrease just in 20 years of childhood sexual abuse.
3% dropped just from 2009 to 2010.
The Minnesota Student Survey charted a 29% decline in reports Of sexual abuse by an adult who was not a family member from 1992 to 2010, with a 28% drop in reports of sexual abuse by a family member.
The majority of sexual abuse cases involve family members, and so on.
2012 reports of child abuse and neglect have dropped nationwide for the fifth consecutive year, and abuse-related child fatalities are also at a five-year low.
And 2007, there were 723,000 cases Of child abuse or neglect in America, 723,000 in 2007.
2010, 695,000.
2011, 681,000.
It's declining.
Now, all the people in power are still the same traumatized, you know, John McCain's mom used to beat the crap out of him and make him sit in a bath of ice water as punishment.
I mean, so all the people who are still in power We're all going through the same, you know, acting out the same traumatized bomb in the brain stuff.
But this next generation, I mean, is it a coincidence that child abuse suffered a huge decline just when this show began?
Yes, it is.
We've probably contributed a little bit to that decline.
But there are other forces at work.
And it is immense progress.
Now, you want to look at...
Not the rate of decline of a civilization, but whether the decline is accelerating or decelerating.
Now, economically, it is accelerating, which is exactly what you would expect, because we have an older generation in power.
But what's being sown, the next generation is growing up with far less violence.
Now, some of this, of course, is problematic because the schools Are in some ways getting worse.
And that's a challenge and a problem.
But just as the schools are getting worse, the capacity to educate yourself outside of school has gone up enormously.
The idea that you have a tiny little thing, smaller than a deck of cards, that can access pretty much all of the knowledge that humanity can put in a computer is truly astounding.
I mean, it's literally mind-blowing.
You don't even have to have any money.
Just go to the library and you can use it there, right?
That's astonishing.
I mean, the fact that this show has pumped past a hundred million show views or downloads, I mean, that's the biggest philosophy shot in the arm humanity has ever, ever, ever received.
Now, I obviously believe that philosophy is the most important thing.
And it's what humanity needs the most of in order to heal and grow and have a peaceful world.
And so this is...
Philosophy is getting its greatest shot through your support, through this conversation, through what I'm doing, and through what the other people working here are doing.
Philosophy is having its greatest shot.
And so we're going to see what happens.
But this is...
Incredibly new, right?
Really, I mean, I started right at the beginning of all of this stuff.
I remember trying to puzzle out an XML feed, right?
Sitting at my kitchen table in 2006, I think it was, or 2000.
Yeah, I think 2000.
Trying to puzzle out an XML feed when bandwidth was unbelievably expensive, you know, back in the day, what, eight or nine years ago.
And that is...
The capacity to have this kind of conversation, like with you, and to have everyone listen to it, and to get information out there that is not gate-keeped by the mainstream media.
I think that we are living in a time that in the future, anybody with the heart of a lion and the balls of a sumo wrestler...
I would love to live in because I think this is the greatest chance for virtue to ascend and for evil to fail that the world has ever been given.
And so that to me is where the excitement is.
I mean the fact that I'm able to tell you or other people are able to tell you about what has caused the California water crisis It is amazing.
I mean, I'm old enough to remember, of course, life way before the internet when, you know, if it wasn't on the 6 o'clock news or the daily paper, I mean, you couldn't find it.
It didn't exist fundamentally.
You could sort of go pore over things in the library and so on.
But now, whenever a false narrative is put forward, man alive!
I mean, do you see how quickly it gets deconstructed?
Yeah.
I mean, it's astonishing.
Now, of course, some people go, in my mind, you know, not everything can be a false flag, people.
But it is astounding just how many people seize on and spend huge amounts of time and energy processing and deconstructing narratives that are put forward.
And having access to that is just astounding.
That is really great.
I mean, I remember taking a course in race relations when I was in university.
This was an undergrad.
And, you know, I just, I didn't buy the, even back then, I didn't buy or accept the, you know, slavery, press, racism, that's the sort of beginning and end of the explanation of everything.
And finding information to see if there was any support for countering that case was virtually impossible.
There's no political correctness on the internet.
You know, the language police, the thought police that infest the halls of academia, you know, the cultural Marxists, the European Freedom Club hating sons of bitches, they barely exist on the internet.
And you can go and you can say things, you know, if you're willing to take the hits, you can go and say things that would be impossible to say in a university.
So, this...
And I sort of say Wild West in the very best possible sense of the word, but this Wild West of radical thought, where you don't need permission from a professor, you don't need permission from the king, you don't need to subjugate yourself to the PC of an editor or some sort of collective group in a newspaper.
You can simply say...
Things and make cases and make arguments in a form that reaches the whole world.
In the whole world, anybody who wants to listen pretty much can read and hear these things with no gatekeepers.
And if we can't make freedom work with these kinds of tools at our disposal, then we have no right to be the guardians of the fire.
Like, we just have no right to be the guardians of the fire if we can't make an effective case for freedom with all of these tools at our disposal.
And I mean, even things like, for instance, when fiat currencies have hit the wall in the past, there's been nowhere to go usually but totalitarianism, right?
But we have, in the form of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, we have an entire shadow system of friction-free, highly programmable, highly scalable, blockchain-based cryptocurrencies.
Information and trade transfer currency, we have an entire infrastructure that has spontaneously come to life during the waning days of a fiat currency apocalypse.
That has never existed before in history, where it's like, oh, my horse died, and look, a rocket ship picked me up.
I mean, normally your horse dies in the desert, you just die, you know, two miles from your horse.
But in this case, we don't have to have some Iron Chancellor Hitler guy to come in and revalue the Reichmark and so on.
We just don't have to have any of that stuff.
So with all of these tools, all of these, I guess you could say, arrows in our quiver, if we can't take down the dominant paradigm, Then it's our fault.
I mean, the statists are going to fight for the state.
Statists going to state.
Why do you got to be such a stater?
So statists going to state, and they're going to do their thing, and they're going to yell and scream and spread lies and do all of that, rules of radicals, Saul Alinsky, left hit below the belt, dirty, bite you on the balls kind of wrestling stuff.
They're going to do all of that kind of stuff, and that's natural.
That's what they're going to do.
That's the nature of the beast.
But, man, if we can't make a compelling enough case with all of this incredible technology at our disposal, with the voices of reason and curiosity and empiricism and philosophy having the loudest and widest possible reach, well, we have failed freedom.
We have failed the future because there's no reason why we can't.
Because if you'd have said to me 20 years ago, Oh, yeah, Steph, you know, you've been talking to individuals about freedom, you know, since you were 16, about philosophy and all that.
And, you know, you've maybe talked to a couple of hundred people over 20 years, maybe.
Probably is a high estimate, but, you know.
But don't worry, because in the future, you'll be able to record in your car and spread philosophy and reason and evidence to the world and millions and millions of downloads and I don't know how many people and all that.
I would be like, no way.
I would be like, hey, if you give me that, you give me that lever, and I can move the world.
You give me that old thing, if you have a big enough lever, you can move the world.
You give me that lever, I can move the world.
And I think that there's a lack of appreciation and gratitude on the part of those of us fighting for reason and freedom.
Just the incredible gifts that we have been given that were unguessed for and unprecedented.
And, you know, 10 years ago were unfathomable in many ways.
And having this kind of gift, having this kind of opportunity is really, we should wake up every day and be happy and grateful for it.
because now we've finally, in a sense, been given the weapons and we're on the battlefield.
Before, we weren't even able to get on the battlefield.
I mean, you had like Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul with their hand-typed newsletters, photocopied and mailed out and stuff like that.
I mean, we weren't even on the battlefield.
Now, we've got the best weapons.
We don't have the best numbers, but who cares about that, right?
But we have the best weapons and we're finally on the battlefield.
And I mean, if we can't win, I think that the future will hold us in great contempt.
And I think rightly so.
Glad to hear you, man.
So, how do you...
So, often times I watch your videos, not to pick on, I mean, I shouldn't pick on the California water crisis or whatever, it's kind of arbitrary, but I'm like, how does this guy just log all this information?
How do I log it?
What do you mean?
Like, how do I get it and communicate it?
No, I mean, pour over this data and make a video about it and just knock it down about it, you know?
And then you go on a rant, and I mean that in a good way.
About, you know, people are just crazy, and the world's insane, and I'm like, how does he have a positive attitude about life?
Just like, you know, when he's, you know, immersing himself in these things, you know what I mean?
Well, the problem is I knocked up my wife, right?
And, you know, because I knocked up my wife, I have a child, and so I have no choice, right?
There's nothing that says commitment like having a kid.
Hey, honey!
Welcome to the world!
This is the world I have brought you into.
I had a commitment before I had a kid, but that's one aspect.
You corner a rat enough and he'll take on a grizzly.
When you have a kid, I think you owe it to your child to make the world as great as you can.
That's one aspect of things that I think is certainly important.
For me.
The second is that the California water crisis would have gone down in history in the same way that the Great Depression of the 1930s would have gone down in history, right?
Failure of capitalism.
Greedy first world people using too many resources, right?
Like Barack Obama talking about the need to conserve resources.
And now I must fly on Air Force One To golf.
It's like you're not serious, right?
I mean, wasn't that thing used like 7,000 gallons an hour of fuel?
Or like Prince Charles gave a speech on the need to conserve our precious natural resources and then took a helicopter home?
LAUGHTER I was explaining this to my daughter at dinner.
Even Harrison Ford, you know, he's like, you know, we should not frivolously waste our resources.
You know what my hobby is?
I'm a pilot.
I fly for pleasure.
Well, I think that...
Anyway, I think that's just the kind of stuff you have to say.
You know, like Leonardo DiCaprio has been like a big environmental guy for many, many, many years.
And even that Billy Goat Gruff...
Beard of his, which I guess is his opportunity to save water.
But he, to do, I think this came out of the Sony emails hack, but to negotiate some movie deal, he flew, like over a two or three week period, he flew back and forth from New York to Los Angeles six times on a private jet.
And it's like, oh, you've got to, I'm not saying the guy has to walk.
But sweet mother of all that's holy, I mean, maybe you could be just a little bit more forgiving about people's desire to have a 75 watt rather than a 60 watt bulb, given that you are basically digging up dinosaurs and raping them with your Western imperialistic waste of resources, giant echo unfriendly dildo.
I mean, that would just be astonishing, right?
Yeah, $200,000 worth of private jet travel in just six weeks in 2014.
And that's...
I mean, it's quite impressive that you go lecturing the peasants about not eating too much bread when you're basically about to explode from dough.
So, anyway.
Don't rape the dinosaurs, Leo DiCaprio.
Please don't rape the dinosaurs.
I believe we have a show title because we are just click wars.
Anyway, but...
No, I mean, and I've got a whole show about eco-hypocrisy on the part of people and so on.
But what would have happened, of course, in the past is that there would have just been this, oh, you know, capitalism denudes the resources from the planet and so on, right?
Like, somebody was posting, I just, I find that these, oh, rant, here it comes!
I can't stop it!
I thought we already did that part.
No, no.
Did I shriek?
Did I sound like a little girl?
But, well, so all of these people who post about, you know, overpopulation, overpopulation, the world is so overpopulated.
That's nonsense.
You could take the entire population of the world and fit it very comfortably in the state of Texas.
Overpopulation is nonsense.
Now, excessive use of resources, yeah, okay, you can certainly consider that a problem, but that's what the free market is designed to cure.
The free market is designed to cure excessive resources by raising their prices until people can curb consumption, find alternatives, all that kind of stuff, right?
And so if somebody was saying, if everyone in the world lived like people in the U.S., we'd need three Earths!
To sustain the population because there's no such thing as supply and demand.
I just think that's just hilarious.
I didn't even know what to say about that.
That was a great meal.
It took me an hour to eat.
If I ate 24 hours a day, I would be very unwell.
I'd be like Mr.
Creosote from a Monty Python movie.
But of course you get full and you stop.
The whole point of the free market is to...
Make sure that we don't run out of stuff and that we use things as intelligently as possible and that we curb usage.
I mean, we all understand that.
But just this, you know, the world is overpopulated.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're too lazy to have kids.
I get it.
But please, God, don't.
Just say, I'm lazy!
I don't want to get up and feed a baby.
I don't want to get up when my kid gets up.
I don't want to help my kid with homework.
I like playing Xbox.
I don't want to get out of my pajamas.
Actually, you can stay in your pajamas with kids.
They don't care.
But just say you're lazy.
But God, please don't cloak it in some sort of kneeling before the clitoris of Gaia trying to flicker into some sort of happy, sustainable orgasm.
I mean, come on.
I'm lazy.
I don't want to have children.
I don't want to face it.
I don't want to have children.
I don't want to talk about being lazy.
So I'm just going to say that I'm virtuous for not sharing my seed.
Yeah, yeah, that's it.
Because Lord knows that all the people who aren't virtuous are thinking exactly the same thing.
You know, if I was a bad guy in the world, if I was like a mean, terrible bad guy in the world, then what I would do is I would put out really complicated arguments That only intelligent people could understand that would convince them not to breed.
You know?
That would be my...
I would wake up in the morning and say, well, you know, I don't want to fight like a soldier.
I want to fight like a spy.
I want to fight like a propagandist.
I want to fight like an indoctrinator.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and get the least empathetic people to breed the most.
And I'm trying to get the most empathetic and intelligent people to breed the least.
So I'm going to tell them about the environment and overpopulation.
And then all of those who are sensitive and who can think in the long term will be doubtful about the utility of having children.
And then all of the people who don't give a shit about all of that stuff will just breed like rabbits.
It's that idiocracy thing, right?
And it's brilliant.
It's brilliant.
Those people who are sort of embattled minorities, they never think this way.
I mean, Jews don't say to other Jews, you know, it's really important, don't get married, or if you do get married, for heaven's sake, don't have kids, because overpopulation.
You know, from what I've heard from Jews, it's like, hey, if you don't have kids, you're just continuing the work of Hitler.
So breed, breed, breed!
I just think it's funny.
I mean, people, it just, only some people, and this is why I'm not even sure that certain groups of people are even fit to continue, because it's like, Oh, but the environment is...
Come on!
I mean, I'm not sure the degree to which Muslims with their, like, reproduction rate of, like, you know, eight per fingernail are really concerned about the environment.
And I just...
Again, I'm not trying to say, like, let's not be concerned about the environment.
I'm more than happy to contribute to environmental protection, and that was my career for quite a long time, so I speak with some knowledge, but...
You know, just please, God, the number of people who are like, well, I've chosen not to have children because of fears of overpopulation and stripping of the Earth's resources and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
And it's like, ah, God.
I mean, come on.
See, now, Stefan, on the one hand, it seems like you're aggravated as you talk about, you know, what you just talked about.
And on the other hand, it seems like you kind of enjoy just that you're splashing a drink in the face of these people that you're ranting about.
You know what I mean?
I'm like, it's kind of aggravating.
I must be frank with you.
I do not know what you mean.
It doesn't mean you're not making sense.
I hear aggravation.
I mean, you're talking about something that's aggravating you, but somehow you don't get down to it.
I'd like smart people to have more kids.
I'd like smart people to have more kids.
Am I so wrong in that?
I don't feel that the world can really be harmed by more smart people who raise their More smart children who are raised peacefully.
I think that that is going to be the salvation of the world.
And, you know, indoctrination is easier than conversion, right?
And this goes right back to my novel Revolutions, which you can get at freedomainradio.com, which is basically about a revolutionary who goes through the whole process and comes out with a better idea than revolution, which is kind of how I sort of live my life.
But no, I would like smart people to commit to having kids.
I would.
I think that's pretty essential.
There seems to be, I'm no expert, there seems to be a genetic component to intelligence.
You know, I mean the estimates range, but there is a genetic component to intelligence.
And of course the other people are like, well just adopt!
Well, yeah, you certainly could.
And there's nothing wrong with adoption.
There's nothing wrong with adoption.
It's great and it helps kids and all that kind of stuff.
But the reality is that smart people are not likely to adopt a kid who's as smart as they are.
Just, you know, on average, statistically.
It's just not going to be the case.
So, yeah, just this idea that just adopt.
Well, first of all, the people who say just adopt, from my experience, never end up adopting.
Because, you know, that means getting off your ass and filling out some paperwork.
Is that hard to do?
Is it hard to do, by the way?
Yes.
Yes, it is very hard to do.
Yeah, we just did an interview with Dr.
Kevin Beaver.
Okay.
And...
I think it's because Mike was searching for Beaver on the internet and just came across this guy.
At least that's my understanding.
Oh, sorry.
He meant the actual person in the woods.
No, he mistyped, Buck.
I was interested in building a dam, okay?
That's right.
So anyway, you can check out that.
But yeah, so it is important.
Intelligence is...
It's not for everyone.
Intelligence is not inherent in everyone.
And like it or not, there is some genetic component to intelligence.
So if smart people don't breed, everybody just gets dumber and the world tends to slide back into a complete mess.
And look, I mean, again, I'm not saying that you owe it to the future, you owe it to the species or anything like that.
I just want people to be honest and this environmental cover for, I don't want to have kids, you know?
Good thing your parents didn't say that, huh?
So you're taking the gift, you're not paying it forward.
Don't bogart that life, man.
But I just want people to be honest and say, ah, I'm lazy.
But the idea that they're going to pin this Echo metal on their chest for, through their indifference, contributing to the growing idiocy of the species.
It's just annoying.
So anyway, I don't know if I left you in a positive frame of mind, but that would be my approach.
There's this fantastic stuff happening in the world.
If the world as a whole was just getting worse, I mean, yeah, I would get it, right?
But I think what happened was in the 90s, In the late 80s, early 90s, there was kind of a tipping point.
And that tipping point was towards more peaceful parenting.
And I think kids are still being yelled at a lot, and they're still getting a lot of crap in schools.
But I think that childhood is far less traumatic than it was now.
As I mentioned recently, I went to look at my old boarding school website.
And, you know, there's no mention of caning six-year-old children for climbing a fence, right?
It's gone.
It's gone.
You just, you don't see it.
I mean, it's still a lot of control going on and a lot of indoctrination, but nonetheless, there is less emotional, sorry, less physical trauma occurring for kids, lower rates of sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, and so on.
And that's, I mean, that's, if I can't get behind that, then this show has been completely in vain.
I mean, not just this show, but the show as a whole.
And the one, can I tell you one other thing?
Let me just give you one last thing.
Sure.
To make your dark heart sing with a kind of Mozart Requiem style glee.
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
Are you ready?
Okay.
So in the past, being uninformed was excusable.
Hmm.
Because it took a lot of work.
You had to find people.
You had to find the right people to read.
It was accidentally exposed to it.
To figure out what was going wrong in the California water crisis in 1975 would have cost you like a week in the library, and then you'd have found out about it, and what would you have done with it?
Nothing.
Nothing!
I mean, I can, I've never become an expert on anything, but I can come up with some reasonable stuff to talk about, like in two days, about the California water crisis, right?
So, not only has the cost of acquiring knowledge gone down hugely, but the value of holding that knowledge has gone up exponentially.
I mean, and even if you're just someone who comments on other people's videos or even if you just write a little blog or even if you send out some sort of email to a bunch of people or even if you just post it on Facebook or whatever, right?
The value of having information has gone up enormously while the effort and cost required to acquire that information has gone down enormously.
That is a fantastic tipping point, right?
Yeah.
And so as the price of something goes down and the value of it goes up, Well, right?
Look at the spread of cell phones, right?
And so we have this world now where to be uninformed is without excuse and without forgiveness.
So it's one thing to say, oh, the California water crisis is because of your resource consumption and Al Gore flushing three toilets at the same time or whatever, right?
That's one thing.
In 1980 or 1990 or 2000, that was one thing, right?
But, holy shit.
If you don't know stuff now, you are aiming to not know stuff.
So, it allows you to be less gentle with people who don't know anything.
Right?
So, people who just parrot the party line.
Oh, yeah, Sarbanes, you know, the financial crisis was the result of deregulation.
Like, you are a complete moron.
And you now know that anybody who says something that's so easy to rebut, and even if it's not easy to rebut, it's easy to find alternative viewpoints, you know that all they're doing is going to an echo chamber to reinforce their initial prejudices, And you can call them out on that.
And so having really, like somebody was saying on YouTube about how, well, the Fed overprinting Federal Reserve policy had nothing to do with the Great Depression.
It's like, are you kidding me?
Didn't Ben Bernanke just admit that that was the case?
And he was the chairman of the Fed, might know a little bit more than you.
Right?
So when somebody has really bad information, Then you don't have to be as patient with them anymore.
Can you look that up, Mike?
I think Bernanke wrote a paper on how the Fed was responsible for the Great Depression.
Let me check.
Alan Greenspan unfortunately blamed the free market for the crash.
And I'm not saying that anybody who doesn't agree with the Fed caused the bubble and the crash, that you can just rail against them or anything like that, but you have to at least know the alternative arguments.
You at least have to know and rebut the alternative arguments.
And so if somebody says, well, there is an argument...
I'm sorry?
You're right, Ben Bernanke.
Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression.
He wrote a whole paper on it, right?
I'm seeing headlines about it.
I'm not sure if it was a paper or an interview, but he definitely...
Yeah, he blamed it, right?
And so it's common knowledge within financial circles now that, or at least well-educated financial circles, that the Federal Reserve caused the bubble and the Great Depression.
Of course, nobody ever translates that into the here and now.
Maybe we should do a show on that, because I don't know if enough people know that, but it's so funny to think that Ben Bernanke is closer to Ayn Rand than Alan Greenspan.
It's a whole other mind frack, but...
But yeah, so you can let loose with both canons on the uninformed now because it's so easy to become informed that you just don't have to be as patient with people anymore, if that makes sense.
Or if they're informed, but only of their arguments.
No, but that is being uninformed.
Right, right.
Right, that is being uninformed, and that is just being a terrible person.
You know, I mean, just think of the people who are spreading the anti-vaccination.
Message, right?
I just read this terrible story.
I'm sorry, Mike, to keep you typing.
Some woman whose kids all got sick with whooping cough.
If you can find that article, Mike, and give it a wee bit of a read, that might be helpful.
But yeah, like the anti-vax stuff.
And again, I'm no expert on the science of vaccinations or not, but I'm pretty happy to not have smallpox and all these other things floating around.
But...
So I would, you know, the fact that information is so easy, that anybody who doesn't have, doesn't admit to any exposure to alternative arguments, you can be very frank with people like that, just how dangerous and ridiculous they're being.
So I guess I kind of hear, like, underlying what you're saying is, like, you can choose what you want to focus on.
I mean, there's a lot of good things happening, there's a lot of bad things happening, you know.
Well, no, because that's so passive.
What I'm saying is we have a greater capacity to make good things happen than has ever existed before in human history.
We're not just sitting here.
There used to be this show when I was a kid.
I don't know what the hell it was called.
It was in the 70s.
I think it was usually women.
They would look at all these goods go by on a conveyor belt.
Every good you could remember, you got to keep.
You know, an iron.
And it was like crappy.
It wasn't like, and a car.
It was like a curling iron, half a toaster, a piece of bread, a gull's wing.
It was almost just crap.
But I guess, you know, it was useful to some people.
And I don't want us to sort of look and say, well, this thing is good and this thing is bad, and I guess there's 60% good and 40% bad, or 40% good and 60%.
That's very passive.
What I'm saying is that we have a greater capacity to make good things happen as thinkers and communicators than has ever occurred before in human history.
Yeah, anti-vaccination mom finally agreed for her seven children to be vaccinated after her entire family contracted whooping cough and had to be quarantined.
So she's from Canada.
She refused to fully immunize her kids over fears that it could lead to autism and other conditions.
No, no, no.
I think autism is rising because sperm is getting dusty because older men are having kids.
I'm not sure, but that's sort of one thing I've heard.
And so she said, she said, right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear.
I understand the families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk.
I want them to know that we tried our best to protect our kids when we were afraid of vaccination.
We're doing our best now for everyone's sake by getting them back up to date.
Actually, the thing that bothered me about this woman is that it's because I think her sister had a baby and she was worried about some illness passing from her kids to the baby.
So it's like, oh, okay, so every other kid that your kids come in contact with, to hell with them.
But if it's your family, suddenly vaccination starts to look pretty good.
And anyway, so it's rough.
Well...
As far as I understand the vaccination thing, all the anti-vaccination so-called stuff that I've seen is just arguing for freedom and that parents shouldn't be forced to vaccinate the kids, which I would imagine you would agree with.
Well, you know, of course not force, but again, this is sort of the misinformation stuff, right?
I mean, The Lancet in the 90s published this information about a link between, I think it was the measles, mumps, rubella, or MMR vaccine, and autism, and then the study was completely discredited, and they published a retraction, and you still hear people talking about this stuff as if it's true.
There's actually, we just published a podcast, 2936, titled Mandatory Vaccinations, where stuff goes into the subject in detail.
Yeah, I mean, there'll be ways of encouraging people to get vaccinated in a free society, but people just have bad information about it, that's all.
And of course, yeah, everything you put in your body has certain risks, and there absolutely will be some kids who get vaccinated.
And then appear to become more autistic.
But, you know, correlation is not causation.
I'm reminded eternally every time I put out anything.
Also, the consumption of SSRIs by a pregnant woman leads to higher rates of autism in her children.
There's just a bunch of things, like Steph mentioned as well, the older the male is when he has children.
I had no idea about this until recently, but you know there's all types of risks associated with having children as an older woman.
There's also risks from dusty sperm, as Steph put it, older men having children, and increased rate of autism is on there in addition to a bunch of other stuff.
It may be worth putting out a presentation with all the other things we know.
And again, correlation is not causation about things that increase the rate of autism because there's a lot of additional information out there other than just, hey, look at vaccinations.
Yeah, guys, if your Billy Joel-style 65-year-old sperm is using a fucking walker to climb up the fallopian tubes, you may not be coming out with the highest quality human being.
It is not like wine.
It's not like cheddar.
You know, it's like, well, I guess it is like cheddar that you leave out in the sun.
But, yeah, if it needs a conveyor belt to get out from your ball sack, then it may not be the sprightliest sperm.
I mean, Anthony Quinn had a kid late.
I think Billy Joel, isn't he just having a kid?
He's 65...
Years old.
And I think, as far as I understand it, he's going to get Gollum.
That's my understanding.
I'm not, obviously, a doctor, but...
Precious.
First thing he does, comes out, goes for the wedding ring.
It's terrible.
Scampers off down the hallway.
Got to go after him with furry feet.
It's a mess.
It's a mess.
Yeah, he's 65.
Yeah, from slow down, you crazy child, to speed up, you ancient sperm.
Anyway, that's a reference to a Billy Joel song, for those who don't know.
And can't recognize it from my joyful rendition.
Alright, man.
Do you mind if we move on to the next caller?
Oh, I appreciate it.
You're full of a joyful noise now, right?
Gonna go out and do something for freedom?
Uh, okay.
Wait, should I just convince you to become a criminal like we were talking about at the beginning then?
That might work.
Come on, look at these soft people!
They're soft!
You need to go out and toughen them up a little bit.
Don't you know that a civilization rises on hobnail boots and falls on silk slippers?
People are getting too soft!
I've had enough of this mere Call of Duty digital stuff going through their window with stun guns.
Anyway.
Thanks so much.
I had to interrupt my Call of Duty for Call of Duty.
Anyway.
One of these days I think you need to do the motivational speech to criminals as a show.
You think?
Yeah.
People are getting soft!
Dolphins don't swim if there are no sharks!
Be the shark!
Strengthen the dolphins!
Okay, maybe I will.
I feel I have quite a well to tap into down there.
Clearly this being virtuous has been quite a strain.
It has created a giant cyst of incipient evil right underneath the surface.
Alright, I've had it with trying to motivate you people with podcasts!
I'm getting me some tanks!
To drive people into the ocean, as Jan Hedfold said way back...
Alright, well up next is Ilyas.
He wrote in and said, After bringing philosophy into my romantic life, my friendships, and my family relationships, I'm struggling to bring philosophy into the career side of my life.
What are the benefits of bringing philosophy into the space of making money?
Hey, Steph, how you doing?
Sorry, what was your name?
Elias.
Elias, nice to meet you, Elias.
You want philosophy to make you money?
No, I want philosophy.
I want to be basically...
Well, first, let me start.
I'm just getting the ancient wizened Greek cheeks of a...
Of a lap-dancing Socrates slowly peeling off a veil or a robe in my mind.
So let's just say it's a good thing we're not broadcasting video at the moment.
Shake your money maker!
Yeah, so you want philosophy to help you make money.
I'm not sure that that's necessarily using it in the right way, but tell me more.
No, well, what I really want, first I want to thank you for everything that you've done.
I've watched probably 400 to 500 videos for the last two or three years, so thank you very much for everything you've done.
And has it made me money, you watching my videos?
It has, it has.
Oh, thank you.
I appreciate it.
Of course, you know, I'm the man of my word.
I donate, of course.
Thank you.
So, really what I want to do is, and I could go into my little work history if you want, but what I want to do is I want to bring philosophy into my work life so that, you know, I go to work, I work a lot of hours, and, you know, while I enjoy what I do, I feel like I could do so much more.
And I feel like the missing factor in that is philosophy.
So, should I go into my work history, I guess, a little bit?
Give you some background?
Well, maybe your current, you know, just generalize it, obviously.
Of course.
What sort of area of business are you in?
So, right now I work for one of the big four accounting firms.
If you don't know what that is, it's just the big accounting firms.
They're globally known as the big four.
I'm a manager there.
I'm actually one of the youngest managers in the office, so I should feel accomplished.
I... I run the operations.
I do the finance portion and I do the staffing portion of the engagements.
I have a small team that does it with me.
It really is enjoyable.
I've been doing it for about seven years now.
Six years, actually.
It really is enjoyable, but I feel like I could do so much more with my time.
I've been struggling with...
Wait, sorry.
Do you mean with your time at work or outside of work?
Outside of work.
Outside of work.
Right.
At work, I'm really busy.
I'm very busy.
And a lot of times, actually, I work 10 to 12-hour days sometimes.
And it's getting a little bit tiresome.
And in the future, I see myself, if I continue to go on this path, I see myself working the same, if not more, hours.
And that's something I want to avoid.
I do want to start a family.
Right now, I'm actually in the process of buying a home.
And it's something I really want to pursue, something that Allows me to do something valuable, but also allows me to get some time to start a family.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, you don't want to be working 12 hours a day and have work on the weekends and so on.
Exactly.
For the last two months, I've worked every weekend.
It's been pretty intense.
Daddy is a tall ghost that passes by my bed when I'm half asleep.
That's never something I want to do.
It's the old adage that women serve their families by being there and men serve their families by being away.
It's like, no!
Break that, right?
Yeah, of course.
I definitely agree with that.
So, first of all, I've been trying to bring philosophy into my workplace, maybe try to incorporate the odd truth and honesty.
I feel like my team has run I guess in a philosophical way.
I probably should go into that a little bit more to explain.
So the way I run my team is everything is honest and upfront.
If I forget something, I say, hey guys, I forgot about this.
I don't try to blame it on somebody else, which is actually very common and I've seen it a lot in the past.
But we run the operation site just like that and it's actually improved efficiency a lot.
Just making people take responsibility for what they're doing, that's something that people are not really used to in most of the places I've worked, at least.
Oh, yeah.
And the other thing, too, which I'm sure you do, is that...
You know, always promote the great ideas of your employees.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I mean, like I would bring something to the board and say, oh, you know, it was so-and-so's idea and I think it's really good.
I'm just passing it forward and so on.
And that, you know, there's no better way to kill the creativity of your employees and take credit for stuff.
That's sort of killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
But the degree to which you can promote the good ideas of your employees is the degree to which you'll get more of them.
Oh yeah, so absolutely.
My associate, which is the lowest level, he actually has, I think, the best ideas.
He's very creative.
He has a lot of energy, so much energy.
And we've been able to create a lot of reports and things like that that weren't being used before.
And he created it from scratch with my help.
I just helped him with macros.
I helped him with some Excel stuff.
But it was his idea.
It's been a great chance to bring philosophy into that world, but there's a limit to how much you can bring.
Hang on.
Do you want to do something with philosophy in your workforce or would you like to do something more entrepreneurial with philosophy as a whole?
I really feel like I need to go entrepreneurial because I was going to get into that because there's a limit to how much philosophy you can actually bring.
Yeah.
If it's not your company, then you've got to work within the culture that exists.
But if it's your company, you can create the culture, right?
Exactly.
That's exactly what I was thinking.
And it took me seven years to realize that.
I thought I could work within the company, not within the company, within different companies to maybe change them up and make them...
Kind of my own and bring in my thoughts.
Well, you can if you want to go all the way to the top.
I mean, then you still have challenges, but that can take you at least another 20 years, right?
Exactly.
I mean, people say, oh, why do CEOs get paid so much?
It's like because they've worked 80 hours a week for 30 years, because they've traveled all over the world, because they've had no life other than their business.
I mean, just read a biography of Jack Welsh.
I mean, the guy doesn't even know his kids' names, it seems like sometimes.
Yeah, that's not the like It's a brutal life.
Some people like it and that's their preference.
I think it's a shame.
Why bother having kids?
But it is an incredible amount of work to become a competent CEO. And of course, just by the by as well, because companies are much bigger now than they used to be.
Well, CEO pay is much higher.
It's a ratio of blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, okay.
But if you improve the earnings of a $5 million company by 10%, that's worth $500,000.
If it's a $500 million company, We're good to go.
You know, in terms of the money is just subtracted from the workers' salaries.
I mean, that's just stupid Marxist zero-sum thinking crap.
You know, I mean, the the they they make for the company in general, not always, but in general, the goal is that they make a huge amount more money for the companies than they take in salaries.
And so they are giving to the workers and the workers whose CEOs are paid the most in general should.
should be the workers whose salaries are increasing the most in a free market over a long enough period of time.
But there's just this weird thing where CEOs' salaries are overpaid.
Like, they just go in there and the company vaults, you know, with a giant vacuum cleaner and hoover up all the dollar bills and, you know, grab the Snickers bars out of the mouths of the workers and so on.
I mean, it's just usual Marxist resentment stuff.
I mean, those guys pay a lot.
Those men and women pay a lot in terms of time and all of that to be able to do that stuff.
And they come up with really innovative stuff.
Like one of Jack Welch's, he's considered to be one of the great CEOs of the last sort of generation.
And one of Jack Welch's innovations in China GE was people used to get paid according to how they improved relative to each other, right?
So if you had a plumbing department that went up 5% in sales and then you had an electrical department that went up 10% in sales, then the electrical guys would do a whole lot better.
But what that meant was that the most talent would always try and aggregate in the areas that were growing the fastest.
And of course, in some ways you want that, but in some ways you want the Most talented people to go to the most problematic areas.
So what he did was instead of comparing these divisions to each other, he compared them to equivalent divisions in the industry.
So he was comparing apples to apples rather than apples to oranges.
And that would draw the greatest talent to, in some ways, the most challenging environments and produced a much more even turnaround situation in such a huge...
But that's a pretty cool idea.
Not just having the idea, but having the energy and the focus to really get those ideas across and make them happen and so on.
And what he did with General Electric was huge in terms of the increase in productivity and so on.
Anyway, I just sort of wanted to point out that you can, but it's a huge sacrifice in many ways to end up in those kinds of positions.
And entrepreneurial stuff, you may not end up being quite as big, but you certainly will end up with your hand on the rudder sooner, even if it's a smaller boat.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
So the big four firms, they're all partnerships.
So CEO is equal to partner, basically.
That's the top rung.
And even when you're a partner, you have so many other partners that you have to compete with that it's hard to make any changes that you want.
So even then, it gets difficult for partnerships especially.
You have to be more comfortable with significant conflict if you want to change an existing culture rather than create your own.
Yeah, right.
So I can stay here for a couple more years.
I have no problem with that as I build up something that I can go on and jump off to do on my own.
I just wanted to see what the best recommendation or best way that I can use the philosophical knowledge to the best of my abilities and do something else.
Right, right.
Well, I mean, I can sort of give you some thoughts, like if I wasn't able to do this, sort of ways that I would approach things.
Right, I mean, so I do have some, I've had some ideas, you know, I also have the naysayers all around me.
Oh, what are you doing leaving such a good job?
What do you, you know, are you stupid?
Why would you ever do that?
And are those people much more successful than you?
No, not at all.
Yeah, see, that's a bit of a problem, you know?
I'm going to teach you how to sing!
I think that's alright.
I think I'll sign up to the Freddie Mercury School of Infinite Yelling.
But...
Yeah.
You take the least successful people around you and you do the opposite.
They can give you wonderful advice.
It's just an opposite world.
You should stick where you are.
You've got a good pension.
It's like, okay, so you, the guy working at Starbucks, is giving me career advice and it's incredibly useful as long as I accept that it's the complete opposite advice from what I should do.
Right.
Right, so that's one of the barriers that I'm seeing.
The other barrier I'm seeing is that whatever I want to try to start, it is just filled with government red tape.
And it's like, alright, so either I stay here and deal with people's red tape, you know, the The firm's red tape or I leave and I deal with tons of paperwork.
For example, I was thinking about opening up, starting to sell Chinese motorcycles in New York.
And I'm like, all right, let's see what it takes to do that.
So I could import one or two, no problem.
I could definitely get that done.
But at the scale that I wanted to be done, I would probably spend a year or two just going through laws, getting a lawyer, paying a lawyer.
It would take so much time.
I'll spend the effort and time and money and really it is the money that's stopping me.
I'll spend the time, I'll put the effort in.
It's just the money that's hard to get to start off something like this.
You have to pay the lawyers, you have to pay all the titling and that kind of stuff.
So I'm like alright, maybe I'll do property stuff.
Right now, I'm in the middle of buying a house.
Just today, I put in a bid.
Buying houses and renting them out is pretty tough, too, in New York.
First of all, you've got $14,000 a year worth of taxes.
Then you have to pay inspections.
You'd pay for it anyway, but those prices are inflated because they're forced upon you.
You have no choice.
You have to pay all kinds of fees and taxes just to get a mortgage as well.
You have to deal with Freddie Mac or Shelly Mae.
It's a giant mess.
So I want to bring more philosophy into my life and world.
Everyone around me I keep because all my friends are good because They're into philosophy.
My fiancé is really into philosophy with me.
And I want to bring philosophy into my work world, but it seems like everything I try to do is stopped by the red tape of government.
Well, no, no.
Technically, it's stopped by you, right?
Well, yeah, right.
Because it could be done.
But you find someone who is going to take care of that stuff for you, right?
And it's not a year or two to get a business incorporated and so on, right?
If you're not in, I don't know, Somalia or something.
But yeah, you can just get someone who's going to handle all that stuff.
You know, you don't have to do it all.
And find someone that you want to work with.
I mean, I think a partnership is hugely advantageous in entrepreneurial situations.
Because you can both motivate each other, keep each other's energy going, and there is this sense of, I don't want to set sail alone.
Having two people is important.
And if you find someone who complements your skill set, maybe there's somebody who's better, maybe he's not so much of an idea hamster, but is better at just handling all of the paperwork.
And it's a very valuable and positive skill.
But yeah, you can certainly...
Make it work with less time and energy.
It's just because of your philosophical views, I assume that the red tape is even more horrible than it would be for most people.
It's one thing to be an average person doing taxes, which you hate.
It's another thing to be a philosophical person doing taxes, which brings a whole additional Dantian layer of hell to the entire situation.
It's a horror show.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
It is, absolutely.
I mean, it's like just reach in and pull out my kidney through my eyeball and let's call it a day, right?
Because it's It's got the moral horror rather than just the annoying inconvenience, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly what that is, yeah.
Yeah, so get someone else who doesn't have necessarily the same philosophical approach or is willing to just do it anyway and make it happen that way.
Right.
So, I mean, I've been having a lot of trouble finding that someone else.
I mean, my fiancé has the same philosophical leanings.
I just – she's not much of a – I don't think she would thrive in those kinds of situations where you have to deal with lawyers and all that kind of stuff.
But dealing with lawyers, you just pay the lawyers and do what they tell you to, right?
Right, that's true.
It's like you don't deal with the doctor.
You just go to the doctor and say, I got this rash.
And she says, you know, in Canada, they say, put these leeches on it.
And then you say, okay, I guess I can go to the States or whatever.
But you just do what they tell you to, right?
I mean, it's not a lot of dealing with lawyers.
It's just like, oh, you have to do this?
Okay.
Yeah, that's true.
And keep the conversations short.
It's important, you know?
I don't want to hear about your day!
Hearing about your day is going to cost me 80 bucks.
Anyway.
Right.
So, yeah, I mean, I shouldn't be discouraged.
I should go forward.
But you are discouraged.
Should or shouldn't is sort of irrelevant.
But you are discouraged, and you have to be, if you want to be an entrepreneur, and I'm sorry, I really hate to be this annoying, but I'm going to say it anyway.
I'm sure you get this, but for other people.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, you just have to be unstoppable.
You have to be just like water going down a mountainside.
You find a way.
Oh, there's a rock, we'll just go around it.
Or we'll build up enough of a reservoir until we push the rock over.
You just have to be unstoppable.
And there is just a brute, blind, passionate willpower to being an entrepreneur.
You know, just...
You just have, like, okay, I'm gonna do it, and okay, there are lawyers.
Okay, so what do I need to do to deal with the lawyers, right?
But if you're the kind of person who's like, oh, there's lawyers, and, you know, it might take a while, and, right, then that's not the right mindset.
And I think that's too risky.
I mean, there's enough risk in the entrepreneurial world without also feeling like you might fail, right?
In motivation and energy, you just, you find a way to get it done.
You find a way.
The very first time that, and this is way back in the day when I started programming in Windows, I had to, and this is, there was no code examples on the intranet.
There was barely an intranet.
I mean, and the books were, I had a book that was terrible and whatever, right?
And there was no type ahead drop downs for your programming and all that.
So, and I had to, I had to Find a record, open a record, write a value and close a record.
And it took me nine hours.
Like I just sat there and tried this and tried that.
And like I didn't even get up to pee.
It was just like nine hours of like this most ridiculously simple thing that would take me about 20 seconds now.
But you just have to...
You just have to make it happen.
And that's an annoying thing.
Just do it, you know.
But as far, like if you want to be an entrepreneur, there's enough that's going to stop you that's external to yourself.
You cannot have internal things that you will accept as a valid way of stopping you.
To look at yourself and saying, something inside of me is stopping me, it's hard to even see that, now that you're pointing it out.
Yeah, that doesn't mean you do everything, right?
I mean, maybe renting a house in New York is not for you.
So, I'm not saying, like, don't evaluate risk or anything like that.
But you're talking about things that are more generic, like, well, there are lawyers involved in the creation of a business, and therefore...
Yeah, okay.
There are lawyers involved in the creation of a business.
Absolutely.
I think I might also be paralyzed by the analyzing of the risk.
Because like you said, in every entrepreneurial endeavor, there's going to be risk.
So, you know, I come from a big four and all we do is handle risk.
So I'm like, all right, let's see the risk.
Let's see what can happen.
I look at thousands of different things that can go wrong.
And then, okay, so I'll add that to all the things of red tape and things like that.
I'm like, holy crap.
What am I going to do?
Knowing that...
How can I put this?
It's a marathon.
And to win the marathon, all you have to do is keep running.
If you're the kind of person who is just going to get things done no matter what, then you are already leagues ahead of 999 out of 1,000 people.
Right?
So, you have hugely diminished your risk.
Assuming that you're in a business model that people want at some level and care about and are willing to pay money for, you just keep going.
Right?
It's a song from the Black Eyed Peas, but the race is not for the swift, but for who can endure it.
And you just have to be the kind of person who You just keep going.
You just keep going.
It doesn't mean you don't change course.
It doesn't mean you don't look around you.
It doesn't mean you don't take feedback.
But you just keep going.
There are times when this shows a bit of drag.
You just keep going.
There's that old thing, 90% of success is just showing up.
And you just keep going.
Think of all the people who start out wanting to become comedians, right?
And it certainly is true that when you have success, you want to keep going.
But there's times in every comedian's life, I think, where they don't want to keep going.
And that's the choice that you have to make.
You just have to be the person who finds a way and who keeps going.
And that is the biggest way that you can diminish your risk.
Because by being that person, you have enormously diminished your competition.
I'm starting to see that now, actually.
So I also started a YouTube channel just so I can spread the word of philosophy on a motorcycle.
It's only got eight subscribers.
I only started it two months ago, but I'm relentless with that.
I just keep pumping out videos until people start listening to me.
Yeah, you just keep going until you get better.
And as you get better, you continue, right?
Yeah, I started off with nothing and no views and all that kind of stuff.
You just have to keep going.
I wish there was an easier way, but there isn't.
Of course, society puts a lot of things in your way.
There are too many things in the way of entrepreneurs at the moment, for sure.
But what that means is that if you are the person who breaks through that, then You are already way ahead of your competition, to the point where you almost can't be competed with.
I think that's some advice.
So find someone who can, if the barriers are completely distasteful to you, and if they're morally reprehensible for you to get involved in, sure, okay, but then find someone who can handle that for you.
You know, maybe they won't be a partner, maybe they'll be someone you just pay.
But find someone who can allow you to focus on maximizing your value, right?
I mean, it's the division of labor, right?
Michael Jordan doesn't do his own typing, right?
I mean, it just wouldn't make any sense, right?
And so, you know, find whatever it is that adds the most value that you can bring to the table and then try and outsource absolutely everything else, right?
I mean, Brad Pitt doesn't work the camera too, right?
That's true.
Yeah, that was it.
That's just what I wanted to ask.
I think that's what I needed to hear.
All right.
Yeah, so keep your eyes out for the right person.
And, you know, maybe there is someone that you already know, or maybe you have to sort of put the word out there.
And, you know, there may be entrepreneurial groups around where you are that can find someone who's going to be better at this sort of stuff than you are.
But, you know, this sort of won't get stopped means also won't get stopped until I find someone who I can work with.
Right, right.
All right, thanks a lot, Steph.
All right, thanks, man.
Take care.
Keep us posted.
Okay, bye-bye.
Bye.
All right, well, up next is Stephen.
Stephen wrote in and said, where do Christianity and philosophy intersect?
What goals and principles do we have in common, and how might we relate to each other in a way that is mutually beneficial?
I think this question originated out of the An Atheist Apologize to Christians podcast.
I'm just seeing a lot of lasers on my body at the moment.
Atheist snipers!
Okay.
Go ahead.
What do you think?
Before I go into that, I just wanted to thank you for that video.
You posted the apology to Christians.
I didn't feel like you had to apologize, but the things you said made me feel really warm and fuzzy towards the whole idea of Christians and philosophers in FDR just coming together.
We have so many things in common that I thought it was such a fruitful speech you gave.
I know you must have had backlash for that from...
Yeah.
Backlash!
I don't know, Mike, did we get any backlash?
At least nobody canceled their subscriptions to the show.
I mean, that's the most important thing.
That's just been fantastic.
Oh, I think we got a couple of those from that show.
Yeah, just a couple.
Just a couple.
Yeah.
And no, I get it.
I mean, you know, I guess for some people to say any good things about religion is, you know, tantamount to cozying up and having a child with Satan or something like I've got to go with the data.
And, you know, I hate to say I have to follow my heart because that's not exactly a philosophical thing.
But I've always wanted to be honest about where I am emotionally as well as intellectually.
And in reading, the degree to which I think very positive values were put forward by religion is...
And I tried to explain it well, but yeah, that was certainly quite a defection of people who found it entirely unacceptable to find even a shred of positive aspects to religion.
And, you know, I'm sorry that people decided to cancel their subscriptions and stop supporting the show and all that.
That's obviously their choice, and I actually think that's probably for the best.
You know, I mean, I don't want to take people's money who, if themselves are challenged, you know, just take their ball and go home.
I mean, I get it's challenging for atheists to hear anything positive about religion, but the number of people who are religious who find positive stuff in My show is important.
A number of people who are, who've been, a number of religious people even, who've been positively influenced by an atheist like Ayn Rand, or, you know, they also have been able to find positive things in atheism, and I feel that the compliment can be honorably reversed.
So yeah, the people who are like, you said something even remotely positive about religion as a mechanism for transmitting values that are helpful to children and families, I'm taking my money.
I'm going home.
It's like, well, you know, I think that's a good idea.
I really do.
Every now and then, you need to clean house, right?
But anyway, that's sort of neither here nor there at the moment.
Yeah.
So when I was thinking about it, where do they intersect and what goals do we have in common?
I realized that we...
The most striking thing that comes to me is that we have a common enemy, which is...
And let me clarify, I'm talking about the Christians that I associate with and that I read and look up to and so forth, which I know does not represent the whole of Christianity, but I'm talking about sort of the philosophically minded, more reasonable people in the faith.
When I say Christians, I'm fully aware that there are Christians who are very anti-rational, very...
Hostile to atheists and so on.
Can I tell you a secret?
Yeah, go on.
I'm sure that no Christians know this, but there are actually some atheists who are quite anti-rational.
Yeah, we have no idea because all the atheists are always talking about rationality and we just take them out of their word.
Yeah, I mean, one day I'm going to meet an atheist who's pro-state.
I mean, I feel that day, isn't it?
So, they have their religion, called atheism.
But, yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, I mean, atheism does not have any kind of monopoly on rationality as a whole.
And I've had lots of conversations with atheists who were even right of center and talking about voluntarism and anarchism and so on.
And They have exactly the same short circuits as fundamentalist religious people hitting arguments about atheism.
So yeah, I'm with you there.
It's easy to idealize a community based upon looking at one aspect of them.
This earlobe is really hot.
I bet you the rest of the woman is...
Yeah, so when I say Christians, I just mean that whole caveat.
But I think we have a common enemy, and the common enemy is sort of the sophist, or the liberal sophist.
That's the form it takes in our age.
The people who kind of want to shut the conversation down, and like I said, I know there are plenty of Christians who do this, but I find that the Christians that I listen to and associate with, they have much of the same desires and wants and wishes as we here at FDR. And I think that's something we could unite on.
I don't know in what capacity, I wouldn't think a formal capacity, but we have this shared goal of opposing the people who want to shut the conversation down and obscure truth and just Fight with the sword rather than with words.
Well, yeah, I think there is a hysteria in public discourse these days where the offense bomb grenade gets pulled and everyone runs away.
Yeah.
And I think that's a real shame.
And the thing is, of course, that Christianity, as all religions have had at various points and some even current, Christianity has had times where contrary opinions result in significant negative repercussions.
But it's been quite a while since that's been the case with Christianity.
And now, what the leftists mock and so on, like this sort of war on Christianity, I think that there's actually quite a bit of validity to that.
I think that Christian values are regularly scorned and mocked.
In the mainstream media.
And I think that's a shame.
Because it's the old thing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I'm certainly not a believer in a deity.
But that doesn't mean that I have nothing in common with people who believe in deities.
There are values in the Christian world that I find far more compatible with my own.
I really am a big fan of Ann Coulter.
And she is religious.
And I find it fascinating.
I remember I was reading one of her books and she started coming up with criticisms of evolution.
And I thought, oh, come on, you know.
But I'm like, oh, listen to what she's got to say, right?
And she put forward the arguments criticizing evolution.
And as I've said before on this show, you know, they're not bad.
You know, they're not bad arguments.
And, you know, I've listened to Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, and there's some strong evidence for.
It's important to read the criticisms against.
You know, there's this thing that I think, I don't know, you probably know more Christians than I do, but this capacity to hold an alternate position in your mind...
Is really, I think, one of the definitions of what it is to be intelligent.
Can you argue a contrary position?
Can you accept the validity of a contrary position, even if you don't accept all the conclusions?
Like, can you accept that there's a strong case to be made, even if you can find holes in it?
And the capacity...
And this is back to sort of the Walter Scott video that also bothered some people, right?
The fact that I can argue...
A case within a status paradigm does not mean that I am accepting a status paradigm.
It's just a mark of intelligence to be able to play devil's advocate, to be able to go into another mindset and argue from that position.
Doesn't mean, said very clearly in the video, I certainly don't accept all of this, but this is the way that the system works.
And I think that aspect of things is not part of contemporaneous dialogue.
That there is just this It is a really chilling betrayal of the great lesson learned from the religious warfares that were going on in Europe in the later Middle Ages, early into the Renaissance.
It is the lesson that we have tragically lost.
Which is the best cure for bad speech is not no speech, but more speech.
But this idea that you just scream that you're offended and you chant stupid ass slogans and you boycott people.
I think Ann Coulter tried to give a speech in Ottawa and they couldn't guarantee her safety.
And I went to a men's rights conference to give a speech last summer and we had to brave bomb threats and death threats and all this kind of stuff.
And that is just appalling.
It's appalling that we are, after 2,500 years of Western intellectual civilization, that we are at the space where you just get screamed down and shouted down and just get horrible names thrown at you and nobody engages you in anything of substance.
They just try and dig up dirt and smear.
I mean, it's really tragic.
It is, you know, whether it's at a tipping point where people are just afraid to talk about anything of substance, I don't know as yet.
But it is just terrible.
Yeah, I mean, Warren Farrell, when he tried to give a speech in Toronto, people just scream him down.
But this capitulation goes back to the 60s, when you had radicals on campuses who were able to shut down campuses, and there was just this loss of resolution, a loss of nerve.
But when you scream down opposing viewpoints, it's because you can't answer them.
It's a complete confession of intellectual sterility, infertility, and lack of confidence.
You have to scream people down because they're making more sense.
You're really screaming your own doubts down.
It's nothing to do with...
But this idea that it is somehow valid to scream people down in places in Europe and other places, you can't talk about certain topics.
You could actually risk going to jail.
And the idea that that is somehow what should be the case is so counter to at least the last 400 years of what has been so bitterly fought for in the West.
And, you know, Christians had a lot to do with that.
And Christians, of course, had a lot to do with the end of slavery.
Which was pointed out to me by a Christian, and I looked into it, and lo and behold, the Christian faith was a very powerful driver to the end of slavery.
Can I just mention something?
These are not things to just be sort of brushed aside.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Can I just mention something about what you said before?
Because I don't want to forget.
You said...
That these names that get slung around, Christians are really experiencing this a lot on the same-sex marriage issue, and I wish people would just listen more, because I think what people are perceiving as homophobia and bigotry is really a desperate defensiveness.
At least this is what I see from the Christians that I listen to.
When we have these acts in Louisiana, was it?
No, it was Indiana.
The Christians feel like they need something to protect themselves from the state which is going to force them to participate in something that compromises their conscience.
And they don't particularly care that a gay wedding has a cake made.
They just don't want to be part of it.
And they feel bullied into this.
And for that, they get called bigots and homophobes.
And that's all fine.
I don't think we Christians, we expect to be called names, but What sucks is that we actually are being bullied and we have the arm of the state against us on this.
There's no doubt in my mind whatsoever that forcing someone to act against his or her values where there's no initiation of the use of force is wrong.
It's absolutely morally wrong.
And the fact that we would have a society wherein a Christian would be forced to participate in I mean, it's unbelievably wrong.
And we know that that's wrong.
I mean, we simply know that that's wrong.
In the same way that if you were to go to a gay printer and ask him to print something that was offensive to his sensibilities, he would have the perfect right to say no.
Because we have these debates using our words, right?
We proselytize.
We do not convert by the sword.
And what's going on with the state now is everybody is trying to convert by the sword.
And we are back to the religious warfare or the warfare of gaining control of the state power that was supposed to be the big lesson we learned from religious warfare in Europe.
And this not having the willingness...
Or it's probably not even having the ability to have a debate.
I mean, I did this thing on Gay Marriage a while back where it was just like, God, gay people can be very funny.
Just make fun of them if you want, right?
But this death threats and stuff like that is like, don't do it.
And I think there's an old idea that I think has some validity.
I don't know if it's been entirely proved.
And Mike, if you can dig up anything on this, it'd be great.
But I think that the lower the verbal ability, The more likely people are to resort to force.
I think that makes pretty intuitive sense.
That's what we say to kids.
Don't use your fists, use your words, right?
Use your words.
It's called acting out in terms of physical aggression because you can't negotiate, you can't get your feelings out in words, you can't speak, you can't convince, and so you have to aggress.
Yeah, and it's weird, too, because it's not like they don't have any arguments.
Christians, for the most part, are happy to debate the validity of Christianity.
And there are plenty of atheist arguments for them to use, so I don't know why they feel the need to do this bullying tactic.
Well, I mean, it's one of these ironic and gruesome things that basically it's become a witch hunt.
What's happened now is there's people who have low verbal skills.
And I find this to be the case that people with low verbal skills get drawn to leaders who give them permission to be aggressive.
And, you know, what is the cause of these low verbal skills?
Well, it's a variety of things.
It's bad schools, too much television, too many computer games, and all of that.
Because, you know, in computer games, it's usually domination.
It's not, you know, you shoot the guy with the rocket or you don't.
There are some games that are more negotiation-based and so on.
But there's a lot of this sort of win-lose stuff and thumb-mashing and stuff.
So people are getting, the kids are getting a whole lot of not-negotiations.
In their childhood, you know, one of the biggest predictors of empathy, as I've mentioned before, sorry, one of the biggest predictors of empathy or something that grows empathy is unstructured play for children, right?
They go out and they figure out what they're going to do because you have to negotiate with everyone.
You have to try and find a way that the game pleases everyone and you have to take turns and you learn how to negotiate.
And even though kids are much safer now, there's this general terror of kids being left alone.
They're unsupervised or whatever.
You've got to take them to Chuck E. Cheese where everything's structured.
You've got to take them to laser tag where everything's structured.
The stranger danger.
You don't just say, as I was told as a kid, you get up, you have some breakfast, you go out, you come back when the streetlights go out.
You don't have any money.
You just go find your other kids and you go find something to do.
And so there's been this loss of verbal acuity in negotiation skills.
And I think that's really, really tragic.
Now, again, I want to recognize, of course, at the beginning I'm saying that violence is going down.
But I don't think the violence is necessarily going down because verbal skills or abilities are going up.
And so we got to something here.
In the case of Hannibal Lecter, the psychopathic killer, was framed as an individual with superior intelligence, an omnibus intelligence that enhanced his ability to manipulate and victimize others.
Contrary to this popular conception and based upon data from 840 cases selected from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, mathematical models have shown an inverse relationship between verbal intelligence and psychopathy for 8 of 12 items of the disorder on the scale.
So, psychopathy goes down as verbal intelligence goes up.
That's very different from what you see in media, right?
Yeah, the psychopath is generally considered to be this verbally fluid guy.
Yeah, he's just like this really smart cutting guy.
Well, but those politicians who are that way inclined, we tend to see a lot of them and so on.
But I think those are the exception to the general trend.
I've actually never heard that.
The more you promote language skills, the more you promote negotiation as opposed to coercion.
What I view with the people who want to run to the state and get weapons and force people to do stuff, they simply do not have the ability or the desire or the willingness or the intelligence.
To make their case.
It takes confidence to make a case rather than force people.
And it is really, of course, the essence of civilization, right?
I mean, were they hit as children?
Were they negotiated with as children?
You know, my daughter is an expert negotiator.
I mean, she's going to grow up to be one of these barkers who sells cattle at 400 syllables per second.
She's an expert negotiator.
So why would she ever need to get aggressive?
Whiny, yes, but she gets that from me.
So I think that Christianity, there is, I think, still a desire to make a case.
And I don't know the degree to which this is true.
I've read this.
I haven't read it and sort of studied it in great detail.
But Christians send missionaries, not armies, in general.
There was a goal to spread the word through language rather than through coercion.
Yeah, and that was in Paul's letters as well.
What he did was he went to the marketplace and he talked with the local philosophers and he made the case for Christianity.
And I think that's the model we should follow.
And I'm sort of glad that Christianity is becoming more on the fringe these days because it's forced us to actually have to I think we lost that for a little bit.
But now Christianity is not taking that seriously.
So Christians, there's a real call in the Christian community to learn about the opposing arguments, to learn about what atheists say in very, very sharp detail, too.
It's not just this superficial surveying of atheist positions, but we really try to go into this and we want to be able to give good answers.
And I think that's a really It's a really cool thing, and I sort of wish everyone was in that position, so then we'd all know each other's views and not be kicking over straw men all the time.
Yeah, I think, because to me there's two, and this I think is fairly commonplace knowledge within the Christian community, but to me there are two approaches or purposes of Christianity, and it really fits It centers around the question of good works.
So is a moral atheist more likely to get into heaven than a dissolute Christian?
And there are, of course, two fundamental schools of thought in this.
And one is that, no, it doesn't matter how good you are if you haven't accepted Jesus, if you don't confess, and if you don't go through these.
It doesn't matter.
Socrates goes to hell, so to speak.
And there's another one which says that it is the quality of your deeds...
By their deeds shall they be known, that God will look not at allegiance, but God will look at the quality of the deeds that you have performed in your life.
Now, with regards to the former, I have obviously some challenges of, to take an extreme example, Charles Manson confesses his sins and gets to heaven, right?
That's You know, that's a little tough to take.
And Socrates going to hell is a little tough to take.
And this is the tradition I was raised in, which is that faith is well and good, but by your deeds shall you be known.
And by your deeds shall you be judged.
And God hates the outward show of devotion.
Without a commitment to good works.
That was sort of how I was raised.
I think that's very true, especially of Jesus.
Jesus, he got mad at a lot of things, but the thing he got mad most at were the religious hypocrites, and they really aggravated him.
To have this false outward display of religion without actually getting the moral virtues...
It really frustrated him.
Right.
Yeah, because if you can confess your sins and go to heaven, and this is a little bit more on the Catholic side, or at least the Catholic side of indulgences that Martin Luther was criticizing in the 15th century, but it is the idea that you can be a complete bastard and then get a big giant mulligan at the end, right?
Because you can, you know, weep and wail and gnash and confess your sins and so on.
In which case, if there's a get out of jail free card at the end, that is not encouraging or promoting good works during the lifetime, if that makes sense, right?
Hey, free lungs at the end of your life!
Or, you know, free lungs when you get old, so why not be a smoker, right?
Because you get to be healed.
Whereas if salvation is really the accumulation of moral deeds that you do during your life, Then, that to me is certainly more compatible with what I talk about.
I certainly never liked the idea of, you know, just, oh, at the end you can get your salvation and all of that.
You know, there's this terrifying scene in Hamlet where Polonius is praying.
Sorry if you haven't...
I'm not going to apologize for spoilers on a 400-year-old play.
No, I haven't seen the end yet.
Yeah, Hamlet is going to go and kill Polonius, but Polonius is praying!
And even though Polonius is a murderer, according to Hamlet's ghosts, right?
I mean, Hamlet's father comes and Polonius' uncle is a murderer.
No, it's not Polonius.
Polonius is...
I think you're right.
I think it is Polonius.
Oh, wait.
No, no.
Polonius is the...
Oh, I can't believe I made this mistake.
Yeah, Polonius is the crazy, like, bumbling uncle, wasn't he?
No, he wasn't the uncle.
He's the guy who has this weird wisdom.
That's right, yeah.
He's the father of Ophelia.
Laertes and Ophelia.
Yeah.
I know what you're talking about.
I just forgot which character it is.
I'm going to find it.
It's a fantastic speech, and it's something that really struck me when I read it as a teenager.
While you're doing that, I just want to make it clear that, at least in Orthodox Christianity, we don't base salvation on works, but Neither do we necessarily think that you could be a terrible guy and then at the end of the day be like, haha, God, now I repent.
And God is like, drat, you got me, you're in heaven.
Yeah, fine print.
Ah, here we go.
Claudius.
Yeah, Polonius is the neither a borrower nor a lender be and so on, right?
Oh, right, yes, okay.
I'll just, let me just give you the, and this is, I think it's really, it's really important.
Was it Polonius?
No, Claudius.
Oh, Claudius.
Claudius has become the king by murdering Hamlet's father.
Basically, it's a play, but also it seems to be a Spanish soap opera.
I'm just trying to find the rights.
Okay, so he wants to go, and Hamlet comes in, and he wants to kill him, and he says, Now might I do it, Pat.
Now he is praying, and now I'll do it.
Now I'll kill him, right?
For killing my father.
And now I'll do it.
Ah, and so he goes to heaven.
And so I am revenged?
That would be scanned.
That means that, like, let's think about this.
A villain kills my father, and for that, I, his sole son, do this same villain sent to heaven?
Oh, this is higher in salary, not revenge!
He would pay me to do this, right?
He took my father grossly, full of bread, with all his crimes broad-blown as flush as may!
In other words, my dad was a...
Not a great guy, and Claudius killed him when he was deep in sin and without any confession.
He says, he took my father grossly, full of bread, with all his crimes, broad-blown, as flush as may, and how his audit stands.
Who knows?
Save heaven!
I don't know.
Did he go to heaven or did he go to hell?
I don't know.
But in our circumstance, the course of thought is heavy with him.
And am I then revenge to take him in the purging of his soul when he is fit and seasoned for his passage?
No!
He's gonna go straight to heaven if I kill him.
And he says, Days.
So then he leaves, and then King Claudius gets up and says...
My words fly up.
My thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
So he wasn't even praying well.
Anyway, it's just one of these ironies.
But the murderer will go to heaven if he's praying and I kill him.
That's good.
And I remember reading that when I was a kid and just like, ew!
You know, that's gross.
That can't be right.
And it's sort of unintentionally hilarious, too.
It's kind of funny.
The idea like, oh no, I can't kill him now, he just prayed.
Yeah.
Or like, the opposite could happen.
He'd pay me to do this, right?
I pray, and then I accidentally sin, and now I die, and I didn't have a chance to pray about that one, and I'm going to hell now.
It's a little stressful.
Yeah.
No, it really makes you watch your way on the stairs down from the whorehouse, you know?
Don't trip.
Don't trip.
Get to a priest!
Right?
And so on.
And so if, you know, if, and this is to me, we sort of start the conversation where the levels or lines of compatibility.
The lines of compatibility is that to the degree to which Christians focus on good works, we are compatible.
Right?
The degree to which, you know, good works are universal values and virtues and so on, and, you know, a lot of the virtues that Christians would, you know, I would favor as well.
And if the focus is on good works, then I would say that Christianity and philosophy have a lot in common.
And there's lots of Christians who, you know, think all the way back to Augustine and so on, who use specifically philosophical arguments to establish God and to establish virtue and so on.
And so if the focus in religion is upon good works, then I think that there's a fair degree of compatibility.
But if the focus on religion is, you know, salvation and works don't get you into heaven, only the priest can grant you that access, then I think there's less compatibility, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I sort of feel like there's three guys in a room.
There's the Christian, the philosopher, and then the liberal sophist.
Leftist, dude.
And the Christian and the philosopher, well, they have a beef over God's existence, and they kind of want to settle that, but there's this other guy in the room who's just trying to shut the whole conversation down.
He's just being incredibly loud and obnoxious and flinging stuff, the other two.
And I feel like, well, the Christian and the philosopher just want to make that guy go away, and then we could talk it out and may the best arguments win, but there's this other guy.
I don't know if that makes any sense.
No, no, it does.
Let me just also give this a little bit of research.
Research has consistently shown that offenders are more likely, criminal offenders, are more likely to score lower on measures of verbal IQ than on measures of performance IQ.
Explanations for this pattern are in short supply, but the association likely has to do with deficits in the language centers of the brain, specifically Wernicke's and Broca's, areas that are indirectly assessed by the IQ test, and also child abuse.
Child maltreatment increases the odds of having a verbal disability by 300%.
So I just really want to circle back and say that the degree to which language is enhanced is the degree to which criminality is decreased.
And, of course, Christianity is great for language.
I mean, there's no sermon delivered by Xbox or tablet, right?
You go and you listen and you debate and you read and you converse.
And from that standpoint, I'm grateful to have a childhood that had religious elements because...
I mean, there were no philosophers around, so it was the deepest I got into existence and virtue and ideas.
And from that standpoint, I think it was very important.
And I, you know, if I'm trying to think, this is sort of more of an extreme case, but I've had communists as neighbors and I've had Christians as neighbors.
And who do you think I had a better time with?
Well, of course, the Christian.
The communist neighbors.
I mean, oh my god.
They're assholes.
I'm sorry to say it, but they really, they were just obnoxious and superior and contemptuous and know-it-alls.
And, you know, anytime you disagreed with them, I mean, you were just a slave of bourgeois.
And they also had this thing called false consciousness.
Which is really annoying.
What is that?
Because false consciousness is like the no-null hypothesis.
So false consciousness is, I'm a worker and I don't feel exploited, thank you very much.
I'm very happy to have this job.
I see the boss is working here 12 hours a day.
I get to go home after my seventh and a half hours.
But they're going to say, oh, you're internalizing your oppression.
It's false consciousness.
You see, we have a theory that says you're oppressed, and if you don't feel oppressed, you're wrong.
I mean, try that at the datings.
I have this theory, young lady, that you'd like to go out with me, and if you don't find me attractive, well, you're wrong, and I'm going to inflict my theory on you anyway.
I think that's called kidnapping.
That's what the feminists do to all the women who oppose feminism, like Karen Strawn.
They'll just say, oh, you've internalized your misogyny, which is just incredibly condescending.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, it takes a feminist to tell a woman that everything she thinks and feels is wrong and consider that she's pro-woman.
I mean, that kind of stuff just takes a certain amount of hubris.
Whereas I've almost never, and I'm trying to think, never really experienced that level of know-it-all contempt and all of that from Christians.
Yeah.
There's no virtue for humility in communism, right?
That's the central planning thing right there.
We legitimately, from our worldview, we legitimately want and need to convince you.
We can't force you because that doesn't work.
You can't force someone to believe.
Whereas communism, they can pull it off just forcing people, blowing people around.
But Christians...
We can't...
We don't have that option.
That's not...
It's just a contradiction.
No, and you can't just make up something called false consciousness and say to atheists, you do believe in God, you just don't know that you believe in God.
So there...
Right?
I mean, that's generally what goes...
It's false consciousness.
You may not feel oppressed, but you are.
So there.
We get the guns.
And so...
Yeah, so I think that the devotion to spreading the thoughts by the tongue rather than by the sword, great.
You know?
And...
The focus on, you know, there's an old story of conversion, I think it was either in Ireland or in Scotland, and forgive me if I, it doesn't hugely matter, it was some uncivilized place.
Oh!
But what happened was, so there were these basically druids, and they didn't really have a huge amount of religion.
And when the Christians came, This is way back.
This is like the 3rd or 4th century AD. And when the Christians came, the Christian priests came, missionaries, they talked to the village elders and the village elders listened.
And one of them said after they told the good news to Christians, one of them said, for us, life is like A bird flying through a house.
It flies in through one window and out the other window, and the life that we have where we are alive is just like the bird flying through the house.
We've never really thought that much about what comes before, and we certainly never really have thought that much about what comes after.
But what you're saying is that there's a world outside of the house, and that this brief time of flying through a house is our life, and it's a tiny, tiny slice in the life of the bird, but we think that's all there is.
Now, what a beautiful metaphor.
I mean, I'm not doing it justice, but it's a completely lovely way of framing the debate about eternity and so on.
And to me, it's about thinking about more than the immediate.
You know, because that could sort of be our everyday, the bird flying through a house.
No continuity, no forethought, no long-term planning.
And that's an example.
They didn't sort of ISIS-style, you know, say to these guys, convert or die, you know?
I mean, they went and laid out a well-thought-out metaphorical case.
I think that's just sort of an example that comes with the creativity that you speak of when force is removed from the equation.
And sure, Christians have tried to force people to believe.
I think that was a ridiculous move.
I don't even think that makes sense.
But when you take force out, then yeah, you've got to do a lot of convincing.
You've got to get creative.
And I think Christians, we really feel like we really need to do that.
Like, that's what Jesus tells us to do.
He tells us to go and make disciples, and we can't do that with the sword.
We have to do it with words.
Right.
So, yeah, so I think, you know, the focus on good works, I think, is the key.
And the degree to which Christians focus on that, I think that is important.
And, you know, the other thing, too, is that, I hate this phrase, the older I get.
Like, it doesn't prove anything, but nonetheless, I'll say it, that the older I get...
The more I realize how deeply my roots go down into the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian tradition.
You know, I mean, there's that old saying, you know, if I've seen further, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants.
Oh, yeah.
And I think that was Newton who said that.
I thought it was Justin Bieber.
He's a giant rapper, I think he said.
But...
Yeah, don't go back.
Don't cry.
Don't go back to Argentina.
I think I'm an arrest warrant.
But so the degree to which I am, you know, like a snowflake on top of the iceberg of prior thought is becoming more and more evident to me.
And how much...
I've been thinking about my childhood and because people, you know, I always get this question, like, what are your influences or how did you become the way that...
It's not an unimportant question.
It's not determinism or anything.
But I've sort of been thinking back to the early days of my childhood and the ideas that I was exposed to and the conversations that I was exposed to.
And when I was in boarding school, I sang in the choir.
We were in church a couple of times a week.
And there was quite an emphasis on the quality of your character.
Religion was something that you used to...
This sounds like I'm not describing it well, but I got the sense that religion was something that you used to remind yourself to develop sterling qualities of your character, to develop courage in the face of immorality.
To have integrity, to have a uniquely British virtue called common sense, to be sensible, which is to not be hysterical and not to chant mindless slogans and scream at people who disagree with you and have all of that stuff, which would be mortifying to a British person.
It would be, I mean, the social sin of extravagant Italian-style catawalling emotion, which is the opposite of, I think, recent intellectual debate.
It's not like I don't sometimes go on my rants and all of that, but Those are not for entertainment as much as anything else.
But the sort of sober, sensible, courageous qualities that were inculcated through religion in me when I was very young were...
As I get older, I recognized the formative influences that they had on me.
And if I had grown up without religion...
At all, it's hard to imagine that those values would have become embedded in me to the degree that they have, because I certainly haven't seen them in any secular context to the same degree.
Yeah, and I'm really glad that there are atheists who are like you, because that sounds weird, but every atheist is like a leftist liberal, except for you and a few other people I can name.
And I really think we need to unite on this front to get rid of the people who are trying to shut the convo down and just like before we can settle the issue of does God exist?
We need to be able to actually have the conversation.
There are people who don't even want to be able to talk about truth anymore.
No, and I think I think that's that's an excellent point.
We need to get the rabble out of the arena so we can have an intelligent discussion about these things.
And the rabble in the arena tend to be the leftists.
Leftists tend to hit their kids less and fundamentalists of all stripes tend to hit their kids more.
Corporal punishment is more common in fundamentalist households.
And so...
It's a challenge because whenever I sort of beg on the left, people are like, they immediately want to put me on the right.
Because this bichromatic rainbow of human thought apparently is all there is.
But I would be...
I'm willing to take my chances with debates with Christians a lot more than facing some screaming, rock-throwing mob of leftist lunatics.
And it's much more civilized.
It's much more civilized to do that.
Alright, Stefan.
Well, thanks very much for calling in.
It's a great set of questions and I appreciate that.
I appreciate that topic.
And I appreciate your openness.
It's a very bold and courageous move because I know you did lose some subscribers and I think it's so admirable that you're willing to lose subscribers over saying which on your mind because you could easily just Not even have touched on that, and you would have had a few more dollars in your pocket, so I really respect that.
Well, and in particular, I think it was difficult for people because it was not just dry and abstract, but I felt very strongly about it, too, right?
And I think that's, and feel very strongly about it, and I think that's another thing that's hard for people.
But, you know, the last thing I want, and don't pull these moves out of any kind of strategy, right, but the last thing that I want is for this place to come some sort of echo chamber.
My beliefs are challenged and my perspectives are challenged through the work that I do, through conversations with people, through the research that we do.
So I don't want people to come to this show or to this conversation and expect that nothing will ever be challenging for them.
Does that make any sense?
Like that nothing's going to be like, whoa, where's that coming from?
That to me would be the opposite of Scientists should always have that sense of wonder and curiosity that people talk about and that I think is one of the great joys of life.
The fact that people are surprised by a perspective that has some, I thought I had some great data behind it.
I had some great arguments behind it.
I had the analogy of it's better to have the wrong diagnosis but the right prescription than the right diagnosis but the wrong prescription, which I thought was a very good way of tying it all together.
I thought it was a pretty good argument.
Was it some sort of syllogistical 100% proof?
No, but it was, I think, a really good argument backed by some really great and important data and ties into the concern for the family that I've had from the very beginning.
And so for me, if people find that A good argument with good data, unbearable, and want to exit the conversation, I think it's a shame.
I think that they're missing out on the opportunity to challenge and grow, but if that is the fragility of where they're coming from, it's not a great place for them to be anyway.
I appreciate that.
It's really strange, too, because they could stomach atheism, they could stomach anarchism, they could stomach peaceful parenting, but there's always that one button that people can't stomach, and it's weird what it turns out to be in some instances.
Well, you know, if it's to anyone's consolation, I was appalled by the thoughts at first, too.
I'm like, wait a minute, why am I thinking positively about this?
Wait a minute!
So, if people are shocked, well, you know, get in line, right behind me.
Right.
But I'm not going to hold back something that I have a good argument for because it may offend my sensibilities or things that I've said in the past or my listeners.
I think that the show will grow in the long run if I just really try and keep to that straight and narrow of being honest and not attempting to temper things for the sake of popularity.
I think philosophers who try and do that, it's short-term gain.
Yeah, and you really want to get on the Christian's good side, Stefan, because we have the money, we'll give you all the donations.
No, I'm kidding.
Well, we'll see.
Apparently there's a gap.
And I will be donating more if I ever get a pay raise of some sort.
Well, I appreciate that.
And let me, you know, I sometimes wish that almost that I made calculations based on financial utility.
But I think that's, I mean, obviously that would be very much, I know you're not suggesting it very much against any kind of reasonable integrity.
And it would certainly not work, even if I thought it was worthwhile.
But thanks.
I appreciate that.
All right.
Thanks, Stefan.
Take care.
Up next is Andrea.
Andrea wrote in and said, I'm in my final year of college studying for a bachelor's in screenwriting, but I've completely lost my motivation and drive to get the degree.
How can I stop procrastinating and get the work done?
Panic, fear, starvation.
Okay, Andrea, go ahead.
Is there something you want to add to that?
No, I'd actually prefer you to ask me questions and I'll answer them because I haven't had a long conversation in English in about four years and I'm really anxious about it.
Oh, okay.
No problem at all.
Would you like me to switch to your native language?
No, it's okay.
Okay, good.
I was really bluffing there.
I'm sure you knew that.
When did this start?
I think about two months ago, I was actually trying to write a screenplay about a six-year-old boy.
I was actually aiming to promote peaceful parenting, but as I was sort of thinking about the script, I kept finding all of these plot holes.
After I... Sorry, I'm really, really anxious.
I can't.
No, you're doing great.
You're doing well.
Okay.
I really don't know what to say.
I'm sorry.
I'm a bit stuck here.
Well, do you want me to just jump straight in?
I mean, we don't need a whole lot of...
Yeah, yeah.
Right, okay.
Great.
So, the end of college is the end of childhood, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, I've had a look at your Adverse Childhood Experience score, and you were not very well prepared for adulthood, right?
Yeah.
Do you want to talk?
I mean, I could read it out, or if you want to just talk about a few things that you think may have affected that.
Well, first of all, when I was little, I used to write a lot.
I kept a diary, and I would write all sorts of things that happened during the day in it.
And my mom always, you know, used to just take it and read it out loud with my father and they would make fun of me.
Oh, like they'd find your journal or whatever and then they'd just make fun of you?
Yeah.
And, you know, my father always used to tell me that I won't do anything, absolutely anything with the creative stuff that I had in my mind.
And...
And do you know why he did that?
Why certain parents tend to be highly opposed to creative work on the part of their kids?
No, not really.
It's because they don't want their children to write about the family.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
That's what sort of happened two months ago when I said that I started panicking.
I wanted to write this...
This screenplay about abusive households.
I started remembering a lot of stuff from my childhood.
My parents are never going to actually read my screenplay because they really don't care.
They just want me to get a degree and that's all.
So they can tell their friends that Their daughter graduated college and all of that.
But I was just thinking how my father would react if he would read the screenplay and he would most probably...
I don't know.
I don't know.
I kept thinking that he would just break into my house and, you know, actually beat me to death.
And that...
Which obviously makes writing kind of high stakes, right?
Yeah.
Kind of scary, right?
I mean, if I'm honest, then, you know, I could get killed, right?
So that's, I mean, that's writing under Soviet-style punishments, right?
Yeah, and it's really weird because, you know, I'm already 23 and I keep, I just keep being really afraid of dying at the hand of my father.
And I, you know, I know that I can call the police if he's going to come here, stuff like that, but I do realize that rationally, but not emotionally.
Well, sure, because you've experienced beatings in the past from him, and not even the too distant past.
At those times, the police were not an option, right?
Yeah, right.
And now I change the script, actually, because I realize that without therapy I can't write anything about...
Peaceful parenting.
I have to sort myself out before writing about such a delicate subject.
I can't just treat this superficially for an exam in class.
I changed my script and I still can't find a drive to write it.
To actually start writing it.
I'm currently just writing the outline.
I didn't even expect anything for the final exam.
It's a brutal thing to write about.
Yeah, I know.
It's a brutal thing.
I've mentioned this on the show before, but one of the most terrifying plays of family dysfunction is called A Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill.
And it was such a brutal play for him to write.
His wife says, you know, he'd be in his study, he'd come out just like drained of blood and shaking, hands shaking and so on.
He was writing the play.
And after he finished the play, he would not allow it to be produced.
He would not allow the play to be mounted, to be shown anywhere.
In fact, I don't know if this was ever enacted, but my understanding was that he would not allow the play to be produced until 10 years after his death.
And that is...
And Pink wrote a family portrait, which was about, as far as I understand it, her own family.
And it was horrifying for her mother that she wrote this family.
And I think it caused some significant...
That she wrote this song and...
It caused some significant problems.
I think Tennessee Williams, after he wrote Glass Menagerie, which was his first big success, his mother came to see the play, and obviously his mother is portrayed in a lot of his plays and very directly in the Glass Menagerie.
And I think she basically just said, well, who did you base her on?
Who did you base the mom on?
I don't know if she was...
I can't remember exactly what she said, but it was something like that.
But writing about your history is...
It's very tough, and it's very tough in particular to do it in a way that gives parents responsibility.
Yeah.
You can give parents, oh, well, they were poor or he was drunk or whatever, right?
But the idea that parents could be immoral is still such a taboo in society, particularly mothers, right?
But it is a very, very challenging thing to write about.
Yeah, especially in this moment.
I mean, I still want to write a screenplay, but I'm...
I'm just willing to give it as much time as it needs to.
I can write it in four or five years and I really don't want to rush it because it's extremely important to get it right.
And so I sort of changed the screenplay into something less personal, but I just still can't.
I'm not I'm that afraid of the final exam.
Sorry, I'm rambling.
The thing is that although the new subject isn't as personal as the last one was, I just still can't find myself being able to write it.
I really don't know why.
Actually, I really don't care.
What do you mean?
Sorry.
I know it's not your first language, but, you know, find myself able to write it.
I mean, do you expect to sort of wake up and see yourself in another room finishing a screenplay?
I mean, you don't find yourself doing something.
You do it or you don't do it, but you don't trip over yourself doing something, right?
Yeah, right.
That's a way of putting it that makes you passive, right?
Yeah, right.
I know something...
I really don't care at all about the degree.
Obviously, I'm in film school and it was a huge disappointment for me.
Obviously, it's a state university and it's full of leftists and so on.
I don't know.
I don't know exactly what happens, but I just can't start writing.
Thanks.
I'm sorry.
Do you feel that what you want to write about is not going to be acceptable to the professor?
Yeah.
I know that nobody actually cares about what we're trying to write and so on.
I can basically write anything and I'm still going to pass the exam.
And that sort of frustrates me and gives me that feeling that everything is in vain and that I'm just going to have a piece of paper after I finish college.
That's going to be it and so on.
And I don't know, it sort of crushes me in a really weird sense because I came here with a lot of high expectations and then it's, you know, it all went to basically went to nothing, turned into nothing.
So is it because you feel that you can't fail, that your motivation is down?
Yeah.
Yeah, actually, yeah.
Right, right.
Everybody gets an A. Yeah, exactly.
So, you can't do things for other people.
Everything which is sustainable and I think of real value comes out of the passion that you have for what it is that you're doing.
So maybe you'll get an A, maybe you'll get an F, whatever, right?
But you cannot do these things for other people.
If you have a story in you that you want to tell, then you sit down and you write it.
Yeah.
And you keep writing it and you don't worry about what other people think, about what other people like.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The stories that connect the best are the ones that are deepest within you.
And the degree to which you focus on other people's reaction to what you're doing while you're doing it is the degree to which I think it loses power.
So if you have a story that you want to tell, and the story doesn't have to be, quote, deep or meaningful.
It can be frivolous.
It can be fun.
I mean, Oscar Wilde is a delightful playwright.
And, I mean, he is seriously funny, if that makes any sense.
But you cannot look for external rewards to provoke inner greatness, inner concentration, inner focus.
And in fact, I think the stuff that has the most value to humanity tends to be the things which provoke negative reaction in some people, right?
Yeah, right, right.
Nobody's going to be that mad at the new Jurassic Park movie.
Not a strong dinosaur lobby left anymore.
But if you're going to do something important and great, then it is the idea that you would focus on extrinsic rewards, right?
And we all know this because, I mean, the people who tend to be the most successful in their field tend to keep going even when they don't need to, right?
I mean, it's not like Steven Spielberg needs to make another movie or Brad Pitt needs to make another movie or whatever, right?
I mean, they are very successful in their field and they keep doing what they're doing.
They keep working at what they're working at.
And that inner drive is what you need to get to.
It's hard, of course, when you've been raised in an abusive environment, Andrea, of course, what happens is you end up focusing on other people.
Focus out, focus out, focus on other people.
Is it safe?
Are they dangerous?
Are they in a good mood?
Are they in a bad mood?
Are they angry?
Are they aggressive?
Are they upset?
Are they tense?
Did they get bad news, right?
You're focusing on other people all the time.
And what happens then is that when you need to transition from When you need to transition to a focus on your own life, when you've had to be raised, focused for survival on other people, then when you become an adult, it's like you've been leaning your whole life against a wind and then the wind stops and you fall down.
And you're right on the cusp, you're right on the edge of adulthood, independent adulthood.
And there's something within you that is demanded, that has not been nourished throughout your life, but rather has been suppressed, oppressed, punished.
I mean, for those who've not grown up in violent or abusive households, it's a hard thing to understand the degree to which this hypervigilance, this concern for the moods of others...
The degree to which that dominates your thinking as a child is obvious.
I mean, you know, if you fall into a lion pen in the zoo, you're pretty much focused on the lions, right?
Yeah.
You're not really going to notice anything else.
You really need to focus on that which is dangerous within your environment.
That's how human consciousness and indeed almost all animal consciousness works is that you have to focus on what is dangerous within your environment.
When you're a prey, right?
I mean, I guess the deer is dangerous to the grass, but the deer only has their eyes out for the wolves, right?
And so, when you grow up in a violent household, the focus on others, the focus on the moods and needs and preferences of others, the need to manipulate people into not hitting you, That is a constant focus and it hollows you out.
There's so much that doesn't develop or doesn't at least develop organically or properly when you spend your time focusing on other people.
To me, there's such a narcissism in violence because violence causes other people to focus on you all the time.
It's like the mom who comes home and is like slamming the drawers and all that kind of stuff.
There's a kind of I, me, me, I In violence, this kind of narcissism and focus on me and I want to be the center of attention at all times and I do that by being dangerous, right?
And when you grow up in that kind of environment, the idea of having a goal that comes organically from within yourself that allows you to focus and concentrate on yourself is hard, right?
Very hard.
And I would not say it's so much procrastination as I would say that shifting the focus from others to yourself is to develop a muscle that should have been developed more organically over many years but needs to be developed more quickly.
And counter-intuitively, right?
Because when you've been in a lion cage For 20 years, you can get out of the cage, but the lions just follow you in your head, right?
And, you know, I don't mean to sound negative, but in some ways, I don't know if we ever get out of that cage.
And I don't mean by that that we can't have happy and productive lives.
But what I mean by that is that we are always shaped by our earliest experiences.
Now, we can make that for the better.
So I had a violent and abusive family when I was a child.
And my way to make the cage my home is to do the opposite.
I can never be somebody who didn't have that level of violence.
You can never be that person either.
We can never be the people who were never hit.
We can never be the people who were never screamed at.
We can never be the people who weren't beaten up.
There's a guy who used to run a show called America's Most Wanted.
I think he ended up starting that show because his daughter was murdered.
So he dedicated his life To helping people catch violent criminals.
In other words, the rest of his life, he's standing by the graveside of his daughter.
He's just doing it in a way that helps.
But he never leaves his daughter's grave.
And I'm not sure that I ever leave my family home.
But what I can do is observe and drink in the lessons of my history and use it to create as much good as possible.
That is how you frustrate the devil, is the devil provokes you to wrong and you take those lessons and turn it to right.
And sorry, I just got a correction.
Adam Walsh, it was his son...
Who was killed.
And so I think that my guess, Andrew, would be that you're at a tipping point.
And that tipping point is to try and find a way to focus on your inner drives, your inner needs, and let down the Need to scan your surroundings.
I need to scan those around you.
And when you move out of structure and, you know, the end of college is the end of other people telling you what to do.
Right?
It's the end of other people giving you assignments.
You know, when I was in theatre school, I always got cast in a play.
Right?
But it's different to then go out and audition, right?
Right.
And the end of external structure exposes some of the challenges of having to focus on other people so consistently and persistently throughout your life.
Does this make any sense?
Yeah, it does.
Another problem is that my parents are actually calling me two or three times a day and they're just asking, so how's writing?
How are you on the bachelor's degree?
And I really have no time to actually sit down and breathe and think about my knees because they're always there, they're always calling me.
I obviously have to I have the option not to answer, but I'm just way too afraid not to do that.
I'm guessing you also don't have the option to say, you know, can I get a week or two off just because it's not helping me concentrate?
Yeah, no, no.
My mom's hysterical and I really can't do that.
I'm also going to assume that they have no idea that they're not helping, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I actually said that once to my mom.
I was, you know, mom, you're just putting pressure on me and I'm not, I'm, I don't think I'm going to make it like that.
And she just started, started screaming.
And then, uh, actually my father called me, uh, three or four days ago and just said that nobody likes me because, um, um, um, You know, stuff like, can't you see that you've got nobody to work with because you're just so unbearable?
And he was just, you know, projecting the choices that he has been made in his life.
He has made, sorry, in his life.
And, you know, just kept making me feel like crap.
That's basically all that they do.
They just call me and start bullying me.
How much time do you have to...
When ideally should you have a first draft done by?
in about two or three weeks.
Yeah.
Right.
So this is not a time to do anything in particularly proactive with your family, right?
Yeah, I understand that.
I get that.
Well, I plan on doing that after I finish college.
I want to start therapy to get a job and then start therapy.
Well, then I'm afraid then that there's only one answer.
You're not going to like it, but there's only one answer.
Are you ready?
Yeah, I am.
Okay.
You just have to do it.
No, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
We don't have a lot of time for beating around the bush.
I mean, you've got a couple of weeks, right?
Yeah.
So that means that you just have to do it.
And...
When you've been raised in an aggressive environment, self-discipline often feels like self-abuse, right?
Like you're being bullied.
I get that, but it's not.
You know, the answer to my mom screamed at me every day to brush my teeth is not to refrain from brushing your teeth, right?
And if, you know, what is colloquially called discipline was inflicted upon you As a child, if you were abused as a child and aggression and all that, then being firm with yourself can feel like self-bullying.
Yeah.
But I'm afraid that you have to.
I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but you have to.
You've got a couple of weeks and you know what that means.
You've got to get yourself 10 pages a day written, right?
Yeah.
And you just have to make those fingers move.
You know, it's that old thing, writing is easy.
All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until beads of blood form on your forehead.
I mean, you have some idea of a story that you want to tell.
And you just have to start telling it.
You have to, you know, I'm a big fan when it comes to writing.
Get it down and then get it right.
I know everyone writes in a different kind of way or whatever, so whatever your process is, but I'm a big fan of just get something down.
I'm working on a book on parenting at the moment and I just have to get the thoughts down.
Maybe they need to be rearranged or edited or maybe even deleted or moved, but I have to just get it down.
And everyone has a different process of working.
I pace and voice dictate.
Just because so much experience podcasting, I used to write by typing, but I haven't done that in, I don't know, probably 10 years.
Like just typing.
So now I voice dictate, and I think that's actually pretty good for screenplays because you are trying to approximate spoken language and so on.
But you just have to...
To get it down and get it right.
And for me, at least, when it came to art, to creative writing, you just have to keep throwing shit at your characters.
I mean, let me look at the movie Gravity.
It was like, and then this terrible thing happened, and then this terrible thing happened, and then this terrible thing happened.
Or like Interstellar, in which case, and these terrible physics happened, and these non-existent physics happened, and then Matt Damon turned on me.
Right, so...
You just keep throwing crap.
I remember years ago talking to a woman I was going out with when I was starting a novel.
I started to work on a novel.
And she said, oh, you know, these negative things are so outlandish or unbelievable or whatever.
Oh, she was a joy to be creative around.
And I said, come on, Hamlet.
How does Hamlet open up?
The guy's dead ghost comes back and tells him that the uncle who's screwing his mom killed his father.
Okay, so that's kind of a MacGuffin, right?
Here we go.
We've got something that is an incitement to action and something that gets the momentum going.
Or like I think in The Stand, Stephen King was saying, he was writing the book and it was like, oh, too many characters, too much is going on.
I know, I'll just kill half of them off.
You just have to make decisions that stuff is going to happen to your characters, most of it bad.
And just keep throwing shit at them and have them deal with it.
Or not, right?
I mean, that's, I think, the way that it has to work.
And, I mean, I wish I could sort of give you something more sophisticated, but, you know, just put your characters through hell and see how they do.
Yeah.
Well, the other problem, well, obviously the main problem is with my parents, but the other problem is that I just don't seem, well, I know it's a really silly way to put it that I don't really care about my degree, but...
No, no, but who cares about, no, forget the degree.
I'm telling you to care about your characters.
Oh, all right, all right, okay.
Forget about the degree, fine, you know, you do whatever, but view the degree as a great excuse to make yourself do stuff.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, can I tell you a tiny secret?
Please don't.
Okay, just you and me.
Okay, everyone, stop listening.
It's just between you and me.
Are you ready?
Yeah.
I really didn't want to do a show tonight.
I didn't.
That's very rare.
That's very rare for me.
But I just, I really didn't want to do a show tonight.
I just felt...
I don't know, a little tired and, you know, I don't know, whatever.
It was just, I just, I really didn't get in.
Everyone else still don't listen.
Hey, you in particular.
But I really didn't feel like doing a show tonight.
Can I tell you something?
Yeah.
It's a pretty good show.
Yeah, it is.
I had to do it.
I mean, I could have canceled, right?
I could have just said, oh, you know what?
My voice, my instrument is too delicate for a rant.
But I didn't feel like doing a show tonight.
And this show was a...
I mean, because I didn't feel like doing a show.
If it wasn't a Wednesday night, I wouldn't sit there and go, oh, I know, I'll spend three hours doing a show tonight.
I wouldn't have.
But this is an opportunity for me to do a show.
And this happens, I mean...
Eugene O'Neill's dad was a famous actor, and he did a show when his son, I think, was still born.
They switched names in Long Day's Journey and Tonight.
The kids, he actually gives himself the name of the dead kid.
Anyway, but he decided to go and do a show.
It was a swashbuckling adventure.
Nothing particularly deep.
But he went and did his show when his son was born dead.
So everyone else can start listening again.
Thanks for your patience.
But sometimes you've just got to do stuff.
And because you had A lifetime of being terrorized and beaten up and ordered around, the idea of making yourself do stuff seems, I would assume, like that can't be right, right?
Yeah.
But don't let abusive discipline rob you of self-discipline, right?
Right.
You've got to get up, you've got to have your coffee or whatever it is that you've got to do.
When I was working on novels, I used to go to Starbucks and I didn't want to spend much money so I'd I'd get a cafe Americano rather than a latte because it was cheaper and, you know, nurse that thing.
Like, I think it evaporated more than I drank it.
And I'd sit in the corner on an old computer with two megs of RAM and I'd listen to music.
And I generally would listen to the music that was appropriate to the time frame that I was writing about.
And I would just I just have to keep writing.
And I know that some of it would not be good.
And I know that some of it would have to be thrown out.
But I just, you know, it's like if you're stuck in the woods, you've got to walk somewhere.
Lost in the woods, you can, I know they say stand or whatever, right?
But that's, you know, if it's nighttime and no one's coming and you've got to walk, you've got to walk somewhere.
I don't know if that's the worst advice ever, but the analogy is sort of clear as far as you have to get some words down on a piece of paper.
And yes, it may be not good and maybe you'll need to throw out half the day's work or all the day's work, but at least you'll get the motor moving, right?
Right.
Right.
I really can't thank you enough for what you just said.
I just, you know, had lost all hope.
An overreaction is a loss, right?
An overreaction is a loss in general, right?
So if you're like, well, my parents bullied me, so I'm never going to make myself do anything, then your parents have still won.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
Because this is your value and your choice and what you want to do.
And, you know, there are shows that we've done, you know, Robin Williams we put out really quickly, the Elliot Rodger video, the Bill Cosby stuff.
I mean, we really burned the midnight oil.
And it wasn't like, hey, you know, let's just do this because it's fun.
We really worked hard on those shows and those shows have done very, very well.
And there are other shows where we didn't do that and they've done well too, so it's not, you know, but it's You just make yourself do stuff.
That's the worst advice.
I get it.
But it comes down to that.
You have the free choice, Andrea, to get up and to sit down and whatever you need to do and just say, well, I'm not getting up until I have five or ten pages written.
I don't care if it's all work and no play makes Andrea a dull girl, but it's got to be something, right?
Yeah.
And that really is the secret to success.
You just have to make stuff happen.
And there's lots of times when you won't feel like it.
You know, did you think every time a baseball player goes out on the diamond that he's just in love with the game and couldn't be happier?
No, sometimes they have a headache.
Sometimes they just got bad news.
Sometimes whatever, right?
I mean, you just have to get things done.
And those people who are willing to act in a consistent manner to get things done are the people who succeed in the world.
And those people who give themselves excuses, and you have a great excuse, don't get me wrong, you had a terrible childhood.
You had an ACE of seven, adverse childhood experience score of seven.
Brutal stuff.
So you have that excuse if you want it.
But taking that excuse and moving forward with that excuse will mean you never get out of that childhood state.
I'm glad I did a show tonight.
Yeah, I'm glad as well.
I'm going to actually translate the screenplay in English with the help of my fiancé because he's much better at it.
Is he there?
Did I just hear him?
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Well, I hope that the door is open and at least one of your feet are on the floor.
Just kidding.
And I'm going to...
No, and send it over.
I'd like to have a look if you don't mind.
It would be really great.
I'd really love some feedback from you.
Sure, send it over.
I'd be happy to have a look.
I like the artistic brain.
I haven't exercised it as much as I'd like, but, you know, it's well worth...
Yeah, it'd be well worth...
I'd be honored to have a look.
That's great.
That's going to be really motivating for her, Stefan.
Oh, I hope so.
I hope so.
Now, but it's not going to be like, so it's easy now.
Now you're like raring to go.
Tomorrow morning you won't be.
No, it's true, right?
I mean, yeah, okay, I'm going to sleep on the...
It's all over, right?
So, you know, you don't need me now, but you need me in the morning, right?
Yeah.
And that's when you just have to say, okay, fine, I'll do it.
And you can resent doing it, too.
But I was walking, going down, getting ready to...
I was even grumbling to myself, like Ed Esner with a hemorrhoid.
But I'm like, okay, I can do it.
And it was fun, right?
So you have to just make yourself do it.
Yeah, I will.
I definitely will.
Alright.
But keep us posted.
If you want to show me something, I'd be happy to have a look.
Best of luck.
I think you'll be surprised at how much willpower there is involved in creativity.
This idea that something's going to hit you and come pouring out of you and so on.
There are a few times when that's happened.
A few times when that's happened.
But that's usually because people have had a long, flourishing career beforehand.
Like the guy who wrote Goodbye, Mr.
Chips, which is a sort of very famous story that in an English boarding school, if I remember rightly, has been made into a movie approximately 12 million times.
But he wrote that in three days or something like that.
But I think he'd been a very experienced writer at some point.
And there are other...
Other examples of how, you know, stuff is just sort of poured out of people, but that's usually, that's the prize after many, many hours of sweating blood to get stuff down on paper.
So, yeah, I hope it works out, and I'm sure it will.
Just, you know, because that's just something.
You can make yourself sit down and type.
That you can do.
All right?
All right.
Well, thank you everybody so much.
I'm glad that in a...
We had a show about making things happen when I originally didn't feel like doing a show, but I guess it kind of hangs together well that way.
And thanks, of course, everyone so much for calling in.
Freedomainradio.com.
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