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Sept. 1, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:25:54

HOW TO WRITE! By Stefan Molyneux

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	So, hi, of course, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
	So, I would say I'm a successful writer in that I've written, what, 10 or 12 books?
	Actually, probably 12 or 14 books.
	They've been read millions of times, and my blog was very popular, and I've written fiction and non-fiction.
	I've written I got an A on a very challenging graduate school thesis in the history of philosophy.
	So, pretty good at writing.
	And I say that not because I want you to think...
	I don't care what you think of my writing skills and my writing abilities.
	I'm here for you.
	I'm not here for you to praise me.
	I'm here to help you to communicate.
	Because, boy, you know, if you're interested in philosophy, if you're interested in this kind of show, I desperately need you to be out there...
	Doing philosophy or writing novels of great import and meaning and depth and communicating with people about reason, liberty, evidence, empiricism, all that kind of good stuff.
	And writing forces you to organize your thoughts.
	And when your thoughts are organized and your communication is effective, you're a great force for good in the world.
	So this is here.
	I simply mentioned my sort of history in writing.
	So that there's some vague reason to listen to what it is that I have to say.
	So my books are read, last time I checked, about 100,000 times a month.
	So, you know, 1.2 million a year, over many years, definitely millions and millions of reads.
	So I think that's important.
	And so...
	I want to transfer the hard and bitter and ugly lessons that I've learned over the years to you.
	You can help avoid then some of the mistakes that I made and some of the time that I wasted in the creative process and hopefully that can work out.
	I can't say I'm successful too.
	Thousands of readers as opposed to millions though.
	Well, of course, that is how we all start, right?
	I don't think you are.
	But if you want a brief history of my writing projects and what I've done in the writing world, hit me with a why.
	I'm easy either way in the time that we have.
	I'm really interested also in focusing on mostly how to benefit you in this conversation.
	If you're at all interested in my history with writing, I'm very happy to mention that.
	But I'm not taking it personally if you're not interested and just want to get to the meat of the matter.
	That's totally fine.
	Just hit me with a why if you would like me to do that and I will be Happy to.
	I'm here to serve you. I'm here to serve you.
	Okay, a couple of whys. I'm just seeing here.
	No, everybody seems to...
	Okay, I'm certainly happy to talk about that.
	So let me just get this off.
	I have... You know, one of these things that's kind of like a notebook, but it's also kind of like a...
	A briefcase filled with gold.
	Okay, so I started writing very young.
	As I said, I was six years old when I first wrote my first short story.
	I remember it very clearly. It was about a guy who thought that a leopard was pregnant on his land.
	Sorry, he thought that the leopard was ill.
	It turns out the leopard was pregnant.
	And the idea that, of course, if that's what you feel is harming you can turn out to benefit you was kind of early on that way.
	I wrote basically about half a novel when I was 11 called By the Light of an Alien Sun.
	And it was a science fiction, I was very much into science fiction at the time, Arthur C. Clarke and so on.
	And so I wrote a novel and my English teacher, I still remember her name, read it out in class over a series of days.
	And with the audience, of course, there were some references to classmates and all of that.
	She was kind of laughing about it, and in a very good natured way, everyone was laughing about it.
	There was a girl I liked who I still remember her name, 50 or 45 years later, or whatever, but...
	I remember her name and she was in the novel and it was not racy, racy, but you know, there was some kissing and it was pretty clear, you know, that I liked the girl and all that.
	So it was really enjoyable and I really enjoyed that process of having thoughts alone and then bringing them to an audience.
	I wrote a whole series of short stories about sharks and sea travel and I was very much into ocean stuff as well and I wrote a whole series of short stories about that and quite enjoyed that although I would say I've never been particularly interested in short stories I like to read them from time to time but I find that short stories don't work very well with my rather expansive way of communicating so I can't really compress it down I started writing poetry in my mid-teens and I self-published.
	I still remember hammering away on one of the original Macintoshes at a university.
	I just sort of talked. I wasn't in school at the time, but I talked my way in.
	To do that and ended up laser printing, photocopying, binding them.
	I remember putting them under the corner of a couch to fold them over properly and I sold them at school.
	So I did a lot of poetry back in the day.
	I started getting more into playwriting.
	I've written about 30 plays over the years.
	But I very much enjoyed the acting side of things.
	The character, the dialogue, the spontaneity of acting has always been really enjoyable for me.
	And if you want to see some of my acting skills with a Z, you can almostnovel.com.
	You should check out my novel, which is really the best.
	I've written two, two and a half great things in fiction, as far as that goes.
	The God of Atheists, Almost, and the novel Just Poor.
	So... Then I auditioned for the National Theatre School because I did a whole lot of acting.
	I was directed by a guy at Glendon named Skip Shand and he was an English professor who cast me in everything because he liked what I did.
	I did Chekhov, I did Harold Pinter, I did just a whole bunch of stuff.
	And so I wanted to go to look into playwriting, screenwriting and acting sort of as a combo.
	And so I auditioned for the National Theatre School.
	They take like one out of every thousand applicants.
	I did some scenes, some monologues, and then they told me to take my favorite play and Boil it down to three minutes and act it out.
	So originally I did, or a play that I liked.
	Originally I was going to do The Tree and Waiting for Godot.
	Like in Waiting for Godot, The Tree has a leaf at the first half of the play and no leaf at the second half of the play.
	So I was just going to go out and close my hand at a minute and a half and wait till the end.
	But I thought that might be a bit too clever by half.
	So I took Edward Albies, who's a writer I quite liked at the time.
	I took Edward Albies' Zoo Story and compressed it down to three minutes.
	I got in and...
	I wrote a bunch of plays, did a whole bunch of acting, and then they liked me, as I said, for the first bit, they said, oh, forget the writing stuff.
	You're a good writer, but you're fantastic as an actor.
	Just be an actor and do that, and maybe you can write later.
	But anyway, eventually my politics came out, my philosophy came out, and it was very, very hard left that was running the National Theatre School back then.
	It's probably even worse now. You know, the long walk through the institutions, the infiltration of the artist world in particular is very powerful.
	So then I went and I continued to write when I was an undergraduate, of course.
	I did two years of English literature at York, Glendon campus.
	I did almost two years at the National Theatre School.
	I finished my degree in history.
	I got tired of English because there's no facts.
	Like, what's your interpretation of The Magus by John Fowles?
	It's like, hmm, okay.
	How can I be wrong? If I'm convincing, how can I be wrong?
	And I wanted to be in an area where I could be convincing, so I moved to history.
	And I did so much theatre when I was at McGill.
	I wrote a play called, excuse my French, excuse my language here, I wrote a play called Fuckers, which sounds kind of strange, but it was about two punks who just, everything that came out of their mouth was completely and totally foul.
	Foul-mouthed and repulsive.
	And... They are having their adventures during the day discussing a whole bunch of different topics with truly ungodly sailor stubbed his toe with Satan language and then for a reason within the play they make a vow to each other to just take an hour without swearing.
	Can we go an hour without swearing?
	And then for the last three minutes of the play, they're just staring at each other with absolutely nothing to say.
	So I remember I did that play.
	I did some other play.
	I actually acted in that play.
	I shaved my head, and a friend of mine did a huge mohawk, and it was a really, really fun play to do, with a message as well, so I suppose.
	I played the lead in Macbeth.
	I did just a whole bunch of...
	I did Macbeth, and then I did a homeless guy in the next play that I was in.
	So it was really quite the arc.
	And then, of course, I went into the business world.
	My writing was technical. My writing was help manuals.
	My writing was instruction manuals and business plans and requests for proposals.
	And so a very sort of dry, technical, non-creative, non-florid kind of work.
	But I enjoyed that, sort of getting the language down to its bare minimum to communicate arguments and ideas as to business profitability and value was wonderful.
	It was great. Before I was in the business world, in my 20s, I wrote two novels.
	One was called Revolutions, which you can get at freedemand.com forward slash books.
	Revolutions, I was incredibly inspired by an old Ivan Turgenev novel, 19th century Russian writer, called Fathers and Sons.
	I adapted it to a play called Seduction, which I produced in Toronto after I left theatre school.
	And I also then took some of the ideas to some degree and then merged it in with really Historical facts about two real people.
	It was the first time I'd written history, historical novels with actual people from history in there, which was interesting.
	Nechaev and Alexander Girtzen were the two characters, and everybody else was sort of made up.
	And it was about a young man who was very powerful in his language, very convincing in his demeanor, and very committed to changing the world, but had a very violent streak.
	Was he going to choose between pursuing a life of violence and revolution or was he going to, as his fiancee later said, are you going to make the world a better place through blood or are you going to make the world a better place through three or four good children who raise good families themselves?
	Macro or micro, right?
	Personal or political.
	It was a big choice for me at the time.
	Not that I was ever tempted by violence, but that was me sort of working out that whole thing.
	I wrote a novel called Just Poor that came out of a dream I had, which I still remember incredibly vividly in my mid-20s.
	It was a dream about a girl who was like 12.
	In a completely ass-end-of-nowhere rural setting in the past, distant past, like hundreds of years ago.
	And she was milking a cow, staring off into space, And her eyes were just deep and brilliant.
	I remember this in the dream, just looking at this incredibly brilliant girl lost in a rural nowhere setting in the 18th century in England.
	And this became so sort of powerful and compelling that I brought it to life in a novel about if you're a genius and you're lost in the middle of nowhere and what scope do you have for The expression of your brilliance, right? And so that was a very powerful novel for me, for sure.
	And then, sort of fast forward, I'm sure I'm forgetting something here, but I wrote...
	Then after I took a break from my business career, and they were luring me back with, like, crazy money for three hours a week because I was very productive.
	I knew all the code base. I'd written most of the code for the entire software company.
	But I said, no, I ended up taking a course at the Humber School for Writers where I was...
	Under the tutelage of two writers, one I didn't get along with at all, one I did.
	I wrote two novels in that 18-month period.
	One is called The God of Atheists, which is a black comedy about a bunch of children who start to cross-examine their parents in a Socratic method about morality and basically unravel the entire community around them based upon patient and persistent questions.
	It's sort of united, but the same process occurring In a very corrupt software development environment and also with a boy band.
	And I think that there's just some delightful bits in the book myself.
	So the boy band, they have an argument about, like, do they want to be an edgy boy band or like a K-pop cheesecake boy band?
	So the compromise they come up with is they call themselves boy band, but with an umlaut over the O, and the umlaut is their edge.
	And their manager's really excited by the idea until they register it and start publicizing it, and then he realizes that nobody knows how to type boyband with an umlaut over the O into a search engine, and he's really mad about it.
	And so there's a lot of kind of funny and engaging stuff.
	I really did try to write a comedy, and I have a fairly decent sense of humor, and I think it actually came out.
	The boyband thing, I just rock with an umlaut, boyband with an umlaut.
	It's like, the umlaut is our edge, man.
	I just thought that was, at least for me, pretty delightful.
	I hope it translates to others as well.
	So, yeah, in the business world, in the family world, in the academic world, and in the entertainment world, I was just exploring various themes of corruption and what can be done, because I had experienced a fair amount of corruption in the academic, in the entertainment world, in the business world, and so on, and I just really wanted to bring that to life.
	And until I understood how the sort of patient questioning of Children can really do damage to society, or rather heal it through that kind of damage.
	So I worked on that.
	And then, as you know, I did a whole bunch of...
	And then I wrote Almost.
	Almost is like my giant novel.
	It's like 380,000 words, like Lord of the Rings length.
	And it's family history, all of Europe, famous historical characters from Deladier to Churchill to, well, you name it, who's in there, Anthony Eden.
	And I really just wanted to bring to life...
	How little decisions, I've always said, where you end up morally in life is the little decisions at the beginning of things that make the big difference.
	You know, like if you're sailing from London to New York and you're off by one degree, it doesn't matter much at the beginning, but you can end up in a totally different state by the end, right?
	So I was obsessed, really.
	I became obsessed. And this came out of listening to an audiobook.
	Biography of Churchill, I became completely obsessed with what the hell had happened to my family.
	You know, the biggest impact that happened to my family on both sides was the Second World War, where my grandmother was killed on a bombing run that was manned by one of my uncles on the British side, and being caught between the two pincers of Nazism and communism.
	So, as you know, generally those who are anti-Nazi tend to be pro-communist, and those who are pro-communist Or anti-communist will often tend to be pro-fascist or pro-Nazi or whatever it is.
	But of course my family was barred from publishing by the Nazis and my mother was cornered, chased and possibly abused by the communists when they invaded from the East, from Russia, from Poland and so on.
	And so my family was really caught between the pincers of fascism and communism and How this all came about and what were the steps that led to this world disaster of the Second World War and how do you tie personal stories into the most abstract political events and how often are those personal decisions resulting in the abstract?
	It's an amazing book.
	I don't think I'll ever do better in my life as far as writing goes.
	It's totally free. Almostnovel.com.
	Almostnovel.com. Hope you'll check it out.
	Then I did a whole bunch of nonfiction, which you're aware of, arguments with regards to theology, arguments with regards to agnosticism, arguments with regards to philosophy as a whole.
	And my whole theory of ethics, universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, a book on an introduction to philosophy called Essential Philosophy, a book on how to fall in love and stay in love called Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love, because the idea that emotions and reason are opposites has always bothered me.
	And the idea that we can't find a rational way to fall in love and be happy in life has always bothered me.
	So anyway, that's sort of my brief history.
	Of writing. I hope that makes sense.
	We have the god of atheists on our bookshelf, says someone.
	It's well-worn. Alright.
	Peaceful parenting is slow.
	It's very slow. Alright. So, yeah, playwriting.
	You hear me acting, right?
	You hear me acting when I do my role plays with people, right?
	That's just basically spontaneous improv.
	Okay, so... Do you want me to start?
	Actually, I'll make this decision.
	I will start with non-fiction.
	Sorry, I will start with fiction. I will start with fiction.
	Planning is so essential. So fiction.
	So what is the purpose of fiction?
	If you don't know what you're writing for, then the great temptation is to write for vanity.
	The great temptation is to write for vanity.
	Ooh, I want people to think I'm a great writer.
	I want people to see me as a great writer.
	Or I want to be very successful as a writer.
	I want to make a lot of money as a writer.
	And I want to see my name in lights and movies and whatever it is.
	I want to be optioned. None of those things is particularly bad.
	But I'll tell you this, man.
	If you want to write as well as you can possibly write, and who doesn't, right?
	I mean, why not aim for the very best?
	Why not aim for the top? If you want to write as well as you can possibly possibly write, it cannot be about you.
	It cannot be about you.
	It is about what?
	What is the purpose of fiction?
	Why do we even read fiction?
	Why have we evolved to find fiction valuable?
	Why have we evolved for stories and Beowulf and dances and sagas and epics and poems?
	Why have we evolved for these things?
	Well, I'll tell you why.
	So, we have this pesky thing, most of us, I believe everyone in this conversation, we have this pesky thing called a conscience.
	Now, the conscience...
	Will completely mess you up if you have one and you do wrong, right?
	If you have a conscience and you do wrong, and I don't mean like, I don't know, you flirt with some other girl while you've got a girlfriend and you don't do anything.
	I mean like if you do some serious wrong, you really betray someone, you rob someone, you really hurt someone without making any effort at recompense, you steal significantly, you You punch people, you have children that you harm or beat or hit, like I watched The Death of a Salesman over the last couple of nights, the Dustin Hoffman and the Rather.
	You know, John Malkovich has only like two settings as an actor, zero and eleven.
	He has no other settings as an actor, as far as I can tell.
	He's like screaming at the top of his lungs and dropping spittle out of his mouth when he cries.
	But anyway, so I watched Death of a Salesman and Willy Loman, the guy who you're supposed to have sympathy for, talks about whipping his children.
	Whipping, whipping, not just beating, whipping his children.
	In which case it's like, yeah, you go drive your car off a cliff.
	I could care less. Release people from the horrors of your destructive and sadistic personality.
	So if you do serious wrong, then after you do the wrong, what happens?
	After you do the wrong, your conscience plagues you.
	Your conscience becomes your enemy.
	And your conscience will demand that you make restitution.
	Now your vanity says, I don't want to make restitution.
	I don't want to admit fault. Because the moment I admit fault and want to make restitution, I put myself...
	Under the power of someone else, right?
	If you've ever made a real apology, you know how vulnerable that makes you.
	Because, you know, we've all had people in our lives, I'm sure, who say, well, tell me what I can do to make it better.
	And you tell them, and that's just this long pause.
	It's like, no, I was just saying, I was just saying, tell me what I can do to make it better.
	I actually wanted to tell me what to do to make it better.
	So you kind of do bad things, and then your conscience attacks you, and you are very tempted to double down on your wrongdoing, right?
	So if you pierce through the veil of conscience, and your conscience turns into an enemy...
	You fight your conscience by punishing it with further immoral acts a lot of times.
	You become an enemy, it's become something you've got to banquish and conquer and subjugate and subdue and so you will end up doubling down, tripling down, quadrupling down, infinity downing on immorality.
	Not you guys, but this is how people slide down this slippery slope towards true evil.
	So, the great danger When you do evil and provoke your conscience is that you then justify the evil and use it to attack your conscience.
	And you view your conscience as enemy and you'll do more evil to spite it.
	So, why do lions, dogs, cats, when they're kittens, why do they pretend to hunt?
	Obvious question, easy answer.
	Why do lions, when they're lion calves, pretend to hunt?
	Well, they pretend to hunt so that they can hunt when they get older.
	Why do kids play fight?
	Because they may need to get involved in combat when they get older.
	Why do little girls have dolls and play house?
	You understand, you're sort of preparing for the adulthood of getting resources and raising a family.
	So I'll tell you what fiction is for.
	It's to give you the experience of provoking your conscience without actually turning your conscience into an enemy.
	So we've all had mad ambition.
	We've all had the desire to use violence in our life.
	If you claim otherwise, I don't believe you.
	I will never believe you. We've all had the desire for mad ambition to use violence and all of that.
	And if you've been bullied, without a doubt, you know, I thought of violence when I was a kid.
	I thought against violence against people who assaulted me, who bullied me, and so on.
	And if you've never thought about violence, you're some other species.
	You're like some, you know...
	A pacifist robot in a human flesh suit.
	I don't know what to tell you.
	So we've all thought of violence. And we've all had mad ambition.
	And we've all thought of taking the shortcuts.
	How do I get...
	Into a university. Well, I guess if you're Lori Loughlin, go in with a guy named Singer, who never ended up doing any jail time, oddly enough, then you, you know, you fake a rowing team and you donate a bunch of money and then you end up going to jail for a couple of months, right?
	And her husband was in solitary for, what, eight weeks?
	Because of COVID? Like, that's monstrous.
	Anyway... So, we all have the temptation to do bad things.
	Now, what art gives us is the potential to experience the consequences of negative things without turning our conscience into an enemy.
	So, I'll give you a very obvious analogy.
	In the traditional vaccine, you get a deactivated or inert virus put into your system.
	Your body recognizes it as a foreign object.
	It creates the antibodies.
	The antibodies often get stored in the bone marrow and are available for the rest of your life.
	And if the virus actually comes in, the live one comes in, they attack it, neutralize it, kill it or whatever, right?
	That's the traditional virus, the vaccine thing, right?
	So you understand that art is to give you the experience of evil so that you don't do evil.
	It's a way of inoculating you against evil.
	That's what art is for.
	That's why we get involved in that.
	That's why we consume it. That's why we're passionate about it.
	And you can think of this from Macbeth, right?
	is driven to mad vanity by the nagging of his wife.
	He kills the king and his life turns to literal hell on earth.
	He can't sleep. His wife goes mad.
	He ends up being killed and all of that.
	I remember when I was Playing Macbeth, just obsessing.
	Obsessing. I'm a big fan of obsession.
	Obsessing over like, okay, what's this story for?
	What's it about? Now I get that Shakespeare was writing this stuff.
	He was on commission from the king, and so he's going to want to say, no regicide, right?
	No killing the king. I get all of that.
	But why does it last?
	Because we get to go through the horror of what it's like to kill someone and what happens afterwards.
	And that means if we have a desire to murder someone, we'll remember the play.
	And we're inoculated.
	We're inoculated against.
	In the same way, play fighting, you play fight and you wrestle and, you know, you'll see kids, I did this, you did this, especially if you're boys.
	You see kids wrestling and play fighting and dogs do it too and they stop.
	Sure, like the dog will show its neck.
	We'll bear its throat and the other dog is like, okay, fine, I'm dominant and it's play fighting.
	So you go through the experience of combat without the risk of injury or death that comes from actual combat.
	So you're practicing. So all we're doing with art is we are giving people a dream with its consequences, right?
	So to take a silly example, if you're smoking and you have a dream about dying of lung cancer in a hospital, Or let's say you're thinking of smoking and then you have a vivid dream about dying of lung cancer in a hospital, your kids weeping and the agony you're in and the regret and the horror and all of that.
	Okay, well then that's your body trying to inoculate you against becoming a smoker.
	You understand, right? So art is a way of fast-forwarding through moral decisions so we emotionally feel the consequences, thus rendering us Far less likely to perform immoral actions.
	So this is why art is so powerful.
	You are inoculating people against evil.
	Now, the evil of the good and evil is very complex, right?
	So, I mean, I remember at the beginning, I remember talking with my director, with Macbeth.
	Now, I played Macbeth with a higher voice than I normally have for a variety of reasons, but I remember saying to the director, you know, I said, like, I've got a problem here.
	I had a problem with the character, which, you know, I often would make a director roll his eyes, but in this case, tell me what you think.
	I said, so the problem I have is that Macbeth has just come in from killing 50 peasants in a battle.
	He comes in from a battle where he's, you know, he's well-armed, he's got his armor, he's got his sword, he's got his shield, he's got his helmet, and he's possibly just mowing down peasants who are armed with scythes in a burlap sack.
	So, you know, why is the play not about him feeling bad about just killing 50 peasants or 50, even, you know, 50 knights or whatever, right?
	So he's totally fine.
	He experiences no guilt, no problem, no negative consequences from killing 50 peasants, but then he goes and stabs one old king, the king who ordered him to go and kill the 50 peasants, and suddenly his life turns to shit, right?
	That's a problem, right?
	I have no idea what we talked about, but I do remember, I don't know what the conclusion was, but I do remember that being a big issue.
	If you look at crime and punishment, very clearly, very clearly crime and punishment, Raskolnikov, It's dealing with the consequences of murdering with the goal of doing good.
	And what happens to him as the consequence.
	And I remember when I first read that in my teens, thinking like, well, he's going to take the money, he's going to do good.
	Like, why doesn't he take the money? Why does he do good?
	Why does he go back to where he came from?
	Why is he talking about how he would commit the perfect murder to a guy who's on the police force?
	You know, all of this, like, why is he doing all of this stuff?
	And, of course, Dostoevsky, one of the great human psychologists of history, was saying that after you kill, After you kill, you're not the same person.
	And this is what I've heard in interviews and so on.
	You kill yourself when you kill the other person.
	And yet, Raskolnikov's argument is incredibly powerful, which is...
	Napoleon was a world historical figure who started his career by firing cannons full of grapeshot into a crowd that was simply rioting for or protesting for their own rights.
	So he started off as a mass murderer and he perfectly sailed up.
	He perfectly sailed up into world historical stage and the fascination, of course, that people have with world historical figures, right?
	Hegel was fascinated by it and many others.
	Nietzsche, of course, was fascinated by it.
	And so was Dostoevsky.
	Like, what is the deal? Why are these world historical figures able to do that, which is not allowed to anybody else, and become famous and successful and powerful and put on coins and stamps when they're just mass murderers?
	It's a big question, right?
	Or, as Raskolnikov says when he's talking with one of the great detectives in human history, Porfiry, he's talking to Porfiry and he says, well, so, in a siege, Was it Constantinople?
	In a siege, they fired plague-ridden bodies over the walls to kill the people inside, and those people all, the people who fired these plague-ridden bodies into the city, they got medals and pensions, right?
	We all have this question when we're a kid, don't you?
	Don't you all have this medal? Medals and pensions question, right?
	Some guy goes and kills some other guy, he goes to jail or they hang him or they shoot him.
	And yet, if you put a uniform on and some guy in another uniform orders you to go and kill 20 guys who are not threatening you directly or personally in your home or even in your country, you get a ticket-tape parade, you get pensions and medals.
	It's a big question.
	Does the costume change the moral universe?
	Can you surrender your conscience to another human being?
	Can they take on the sins that you do?
	Of course, the argument from the Christians, which I agree with, is no.
	So, Give a man a why, he can bear almost any how.
	The question is, why are you writing fiction?
	Why are you writing fiction? Well, you're writing fiction, I think, if this theory holds.
	Because otherwise we have to explain why we're so drawn to things that aren't real.
	Why did we evolve the susceptibility to enter into fictional universes obsessively?
	Like, we do this over and over. Storytelling is...
	So, I mean, I did years and years of storytelling, a sort of role-playing storytelling, like, on-the-go D&D Dungeons& Dragons with my daughter, and she absolutely loved it.
	And we would do this, like, sometimes six, seven, eight hours a week.
	And why are we so drawn to these stories?
	They must serve some evolutionary purpose, otherwise we would not have evolved this love of stories.
	So the evolutionary purpose...
	Now, you could argue that it's not about morality, it's about conformity, and I get all of that, right?
	So the conformity is...
	Do what the tribe tells you to do or disaster occurs.
	So the young women would be reading all of these stories.
	The novel coincided with the rise of female literacy and women.
	So the novel had a lot to do in the beginning of saying to women, look, you're young and beautiful and powerful now.
	You're at the height of the sexual market value.
	But if you don't choose the right guy, your life is ruined.
	And it was a way of saying don't get flush with power but use your power to choose the very best and most moral guy that you can or at least a good provider so that your children will I grew up with enough to eat and education and so on, right? So a lot of the novels, all the way from, gosh, well, Pamela was a big one, Samuel Richardson, of course, the Emily Bronte novels to some degree, the Bronte sisters novels, and...
	Jane Austen and even, I was thinking, Willem Dafoe, Daniel Dafoe, the first novelist, wrote to Moll Flanders, which was about what happens to a woman who makes bad decisions in her life.
	And Les Mis was also about some of this stuff as well.
	So seeing the horrors of, and you could see some of this in Downton Abbey, even at a sort of more modern level, You can see this in Ian Forster's novels as well.
	So if a woman makes a bad decision when she's at the height of her sexual market value, then her life becomes complete hell thereafter.
	And so it's giving women a fast forward and then allowing them to rewind.
	Art gives you the fast forward to consequences and that allows you to rewind.
	See, the conscience doesn't allow you to rewind.
	Like, if you go and strangle a guy, there's no rewinding and bringing him back to life.
	But if you read a book about how horrible it is to strangle a guy, then you fast-forward to the consequences of evil, but then you can rewind to the present and avoid that path.
	Right? When I was a kid, they had all these PSAs or commercials about, you know...
	Smoking is very glamorous, and some guy is smoking through his tracheotomy hole in his throat or...
	People in wheelchairs talking about how they shouldn't have drunk drive and so on.
	So you get to fast forward to the consequences of bad decisions like smoking and driving drunk, or just getting drunk, and then you get to rewind and alter your behavior.
	It's what dreams are for as well. Dreams are rehearsals for you to avoid self-destructive behavior, and dreams become more vivid when society as a whole counsels you to do self-destructive behavior.
	So, art is is there to instruct and to threaten and to to threaten you with unhappiness and to bribe you with happiness while giving you the chance to rewind and make a different choice the art can become like de-platforming is an art as well so when i'm de-platformed it's not so much about me it's about everyone else right like don't don't talk about what steph talked about or you'll get de-platformed as well and it's a way of people fast forwarding to being de-platformed rewinding and saying well i'm not going to do that so i won't talk about his his stuff right so This is what you're doing it for.
	It is an instructive mission.
	And this, of course, is, you know, see the Bible.
	Oh, the Bible, you know, well, it's a lot of stories if you're not Christian.
	It's a lot of stories and so on. It's like, and so?
	And so? The stories are what?
	Now, there can be art that inspires and ennobles.
	I would put some things like the Fountainhead and so on in that in particular.
	I found that very inspiring. So there is art that inspires and ennobles and gives you the courage to make better moral decisions.
	And then there is modern art, which is saying if you don't fall into a vat of radioactive spider venom and gain superpowers, you can't be moral.
	You can't be a hero. You can't whatever, right?
	If you don't come from the planet Krypton or whatever, if you're not a radioactive mutant or whatever it is, right?
	So it's a way of abstracting, alienating moral courage and saying battling evil is for everyone who's not you, like everyone who's got a superpower, everyone who's not you, right?
	If you think of sort of what it is that you're writing for, then you can have a much more powerful, in-depth approach to it.
	You are showing people the consequences of bad decisions, and in particular bad moral decisions.
	So I have a scene.
	I'll post a link to it below.
	I have a scene in The God of Atheists.
	I'm not going to give any spoilers here, but I have a scene in The God of Atheists.
	I think you can go to tgoa.com, tgoa.com, or you can go to fdrurl.com forward slash tgoa, or you can get the book.
	But there's a scene where a father owes an apology to his son, but the father's vanity is He faces this choice and his conscience is screaming at him.
	Apologize to your son. Make things right with your son.
	Make amends with your son. And you can hear his conscience and the battle that he's got.
	And his son is only vaguely aware of the titanic battle, the decision for the future that is going on in his father's mind.
	Now, the father was bullied by his own father, and his son is now one of the people asking him insistent moral questions at the age of 12 or 13.
	And he says, my son is like my father come back to life in Star Wars sheets, in Star Wars, no, the line is, yeah, my son is like my father come back to life in Star Wars pajamas.
	And that battle where he's like, I know I need to apologize, I know I need to tell the truth, I know I need to come clean to my son, And his conscience, all caps, screaming at him to do it.
	that the entire future of his life is being decided in this moment.
	And the father makes his choice.
	And the emotions, because this relationship is very important in the book as a whole, the emotions...
	That the reader experiences whether the father makes a good choice or a bad choice.
	If the father makes a good choice, we feel admiration, relief, and happiness.
	If the father makes a bad choice, we feel horror, despair, and shame in a sense because we almost feel like we should have been shouting at him to do the right thing.
	That is really important.
	There's a husband and a wife.
	The wife is demanding more resources.
	The husband works too much and ignores his wife's emotional needs because he finds it annoying that she keeps telling him to work more, even though she wants him to be emotionally available and so on.
	And because he has refused to deal with his wife's complaints in an honest and forthright manner, which doesn't mean agree or disagree or exceed to them, just say, you're annoyed at me?
	Well, I'm annoyed at you because I have these contradictory demands from you.
	There's a line in the book where it says the wife.
	The wife had collected injustice over the course of their marriage in the way that an elk collects burrs in the woods.
	And at this point in the marriage, she was far more burr than elk.
	I've always left that line.
	There's another line about a woman whose daughter is questioning her morally.
	And There's a line that says, her horror advanced towards her like a rolling skinned seal pup in an incoming tide.
	It's about as vivid a thing as I could generate.
	Whether you could do better, I hope you can, but that's about as good as I can do as far as these things do.
	And I don't want to sort of give you the little snippets and so on, but the reason why I was willing to dig so deep and take so many steps Allegorical risks at the point of being so vivid that you might cause the audience to recoil is because it is really, really important that the raw original curiosity of children be allowed to Socratic-style cross-examine society.
	Society accumulates all of these errors almost by accident, these contradictions, by convenience, as do people, right?
	And so when I said she had accumulated injustices over the course of her marriage in the way that an elk Collects burrs in the forest.
	So, you know, an elk is walking through these little burrs attached, right?
	These little hook plants they attach.
	And because they're not dealt with, it's almost accidental.
	It isn't even by conscious choice.
	It's just you're going through the woods.
	And normally, of course, burrs rub off, but she had just kept accumulating them because they'd never been dealt with.
	And there's another line where there's this guy who's a pretty bad husband.
	There's a throwaway line, but this is sort of how you can illuminate people in a little flash, right?
	There's a guy who ends up being the manager of the boy band, a pretty corrupt guy, and he hears his son with his friends harmonizing in the basement.
	And he's reading a newspaper, and I just say, he threw away the personal ads he had been perusing and went downstairs.
	And again, it's just a little illumination of a married guy who's looking at personal dating ads back in the day, right?
	So, you just do want to try and illuminate these little flashes of character.
	I've always liked it when you get little glimpses of character in a larger context.
	What was it the movie? It was the movie Pretty Woman or something like that.
	And Hector or something or other, this Hispanic guy is playing a hotel manager and he's saying to some guy, no, no, no, you have to learn how to delegate.
	Like you're getting a little flash into his daily routine as a manager.
	It's like five, ten seconds, right?
	And I've always loved this little windows into other people's lives because it makes them more real and more vivid.
	The more real and vivid you can make the world, the more real and vivid and sensual.
	I remember getting feedback from the woman who was teaching me how to be a better writer and she was saying, you know, the writing is fantastic, but It's not rooted in the senses as much as it could be.
	Like, why don't you have somebody in a red backpack cross behind, and then you get a flash of color, right?
	And it engages your senses more, which means that if you can engage people's senses more through an appeal to sense data and fleshing out the world, colorizing the world and so on, then they care more about the people, they care more about the consequences, and therefore the moral decisions that people make They're more invested in, because they're more like real people to your imagination.
	And she was great advice, and I worked to that to some degree.
	And you have to show the downside of the heroes.
	You have to show the upside of the villains, because if you make people cartoony, they're all villain or all hero, then people can't inhabit those personalities.
	This is sort of one of the criticisms.
	It's fairly valid criticism of Ayn Rand, of the characters alike.
	Fast Talk in 1920s.
	But she learned English watching 1920s Fast Talk in Gumshoe Snap in movies and so on.
	And so, yeah, that they're too pure.
	She says, oh, but they do struggle.
	And yeah, they do, but you always know which way it's going to go, right?
	So you need the good people with a bit of bad in them.
	You need the bad people with a lot of good people.
	And then you need the transitional character, which is the reader, right?
	The reader who goes one way or the other based upon the circumstances and persuasion of good versus evil.
	And so, if you give the details, because you notice this about people's lives, you notice little details about their lives, you go and sit in someone's car, Right?
	And they turn on the radio, you know what kind of music they listen to, or maybe it's talk, right?
	You know whether they've cleaned their car in a while.
	You know if there's trash in places, or whatever it is.
	Like, you know, based on what they're doing.
	Is there a little suction cup for their phone?
	Do they listen to podcasts? Is it automatically Bluetooth enabled?
	Just going into someone's, even the type of car that they have.
	Is it a vanity car?
	Is it a functional car and they don't care how they look?
	There's so much. Just looking at someone's car and getting into it will give you an enormous amount of information about people.
	And if you throw those kinds of details into what it is that you're working on, it's a way of hooking into The waking dream that art represents, the waking educational moral dream that art represents.
	So if you have a moral, like you want to, you know, what did I want in writing The God of Atheists?
	I wanted people, let the children speak, you know, let my people go and let the children speak.
	Why do we have a society where we can't handle any honest questions from kids?
	You know, if you yell at your kid to stop yelling at people and the kid says, well, you're yelling at me, it's a pretty good question.
	What's wrong with the kid asking that?
	If you hit a kid saying, don't hit kids, say, well, you're hitting me.
	That's a good question, right?
	And if you, you know, you go a couple of layers up and you say, well, you shouldn't use force to get what you want.
	It's like, well, don't the teachers get money from us by force?
	You know, that doesn't seem...
	So a society, you know, the old saying, the society that drifts further from the truth hates those who ask basic questions.
	Those basic Socratic questions, which is a childlike wonder towards the world.
	Like, okay, well, this doesn't make sense.
	Help me understand this. Help me explain this.
	Like, when I was six years old, having an argument with an NGO friend of my father's in the back of a car in Africa, and I was saying, like, well, what they should do is just have...
	Plants that run on electricity that produce electricity.
	And he's like, well, no, because you can't get more out than you put in and, you know, thermodynamics and all that.
	So yeah, that's, you know, that's a great answer to, you know, not the smartest question in the world, but I was a curious kid.
	So my question in the book was, okay, what happens if children just don't get bullied into silence?
	What happens if kids just keep asking questions?
	Is my father a good father?
	What is goodness?
	Is he good because he's my father?
	Or is he a good father if he is because he follows some thing of goodness?
	So if he says, I'm a good father, then you say, okay, great.
	So tell me what goodness is and how you conform to it.
	Then there's the basic Socratic question, right?
	What is justice? What is truth?
	What is virtue? And the parents...
	I didn't put violent parents in, right?
	I put sort of modern yuppie parents in so they wouldn't just beat the questions out of their kids.
	But that tension that goes on when kids are just asking legitimate questions about their society.
	Why are things the way they are?
	Is this the very best thing?
	Did it just happen to evolve this way?
	Were the incentives of people who put in the system good or bad?
	Does it matter? Like you inherit a system and then you say, it's the best system.
	It's like, well, Everyone inherits a system.
	What are the odds that yours is the best system in the whole world or the best system that could ever be designed by anyone?
	Even though it just kind of evolved by happenstance, that's literally like finding a cave and saying this is the best house.
	The cave just evolved.
	It wasn't designed. How could it possibly be the best?
	So the kids are just asking those questions.
	Okay, we live in a good society.
	How do we know? Tell me what goodness is and how our society conforms to it.
	So that's the novel, right?
	And the effects it has, these basic innocent questions, right?
	We say to kids, ask questions.
	There's no such thing as a dumb question.
	They're only dumb answers or whatever, right?
	So we ask kids to be curious and ask questions, think for themselves.
	But the moment that they start doing that and start tripping over our moral landmines of self-contradiction, we suddenly get really mad at them.
	But we can't really express that directly because we can't say, I'm mad at you because you're doing what I told you to do.
	And I'm mad at you because you're really trying to, you know, we say to kids, be good, be good, be good.
	And then the kids say, okay, well, but what is goodness?
	How do I know? Goodness is doing what I tell you to.
	It's like, okay, so that means if you're telling me to be good, then you must really know to find what the good is so that I can learn for myself so I don't have to just be dependent on you telling me what to do for the rest of my life.
	Good is what the democracy is.
	Good is what the majority votes for.
	I was like, well, you always told me that if the rest of the class jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge, would I do that too?
	Help me. So anyway, kids have a lot to say.
	The original curiosity of kids is one of the ways we're going to heal our societies, and I really wanted to make that case.
	So it was tough to write.
	I wrote it. It was originally a third longer.
	I got it fairly viciously cut down, and I'm thinking of reading the extended version out of The God of Atheists, but The God of Atheists is vanity.
	You get rid of God, you substitute self-reflection.
	That's the basic theme.
	I had a moral mission.
	Now, if you have a moral mission, then you care only that the moral of the story is transmitted to the audience, right?
	You only care, and this is why I say, if it's about you, if it's about ego or anything like that, you simply can't succeed.
	You will not succeed.
	Now, if you're just writing for money and, you know, you've got some murder mystery and, you know, that's fine.
	I have no problem with that. It's not like there's some big bad thing.
	But if you want to reach truly incredible heights of depth and power, heights of depth, right?
	That's my competence with analogies, right?
	But if you want to reach as wide and high and deep as humanly possible, if you want to write something that will stand the test of time, that might become a classic, you know, and why would you want to get into writing if you couldn't Try to do something that is very powerful, right?
	I mean, I'll give you an example.
	And I say this in a morally neutral way, although the morality is quite complex.
	The blueprint for the unvaccinated restrictions comes directly out of my book, Practical Anarchy and Everyday Anarchy, where I talk about social ostracism and exclusion from economic life as the way to enforce rules within society.
	De-platforming is simply denying you access to participation in society.
	You understand that what happened to me and what's happening to society is directly out of the blueprint of a book I wrote over ten years ago called Practical Anarchy.
	I'm just saying. I came up with the arguments, I came up with the examples, and so the fact that society is working so well based upon exclusion from economic and social activity is exactly a proof of my theory and why we don't need a state, right?
	So I was not expecting for the proof of my theory to manifest so vividly over the last couple of years to me, to society as a whole, but The state has proven that the state is no longer necessary because we can get so much done.
	We can get people to inject themselves with experimental gene therapies based upon some social pressure.
	So it means we don't need the state.
	The state has proven we don't need the state.
	And so I wanted to make that case, and so that's why I poured so much energy into all of that.
	I want, of course, my listeners, you, to be happy in love, to be good parents, and so on.
	So I wrote to Real Time Relationships about how to identify and work with the toxic people in your life, about how you don't have to have toxic people in your life, and how to have...
	A positive and healthy relationship with parents, with siblings, with husband, wife, kids, you name it, friends, and how not to compromise and how to interact with people in a positive and productive way.
	So something I've thought about for many years because I grew up seeing not just in my own family, but in the entire, you know, when you grow up poor, everybody around you is just making bad decisions.
	They're just making, now, whether they're poor because they're making bad decisions whether they're making bad decisions because they're poor whatever but you just see everybody up left right and center top back to front it's an n-dimensional cluster frack of human counter competence like not just incompetence but counter competence right everybody making terrible decisions and so it's actually a great training ground for making better decisions like once you've gone through the 15 i guess i was in i was in like poor and dysfunctional neighborhoods for 17 years straight until i went to go and woke up north and then I was in a tent with dysfunctional people.
	It was a little different. So across three different continents, I got to see dumb people making bad decisions.
	So that's not a bad training ground for how to make a better decision, so to speak.
	And then I wanted to be able to transfer those good decisions to other people so that you can have a way of interacting with people.
	It's called real-time relationships because the purpose is to speak honestly about your experience in the moment.
	That's the most honest thing you can do.
	If somebody annoys you, you can say, I'm not saying it's you, but I find myself annoyed in the moment that it happened after you did something.
	I'm not saying it because of, because you don't know the because.
	You could be annoyed because, like the dad in The God of Atheists, you feel that your father has come back to life and your son with Star Wars pajamas on.
	And the Star Wars pajamas thing, of course, is vivid because everybody knows Star Wars and a lot of people had those as kids, so it's a way of just cementing and making very vivid what occurs in that fleeting thought.
	So... When you're honest in the moment, you say, I feel annoyed.
	I'm not sure exactly why. I feel annoyed.
	It happened after you did this.
	I'm not saying it's because of, I don't know, but what was your thought?
	It's just a way of being honest in the moment with the limitations of not pretending omniscience.
	Well, I'm mad because you did this.
	You don't know that for sure. Getting mad is a very complicated thing.
	It could be any number of things. So exploring your feelings by being honest in the moment and being humble in how many conclusions you jump to, which is pretty obviously not many, then that's the purpose of real-time relationships, to have you have a non-volatile Honest, humble way of talking about issues in a relationship.
	I wanted to do that. It works very well for me.
	I grew up with an insane, institutionalized, violent, destructive mother.
	I saw nothing but bad relationships all around me when I was growing up.
	And I've been very happily married for 20 years.
	And it's getting happier every day.
	So hoard those kinds of insights to yourself.
	So, let me just see what your questions are, comments are, and I'm sorry, I've not seen these for a while.
	Let me just ask you, and I'm sorry to do this, I'm sorry to do this, can you please type your questions in again, because there's just, I don't want to have a big long pause of all of this, right?
	If you could put your, just copy and paste, put your questions in.
	In, please. I'd be very happy to help.
	But it's got to be a moral mission, or it's got to be a mission of depth.
	It's got to be a mission of purpose.
	Now, obviously, Dostoevsky's mission was to tell people that the end does not justify the means.
	Now, he wrote Crime and Punishment at a time when nihilism and hard leftism was beginning to arise within his culture.
	The angels versus the mammals, right?
	The mammals are those who seek to gain material advantage independent of morals.
	And they will only use morals as a weapon against other people who are moral.
	And it's Saul Alinsky stuff, right?
	You have no moral obligation, no truth obligation, no virtue obligation.
	But if lying about morality gets you what you want, then, you know, like people who say terrible things about me, they're not true.
	They probably know they're not true. Certainly never asked me to confirm.
	But they know that what I'm saying is interfering with what they want.
	So if they can lie to get me deplatformed, they will do that.
	Right? So it gets them what they want.
	There's no thou shalt not bear false witness that would inhibit them.
	And this is the media as a whole, right, these days.
	They wish to achieve a certain thing, and if they have to lie about it to achieve that certain thing, they have no more qualms about that than a lion feels like he's cheating when he's creeping up on a zebra hiding in the tall grass.
	All right. Let's see here.
	Does this moral mission apply to writing poetry as well?
	That's why I write, primarily.
	So here's what I think about poetry.
	So the question of what is poetry for?
	What is it? Faces in a crowd like wet petals on a black bough, or 20 ways of looking at a blackbird.
	Among 20 snowy mountains, the only moving thing was the eye of the blackbird.
	So here's what the purpose of poetry is for me, and I think it's pretty universal.
	So poetry gives you respect for your unconscious.
	Poetry gives you respect for your unconscious because poetry can evoke a waking dream in you when it's done well, when it's very vivid and very deep and very powerful.
	Poetry gives you respect for your unconscious because it hooks into the deep visualization capacity of your unconscious, which we go through every single night when we dream, right?
	It's such an amazing thing.
	People say, take drugs, I take sleep because I can have wild, vivid, powerful hallucinations every single night.
	that are virtual reality moral instruction chambers, right?
	I mean, it's a universe of moral instruction every single night that I dream and I gain an enormous amount of insight and power out of looking at my dreams.
	So poetry is a way of, while you're awake, evoking the unconscious vivid sense-based data and it gives you a deep sense of how powerful your unconscious is.
	Now, there are morally compressed lessons In dreams, right?
	Think of T.S. Eliot, right?
	These are the stuffed men, these are the hollow men, head pieces filled with straw, alas!
	Right? So he's saying, if you are simply full of other people's empty opinions, you're not really alive.
	Songs can do this as well.
	I mean, a song that I think is very powerful in its attack upon the false self is Asylum by Supertramp.
	Where you've got a false self.
	Oh, what a...
	Oh, I almost missed my train.
	You know, somebody who's going, oh, do you think it feels like rain?
	You know, just this empty, stupid, waste-of-life conversations, right?
	And then their true self, I do believe I'm dying.
	It's an amazing song.
	And it starts off with a childhood evocation.
	Jimmy Breen was king. His brain was always winning.
	I'm dying for a smoke.
	So there's a guy thinking about his history, his childhood, and goes into true self, false self.
	I mean, Tupatram's very much obsessed with true self, false self, right?
	I was explaining the song the other day, A Long Way Home, to my daughter, right?
	And your wife seems to think that you're part of the furniture.
	Oh, she's peculiar. She used to be so nice.
	You're the joke of the neighborhood.
	Why should you care if you're feeling good?
	You're making everyone laugh at you.
	You're the clown. You're the class clown.
	Why do you care if you actually feel good?
	People are laughing at you or with you or whatever, right?
	It's a very powerful song about the false self.
	And they do a lot of work with the false self in their lyrics, right?
	So... Guess I'll always have to be living in a fantasy.
	So... Poetry can be very, very compressed moral arguments.
	I'll give you a poem that I wrote.
	Actually, it was a series of poems that I wrote.
	I wrote a poem about winter.
	Basically, it's about how we look at the cycles of the seasons and we think that life is a circle, but it's not.
	Life is a straight line to the grave for us.
	The seasons have fooled us.
	Mother Nature fools you because the forest comes back to life, but you won't.
	For you, winter is the end.
	For nature, winter is a bounce.
	It goes back to spring. For you, winter is the end.
	So it's a way of just reminding people that we get all these cycles in our life.
	You know, night follows day, follows night, follows day, follows night, follows day.
	The seasons follow. The tide goes in, the tide goes out.
	The water evaporates, turns into clouds, falls down and evaporates.
	And there's this whole cycle of life.
	But not for you! You're gonna die!
	And no cycle of life for you.
	You are gonna die. The cycle of life involves your kids.
	You're gonna die. And it's just a way of reminding people of that.
	I also did one about, gosh, what was it now?
	About just a sense data one on the seasons.
	I probably remember how it goes roughly.
	Take shaved silence to soft hills, spread it.
	Call it winter.
	Shaved silence to soft hills, spread it.
	Like the snow, right? Call it winter.
	And that's saying that the sense data precedes the concept, right?
	I'm trying to evoke the sense data of what it's like to look at.
	Shaved silence, the soft hills.
	It's a nice alliteration and all that.
	So that's your visual.
	That's your sense data. Call it winter.
	You can call it winter afterwards, but first you have to see the thing.
	The concepts are derived from the sense data, right?
	Take shaved silence, the soft hills.
	Spread it. Call it winter.
	Take a shimmering, bubbling, green goblet.
	Spill it. Call it spring.
	Take the stained glass of a bee's wing.
	Heat it. Call it summer.
	Take a flamethrower to bare trees.
	Freeze it. Hold it.
	Call it autumn. I like the flamethrower to bare trees because when you look at it, it is like they're just on fire.
	I take a flamethrower to bare trees.
	Hold it. Call it autumn.
	So I'm saying that there's these vivid Things that we participate in, right?
	You have to spill the goblet, right?
	You've got a shimmering green goblet.
	You spill it. You have to participate in nature to call it something.
	We have to... Like, the word forest does not exist in nature.
	The word spring does not exist in nature.
	The word temperature does not exist in nature.
	An actual temperature does, but the words...
	So you have to participate.
	You have to spread shaved silence to soft hills in order to call it winter.
	You have to see it and observe it, and then you can call something.
	But the seeing is first, and the language is the participation of you in the sense data.
	Take the stained glass of a bee's wing, heat it, call it summer.
	You have to participate in the world for your concepts to make something.
	So that is a sort of vivid way of describing the process of consciousness and making sure that we remember that the language follows the sense data.
	The language is derived from the sense data.
	You've got to take the shaved silence, the soft hills, spread it, and then you can call it Winter.
	But not before. You've got to have the sense data.
	And you've got to participate in nature.
	But your concepts have to be derived from the facts in the world.
	So I think that poetry is very, very compressed and very, very powerful that way.
	Just joined the stream. Have you got any tips on writing from a marketing perspective?
	Currently drafting a small booklet to try and promote the quality and values of my small cleaning business.
	To hand to prospects after I've done free site survey of their property before I quote them.
	I feel my self-promoting writing is cringy when I read it back.
	That's a great question.
	Let me just check my time here.
	I want to make sure I've got 20 minutes.
	Okay. It's a great question.
	A great question. You're not promoting yourself.
	You're not promoting yourself.
	You do this, you are not promoting yourself.
	Please, please understand that.
	What are you doing when you're writing a marketing booklet?
	What you're doing is you're making someone else's life better.
	You're making someone else's life better.
	Do you believe that your cleaning business is the best around?
	Yes. I believe this philosophy conversation is the very best around.
	So I want to be as engaging and entertaining and insightful and useful as humanly possible because I don't want to rob the world by having people listen to something else.
	Seriously, it's not about me.
	I'm the clear glass window through which you see philosophy.
	Forget about me. Forget about the glacier.
	Forget about the glass manufacturer.
	If you can just see philosophy, forget about me.
	If you notice the glass, it's because the glassmaker did a bad job.
	So if you have the best Cleaning business around.
	Well, first of all, if you don't make it the best.
	Now, once you have the best cleaning business around, you're not promoting yourself.
	You're not trying to make money in writing.
	You're explaining to people how their lives will be better by hiring you.
	I don't use a cleaning business, but I've talked to people who have, and it's genuinely frustrating.
	You know, they missed this, they didn't notice that, they forgot to clean this, and you're constantly on the phone, or they didn't do this, or they say...
	It's just annoying. So if you have a competent, thorough cleaning business, you're going to make people's lives a whole lot better.
	You just want to fire and forget cleaning service, from what I hear, they just come in, they clean, it's all done, you don't need to double check, you don't need to complain, nothing goes missing, you know.
	So if you have the best cleaning business around, you're helping people, you're making their lives better.
	I mean, take an example, right?
	Let's say somebody has dropped $20 and you pick it up and you hand it back to them.
	Are you promoting yourself as a very honest person, blah, blah, blah?
	Okay, maybe there's a little bit of that, but you just, hey, your life's better.
	You dropped $20. I'm giving you $20 back.
	That's good, right? Are you sitting there, oh, I don't want to be self-conscious about what I'm honest and moral personally.
	Just give the guy his $20 back.
	You're just saying, hey, your life's going to be better when you hire me, man.
	Your life's going to be better. Your life is going to be better from listening to this show.
	That's my commitment. Every single time I get online, every single time I get online, your life is going to be better.
	Better from listening to what it is that I'm talking about.
	You're going to laugh. You're going to get an insight.
	You're going to get a depth. You're going to get a connection.
	You're going to get something that promotes and provokes clearer thinking, better decisions, more virtue.
	Your life is going to be better.
	So I'm not sitting here like, oh, you know, I hope that they like me and I hope I'm not too...
	Forget about that.
	Your job is to serve people and make their lives better.
	Now, of course, they'll make your life better by paying you for what you do and so on, right?
	But... You are trying to help people.
	You're trying to help people. Let's say you're a nurse.
	You come across a car crash and you're going around binding people's wounds and talking them through things and whatever it is that you can do.
	You're not self-conscious.
	Do they think I'm a good nurse? You're just there to help people.
	And if you have got yourself to the genuine state of mind and it's real, you're the best cleaning service for the price.
	Maybe there's better, but some people don't have as much money.
	You still give them great cleaning, right?
	If you have the best cleaning service, you're trying to help them.
	And if people are like, I don't want you to bother me, it's like, okay.
	I'm sorry I tried to help you.
	Generally, people like that, but I'm sorry I tried to help you.
	And that's the really fundamental reality of what you...
	You're not there trying to make money.
	You're not there trying to promote yourself because nobody cares about you.
	You don't care about me. You care about the value I can bring to you.
	My friends, my family, they care about me.
	I'm not saying you don't care about me at all.
	Like, if I was hit by a truck tomorrow, you'd be sad, but you would be sad because you wouldn't get to enjoy these shows anymore, not because there's this deep personal connection that we have.
	I don't mean to diminish... What we have.
	But you care about the value that I bring to you, which is perfectly fine.
	I care about the value that I bring to you.
	I care about donations and support of the show and so on.
	So we have mutually beneficial.
	It's great, but it's not like a love relationship.
	It's not like a close friendship or anything like that.
	So I'm just relentlessly providing.
	I'm trying to relentlessly provide as much value as humanly possible every time I get online, every time I go on the air, every time I have a conversation.
	And when people call me for call-in shows, I'm trying to say things I've never said before because generally they've listened for a while and if I'd already solved their problem with another conversation, they would be not calling me.
	Clearly something has not happened for them and philosophies have to come up with something new, which is why you keep listening, why I keep doing them.
	If I was just saying the same thing over and over, it'd drive me nuts, right?
	So forget about, oh, I'm cringy, I'm imposing on people, I'm putting too much forward.
	Imagine if you're dying in the desert, right?
	And some guy, you come across some guy and he's got an extra bottle of water and he's like, well, I don't want to impose.
	I don't want to impose my water on someone.
	No, you're like, please impose your water on me.
	If you've got a better cleaning service, do the honor that your cleaning service deserves and By making people's lives better by them hiring you.
	Right? That's, you know, if you help people with their SAT exams or whatever, or you want to get them into college, I guess that may be not the best way to make their lives better these days.
	But it's not about you. It's about you making other people's lives better.
	Now, when you look at it that way, Why would you be hesitant to make other people's lives better?
	If you can make other people's lives better, why would you hesitate about that?
	What are you, some kind of selfish guy who wants to make people's lives worse by having them go to some sub-par crappy, stealing and not cleaning cleaning service?
	No! Be generous, be nice, be helpful to people, make their lives better.
	Now, they may not know that you've got a great cleaning service, in which case, fine.
	I'll go to your neighbor. My cleaning service will clean his house and then he'll tell you what a great cleaning service I have and then you'll call me.
	But someone's got to start because I've got to show people how good I am.
	So that's really important.
	You're not trying to get something or trying to promote yourself and it's cringy and this and that and the other.
	And you can listen to the show that I just put out on freedomain.locals.com.
	I put out the show, How to Be Creative, right?
	You're making people's lives better.
	You're preventing them from having terrible experiences with cleaning services.
	So just be confident about that.
	And again, if there's stuff you can improve, then improve, right?
	Question. I spend too much time listening to you, but I can't remember much of it and struggle with implementing.
	Thoughts? Well, welcome to me in my first 20 years of philosophy.
	So no problem with that.
	That's perfectly natural, perfectly right.
	So... I mean, all you have to do is start implementing, right?
	You just have to start implementing.
	I can't tell you how to do that or what to do that.
	So if you're having trouble implementing philosophical principles in your life, like honesty and integrity, it's because there are people around you who desperately don't want you to do it.
	And so the only way you can find those people is to start doing it, right?
	That's like the baby powder in the air that shows the invisible person.
	you starting to live with integrity and honesty will quickly show the people who find that repulsive in your life.
	And then you get some exciting decisions to make.
	All right.
	You answered my question about writer's block on your Wednesday live stream.
	Just wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart.
	Keep doing your thing, brother.
	Thank you.
	I'm glad it was helpful.
	Do you think it's better to focus on the characters and tell the story through their eyes?
	I enjoy description and narrative so much so write more of it because I sometimes struggle with dialogue it doesn't matter whether you tell the story through the character's eyes or more objectively whether you're first or third person So first person is generally better for internal struggles, right?
	So if you're an addict, you want to write first person...
	If your character is an addict, you want to write first person, that would be the most helpful for an addict because they could go through the same thought processes.
	If you're talking about more social, like conflict with yourself is usually good for first person, conflict with others is usually better for third person.
	So, in The God of Atheists, I wanted to be able to plumb the depths of the parents' horror and resistance at their children's legitimate moral questions.
	Now, if it was from a first-person perspective on the part of one of the children, I wouldn't be able to get that, because you can't jump brains in the first person.
	So, as far as struggling with dialogue goes...
	Just listen to people. Like honestly, listen to people and write down, listen to people really attentively.
	I would go to coffee shops.
	I would pretend to have headphones in and pretend to be working on something on a computer when I would simply be listening to other people.
	How do they debate? And I would write down dialogue.
	When I was writing The God of Atheists where there's Tween girl conflicts.
	Friends of mine who had girls in that age group, I interviewed them.
	I sat down and I asked.
	I would spend hours. I remember being at a friend's cottage with his daughter, and he was within earshot and all of that.
	And I was just asking her, okay, how does this friend group work?
	And what's happened with this friend group?
	And what happened with this conflict?
	And how does the fight?
	And how does the conflict get resolved?
	Does it get resolved? Just ask, ask, ask, ask, ask.
	Do your research. I mean, this is all the way back to when Stephen King was first writing Carrie.
	He's like, I don't know how girls in high school talk, so his wife gave him all the information, and that's how he managed to get Carrie out, which was his first big breakout book.
	So if you're having trouble with dialogue, don't, God's sake, don't listen to movies or anything, because that's all artificial, but just go out, literally listen to how people talk.
	Go talk to strangers.
	I know it sounds kind of odd. Go talk to strangers, right?
	I mean, if you're writing a novel about an engineer, Find a retired engineer, take him out for lunch and ask him a million questions about engineering and how it works.
	You've got to do your research when it comes to people, and I think that will help.
	If you don't know how to write dialogue, it means you haven't listened to people enough and you haven't made notes about how they talk.
	Life is all about asking the right questions.
	How to come to the most important, deepest question to ask for an individual?
	Well, the most important question is, what is goodness?
	It's the one thing that makes us different from the animals.
	I find I don't have vivid dreams and my imagination is not very visual.
	I do not know why this is.
	Have you talked to anyone with a similar situation?
	Sorry if it's off topic. No.
	I mean, everybody has different levels of vividity in their imagination, for sure.
	And, you know, we've all had people, they think of something sad, they start crying.
	Other people can be at their father's funeral and not shed a tear.
	So that's just, it's just in the bell curve of that.
	There's nothing wrong with it. My prose has been complimented.
	I find words flowing off the pen or keyboard but I haven't been reading that much fiction from other authors lately.
	Is it a good idea to read lots of other fiction to get into the mindset and understand the greats or spend more time writing and redrafting?
	So read the greats.
	Most modern novels I can't stand.
	Like they're absolutely horrifying to me and I would pay good money to never read them because all it is is abuse and trauma and disaster and abuse and trauma and disaster and Marie McDonald's and The Goldfinch and like just oh my god just unbelievably horrible.
	Like people haven't Abortions with coat hangers and Margaret Atwood and the Handmaid's Tale where women are getting electrocuted and having their eyes torn out and they're no good guys.
	It's complete sadomasochistic horror fest dungeon of nightmarish hellscape.
	That's just poison.
	There's a poison for your brain.
	Absolute poison for your brain.
	So yeah, read the greats. I'm a big fan of the 18th and 19th century writers in particular, which is fantastic for that stuff.
	Here in New Zealand, have one of those insomnia nights.
	Glad I do now. I get to hang out with my favorite bunch of people.
	All right, let's see here.
	I wanted to talk about...
	Dialogue in many ways breaks up a story unnecessarily.
	Do you enjoy writing with little to no dialogue?
	Yeah, of course, if you want to do internal stuff, first person can deal with that, right?
	Oh, I also wrote an epic poem about life from the outside in that never gets to the depths and life from the inside out that never gets to any effect in the world.
	All right. We care about you, Steph.
	No, I appreciate that. I'm not saying you don't, but what I'm saying is that it's not the same as friends and family.
	I've always really disliked, and I'm sorry if this is hard for anyone, and it's not you guys, but I've always disliked the, you know, this business is a family.
	No, it's not. It's not a family.
	Unless you pay people to be your family members, the business is a business.
	And what we have is a relationship, because I don't want you to attach to me and think it's a relationship.
	I want you to take philosophy and honesty and use it to attach to the people in your life in the way that I have, so that you don't have a fictional relationship with the screen, but use philosophy to get real, in-depth, powerful relationships with actual flesh people, right?
	I'm pixels. I'm bits and bytes, right?
	So, um, just, I don't want people, I don't want to be people's pets, you know, like people have pets instead of kids.
	I don't want you to have this caring about me instead of having people to love in your own actual life.
	That would be, that would be great.
	All right. Have you ever considered making a comic?
	It's a pretty big market on Indiegogo.
	Uh, yeah, I could think about that.
	I could think about that.
	Um, what do we got here?
	I struggle talking, flirting with women, especially over text, like online dating apps.
	I overthink too much about what they might say next.
	I haven't been on a date for a long time.
	Yes, so you struggle because you're being manipulative, and I don't mean this because I'm a bad guy, but you're trying to figure out what can I say that's going to make the woman attracted to me.
	So if a woman is attracted to you, it's because you're not being who you are, and that's unsustainable.
	You have to be just completely who you are.
	Everyone else is taken, right?
	You have to be completely who you are.
	And that way, if a woman's attracted to you, you never need to fake anything again for the rest of your life.
	But if you're trying to figure out, ooh, what can I say that can make a cut?
	Then she's going to sense that manipulation, and a good woman is going to avoid you like the plague.
	And I don't mean this like you're a bad guy.
	I understand where you're coming from, for sure.
	I don't want you to beat yourself up about this.
	I'm trying to give you this, just be genuine and authentic.
	Now, being genuine and authentic will drive a lot of people away, which is good.
	Because you don't want those people in your life anyway.
	You don't want people in your life who are going to force or cause you to be someone other than who you are.
	That's a very bad thing.
	People have to love you for who you are.
	It doesn't mean you can't change and grow and all of that, right?
	But I've never had to pretend to be someone other than I am in the show.
	I've never had to pretend to be someone other than I am with my wife or my friends or my daughter or whatever it is, right?
	And the moment you're in a situation where you've got to be someone other than you are in order to gain approval, you're in a claustrophobic death spiral in the relationship and you either become yourself or get out.
	So yeah, flirting is fun, but you know, you get somebody yourself, right?
	I love writing film noir in first person.
	It turns all your prose into dialogue and you get to break all the rules.
	Oh, I love breaking the rules.
	I remember so many times when I would take classes, not so much at Humber, but other places.
	It's like, well, you got to do it this way.
	I'm like, why? Why?
	You know, there'd be no such thing as the novel, which only came about in the 18th century.
	There'd be no such thing as the novel.
	If people hadn't broken all the rules.
	Breaking all the rules is great.
	100% listen to how people talk.
	It is so key to writing natural dialogue.
	Yes. Yes.
	I emailed about calling in, but writing the email got me thinking.
	I'm really bad at grammar and organizing my writing.
	What do you recommend for slowing down and organizing thoughts?
	Voice dictation. I'm very big on it.
	I don't get any money from them, but I've recommended for years.
	Dragon, naturally speaking, they're version 15.
	You can train it. You can set up your own.
	Like when I say UPB, it types out universally preferable behavior.
	You can shortcut things, and it trains to recognize you, and you can...
	Give it your writing so it can figure out how you work.
	And you can get to like 99.8% accuracy.
	You can get to like levels of survival from COVID accuracy.
	So we're much more used.
	We're a verbal species. So I haven't written a book by typing in 15 years.
	Now, that doesn't mean I don't edit and all of that and sit down and grind through that.
	But if you are having trouble with grammar and so on, you can even set it up to automatically do your grammar for you, which obviously needs a bit of an edit.
	But if you get used to speaking your thoughts, it's really good.
	It's really good. And writing then doesn't become such a distinct Now, let's talk about editing.
	So editing is really important.
	It's really, really good. And you edit until the next...
	If your story can survive, if you cut something, you cut it.
	And if you love it too much to cut it, but it doesn't serve the story, you save it and have it in the extended version, right?
	Like the directors who have to cut scenes out, they put it in the EP. You can always put out an extended version, right?
	You can put out the short version and the long version of these things.
	You edit and you cut down until the story is as lean and muscular as you can possibly make it, until everything has what Aristotle calls the dual purpose, right?
	What is the dual purpose?
	The dual purpose, it has to both illuminate character and advance the plot.
	It illuminates character and it advances the plot.
	And these are the things that you need.
	Anything that does not illuminate character Stimulate the senses or advance the plot has got to go.
	And you edit until you simply can't stand reading it again.
	Like when it's just like, I can't read it.
	I can't read this again.
	Or if you find that you've removed something that you previously restored because you removed it in the past, like when you're down to that level of circularity, like you look back over your edit history and it's like removed, added, removed, added.
	It's like, okay, then you're done because you're in a circle.
	Don't let other people tell you what your story is about and don't let other people dilute the power and depth of what it is that you're working on.
	And that's very, very important as well.
	So the editing process is...
	I love the editing process.
	I really do. I love the inspirational writing process.
	The editing process is a lot of fun as well.
	Just tightening it, refining it, throwing in flashes of color and vivid backdrops.
	See, when I write, I see the people and I hear the words.
	I don't see the environment as much.
	So going back in later, and that's because I did a lot of plays and playwriting where you don't really see the...
	See, in playwriting, you don't really see about the environment, you know, because it's a stage, right?
	There's this... There's stage stuff that you do, but the environment is not nearly as important as the characters and the language, right?
	And so when it comes to novels, you have to flesh out the environment and putting those details in, which came out of my writing course, I think is really, really good.
	Like the saying goes, perfection is attained not when nothing more can be added, but when nothing more can be removed.
	Yeah, I think that's, you know, I mean, you don't want to be the Hobbit, the Peter Jackson version, right?
	So that's got a couple of minutes left.
	Less than five minutes. So that's my thoughts on writing.
	And perfectionism is simply fear of disapproval.
	And don't worry about that.
	There's no such thing as the perfect novel.
	There's no such standard as the perfect novel.
	There's no such standard as the perfect story.
	If you can write short stories, more power to you.
	I think that's wonderful. I've never had much luck with those at all.
	But if you know what you're writing for, and you know that your writing can benefit the world, not just in terms of entertainment, but in terms of morality, how many people have not killed because of crime and punishment?
	Literally, he's probably prevented thousands and thousands of murders with one book.
	So thousands and thousands and thousands of people are alive because Dostoevsky took a break from the gaming tables and dictated a book to his secretary.
	So if your book can save lives, if your book can make people more honest, give them more integrity, give them more courage, if your book can give them the fast forward to corruption and have them rewind and avoid it and bring integrity and joy and life to the world, you are wrong, almost immoral for keeping it from the world.
	It'd be like if you had a life-saving medicine and you're just like, well, I'm too shy to bring it out to the world.
	Well, you're just being a selfish bastard.
	People are dying because you're not bringing your medicine to the world.
	So shut up about your own ego.
	Shut up that it's about you.
	Shut up that it's about I'm afraid to sell my cleaning business.
	Go out and make the world a better place.
	Because all of the things that you value and that are built are because people wanted to go out and make the world a better place.
	They didn't sit home and gnaw at their Hamlet-style navel-gazing insecurities.
	Just go out and make the world a better place.
	Stop robbing the world with your insecurities.
	And recognize, fine, the final thing I'll say is that once you have a moral vision to your work, The paralysis and the self-doubt and the perfectionism that stops you from moving forward and getting your work out there, or the, I don't want to promote myself too much, blah, blah, blah.
	You understand that this is all just stuff that's implanted in you by bad people so that your art doesn't go out and make the world a better place, which threatens their interests.
	Evil doers are inner heads, and they're constantly trying to design what we do.
	They're constantly trying to stop us from doing good in the world.
	The evildoers desperately need us, desperately need us, to not promote virtue in the world, to not promote courage and honesty in the world.
	I mean, think of all the people I've said.
	You know, they've got abusive family members or whatever.
	I say, yeah, go talk to them. Go talk to them.
	Be honest about your history. Be honest about what's happened.
	Engage with a therapist, you know.
	Look, If there's evil parents out there who've abused their kids and who don't want to change, do you think that evil parents want me to say that?
	Of course not. It goes directly against their exploitive interests, right?
	So, recognize that the barriers against you getting your work out there in the world are almost certainly set up there by bad people to castrate virtue in your soul.
	And, yeah, sorry, you don't have that as an option.
	If you're a moral person, you don't have that as an option.
	Like, if you're a doctor, you don't have as an option that you're not going to see patients because you have a pimple.
	The deal is you see patients, and who cares about the pimple, right?
	And it's the same thing with the work that you can do to bring inspiration, beauty, virtue, and integrity to the world.
	You don't have a moral choice to withhold that based upon the insecurities implanted in you by bad actors to prevent you from...
	Interfering with their evil intent.
	So, alright. Well, thanks everyone for a wonderful...
	I really appreciate you guys dropping by.
	Thank you, of course, to Locals for a great platform.
	I hope that you guys have a wonderful afternoon and evening.
	And, of course, if you're part of the Free Domain Locals community, you can share what it is you've got.
	Get feedback. I'm sure that people would be more than interested to do it.
	I would love to do it, too, except no time.
	No time! No time this time.
	Okay, thanks, everyone. Have a great afternoon and evening.
	I will see you tonight at 7. I'm doing two shows today, doing See You Tonight 7.
	We'll be on Telegram and we'll do audio because I did promise that earlier in the week.
	I want to keep my word. All right.

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