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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| So for those who haven't dipped their toe into the self-knowledge part of this conversation, well, strap yourself in. | |
| We're going in, we're going in deep, baby. | |
| So this morning, I woke up. | |
| And it's like that old Sting did a soundtrack to an old movie, Brimstone and Treacle. | |
| It's actually pretty good. | |
| The soundtrack's great. | |
| And there's a song called, You Know I Had the Strangest Dream. | |
| And I did. | |
| I really did have the strangest dream this morning. | |
| I'll just tell you about it because, frankly, the dream is about you. | |
| The dream is about you. | |
| Now, in this dream, I was in this crazy, chaotic business arena. | |
| Bunch of young bucks hopped up on caffeine and ambition and brilliance. | |
| We're making something cool, making something great. | |
| And I don't know, maybe it's because I've been watching Silicon Valley and it's been dredging up memories of my own days in the software entrepreneurial field, which I loved. | |
| But I had this dream. | |
| About being around. | |
| I wasn't working for... | |
| I wasn't sure exactly why I was there. | |
| Maybe consultancy kind of thing. | |
| Last night in... | |
| The Week in Review show, I was talking just about how like nobody ever asks people for advice these days. | |
| It's pretty rare. | |
| I mean, I've navigated a lot in my life and people don't sort of call me up and say, hey, how did you do this? | |
| How did you do that? | |
| It's just, it's a funny kind of thing. | |
| We've given up on the wisdom of elders and as a consequence, we get a lot of originality, creativity, but we also have to reinvent the wheel a whole bunch of times as well. | |
| So yeah, these were young guys and they were charismatic guys and it was a brainiac fest for sure. | |
| I remember that in the dream there was this guy, you could tell, really good looking. | |
| I mean, if you've ever seen, you know, stubble on young guys looks cool, stubble on old guys just makes them look homeless. | |
| But if you've ever seen a really good looking guy who's been in the woods for a while, like he comes back and it's like, Damn! | |
| Still good looking. | |
| It's like those... | |
| If you get a model who makes one of those goofy faces, it's like you can tell when the rubber mask snaps back to normal. | |
| She's a good looking woman. | |
| I remember there was this guy at the table. | |
| He was really good looking, but he had a big black beard that he'd kind of grown in to hide his chiseled features, hoping that he'd be taken more seriously and not relegated to, I don't know, sales or something because he was good looking. | |
| And... | |
| There was wild energy in the whole area. | |
| And what there was, was something that I called momentum confidence. | |
| Momentum confidence. | |
| That's confidence based on success that is to some degree accidental, but for which you take personal pride. | |
| And the momentum confidence is... | |
| Giddy and very risky. | |
| Momentum confidence. | |
| So the way it works is if you're in the academic field. | |
| Whether you get published or not the first time is, to a large degree, or at least to some degree, accidental. | |
| You know, you happen to have the right contact with the right person. | |
| He happens or she happens to really like what it is that you're doing. | |
| Maybe it's part of a personal thing that they're really into or whatever. | |
| So you get published. | |
| That's, to some degree, accidental. | |
| Because you got published the first time, well, it gets a lot easier to get published the second time. | |
| And then you get this Momentum confidence. | |
| And it is because, you know, it's the dominoes. | |
| That first one is a crab. | |
| The second one come down a lot easier. | |
| And this momentum confidence of leaping from success to success, you know, like if you're an actor and you just look right for that particular role and you're a decent enough actor, well, you get that role and then you kind of bounce to other ones and there is this kind of momentum confidence. | |
| Not everyone who succeeds is prey to this momentum confidence, but all success has to some degree this momentum confidence. | |
| And I know for myself, when I first started doing this show about 10 years ago, momentum confidence had a lot to do with it. | |
| I had a lot of very positive feedback, a lot of very enthusiastic support, and made some great friends through the show. | |
| And I still have some. | |
| So there is this momentum confidence. | |
| However, momentum confidence... | |
| Is when you mistake accidental fortune for personal virtue. | |
| Now, the thing about accidental fortune is that it's accidental and you're fortunate, which means things can change. | |
| Can you weather a recession? | |
| Can you weather a lot of people saying no to you? | |
| Can you weather a problem with your infrastructure? | |
| You know, your server fails, you lose some code. | |
| Can you weather a key employee situation? | |
| Can you weather the inevitable vagaries and ups and downs of life? | |
| If you have momentum confidence, then when that momentum breaks, as it always does, right? | |
| Life is never a steady line upward. | |
| Can you weather that? | |
| Well, a lot of people who think that it is their personal virtue that they've been lucky when that luck fails, as it does always. | |
| Well, that often will lead to a crisis of identity, to depression, to anxiety, to a feeling of being out of control. | |
| Well, the reality is, to some degree, we're all always out of control. | |
| Life happens. | |
| You're sailing high, you get sick. | |
| You're sailing high, your girlfriend has an affair. | |
| You're sailing high. | |
| You understand. | |
| Things happen. | |
| Some of them are under our control, and I try and focus on that. | |
| I'm a free will guy, but some of it is accidental. | |
| I mean, the fact that I'm here is accidental. | |
| I got cancer a couple of years ago. | |
| A lot of good people die like dogs. | |
| A lot of bad people flourish like weeds. | |
| I'm lucky to be here, and other people who weren't as lucky are not. | |
| Remembering the aspect of luck is what keeps us humble and allows us to weather the storms, right? | |
| The ups and downs of when luck turns, of when environment changes, of when betrayals happen, and so on. | |
| So there was this wild kind of confidence momentum that was going on. | |
| These guys had bagged a couple of big clients and their code was working and they just had this Real enthusiasm, but it was a little manic. | |
| And it was a little unsustainable. | |
| And I was kind of concerned about all of that. | |
| And I was also concerned that when you're in the throes of momentum confidence, you don't really listen to people who say, you know, slow down. | |
| So I wanted to slow this organization environment down, to have it weather itself for the long term, for the inevitable ups and downs of the dream. | |
| But I didn't want to provoke... | |
| Depression and anxiety by being, you know, the old guy who says, whoa, whoa there, bucko! | |
| You know, you better build some solid foundations before you do this Dubai skyscraper of mania. | |
| Overconfidence, of course, is when you think you can control more than you can. | |
| And anxiety is when you think you can control less than you can. | |
| But anyway, so... | |
| In a meeting, I was sort of, I think I was in there as a consultant and I was waiting to be called on, but I wasn't being called on because they knew everything and weren't going to be told anything. | |
| So in a meeting, I sort of stood up and said, but remember, we're not selling solutions. | |
| We're not selling solutions. | |
| We're selling the possibility of solutions. | |
| And of course, the young guys, who in the middle of jokes and laughter and, I don't know, Nerf guns and water pistols or whatever was going on, they stopped and blinked and laughed like... | |
| What? | |
| Oh, you know that thing on the internet where people are like, ha ha ha ha, wait, wait, what? | |
| You know, when someone has said something, and I said that, and I knew that they were confused and baffled and maybe even a little annoyed, as sometimes happens with this show. | |
| And I said it again, more forcefully, we're not selling solutions. | |
| We're selling the potential for solutions. | |
| And the guy said, hey, hey, Mr. | |
| Fortune Cookie, you know, you want to break that down a little for us? | |
| What are you talking about? | |
| Now, to explain, when I was an entrepreneur, at the beginning of my career, a guy would call me up every couple of weeks and try and sell me a network printer. | |
| We had some use for it, but I couldn't quite justify it. | |
| So I was like, ah, you know, let me run it past people. | |
| You know, when I was just starting out, I was, you know, kind of shy and didn't want to say no. | |
| And of course, I did a fair amount of sales, and therefore I knew what it was like to be on the other side of the phone. | |
| Anyway, it's... | |
| So just... | |
| So I think probably because of that, the printer example, it's not a great example, but anyway, it came up in my mind, and I'm going to be... | |
| I'm not going to mellish the dream. | |
| I have to have fidelity to the dream itself, because everything is meaningful. | |
| Dreams are very, very important. | |
| And so I said, let's say we're a printer company. | |
| What are we selling? | |
| Printing. | |
| Hard copies. | |
| I said, no, no. | |
| We're not selling printers. | |
| We're not selling printing. | |
| We're selling the possibility of printing. | |
| You understand? | |
| We're selling the possibility of printing. | |
| So, if you buy a printer from us and if you take care of the printer and if you don't drop it or break it and if you keep it inked and if you keep it maintained and if you keep it oiled and if you keep it stocked with paper and if you keep the network connections... | |
| All tickety-boo. | |
| Then you get a hard copy, right? | |
| You see, we're not selling printers because nobody buys printers just to stick them in the basement. | |
| What they're buying is hard copies. | |
| What they're buying is the capacity to print something out and have it signed or whatever it is, right? | |
| Or for people over 60, printing it out, scanning it, faxing it, and then putting it in an envelope. | |
| Anyway. | |
| And this was important. | |
| And there was a pause where everyone in the company understood that What I was saying at a deep level. | |
| And it is important. | |
| And please understand, this is what I was saying in the dream. | |
| In other words, what the dream is saying to me and what the dream wants me to say to you, right? | |
| Remember, this is going to sound mystical, but it's really, really not. | |
| There are things within us. | |
| There are truths within us far older than we are. | |
| You know, we're the snowflake on the iceberg, nine-tenths of which is under the ocean, right? | |
| Our Our top of the brain, the rational center of the brain. | |
| This is a very, very new addition to billions of years of evolution. | |
| Cellular, lizard brain, amygdala, hypothalamus. | |
| So there are truths within us that vastly predate us. | |
| There are facts and perspectives and realities within us that vastly predate us. | |
| Our conscious mind has a great strength and a great weakness, which is the rejection of reality, the rejection of sense data. | |
| It's great to reject sense data. | |
| Sense data makes the world look flat. | |
| It's a sphere. | |
| Sense data makes the sun and the moon look the same size. | |
| They're not. | |
| Sense data is our perspective from, you know, bipedal, bald apes at ground level. | |
| So we have the capacity to reject sense data, which is why we get science and reason and philosophy. | |
| And this is why we can send probes to Jupiter and so on. | |
| So we have the capacity to reject mere sense data, to reject immediate empiricism, build concepts out of what we get, right? | |
| Which is a great strength, but there's a great weakness, which is we get to reject reality, you understand? | |
| Science and insanity are two sides of the same coin. | |
| Reason. | |
| And anti-rationality are two sides of the same coin. | |
| Both of them are rejection of immediate sense data. | |
| One is for the sake of principles, the other is for the sake of ego defense. | |
| And, or false ego, defense. | |
| So this great strength we have is a great weakness, is kind of a cliche, but it's really, really true. | |
| And so there are truths within us that far predate us. | |
| You know the old statement of Hamlet, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than I dreamt of in your philosophy. | |
| There's real truth in that, which is why self-knowledge is so important. | |
| We cannot merely reason our way through. | |
| We cannot really muscle our way through. | |
| There is a lizard brain deep within us that is constantly trying to bring us back to base reality. | |
| Base physical sense reality. | |
| The body and the soul. | |
| The flesh. | |
| And the mind. | |
| The brain. | |
| And the consciousness. | |
| The consciousness takes us to the stars. | |
| The body and the brain keep us rooted in reality. | |
| These two things are essential for wisdom. | |
| For the truths that matter, right? | |
| There are truths that are inconsequential. | |
| There are truths that are misleading. | |
| There are truths that are completely falsified and not truths but presented as truths. | |
| And there are truths that save us all if we accept them. | |
| And a lot of times when we're over in our head, they come from the body. | |
| They come from the subconscious. | |
| They come from dreams attempting to wake us up, right? | |
| We go to sleep so that we can wake up sometimes from dreams. | |
| So these guys pause like, okay, so what was I saying? | |
| What was the dream? | |
| What does the dream want me to tell you? | |
| What does a dream want me to tell you? | |
| It wants me to tell you, I think. | |
| And again, dreams are kind of disco balls. | |
| You can look at them in a number of ways. | |
| And let me know what you think in the comments below. | |
| But it kind of makes sense. | |
| Right? | |
| If someone's selling you a car, they're not selling you a car. | |
| Nobody buys a car, usually, to, you know, I guess Jay Leno accept it, but nobody buys a car. | |
| Seinfeld, yeah. | |
| Just to stick it in a basement and cover it in a car bra, right? | |
| You buy a car. | |
| To get somewhere, you buy a car. | |
| It's like saying, well, I want to buy a ticket to that airplane. | |
| And somebody sells you a ticket to an airplane, but it's a ticket to an airplane that left 20 years ago, right? | |
| You don't want to buy a ticket to an airplane. | |
| You don't want to get on a plane. | |
| You want to get to your destination. | |
| The airplane is not selling you an airplane ride. | |
| The airplane is selling you the destination, the access to the destination in a fast way. | |
| People who sell you cars are not selling you cars. | |
| They're selling you convenient and easy access to your destinations. | |
| You understand, right? | |
| It's important. | |
| It's important because if you think you're selling people a solution... | |
| Then you are imagining you are in too much control of the outcome. | |
| So if you sell someone a printer and they never unbox it and they never plug it in, then they don't get the hard copy. | |
| Or if they plug it in and create weird settings and don't use the right paper and buy cheap ink, some substitute ink, and then it smears and it smudges and it crumples and A4 load letter, what does that mean? | |
| Right? | |
| Well, then you have failed, right? | |
| I mean, as an organization, you've sold them the printer, but you've not been able to get to the printing, which is the point. | |
| We are dependent on the integrity of those who consume our services, you understand? | |
| We cannot sell solutions. | |
| We can only sell the possibility of solutions. | |
| So, a lot of the guys just thought this was like, old guy, yakety-yakety, blah-blah, right? | |
| I understand. | |
| It seems like, oh, what's the point? | |
| Does it really matter? | |
| Let's just go sell some printers. | |
| Now, the CEO of the company thought that I was onto something really important, and he wanted me to go to another meeting. | |
| I think it was where the salespeople were. | |
| He pulled me into this other meeting, but there was a speech that was already going on. | |
| And I... It was, again, this kind of momentum confidence. | |
| Ooh, the pride did go before the fall. | |
| So I just... | |
| There was a big conference table. | |
| Everyone was sitting around. | |
| And there was just people sort of standing room only. | |
| And I went up to someone, kind of sat down against the wall. | |
| I sat down against the wall. | |
| And there was sort of pauses. | |
| And this person next to me was talking about Leonard Cohen. | |
| You know, the singer, like a bird on wire. | |
| He's got this really deep, gravelly voice, although people have done fantastic covers of his songs. | |
| Neville Brothers' Bird on a Wire is amazing. | |
| You know, everyone and their dog is covered. | |
| Hallelujah! | |
| And so on. | |
| And he died. | |
| Just a little while ago now, if I remember rightly. | |
| He'd always struck me as kind of nihilistic and hedonistic, right? | |
| Death of a ladies' man and so on. | |
| And so I, in the dream, somebody was talking about Leonard Cohen. | |
| And I kind of imitated his singing in the break of the conversation. | |
| And people laughed. | |
| And then I made some joke about, you know, Leonard Cohen's voice and lyrics. | |
| They touch you so deeply that the art cops can actually come up to you and ask you, show me where on the doll his songs touched you. | |
| And you say, the soul and the heart. | |
| And people were sort of laughing at that. | |
| And that comes out of a joke that I made in my April Fool's video a couple of days ago. | |
| And so then the CEO wanted me to give this speech about not selling solutions, but only the possibility of solutions. | |
| When I got up to talk about there are no solutions, there's only the possibility of solutions, I wasn't doing it for a good job. | |
| I was like, I could start it this way. | |
| And of course, these guys were in the mania of momentum confidence. | |
| So the CEO kind of jumped up and he took over. | |
| He said, I know what he's trying to say is this, right? | |
| And now, listen, when it comes to speaking, I'm not too bad. | |
| And I was kind of annoyed. | |
| Like, this is kind of my wheelhouse. | |
| This is my idea. | |
| I should be the one presenting it. | |
| But then, it was kind of funny. | |
| And this just shows me, you know, you have one perspective, you're annoyed. | |
| You have another perspective, and you're happy. | |
| I mean, isn't that funny? | |
| I mean, I remember when I was younger, I was going to meet a friend of mine. | |
| And we were going to meet at 7 o'clock. | |
| And I got there at 7 o'clock and he didn't get there till 8. | |
| And I was really annoyed. | |
| We met at a subway and I was just sitting there, grimy, gross. | |
| And he's like, no, no, no, I said 8, right? | |
| I said, no, we said seven. | |
| He said eight. | |
| I pulled up my piece of paper and I said, look, it... | |
| Oh, man, I'd written down eight. | |
| For some, it got switched in my brain to seven. | |
| And so I went from annoyed to apologetic. | |
| Like, I'm sorry, I was like, dude, I wrote down eight. | |
| It got in my head. | |
| It was seven. | |
| I didn't check my paper. | |
| You understand, right? | |
| So I went from annoyed to apologetic like that, right? | |
| Just because I got a new piece of impatient. | |
| So when the CEO got up and started talking about this... | |
| We don't sell solutions. | |
| We sell the potential for solutions, which makes you humble, right? | |
| And also allows you to focus on follow-up. | |
| You know, like if you're selling a printer, people aren't using it right. | |
| You need to know that. | |
| You need to help them through it. | |
| It keeps you humble. | |
| But now the CEO had taken over my idea, was given my speech, and I was annoyed. | |
| But then... | |
| I realized, and I made a joke, and I said, well, actually, I've just demonstrated something else, which is called delegation, which is the fact that... | |
| He was taking over what I did. | |
| I had empowered him to communicate the idea. | |
| Do you understand? | |
| I was not necessary to communicate the idea. | |
| In fact, it was better if someone else did it because he was their CEO. He'd be sticking around. | |
| They'd follow what he said more seriously. | |
| It was actually better for him to give this speech about there being no solutions. | |
| So I delegated. | |
| I reproduced the idea in the mind of another who could communicate it more effectively than I could. | |
| It's amazing. | |
| And I went from annoyed to, good, that's the point! | |
| You know, I'm telling you, one of you guys out there, maybe a whole bunch of you, one day, you are going to stand up, you are going to rise up, and you are going to make videos that blow mine away. | |
| I'm going to be like a droplet of water in the wake of your speedboats, and initially I'm going to be like, aw, generational wheel of life. | |
| I'm being cycled behind. | |
| I'm going to get some blankets and some reruns of Matlock and take up my peppermint-flavored tea in an old folks' home. | |
| But that's the point. | |
| I mean, obviously philosophy should never live or die with any particular individual, but should be a replicated process in the mind and minds of the world. | |
| And whoever's better at this than I am, God love you, hurry up and get moving. | |
| Go make it. | |
| So, along with this, you know, there are in fact no solutions. | |
| And I don't mean this, this is not despair. | |
| There's no solutions that everyone's going to agree on to, like, essential important issues. | |
| There's no solutions that are only a benefit with no cost. | |
| There are no solutions that are going to please everyone. | |
| There's no solutions that everyone's going to like. | |
| You understand that everything is cost-benefits. | |
| Everything is cost-benefits. | |
| I like my food. | |
| It tastes good. | |
| It's fatty, sweetie, salty. | |
| Well, it may be bad for me. | |
| Right? | |
| Benefit, cost. | |
| I want to lose weight. | |
| That's a benefit. | |
| But it costs me happiness and sensual pleasure in here and now. | |
| Everything. | |
| You go to work, well, you don't get to relax often, right? | |
| You relax, you don't get to make money. | |
| Everything is a cost and a benefit. | |
| And we're all weighing these possibilities. | |
| Which is why, you know, this idea that there's a perfect solution, there's a perfect love, there's a perfect job, and we are damned by our being barred by the grim barriers of reality from a perfection that exists in our mind only to torture us with discontent and falling shortness and so on. | |
| Everything is a compromise. | |
| Everything is win-lose. | |
| There are no solutions that you can come up with that everyone's going to like, especially in an increasingly divided world. | |
| This doesn't mean there's no truth, no virtue, no objectivity or anything like that. | |
| I just, I want people to not make the mistakes that I've made, which is sailing forth into the public discourse armed with truth, reason, joy, evidence, humor, eloquence, and charisma, and then wonder why there's such significant blowback. | |
| Ah! | |
| Ah! | |
| Right! | |
| Because I cannot sell solutions. | |
| I can sell the possibility of solutions. | |
| Ah! | |
| You sell solutions, but there are no solutions. | |
| Well, sure. | |
| Doesn't mean nothing is better or worse. | |
| But... | |
| I think a lot of people, because of the momentum, confidence, sail into public discourse, hit the blowback and back down. | |
| And I think everything that is worthwhile is a process, not an end goal, right? | |
| You know, it's that old cliche, life's a journey, not a destination. | |
| Everything worthwhile is a process. | |
| Evolution is a process. | |
| Life is a process. | |
| Life is not a snapshot. | |
| Right? | |
| Everything worthwhile is a process. | |
| Thinking is a process. | |
| Conclusions are great. | |
| Don't get me wrong. | |
| Conclusions are great. | |
| And you need to be able to build brick by brick to get some cathedral of virtue in your mind. | |
| But it's a process. | |
| And some foundational things that I believe for many years were overturned by more evidence, more better arguments, and so on, more rational arguments. | |
| So everything is a process. | |
| Everything that is worthwhile is a process. | |
| And if your ego is invested in conclusions rather than your mind being invested in the process, you will inevitably become rigid and defensive and be a barrier to the solution because the solution is not a conclusion. | |
| The solution is a process. | |
| You understand? | |
| And this is why the free market, which is a process, not a conclusion, right? | |
| Central planning or the government saying do this, do that, that's a conclusion. | |
| Well, I know how many loaves of bread are needed for the population, and I know how everything should be farmed, and I know which companies should be given money and which companies should not, and I know what are the facts that are relevant to social situations, and I know that the welfare state is the best way to solve poverty, and I know poverty, and I know all of these things. | |
| They're all conclusions, and they're enforced, as conclusions generally are. | |
| By force. | |
| Freedom is a process. | |
| The free market is a process. | |
| The free market is humility, saying, I don't know. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know how many loaves of bread should be baked. | |
| I don't know how to make a pencil, right? | |
| This is a famous iPencil essay. | |
| Nobody knows how to make a pencil. | |
| No one person knows even how to make a pencil, but some central bureaucrat knows how to solve the problem of poverty by taking money by force. | |
| It's got nothing to do with buying votes, folks, right? | |
| I mean... | |
| We know. | |
| We know. | |
| Multiculturalism is a... | |
| Diversity is a strength. | |
| We know that. | |
| The facts indicate otherwise. | |
| That diversity destroys neighborhoods. | |
| But if you have a conclusion rather than the process, you become dogmatic. | |
| And if you have political power, destructive. | |
| And so, I think the dream is a reminder to me... | |
| As we buck it up around 600,000 subscribers and the show is doing very well and it's put the brakes on momentum confidence. | |
| Don't take my drug! | |
| But it does and it's right that it should. | |
| So I think what my dream wants me to tell you is something like this. | |
| This is not a show. | |
| I know I refer to it as a show but I'm happy to be corrected by my lizard brain. | |
| I can't. | |
| I can't teach anything. | |
| I can't teach thought. | |
| I can't teach virtue or rationality or courage or integrity or anything like that. | |
| I can't teach any of that stuff. | |
| Right? | |
| When you go to a show, you go to a show and you pay to be a show because you're not in the show. | |
| Right? | |
| Nobody charges Freddie Mercury when he would get up and sing people. | |
| They pay him, in fact. | |
| Right? | |
| Because other people can do it better. | |
| Right? | |
| So this is the difference between a show and And philosophy, and I'm going to have to bite my tongue and endure countless corrections as I habitually use the word, but it's not a show. | |
| You know, you're in the army, you're in basic training, and they're showing you a bunch of stuff. | |
| Here's how to break down your weapons, right? | |
| Here's how to climb this barrier. | |
| Here's how to get through this mud. | |
| Here's how, like, they're showing you a whole bunch of stuff. | |
| But it's not a show. | |
| Like, you go and consume it, and it's a memory. | |
| If you think that basic training is a show, you're probably going to go out and get killed in a war. | |
| If you understand that they're giving you the tools to stay alive, to be victorious in your battle, but it's up to you to implement an exercise, then you understand it's not a show. | |
| You go see a singing and dancing show, it's a show! | |
| It's not trying to keep you alive in the upcoming singing and dancing wars. | |
| You understand, right? | |
| And you go to a show because you're not in the show. | |
| There's a separation. | |
| But philosophy is not a show. | |
| Philosophy is not a show. | |
| I can't I can teach you anything. | |
| I can show you some tools. | |
| I can give you the form and the content of good arguments and clear thinking and critical thinking and rationality. | |
| I can give you the form and the example. | |
| And I can constantly uproot prior perceptions for the sake of better arguments, right? | |
| My prior perceptions are plowed under by new evidence, by better arguments, because I need to show you that it's a process. | |
| And people say, oh, Steph, you've changed your mind. | |
| Of course! | |
| The mind exists to be changed. | |
| You understand? | |
| If the mind didn't change, it would be a skull. | |
| A skull doesn't change. | |
| A skull doesn't change. | |
| Give a skull a new argument, it's still your skull. | |
| You don't want your body to be fundamentally an anti-conscious, inanimate piece of biological matter. | |
| It needs to change because it's a process. | |
| It's a process. | |
| You don't jump into a pool and do this and think you're a swimmer. | |
| You have to move to swim. | |
| Swimming is a process of motion. | |
| Within yourself, in your arms and your legs, and through the water. | |
| It's a process. | |
| You can't teach a process. | |
| You can't teach a process. | |
| You can give examples. | |
| You can give principles. | |
| But in the already started fundamental battle of ideas, this is the basic training. | |
| It might keep your culture alive. | |
| But it won't do any of those things. | |
| It won't give you the tools you need to survive and flourish as a thinker, as a free person. | |
| Unless you take it and do it yourself. | |
| The replication of the process, not the transmission of conclusions, is the point. | |
| You understand? | |
| It's the point. | |
| I cannot solve any problems. | |
| If you go and watch a dietician give a presentation, it doesn't cause you to lose any weight. | |
| You have to implement... | |
| The diet yourself. | |
| You watch a workout video, it doesn't strengthen any of your muscles. | |
| You have to do it yourself. | |
| It's a show designed to stimulate. | |
| It's a demonstration rather than a show. | |
| A demonstration to help stimulate different behavior on your part. | |
| Just as new arguments and better evidence is a stimulation of better behavior or more rational behavior or the following of more rational principles on my part. | |
| So, this is a demonstration. | |
| This is basic training for the war of ideas, says the dream. | |
| This is not a show. |