All Episodes
Previous Next
July 9, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:49:30
THE TRUTH ABOUT TWITTER, ART AND CENSORSHIP!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good evening, good evening. I hope you're doing well, my friends.
I hope you're having a wonderful week, a wonderful evening on this, our day, the 8th of July, 2022.
Is it hot enough for you yet?
I do believe it is.
It is nice when the UV index is infinity and Irish people need to hide at least 19 feet underground in order to not burst into flames, Barbados, slave style.
So, Hey, do you remember?
Just while we're waiting here. Do you guys remember me saying that the Twitter sale wasn't going to go through?
Well, it looks like it's not going on.
At least not at the moment. It's not going on.
I think Musk has just indicated that he's cancelling the Twitter deal because I just don't think he's got...
Got enough. Let's get some information and see what's going on.
We can sort of share your thoughts about it.
So, Tesla and SpaceX CEO, nine kids now?
Did he have a set of twins with one of his executives?
Anyway, Elon Musk has withdrawn his $44 billion offer to buy Twitter.
According to a filing with the SEC, Musk offered to buy the social media platform in April.
However, his comments have since trampled ample, will he or won't he, speculation about his looming purchase.
And today we finally know for sure he won't.
Musk's lawyers alerted the firm that he would terminate the merger agreement and that would have seen Musk buy out all remaining shares and fully own the platform.
The quote is the SEC filing from Musk's attorneys.
The quote is, So he got 9.2 stake percent in Twitter.
He's got 100 million followers.
He offered $54.20 per share to acquire the rest of the firm.
And in June, Twitter's board said, yes, unanimously we will accept the deal.
Now, when the board is unanimously accepting the deal, that's really a very good thing.
Just so you know, when someone jumps at an offer you've made, it's usually because your offer is too generous.
But nonetheless, I think he just didn't want to spend a lot of time negotiating.
And so the fact that the board, which might in fact be Toast, unanimously would recommend accepting the deal is interesting that it may have been an overbid.
I think it was an overbid, but what do I know, right?
It increasingly appeared that Musk was looking to back out of the deal.
He had previously cited concerns over spam and the activity of automated bots on the platform, suggesting that Twitter was not providing requested information.
So the SEC filing, and remember, I told you it was going to be bots that were going to kill the deal.
The bots were going to kill the deal for sure.
So the SEC filing says, for nearly two months, Mr.
Musk has sought the data and information necessary to, quote, make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter's platform.
Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information.
This is from the SEC filing.
So in May, Musk said that the deal was temporarily on hold and his legal team sent a letter to Twitter's general counsel in June claiming the firm wasn't meeting his demands for data.
The letter from Musk's attorneys read, Twitter's latest offer to simply provide additional details regarding the company's own testing methodologies, whether through written materials or verbal explanations, is tantamount to refusing Mr.
Musk's data requests. So, yeah.
He asked, hey, how are you coming up with this tiny, tiny percentage of bots that you claim...
Are on the platform. And tiny, tiny percentage of fake users that are on the platform.
How are you coming up with that? And their totally non-skeevy response was, hey man, just trust us.
Smoke some of this, man.
It'll all come clear.
We've got a methodology that's too complex, too Byzantine, too Argentinian beef lard drip extract complicated for mere mortals to understand.
It is an Elysian mystery.
It is ayahuasca.
It is the core Of Scientology.
It cannot be penetrated by mere mortals.
It is, what is your favorite color?
What is the airspeed velocity of the African swallow?
Laden slash unladen.
It is too deep a mystery for the mere human mind to comprehend.
And I guess that wasn't enough.
Musk's team claimed that it was a clear legal breach of the terms of the agreement and Musk may seek to exit the deal.
In response to the news, Twitter Chairman Brett Taylor tweeted, The Twitter board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr.
Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement.
We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.
I can't believe there's a Delaware Court of Chancery.
That's like a combination of Mission Impossible and Charles Dickens.
Musk is the Dogecoin aficionado, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, so, yeah...
So his stock price offer was $54.40.
I always think $54.40 is the Canadian bet, I think, right?
So $54.40. And Twitter stock price closed down 5% to just under $37.
After hours trading, it's dropped down to about $34.
So it's a $20 per share increase, right?
Musk's deal was a $20 per share increase.
That is truly insane, by the way.
I just want to point out that is truly insane, right?
So, what do we got? So, yeah, he was paying 160% of the current share price of Twitter.
And, yeah, it's nice to know that Twitter is now, what, going to try and force him to buy the...
Well, they have to, right?
They have to force him to buy the company.
Because if they're bored...
I don't know, obviously, what happened.
I don't have any inside scoop.
But I... Been to a much smaller degree, of course, in these kinds of situations.
I was involved in the sale of a company I co-founded on more than one occasion.
And it's pretty clear to me what's happening.
It doesn't mean that I know, just my particular opinion from the outside.
So what's happening is the offer was so high that the board had to say we're going to take it.
Because if the board didn't say they were going to take it, Then the shareholders would have had the opportunity to file lawsuits against them for harming the interests of the company, for harming the interests of the shares.
Now, the Twitter board doesn't want Elon Musk to buy the company because the Twitter board, I assume, likes having the control over the discourse that I guess they just recently reversed because Alex Berenson got his Twitter account restored because apparently he said he was tweeting true information, got banned for tweeting.
He got banned for tweeting what he claims is true information, I assume there's proof, and he got reinstated.
Twitter likes being able to control the discourse, and whoever controls Twitter, I assume to some degree from the shadows, also likes being able to control the discourse.
So they had to say yes to the offer, otherwise they would have been in big trouble with the shareholders for not protecting the value of their shares.
But then they're kind of in a bind.
When someone's not giving you information, that's pretty clear, right?
If you're trying to buy a car and you say, hey man, I need to get verification that it's never been in an accident, so I need an accident report on this thing, and they just won't give it to you, that's not because it hasn't been in an accident.
We can all understand it's not particularly complicated, right?
So the board had to say yes because the offer was so high.
But then the board, after having made public claims that a very, very tiny percentage of the users were fake or spam bots or whatever, right?
They then had to verify this.
Of course, right? You make a claim without verification that is significantly, foundationally essential to the value of the company.
The claim being that only a tiny percentage of the users are fake or spam or whatever.
And my guess is 10% to 20%, but again, that's just an absolute, what we used to call WAGs, wild-ass guesses in the software industry.
Next month, a doctor with a flashlight shows you where sales projections come from.
So, Musk was like, okay, I need to see the methodology by which you calculate the tiny number of bots, right?
Tiny number of bots. And they wouldn't provide it.
Now, if they don't provide that methodology, a detailed methodology about how they came about the estimate of the number of fake users, then that's just a deal.
Of course it does. Because if you buy a company at 60% over its current stock price and then you find out...
If you find out that the number of fake accounts is like four, five, six, eight times what was estimated, then you've just paid a lot to drive down the share price of the company because the share price of Twitter is to some degree predicated on a small number of fake accounts used in spam bots.
And if you buy the company, And only after you buy the company do you find out that the company is significantly overvalued because the number of true accounts is much less.
Remember, Twitter is not in the business of facilitating user conversations.
It's not in the business of giving you a platform.
It's not in the business of sharing information.
It's not in the business of facilitating worldwide communications.
It's not in any of that business.
The sole business of Twitter The whole purpose of Twitter is to deliver you to the advertisers.
That's the sole business. That's all it is.
Top to bottom, back to front.
The whole purpose of Twitter is to deliver you to the endless cleavage advertisements on Twitter.
For the rather odd sites that have rather odd articles about once-in-a-lifetime photographs, here's more cleavage-revealing wedding dress fails anyway.
So Twitter's sole job is to deliver human beings with money to advertisers so the advertisers can get them to part with that money.
That's the whole purpose, right? Twitter is in the business.
Like television news is not in the business of delivering news to you.
That's not their business. It's not their business at all.
The sole purpose of the television news is to deliver you to the advertisers.
That's the sole business model.
It's the sole business model.
So if the whole point of Twitter, the whole business model of Twitter is to deliver you to advertisers, well, advertisers don't want bots.
They don't want spam bots. They don't want fake accounts.
They don't want all the badly spelled invitations to come and chat with you because you're some golden lotus name from Japan who's just arrived in your town and wants to chat.
Hey, where are you from?
Oh, gosh.
So, what's he going to do?
What's he going to do? What's he going to do?
Well, he's going to say, you haven't delivered what you need to deliver.
You haven't delivered it.
So then they're going to say, oh my gosh, you absolutely have to.
You made a promise.
It's like, well, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, of course.
Of course, he made a promise predicated on getting information from Twitter.
Say, hey, I really want to buy this car, but I'm going to need to see the accident history.
Hey, I really want to buy this car, but I've got to get my mechanic to take a look at it.
Oh, you can't. And you say, well, I... I really need that to buy it.
Can I have a look at that?
No. Absolutely not.
Well, then the deal's off, right?
Oh, but you promised to buy it.
It's like, yeah, but I promised. Anyway, you understand, right?
I mean, this is the whole issue.
This is the whole issue of advertising.
Advertising is a pretty wild thing.
Business model. You know the old thing, if you can't see the product, you are the product.
If you don't pay the cost, your time is the cost, you are the cost.
And online advertising is really falling.
The money that people are investing in online ads is kind of falling, right?
And I think that's pretty important.
Like just to understand the space that we all kind of work in and deal with, right?
It's really, really important to understand this.
So, I don't know.
There's all this nutty stuff that's going on.
Like online advertising is a mess at the moment.
And its revenues are falling and the spend is falling.
It's really tough. It's really tough for businesses, right?
So businesses got a kind of online news in particular, right?
Kind of got a boom in the hysteria of the Trump years and then I think they worked pretty hard, one could argue somewhat successfully, to get Trump out of office.
But then they shot themselves in the foot because they had this big growth.
Because of the anti-Trump hysteria, if they helped to get Trump out of office, then people check out the news a whole lot less.
Because they're not as terrified about incipient orange man fascism.
So then what happens is they say, oh man, we're not getting as many eyeballs, so what do you do?
Well, you either cut back a lot on your hires, or you say, well, we'll do more ads.
But the problem with doing more ads is that people...
Don't want to go to your website because it's just all ads, right?
Or a lot of browsers have the simplified view which kind of strip out the ads and just give you the text.
So it's a real death spiral.
Death spirals, when you get into these business death spirals, they're very, very hard to get out of.
And there's no way out of them without pain at all.
Like without pain. There's no way out of them without pain.
Because if your revenue is down, your viewership is down, and therefore the amount you can charge for ads goes down.
You say, well, we'll make up for that with more ads, but then your viewership goes down even more, and that's the death spiral.
And that's the death spiral.
Now, you can get your ad revenues back up, but what you have to do is cut back significantly on the amount of ads And then spend money advertising that you have fewer ads or hope that people are just going to notice.
But that's a big trough in business.
In business, this is something that an older entrepreneur explained to me pretty early on in my business career.
Cash flow is king, man.
Cash flow is king. Sometimes your money comes in a lot.
Sometimes your money comes in a little.
But cash flow is king.
And what that means is...
Your payroll is like a metronome, tick, tick, tick, tick, bi-weekly, weekly, monthly, whatever you're doing.
Your payroll is like your rent, your payroll, like all your hard fixed capital expenses, your human resource expenses, your sale, all of that is like boom, boom, boom.
It's coming out of your bank account like clockwork.
And, you know, there were times when I was starting with my business where, you know, we'd have like, I don't know, 10 employees, 12 employers, and they need their money, man.
They need their money. And we had clients who had signed a deal, but they hadn't given us the money.
And it was like, oh, you know, it takes, you know, 60 to 90 days to clear accounting, and, you know, then we'll get our check.
And it's like, 60 to 90 days?
Now, here's the thing, though.
Of course, you can't exactly go to the clients and say, you've got to pay a sooner or more.
We won't be able to keep the lights on.
That's what he used to call it. Can you keep the lights on?
Can you pay your electricity bill?
Man, you've got to give us the money earlier because you can't go to the clients because then the clients are like, whoa, whoa, you guys are that much on the razor's edge and we're committing to a very large project with you.
So, yeah, cash flow is king, man.
You've got to have the money. And so, I mean, what I had to do, along with other people, of course, but, you know, what we had to do at the top was I had to sign these jaw-droppingly large bank loan, like temporary bridge loan.
Because this is an understood problem in business, right?
And so you can get a bridge loan.
And a bridge loan is, you know, fairly high interest because it's considered to be a short amount of time, but you can't discharge it in bankruptcy, right?
Because the bank doesn't want that to happen.
So I signed pretty massive...
Loans in my name, my personal name, to get the money to bridge.
And we made it. The company is still running.
The company I co-founded is still running.
It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool.
And this is like 30 years.
30 years. And in software, that's like 3,000 years.
That's like geological time, as far as that goes.
So yeah, this online advertising stuff is a real death.
It's a death spiral right now.
And... That's why they're trying to manufacture all of these, you know, pseudo crises and pseudo, oh, there's a new strain of Omicron and, you know, all the Jan 6 hearings and all that.
A lot of that has to do with, you know, how are we going to goose people into watching?
And of course, they also got a big ad revenue boost when people were freaked out about the pandemic.
But I don't know what it is where you are.
And I don't, you know, don't even know what it is as a whole.
But my sense of things is that people are just kind of done with the pandemic.
As a whole, like, we've got to just move on.
We've got to just move on.
So, yeah, I think people are...
And I do think that people are...
I don't know, this is just my sense, right?
There's no proof of this. I do think people are going through a kind of funny phase at the moment.
You know, I was reading in Canada, they say, well, you know, here in Canada, oh, you've got to get boosted every nine months now.
And I think people are like, you know, that's not what we were sold on.
Now, things change.
I understand that. Things change.
Can't predict the future.
But when you sell someone on something, if it changes, you really should explain Why it changed, how it changed, how you got it wrong, and how you're going to make sure you don't get it wrong in the future.
You ever had one of these relationships?
Boy, I've had a few. One of these relationships where, you know, fast-talking people just like, move on, man.
Just keep moving. We've got to deal with the next problem.
We've got to deal with the next issue.
We've got to deal with the next problem and just keep you moving.
And there's no circling back.
There's no, I mean, we used to call them in the business world a post-mortem.
A post-mortem is, you know, you finish the project, And some of the projects we did were like a year, 18 months, and so on.
So you'd finish the project and some stuff had gone well, some stuff had gone badly, and you'd sit down and we would, you know, go for a weekend retreat, some nice place, and, you know, spend a couple of hours just, you know, we'd go whitewater rafting, we'd do all these kind of fun things if people wanted to come, and then we'd also sit down and say, okay, well, what went right and what went wrong?
What could we learn? How can we improve?
I do this in this show all the time.
I'm always asking people in the call-in shows, hey, man, Now that you're smoking your cigarette, was it good for you too?
Put on a little Sade and let's talk about the exquisite 90 seconds that just happened.
Wait, sorry, that's a different conversation.
Yeah, but cash flow is the thing, man.
So with these businesses, they had a lot of artificial boosts.
Now there's a lot of weariness, weariness of certain topics.
And so, well, I mean, so of course a lot of the online...
Outlets are just going to go for the alt-tech competitors.
That seems kind of inevitable. It's just going to be something that happens.
You can either...
This is the Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding thing.
Nancy Kerrigan was a great skater.
Tonya Harding was maybe not such a great skater.
And Tonya Harding, if I remember rightly, she paid someone, maybe her ex-boyfriend or her boyfriend, to...
Whack Nancy Kerrigan on the leg or something like that so she couldn't compete.
So, yeah, that's one thing you can do.
You can either get better at what you're doing or you can try and take down people who are doing better than what you're doing.
It's really sad, but I think we all know which way this stuff goes as a whole.
So, yeah, this death spiral thing, you know, the battle between advertisers.
And, you know, it's funny. It's a funny thing, you know.
Life is a bit of a circle. My mom used to complain about this a lot.
She used to complain about this.
It was one of her pet peeves, you know.
Some people, when they get older, they get their pet peeves.
Lord knows they're creeping up on me.
Outlook won't close.
But my mom would say she'd be watching TV and she'd just, ah, she'd get so frustrated at her port, you know.
Because she'd be like, it's all ads now, she would say.
You know, when I was younger, you maybe had two, three minutes of ads every 30 minutes.
Now it's like 10, 12, 14 minutes of ads every 30 minutes.
I think people are getting weary of advertising.
And people are also a little creeped out about advertising.
So, and I think they're just, I think they're tuning out of things.
So when some fast talker just says, oh, here's what I'm promising, here's what's going to happen, and then nothing of the sort happens, and they're like, well, here's what I'm promising now, here's what's going to happen next time.
And I think people are just, they're tuning out.
I think of a lot of news and information that's flowing across the web and across the television, because they're like, well, hang on, we were told this, and this, and this, with absolute certainty.
It wasn't like we think.
Absolute certainty. With absolute certainty we were told this problem was solved.
And now it's not solved.
And now there's more and more and more and more that has to be done.
And again, things can change.
But when people just keep hustling you forward, keep going forward, don't, you know, whatever we hit in the car, just drive, man, don't turn back.
People get very suspicious about that.
And it happens, you know, pretty unconsciously.
And this is how you lose credibility.
That's how you listen to Boy Who Cries Wolf.
Boy Who Cries Wolf.
The vaccines are going to solve the pandemic.
Not solved. Fourth-boosted Fauci got sick.
And not symptom-free sick, but got sick.
Sick. And no one's saying, what changed?
Well, okay, so you said this for certain was true.
Why is it not true? Was it not true because you were lied to?
Was it not true because the data was falsified?
Was it not true because you were claiming knowledge that you couldn't possibly have?
Or as one of the COVID response people said, it was a hope.
Really? It was a hope.
It wasn't a lie. It was a hope. Well, when you're told something is true, it doesn't come true.
And then people say, well, it was just a hope.
It's like, that wasn't That wasn't what was communicated.
I mean, in many...
I'm no lawyer, but I understand...
Morally, that would be called fraud.
You say, here's $5,000.
Give me the used car.
Some Impala.
You give them the $5,000.
Say, I will deliver you this car.
You don't get the car.
You say, you said you would send me this car.
Well, that was more of a hope, really.
Sell me this car that runs.
This car runs. Guaranteed.
Then you get the car that doesn't run.
You say, well, it was more of a hope that the car ran.
That would not stand up, as far as I understand it, from an amateur standpoint.
That would never stand up in any quarter floor.
I mean, that's the whole Theranos thing.
We hope it's going to be able to run 200 tests, 1,000 tests.
We hope! No, no, but you said that it did.
No, but it was a hope! Well, convicted, right?
Sonny Balwani just got convicted yesterday, I think it was, and sentencing for Elizabeth Holmes is in September, I think it is.
So, oh no, she got sentenced.
Did she get 20 years? No, no, that was Ghislaine Maxwell.
So, yeah, it's, I think people are kind of tuning out.
And so when people tune out, advertising revenue drops, you put on more ads, which causes more people to tune out, which means you have to...
That's the death spiral.
Death spirals without really firm, if not downright vindictive leadership, death spirals are just impossible to get out of.
You just end up being bored out.
And I guess that's what was close to happening with Twitter, but maybe it's a negotiating tactic.
You know, maybe, I mean, if I were Elon Musk and I was pursuing this kind of thing, what I would do is I would say, Oh no, it deals off because you're not giving me the information, right?
Now, if you are a shareholder and you're looking at a 60 plus percent premium on the share price as it stands right now, then you'd go to the board and you'd grab them by the short and scruffies, you'd haul them up against the wall and you'd say, give the man the data!
What are you doing? Give him the data that he's asking for!
Well, you know, it's complicated.
There are rituals.
There's a lot of Aztec open, beating heart, children's tears, angry gods, sacrifice rituals we've got to go through, man.
You can't just do this stuff in a moment.
We've got to consult the bots.
The bots are unionizing. The bots are organizing.
The bots have joined the Socialist League of America and they're on strike.
It's horrible. The bots kidnapped my cat.
Can't find it. So the shareholders are looking at this deal, I guarantee you, the shareholders are looking at this deal, and they're saying, wait, we just lost out on 60% value over stock, because you guys aren't revealing information about the number of bots, if that's what's happening, right? Let's say it is, hypothetically, it seems to be, but let's say.
So they're going to go to the board of Twitter, and they're going to say, for God's sakes, give Elon Musk the data!
About how many bots there are, how you came about, given the methodologies, given right the math.
It's the market. Because there's no way this is going to stabilize right now.
Because the market, if Twitter won't give the bot calculation, the percent user's bot calculation, if Twitter won't give that, now they don't have to give it to the market as a whole, they just have to give it to Elon Musk, to the Point where he's satisfied.
So if the board won't give the bot calculation to Elon Musk, the shareholders know exactly why, and the market knows exactly why, and the market will punish and pummel Twitter stock down, down, down.
So you've got this $54 a share, it's $34 right now, but it's not stabilizing.
So if you are a Twitter shareholder with half a brain, you look at it and saying, okay, give that data to Elon Musk.
He'll be close at 54 or it's going south from 34.
My, obviously, amateur opinion.
None of this is advice. Don't buy or sell anything.
I'm not an analyst. I'm not giving recommendations.
I'm just telling you sort of philosophical slash economic advice.
Analysis of the situation.
You make your own decisions. I'm not recommending anything or suggesting anything.
So, everybody knows why Twitter's not giving these calculations out.
Everybody knows. Now, the market has clear indication.
I believe that the $52 a share is an illusion.
It's a mirage. Because the only way the $52 a share can be achieved is if Twitter can prove to Elon Musk that their calculations of the number of bot accounts is accurate.
That's the only way.
The $54 is if the board can satisfy Elon Musk that their bot calculations are correct.
Now if they can't, then what does that mean?
Or if they won't, what does that mean?
To me, I don't know what it means, but I'm just saying my conclusion, my personal, subjective, outside, no inside knowledge conclusion would be, well, then the calculations are false.
That they have underrepresented or used a kind of calculation that results in a low bot count, which is not accurate.
Now, at this point, now that someone's combing back and forth over this, They probably know that it's not accurate and they're either going to confess up and take their lumps and maybe face some significant problems or what?
I don't know. If the calculations for the bot count are way too low, then the value of the company is going to significantly fall.
Again, in my amateur outside, don't do anything with what I'm saying opinion.
So this is Elon Musk pounding the price of Twitter into the ground.
He puts a very high offer in so that the board has to accept it, otherwise they'd face a massive shareholder revolt.
He puts a very high bid in.
This is why he's Elon Musk.
He puts a very high bid in, gets the shareholders all excited, gets the board cornered to have to say yes, and then says, oh yeah, by the way, I'm going to need those bot calculations.
Now, either they give him the buck calculations or they satisfy him, which nobody, I think, believed was going to happen.
I don't think, anyway. Nobody I know.
So, they either give him those buck calculations and he's satisfied and the deal closes at $54 or they don't, in which case the price craters and he gets it for, I don't know, half price or whatever, right?
So, it's pretty wild stuff.
He is a very smart businessman and patient, right?
This is the kind of stuff you kind of have to do slowly and with the great patience.
All we need is just a little patience.
All right. Enough of the Twitterverse.
What is on your mind?
My friend of friendliness?
If you have any questions or issues or comments, I would be overjoyed to hear you.
Just raise your hand. I'm staring directly at the screen without blinking.
Please, God, let me blink.
I'm happy to chat if you have any questions or issues or comments.
I saw something today.
Jordan Peterson was talking about a Bill C-11 in Canada talking about clamping down on tech censorship.
And I thought it was relevant.
It's kind of, it's basically the equivalent in Canada of taking away Section 230 immunity.
I don't know if you're familiar with this going on.
I'm not. I'm basically, I'm not really reading much on politics these days.
And so, no, and I haven't been doing politics for, oh gosh, two years or so.
So if you have some thoughts about it, please feel free to share, but I haven't delved into it.
No, I'm just concerned because, you know, I don't want them yeeting everybody off, even the alternative platforms.
Right. Is there anything else that you wanted to mention about that?
I mean, of course, that's a concern, but that just means there will be alternative, alternative platforms.
You know, one of the things I've seen this in front of mind, like the only thing that I really miss about Twitter or being on Twitter was engaging with people who significantly disagreed with me.
Really, like really strongly disagreed with me.
That was a wonderful, like I had a debate last night.
With a couple, the woman was outraged at my stand on Roe v.
Wade and was pretty angry and was not a big fan, so we had a nice, long, juicy debate.
And that, to me, is great.
That's civilization. That's having a reasonable discussion.
And, you know, one of the things that's less exciting about the alt-tech platforms, you know, I like the alt-tech platforms.
I'm glad that they're around. But one of the things that's slightly less exciting for me, it could be different for everyone, slightly less exciting is it's, you know...
People who agree with you. And it's fine to have people who agree with you.
I think it's a fine thing. You've got to have some like-minded people around in your tribe of thought.
So it is good to have people around who agree with you, but it doesn't do quite as much to do that.
You know, hands across the water, heal things in society, make things better, stuff that is...
Important in the world, very important in the world that we engage with people who disagree with us.
That's why, you know, like when I do these shows, I'm always saying, you know, anybody's got any criticisms or, you know, something I'm doing that bothers you or whatever, or something you think I'm wrong about.
You know, this woman, and, you know, I'm very glad that she did.
She was outraged at my position and was, you know, wanted to set me straight.
And, you know, we had a very vigorous and sometimes quite contentious debate.
For an hour 40 minutes or hour 45 or something like that, which is great.
I mean, that's what you want.
That's civilized. To have these kinds of strong vocal disagreements.
And I remember engaging with people from India on Twitter who were outraged at the history of colonialism.
I'm not a fan of colonialism at all.
It was horrible for everyone involved.
But, you know, if the British think...
Sorry, if there were certain people who thought, well...
England is only rich because it stole everything from India and it's like, you know, India is a pretty wild, wonderful country, but, you know, they do kill, I think it was about 15 million females a year because of infanticide based upon whether you have a boy or a girl.
And, you know, what the British did in terms of building railways 150 years ago, yeah, that's important.
It really is. Is it as important as currently killing people?
That many girls every year?
I would say probably not.
Because it's very easy to get angry at, you know, obviously to get angry at white people, to get angry at the past, get angry at all this kind of stuff, right?
And that's a lot easier than trying to fix significant cultural issues, and in this case, murderous issues in your own country.
So, I mean, this is one of about a million or a zillion arguments that I had with people, and sometimes...
I would always emerge with better information and sometimes I would prevail and sometimes I would be educated and I quote lose, which you can't really lose a debate because you get better informed if you get better information.
That's a good thing, right? So sometimes in the traditional sense I would win the debate, sometimes I would lose the debate.
But that was really great to engage.
That's healing stuff in society, to be able to engage with people who really disagree with you, who may really hate you.
To engage with them, to listen to them, to absorb what they have to say, to roll with them, to wrestle with them is great.
After an hour and a half of pretty ferocious and sometimes inflammatory debating, the woman and I came to some common ground and common agreement.
That's good stuff. That's what you want.
That's civilization.
In a nutshell, civilization is words instead of swords.
So the problem with de-platforming, as I've always sort of said, the problem with de-platforming is that it promotes violence because, you know, we only have two ways of resolving our disputes, reason or coercion.
And so I guess if you end up with people getting yeeted off Mainstream tech, okay, it just turns it into more of an echo chamber.
And then those people will go to, you know, what they call the alt-tech sites or whatever.
And of course the original main tech sites were alt-tech compared to newsprint and media, news radio, news TV and so on.
So what used to be alt-tech has now become mainstream.
And of course, people went to the alt-tech because they couldn't get the original alt-tech like Twitter, Facebook, and I guess back in the day, MySpace and so on.
They went to those companies because they couldn't get their views heard or said or easily done on mainstream media, which was real gatekeepers and bottlenecks of information.
And society flourished thereby.
Society flourished thereby with more and better arguments from more and better skilled people.
You know, you really learn something about the world and yourself and the truth when you collide with people who massively disagree with you and are very passionate and learned in their disagreement.
You really do learn.
I've had so many debates on this show and I've had experts on the show who I significantly disagree with.
Try to find common ground.
And if you can't find common ground, at least you stop wasting your time trying to debate with people who won't ever listen.
So when the conversation is separated, right?
When the common square, the common ground, the city center, the town square, when that's all fenced off, And no one can talk to each other and people only talk to people who agree with them?
Society does very badly out of that.
Because you get not a big hubbub of conversation, you get silos.
You get separation.
And you get escalation, which is really tragic.
I mean, I've always sort of said when free speech is attacked in And, you know, when free speech gets attacked, it's usually through violence or threats thereof, and usually the mainstream media.
If it's people the mainstream media don't like, the mainstream media cheers on those escalations of violence and threats, and then people wonder why there's outbursts of violence and threats.
It's like, well, maybe stop cheering on this stuff.
Maybe stop cheering on people who SWAT and docks and death threats and bomb threats.
Maybe stop cheering those people on.
And society will try and stay peaceful.
So, yeah, if people get kicked off all tech, they'll go underground, they'll go VPN, they'll go, I don't know what the dark web is, but apparently you can go there and do stuff.
So, yeah, they'll just do that.
And then people will be further segmented and people will end up only agreeing, only being around people who agree with them and never challenge them and never question them.
And what that does is it just breeds narcissism and vanity and boring, you know, boring stuff.
Boring stuff. You know, like the websites where it's like, Joe Biden bad, Trump good.
It's like, okay, I can understand that.
I can understand those arguments.
And then you look at other, you know, more mainstream sites where it's like, Biden great, Trump bad.
And it's like, well, you need to have a cross-pollination of these arguments.
So the purpose...
It's like a mirror, right?
If the mirror is whole, you can see yourself reflected accurately in the mirror.
If you do one of these Gene Hackman, Pool Q, Superman crushes down, you smash the mirror in the middle, it all fragments.
You can't see much. Everything's fragmented.
Half the pieces are missing. You can't get the full picture.
And the anti-free speech stuff is like taking a javelin and hurling it at a mirror.
Except you get way more than seven years of bad luck.
So society is fragmented.
People are isolated.
There's not a common square where people can come to vociferously and strenuously and sometimes in a shouty way try to resolve their differences.
I have benefited enormously from criticisms of colonialism.
Fantastic. Great stuff.
But... That's all falling apart.
Now, the only people who are left on the mainstream platforms, generally, are those who kind of agree with each other.
And that's a desperate shame.
It's not a desperate shame just because there's not as good a debate.
I mean, that's sort of an abstract thing, but it's a desperate shame because when you're not exposed to ideas...
Like, I was talking to the woman I was debating with last night.
She said, well, I believe X. And I said, okay, well, have you read the opposite?
Like, whenever I have a belief that seems to...
Go with my worldview and I have innate emotional sympathy for, you know, one of the first things I do is look up rebuttals and try and read the stuff that goes against it.
You know, it can be a little jarring, can be a little like sandpaper on the soul, but it's pretty important to be able to do that because otherwise you're just getting one side of the picture and then you think you've got the whole thing and, you know.
So, yeah, this censorship stuff is designed, you understand, it's designed to escalate aggression.
Because people get into these silos, they get into these echo chambers, and then anyone who disagrees with them is like, whoa, that's weird!
It's like, yeah, you know what?
I don't live in India. I don't live in India.
I've dated a woman from India for a long time, but I don't live in India.
I don't know the general thoughts that the Indians have about Western colonialism.
Or in Africa, the King Leopold stuff and so on.
And it's really important to listen to that stuff.
I think it is really important and I would really enjoy engaging with it.
The more that conversation is suppressed, or you're too offensive, you've got to leave.
You're too upsetting, you've got to leave.
Well, that just means that then people could just get angrier and angrier and angrier without any counter facts disrupting the escalation.
Have you ever seen this? I'm sure you've seen this at least once in your life, where you see someone talking themselves into getting enraged.
Have you ever seen that? You can see them talking to themselves.
You stabbed me in the back.
You're a backstabber. You're just bashing women.
They're using this language that escalates and escalates, right?
And they're just talking themselves into a frenzy.
But that's a silo.
That's a silo. So, you know, when the gas prices are going up, And people say, well, the president has no control over the gas prices.
And then the gas prices go down.
Those same people say, well, Joe Biden has acted to reduce gas prices.
And say, well, didn't you just, like, didn't you say a little earlier that the president doesn't have any control over gas prices?
Like, help me understand that, right?
Well, that's important. It's important.
That's how you combat. You combat ideology and extremism by having as robust and open a conversation as you can possibly have.
So when people are shutting down free speech, they're driving extremism.
Extremism is when the escalation in your beliefs, the absolutism of your beliefs are not challenged by robust knowledge from the opposite perspective.
And so it's designed to provoke kind of extremism.
It's designed to provoke a kind of desperation which can lead to violence and then there's further crackdowns.
It's really an elegant plot.
I'm not saying it's all conscious, but that certainly is the way that it shakes out.
So, yeah, thank you very much for your question, your comment.
It was really, very interesting. All right.
Who else has something for me to talk about?
I wish to listen to you, my friends.
Anybody here from India want to rail with me about colonialism?
Yeah, so I had a real quick question here because...
A few weeks ago, you talked about the movie that you saw, The Northman.
You talked about how you wanted to walk her, I think, through 20 minutes into it.
I did see it. I finished the whole thing.
My general question was, as I'm getting older, I start to kind of...
What you said did kind of speak to me.
When you get older, I start to wonder...
When you eat your diet like you are what you eat, and when you're consuming media like you are what you consume.
How do you parse that when you're not only writing your material for your novels and things like that, and when you're trying to think about what to consume for yourself?
Can you just break out the question a little bit more?
It sounds really tantalizing, but I want to make sure I get the scope of what you're saying.
Yeah, so I guess the whole kind of scope of the question that I'm asking is because as long as I've been like watching film and really kind of getting into it, I'm 31.
So I've been watching film since I'm really liking it, like actually trying to dissect it since I've been about, I don't know, 18 or something like that.
And growing up, I would watch a lot of these documentaries that talked about breaking down social barriers, especially when it comes to sex.
For example, you've heard of John Waters, the director...
Oh, the guy with the little mustache, right?
Hairspray, stuff like that. He said something to the effect of...
I'm trying to think of how he put it, but he said something to the effect of, like, well...
I think one of the best things that we could hope for going forward in Hollywood as far as pushing the envelope is to eventually show, would be for Hollywood to show penetration, sexual penetration.
And even as a young kid, like, you know, very...
Like, you know, I'm like, well, wait, what?
Like, why the hell is that important?
And I guess my broader scope to my question is, like, I understand that these are things that do happen in life.
You know, sex, violence, all these things are important.
You know, the Bible's very violent.
You know, the violent has a lot of adult material in it.
But I guess my question is, is like...
You know, maybe you've even dealt with this in other topics, but just more broadly speaking, like, how do you think, like, I mean, am I being somebody, when I'm trying to consume my media, am I just being too I don't know, am I being too prudish?
Or like, I mean, how does one go about just trying to dissect and figure out which media that they want to consume?
Because I guess, more broadly speaking, I'm also concerned, and I think most people should be too, is like, how could this possibly be affecting me mentally?
How could this be affecting me spiritually and things of that nature?
I mean, does that make sense? Or is that clear as mud?
It's somewhat clear and somewhat not clear.
So again, what you're doing is great.
Just keep painting and I'll get the picture very soon.
Just take one more run if you can.
Okay. So, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry if I'm nervous.
I've been listening to you. No, no.
You're doing great. I'm really enjoying it.
Just keep going. So, well, and I mean, like I said, I'm getting older.
I mean, I've watched a lot of television that, I mean, kind of looking back on it, I'm like, like television movies and things like that.
And I'm not saying it's necessarily, legally speaking, pornographic or anything else like that.
But, you know, you kind of look back on it and it's like...
Like, why the hell did I watch that?
You know, there's kind of an ick factor there.
But then on the other hand, I do know for a fact that those things, you know, violence, sex, you know, even really, like, very hard things, child rape, molestation, things like that, these are things that happen in life and have to be dealt with gingerly.
And... I just, I mean, I think in today's culture, I mean, I am a religious person.
I think in today's more secularized culture, I don't think that there's really any lines that are being drawn there.
There's just kind of an assumption that, like, I'm trying to think of how to put this, but basically just that all bets are off.
And essentially, if something doesn't make you completely throw up, there's nothing wrong with it.
I mean, does that make sense?
Yes. Yes. No, I understand.
I don't think I've ever seen a John Waters film, but I think he's a gay man, and I think he's described one of his movies, Pink Flamingos, as a revolt against good taste.
I believe that's correct, and I think it's actually one of AFI's 100 greatest movies of all time, which is just bizarre to me, because I haven't seen it, but...
I mean, I've seen a review on it, and I couldn't even finish the review.
I'm like, it was that bad.
Well, I, you know, I look at the guy.
I've seen pictures of him, of course, off and on over the years.
I just look at the guy, and, you know, one of the great...
There's an old Steve Martin thing I've mentioned before.
I remember listening to it when I was young, and it's become more important as I get older.
Where he says getting older is just all about shutting doors.
You know, like, I don't do that anymore.
You know, like, I remember when I turned 30, I said to myself, I'm never helping anyone move.
You know, when you're 20 and you have a friend, come over with pizza and beer and help you move or whatever, right?
And it's like, okay, that's fine, right?
And, you know, when I was over 30, it's like, I don't go pick people up from the airport anymore.
Just take a damn cab. What are you, broke?
And if you're going to move, hire some movers.
Don't expect free labor from people.
Like, you just close doors, right?
And he said, you know, getting older is just a series of, close the doors.
And somebody says, hey, let's go camping.
And they're like, I'm sorry, we're closed.
It's like, you know, and that's the same thing too.
I'm not speaking. I'm not sleeping on uneven ground with a mosquito in the tent, water beads on the top of the paper-thin tent walls, with a tree root half up my ass throughout the night.
I'm just not going to do it. I'm not eating food half covered in ash already.
From a fire. I'll have a civilized barbecue with gas.
Thank you very much. There's just things that you don't do as much anymore.
I remember many years ago, a friend of mine and I, we went down to New York.
And it was like the five boroughs.
It wasn't a bike race, but they closed down the five boroughs and you could take your bike and bike all the way through New York.
Which was great fun.
I really, really enjoyed it. It was great to see New York.
On a bike. It was really cool.
And my friend said, you know, let's stay in a hostel.
Now, I'd never stayed in a hostel before because I was very young.
And I said, okay.
You know, he was more of a traveler than I was back in the day.
So we went down. Have you ever stayed in a hostel?
Have you ever done that?
Sorry, that's a real question in case you're asking.
Oh, I can't say I have.
No, okay. Well, don't.
Well, don't. Because a hostel is basically just a whole series of bunk beds and everyone comes crashing in, half drunk, they smoke weed, it's just a godforsaken sleepless night.
And I remember waking up with my friend, half waking up, you know, when you've just had a bad sleep and you just have a half hour, an hour of crashing before you wake up.
You just kind of wake up groggy and annoyed and tired.
And I just remember I turned to my friend and said, oh, man.
I can see why they call it a hostel.
I'm feeling pretty hostile right now.
And I never did it again.
I did do, you know, sleeping on the beach.
I toured Guatemala, Belize, Mexico with a friend.
And it was fine, you know, like eight bucks a night.
You sleep on some, you know, moldy, half-rat-infested...
It's fine, you know, your 20s and...
I remember when I passed a certain age, it's like, that's it for roommates!
Done and does it.
I don't do roommates anymore. Sorry, we're closed.
I will try and find...
And I didn't have bad experiences with roommates.
I think they were fine. But at some point, you've got to move on to the next thing.
So, just a whole bunch of closing doors.
So, the whole point of that, rather lengthy aside, was I looked at a picture of John Waters, and I looked at the movie poster for Pink Flamingo, And I remember saying to myself, well, nope.
Sorry, we're closed.
Like, just not going to do it.
Just not going to do it. You know, like if there's some new mob movie, some new mafia movie, it's like, nope, not going to do it.
Some new female superhero empowerment movie, nope, not going to do it.
Some Marvel kick-bang nonsense of visual stimulation and no humanity or soul, no intelligence, no wisdom, no philosophy, no...
Questions, just a whole bunch of CGI and people doing impossible things for impossible reasons that couldn't possibly matter in any way to your life.
Like, nope! We're closed.
Now, I will occasionally dip into a movie that I think would be good to review for this show, but no.
Like, why would you want to show intercourse in a movie?
Why would you want to show penetration in a movie?
Because it's the argument of excrement, right?
Like you could do a shot from underneath a toilet bowl at somebody pooping, and it would look like they were pooping on your face, right?
You could do that. Technically, it would be possible.
Say, well, it's a real lived human experience.
People do defecate every day, and just including it.
I remember seeing a movie.
I was a big fan of Sting when I was younger before his...
Malevolent, to me at least, narcissistic personality, overwhelmed.
Didn't you like it back in the day when you just didn't know anything about celebrities and their stupid opinions about ridiculous things?
He's about as good a philosopher as I am at singing Roxanne when he was 20.
But I used to pick up just about everything Sting did, like his little additions to soundtracks, to movies, and he contributed a couple of older songs.
To a movie, Leaving Las Vegas with Nick Cage and Elizabeth Shue, I think it was, and Julian Sands, who I still liked, although it was a long way from Room with a View.
And so I was watching that movie and in the movie, I remember this very vividly, Elizabeth Shue pees and then wipes herself and gets up while she's talking.
Now, that's interesting because there is that kind of casual kind of intimacy sometimes in life, not necessarily with peeing, but whatever it is, right?
And so I remember that quite vividly, but why would you want to show penetration?
Ah, well, it's a human experience that happens.
Yes, it is a human experience that happens, as is defecating, as is whatever, right?
But what artistic significance does it have?
And it's prurient.
So prurient to me is not necessarily prudish.
Prurient is when I remember when I was very young watching a movie with Michael Caine.
It was called Alfred or no, not Alfred.
Gosh, it was not Alfred was the guy who played.
What was it? Alfie.
Alfie, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Yeah, Alfred was the, I guess, the butler he played in Batman.
So Alfie, right? And in Alfie, there was simulated sexual intercourse, right?
And I just, I still remember, this is like, I don't know, 40 years plus later, but I still remember he's like interested in some woman and he says, what's your number, love?
And she says, just look me up in the phone book.
Oh, what's your last name?
Smith. That's kind of cute, right?
As they say, more chins than a Chinese phone book.
So, The problem with showing sexual intercourse is it takes people out of the story.
Because we're hardwired to...
When we see sexual intercourse, it takes us out of the story and puts us into reproductive mode, right?
Because it's a turn-on for a lot of people and so on and so.
To me, if you were to show sexual...
I skipped those scenes and I'm completely bored with them.
I have no interest whatsoever.
I don't care how attractive the people are.
But if they're kissing and they're falling into bed, I just fast forward fast.
Because I don't care. I don't care.
Yeah, people have sex.
Is that story worthy? No, it's not.
It's not. It's absolutely uninteresting.
Because it distracts you from the story.
Which is why it used to be off-screen so you could focus on the story.
Now, I think that sexuality can be used for comic relief, but then it's not designed to be a turn-on.
It's actually exciting, right? It's just there for comic relief.
It can be funny. So when he says, if John Waters said this, you know, you've got to show full penetration.
You know, like what was that? I remember in, oh gosh, when I lived in Montreal, all these things always seem to happen in Montreal.
I went to go and see what was the Bob Guccione's from Penthouse.
He funded a movie called Caligula, which had some fairly explicit sex in it.
And I don't, you know, it just takes you right out of the story.
Was it Malcolm McDowell?
Anyway, it just takes you right out of the story and then you're distracted.
From the story, from the character.
And there's nothing particularly individual about having sex.
So when you write a character, what you want to do, I think, I think very strongly about this, so I'm going to put this as more than just my opinion.
But what you want to do is show actions that highlight The character, right?
So everything that happens in a story has to do two things.
It has to illuminate character and advance the plot.
And if you can do the two things together, that's much more efficient.
That's so much the better.
So the actions have to be specific to the character's personality so that you care about the person more than You would sometimes even care about the people in your life.
I said this the other day that when I'm writing a character deep, and I did my very first in my new book, The Future, I do a significant proportion of the book from the first-person perspective, which I've never done before.
Not, he did, he said, they did, they said, but I said, I think, I feel.
It's an incredible thing to do as a literary device because you can Say what the person is saying and then you can delve into what they're actually thinking and you can weave in between their words, their actions, their inner thoughts in an amazing way and because it's an omniscient author and you can have an unreliable narrator like a guy who lies but as an omniscient author you can get more truth out of your characters than you can often out of the people in your life because your characters will never lie to you when you're saying I think this If the character says,
well, I had this image, I thought this, I remembered this, they're not lying to you.
Now, if it's a character who's reporting on something to someone else, well, I did this, I said that, I had this dream, I thought of that, well, they could be lying.
Kaiser Soce style, right?
But when you are actually the writer dipping in and weaving in and out, like there's, to me, some of the most amazing stuff I've done is the description of Wendy and the introduction of Wendy, the character of a very nihilistic character, A negative woman, but with a certain amount of raw charisma and a very high sex drive, which these things are often...
They often coincide.
The introduction of Wendy in my novel Almost, which you can get for free at almostnovel.com, was very powerful for me, and it was the deepest I've gone into the female psyche.
And I know that she's telling me the truth, so to speak, because she can't lie to the author.
The character can't lie to the author.
And because the character can't lie to the author, the character can't lie...
To the reader. So you have to show something that is particular to the personality and advances the story.
Particular to the personality.
Now, is having sex particular to the personality?
No, it's not. Lots of people have sex lots of times.
Is defecating, is eating central to the character?
No, because we all do it.
Anything that we all do is not specific to a character and therefore should not be focused on In the book.
Now, if the character eats in a particular kind of way, then maybe that could be done.
But generally, it's better done in the movie than in the book.
Because in the book, there's no background.
Like in a novel, there's no background because you can't do more than one thing at a time.
In a movie, you can have something going on in the foreground, you can have something going on in the background.
In the movie you have the character on the left talking to the character on the right and you can see the character on the right's reaction in real time without interruption.
But you can't do that in a book.
You can't do that in a novel.
A novel is like a laser.
It burns deeply but can only point to one thing at a time.
A movie is more like moonlight.
It can illuminate a whole bunch of things and it's much more complex.
So you have to get the audience to believe that the people are real, which is where the meaning comes from and the power comes from, the humanity comes from.
You have to show things that only that character would be doing and only for the personality of that character.
Intercourse, penis and vagina, that's not particular to a character.
And you can say, ah, yes, but it's how the character has sex.
It's aggressive, it's whatever, right?
Okay. Are there ways to show the character's aggression without distracting people with sexual stimuli to the point where the hormones kick in and their rational faculties shut down?
Nudity, sexuality is always manipulative in movies, always manipulative in movies, and usually so in novels.
Because, you know, the old joke about men that the blood can only go to one place at once.
So the reason that sexuality is introduced is for prurient reasons, which means to distract you from a deficiency in the story by turning you on.
I'm going to give you an example of what I'm talking about because, you know, all this theory is one thing, but let's talk about something more particular.
So this is a scene From my new novel.
I'm not going to give you any introduction.
I guess you can figure out for yourself whether this is a good guy or a bad guy.
All right. Let me just find it here.
So this is the first person.
This is from a fair way through the book.
It's not a spoiler, I think.
And this is a father ruminating on memories about his son.
And he says... I was at this petting zoo when my eldest son, who was inexplicably obsessed with ducks, his face lit up when he saw two of the foot-sized white birds in an enclosure next to some African cow with a tumor for a neck, and he ran forwards to the gate, waving his arms like a conductor windmilling at the edge of a cliff, then wrestling with some vaguely complicated latch.
And he turned to me with a contemptible, agonized, begging expression.
I can still feel the wild, cold rage, even now.
Because he loved the ducks.
He cared about the ducks.
But he only regretfully needed me to open the latch, swing the gate, and give him access to that which he treasured.
I was only a means to his end.
His end was never me.
His love was never for me.
And if he could have opened that latch himself, he would have poured his heart into those stupid birds and forgotten me entirely.
And what sort of boy wants to pick up and caress fluffy little birds?
I made a mistake that day, which I worried about for over a week.
I did not hit him.
I did, at other times.
Many times. I felt I wanted to drive the softness out of him like hammering a nail can push wood out from the bottom of a plank.
But my cold calculations led me to public error that day.
I watched as my son cooed over and petted the ducks.
I did not enter the enclosure.
I really liked my shoes.
They were a rare gift from me to me.
Jake was picking up tiny leaves and plants, trying to feed them to the ducks, which showed little interest.
We've got food, you know, said a bored, blonde teenage girl, scrolling through her phone, surely against protocol.
Coins are two dollars, three for five.
She pointed at a sign which said exactly the same thing, which irritated me even more.
Jake begged me for a cone.
Once more, I was just a doorway he grabbed through to get what he wanted.
I was a wallet and a driver, an unappreciated builder of shelter and savings.
I bought him a cone.
He asked for three, wanting me to take one, but it was just for show.
He didn't want me in there with his precious ducks.
I turned my genial charm to the girl sitting and scrolling endlessly as if she could somehow get to the bottom of the intranet.
"'You work here long?' I asked.
She took a moment to answer, to indicate her unwillingness and to put me in the category of dads who awkwardly flirt with teenage girls.
"'Oh, yeah,' she said in her nasal voice.
She wasn't exactly pretty, but had a kind of rural meatiness that I supposed could be attractive if you had a barn to raise.
"'Do you like working here?' I asked.
She shrugged."'It's okay.' She thought of something, then added,"'I like animals.'"'Not too busy,' I said in a pleasant voice.
"'Gonna rain.'"'I'm not one for checking the weather.' Or the traffic drives my wife crazy, I added, mentioning my wife to show that I was not flirting with her.
She leaned forward and said to my son, Don't let them jump up on you!
Turning to me, she added, We got a lawsuit.
He's good with the animals, I said.
She nodded indifferently, her hand creeping to her phone like a stalking spider.
I nodded towards my son.
He loves animals.
I knew she was bored.
I intended to be boring.
But I also knew that she was supposed to keep the customers happy.
I said, Has anyone ever been cruel to the animals?
She sighed. Some of the kids can be rough, but your boy is an angel.
He is. He'd love to work here.
She sniggered. Maybe once he figures out the fence...
I nodded. He wants a little time off from me, so I'm going to go and get some lunch.
I have some calls.
You're not supposed to leave him here unattended.
Again, she pointed to a sign that said exactly the same thing.
I leaned forward.
But I will. She shivered slightly.
You can't. You're not supposed to.
But I will.
She blinked at me.
Oh, this was always a moment I loved.
When the little verbal nonsense that people spout to try and keep a conversation on a familiar track, when they realize that those little tricks don't work with me, and they are off the tracks in the wilderness where they might actually have to think for themselves for a moment to evaluate risk and reward.
It's like you go to pet a dog and the dog growls and corners you.
You get to live intensely for a moment.
Charisma is a kind of danger.
I turned to walk away.
The girl said, I'll have to call security.
I laughed. They turned around.
You got a crack guard on duty here?
And what will he say?
When I tell him that you made fun of my son.
You did, I said as her eyes widened.
You mocked him for having trouble with the latch.
And you spent almost your entire time here scrolling through your phone.
There's no sign for that here.
But I'm pretty sure that's not allowed.
And you've also complained about the children who come here that they are cruel to the animals.
Not a good look. Not very good for the position.
I lifted my phone.
Should I leave a review?
What is your name?
Her eyes refused to fix on mine and darted around, as people always did, looking for rescue from the results of their own crappy behavior.
I'll get in trouble if you leave him.
Her voice trailed off.
And my estimation of her rose a little.
The usual girly trick of appealing to a man's protective nature faded in her throat, because I obviously had no trouble making her uncomfortable.
But she earned the behavior.
I was just paying her.
I stared at her, and slowly she began to truly pay.
God, it was good to help people grow!
What do I say?
she whined. That's kind of an eternal question, I replied softly, and I'd better not get paged about an upset child.
Her eyes narrowed, and she nodded slightly.
Oh, she got it.
I went and had a leisurely lunch at the park's low-rent outdoor café, gnawing on what was advertised as a gator burger and feeding most of it to the roaming peacocks.
I went and walked the boardwalks in some nearby woods, made a few calls.
I eventually made my way back to the petting zoo around closing time.
The girl was quite hysterical, and a pleasing number of cones were missing.
And my son was extraordinarily agitated, though he hid it well.
He made it to the car before bursting into wailing tears.
"'You ignore me, I ignore you,' I said before turning on some half-deafening thrash metal on the radio." So, I mean, this is a sadist, right?
This is a sadist and one of the worst characters I've ever written.
Frankly, it was not easy digging deep for that sort of stuff.
Now, if this character had been having sex or defecating or whatever, you would need to show actions specific to that character's personality to illuminate the character and this advances the plot.
So, when people say we need to show the most base biological functions occurring They are reducing humanity to flesh.
There's no personality.
That's just like the penis-piston-vagina combo.
You know, we're fluid.
We're blood. We're semen.
We're skin. We're not personalities in a sense.
We're not souls. We're not deep.
It hollows out. It shallows out the world.
And I try to avoid art that hollows out.
People hollows out things.
Because it leaves you kind of thin and stretched, as they used to say, as I think Bilbo says in Lord of the Rings, that the ring makes you feel thin and stretched, like butter scraped over too much toast.
So, I try to focus on art that deepens and enriches me, in both positive and negative ways.
I've written some really good characters, and in this character, I've sort of written my ideal person, an ideal, my sort of John Galt, so to speak.
And I've written the antagonist, right?
The evil person.
But the evil has to have a depth as well.
And, you know, I mean, there's lots of things I like about this scene.
One of the things I like about this scene is...
All of his cruelty comes out of a deep wound.
All of his cruelty comes out of a deep wound.
There's always a time in parenting when your kids seem to like something more than you.
Of course! I mean, it's natural, right?
And you take those little stings and you extrapolate them to a psychotic level and you get sort of a scene like this.
He's hurt because his son rushes to the ducks much more enthusiastically Then he runs to his father.
And his father, being petty and vicious, takes that personally.
And then, like, the father, it's really annoying because the father misses the point.
The father's missing the point is a bit of a theme of my literature.
But his, let me just get the bit here.
Oh yeah, he won't go into the enclosure because he likes his shoes.
He said they were a rare gift from me to me.
So he won't go in and play with his son because he likes his shoes.
This is, of course, materialism, right?
That you prefer to have stuff.
You know, I'll give you a brief story about that.
I talked many years ago about my mother and the cabinet and the beading and all that.
So I had just a person very close to my life called Bob.
Now, I didn't have any nice clothes and Bob had nice clothes.
And occasionally I would ask Bob.
To borrow his clothes, if I had an important date or something like that.
So he had this lovely blue sweater.
Now, he had actually gotten it at Goodwill, so it was very cheap, which isn't to say that it was unimportant, of course.
It was a really good find at Goodwill.
I used to go down there when I was a teenager, because I was living on my own since I was 15.
I'd need clothes. I'd go down, and you could sometimes find really good stuff at Goodwill, where you'd buy clothes by the pound.
Every now and then, you'd find a Piece of gold in the rubble, so to speak, a needle in the haystack.
So I had this really nice sweater. And I had an important date and I said, Bob, can I borrow your sweater?
And again, we were very close. I said, Bob, can I borrow your sweater?
And he's like, you know, you don't take good care of your stuff.
And he's like, no, I'll do my best.
I'll do my best. I really will do my best to take good care of your stuff.
So anyway, he lent me his sweater.
And it was a clear night.
I went on a walk with this woman out in the park, and we were chatting and all of that.
It was a first date, so it was like no hand-holding or anything like that.
They're walking in the park. And you ever have this like out of nowhere?
It just seems like a fast forward of clouds that just come, and there was a cloudburst.
Now, this I think was a wool sweater, or I don't know, I'm not an expert on fabric, but it was something that was not, it did not do well in the rain.
So I was kind of aware of this or didn't want to get the sweater wet.
So, you know, there was no place to shelter, but we went under a tree and so on.
And the sweater got wet.
And, you know, it's one of these things.
Do you make a run for it and try and save the sweater from getting wetter?
Or is that going to make the sweater wetter?
Is it just about to end the rain?
Long ago, two months from 40 years ago.
And long story short...
Bob was completely enraged about what had happened with his blue sweater.
He's like, it's ruined, man.
You ruined it. This is my favorite sweater.
I lent it to you. I told you you weren't going to take care of it.
It's ruined. And he tried to spread it out and let it dry and it just, you know, it's ruined.
The sweater is shapeless. It's ruined.
Now that's kind of fucked up.
It's kind of fucked up. This is something I've never really understood, which is Stuff over people.
Stuff over people.
I don't care that much about stuff.
I really don't care that much about stuff.
I care about people. You know, if I cared about stuff, not people, I never would have done this philosophy show because this philosophy show has been a whole long series off and on of losing stuff to help people.
Losing platforms, losing income.
And I took a huge 75% pay cut to even start this.
So this whole philosophy conversation has been about giving up stuff to help people.
Myself included. I'm a better person for doing the show, so it's not some big self-sacrifice.
But it's giving up stuff to help people.
And I've never fathomed why people continually put stuff...
Above people, things, objects.
Why would my friend, who I was very close with, humiliate me about getting accidentally rained on?
It wasn't like I walked out and it was starting to rain.
It just clouds gathered quickly, couldn't get, and it got rained on.
I apologize. And I couldn't offer to buy him a new one.
I didn't have much money. Plus, the odds of finding something like that again and goodwill was pretty nil.
Like, why would he grind and humiliate me?
Like, really, you know, putting the knife in, twisting it.
Why would he do that? Over a sweater.
Over a stupid sweater.
Which he probably would have worn 10 or 20 more times, got bored, and would have ended up in the back of his closet.
But it was a serious blow to our friendship.
Because... When someone has something on you, right?
Take care of this. I will.
Oh, it's ruined. This is what he said.
I don't know if it was ruined or not.
I don't know. It seems to me kind of weird to have clothing that can't ever get rained on.
I guess it's kind of weird to me.
But he had power. Take care of this.
You don't take care of stuff. I will take care of this.
Oops, it's ruined. He's got power over me now, right?
You know, like when you tell your kid to carry something carefully and they drop it.
You have power. Why don't you listen to me?
I told you to be careful of that. How do people handle power?
It's good to know. It's good to know how people handle power early on.
So he's enraged that his son prefers the ducks.
And I was only a means to his end.
Oh, Dad, drive me for... Look, all kids will do that from time to time.
They'll say, Dad, drive me to this place because I want to do something.
And kids can't, you know, this son Jake, he can't drive himself to this petting zoo.
He's got to have his dad drive him there.
But, but the son does say, right?
The son does say, where is it now?
Oh yes, that's right.
So Jake begged me for a cone.
Once more, it was just a doorway he grabbed through to get what he wanted.
Now, Jake asks for three cones.
His son asks for three cones, wanting me, the father, to take one.
So the son is saying, come in here with me, Dad, so that you can enjoy the company of the ducks too.
We can share this fun of feeding the ducks.
I'm not a big duck person, but, you know, as you probably know, my daughter's really into ducks.
Shamelessly pillaged her preference for the scene in the book.
And it's really fun.
And he gets mad at the girl more interested in her phone when he's more interested in his shoes than having fun with his son.
Right? He just completely turns that.
Like the girl's on her phone.
I love that line scrolling endlessly as if she could somehow get to the bottom of the internet.
I kind of like that line. So the father is mad at the worker...
For focusing on the object rather than him, the person, whereas he's focusing on his shoes rather than his son.
And he says, I was a wallet and a driver, an unappreciated builder of shelters and savings, right?
This is the workhorse mail problem, right?
You just feel like a bunch of birds attacking your wallet, just stripping you of everything and nobody cares about you, they just want stuff.
I mean, I understand that, for sure.
For sure, that you feel used.
But he wanted to use his son's preference for him to build his ego.
He wanted to use his son, but then he complains that his son is using him.
Who's more responsible, the father or the son?
That's always the question.
So the line, I bought him a cone, my son.
He asked for three, wanting me to take one, but it was just for show.
He didn't want me in there with his precious ducks.
Now that's projection, because he didn't want to go in with the ducks because he was angry at his son and also because he wanted to protect his shoes.
But his son is saying, come play with me, Dad.
Come play with me. Let's share this fun with the ducks.
Let's share this love with the ducks.
But he prefers his stupid shoes and then picking a fight with the woman because he's angry at his son.
So he ends up humiliating his son by picking a fight with the woman.
And I don't know if you've ever met people like that, just completely outside of social protocols.
They say, hey, I'm going to leave my son with you and go have lunch.
No, you can't do that. Oh, but I will.
Yeah, I will. You've met people that just completely blow past, like walking through cobwebs, just completely blow past social protocols.
It's a very terrifying but very powerful thing that people do.
Now, everything that's in this scene is particular to the character.
Everything. Every line.
I edited all of this relentlessly to make sure that there was nothing there that wasn't advancing the story and illuminating character.
Right? So, When the father says, I did not hit him.
I did it other times, many times.
I felt that I wanted to drive the softness out of him, like hammering a nail can push wood out from the bottom of a plank.
Well, why does the father want to drive the softness?
The love of the ducks, the soft animals, right?
The son loves the soft animals.
The father hates the son's softness.
Why does the father hate the son's softness?
Because it demands a softness in him that he killed himself decades ago.
And he doesn't want to face that pain.
Now, at the end of the story, he does, but it's too late to save him.
Oops, tiny spoiler. Oh, you know, come on.
A character like this can't come to a good end.
I think we know that, right? So, for me, I will read art.
There's jump genres completely, right?
The movie Tangled, which I think was the last movie directed by a Christian for Disney and I think was the last really kind of rich and deep story.
And you see this in Fawlty Towers where you get these little scraps of people's history so that they come in.
They're people with history. And I used to work on this a lot as an actor and as a writer, but particularly as an actor, your backstory.
Your backstory. What is the backstory?
What is your character? What was your character doing right before he came into the scene?
What's his mood and why?
What's his backstory? Why is he triggered by certain things?
Why does he not care about other things?
What's different about him? What's unique about him?
People's personalities are as unique as fingerprints, more so, really.
And There's a great line when the guy, the main sort of hero, the good-looking guy, they just can't get my nose right, that guy.
The woman starts asking him where he came from and he's like, no, no, no, no, I don't do backstory.
I don't do backstory. I don't do backstory.
It's very clever, of course, because you're taking a technical term about writing it and putting it in the hands of a character that's been written.
It's a very good movie, I think, and very moving, too, very deep.
Nothing like The Frozen, too, was just a sociopathic fever dream.
So, backstory is important because, you know, when you want to simulate people, you want to simulate in novels a super experience of meeting people in life.
A super experience of meeting people in life.
So when you meet people in life, it's you and them.
Now, you know for sure, 100%, everybody who comes into your life has a backstory.
And, you know, you sometimes think about...
I sometimes think about this, right?
I sometimes think about, like, I'm in some obscure, lonely place, so to speak, right?
And when I was in Australia for my speaking tour in 2018, I think it was, I took this Puffing Billy...
Train to the very end of the line, like middle of nowhere, and met someone who was a big fan of the show.
It was kind of cool. And so you think of, you just meet someone and I chatted with them for 10 minutes, they took some pictures and off I went, right?
It's a very nice little encounter, very cool place.
Now, for me, it's the end of the world, or the end of the earth.
For them, it's where they live.
If you're in a bus or a train, you're driving past some town, I think about this sometimes.
Every little... Backyard, you see it just flashing past you.
You see it for a bare instant.
It's just some backyard.
There's a broken swing. There's a chair and a little birdbath.
So for you, it just flashes past, but that's someone's treasured and emotional childhood playground.
That they spent the first 15 years of their life running around and playing with.
It's where they learned how to catch a ball.
It's where they learned how to run. It's where they learned how to do their first somersault.
Every single thing in that backyard is deeply embedded in someone's consciousness and history.
A friend of mine just bought a house and he bought a house from a woman who in part had to leave because there were so memory memories embedded in the house.
Whereas for him, it's just, he's going to make his memories there.
She's fleeing an excess of memories.
He's moving into an absence of memories.
That the meaning and depth with which people invest and are invested in by the things around them.
And so when I was at the end of the train line and puffing Billy meeting these fans of the show, well, you think of all of the places I've moved, all of the places they've moved, and then we just meet and then we part.
But I have my own backstory that they know a lot about because of my show.
I talk a lot about it. I just talk about abstract topics, talk about personal topics as well.
So you guys know my backstory, right?
I mean, as well as I do, I think.
I'm really honest with it. It doesn't mean I know my own backstory perfectly.
I don't think anyone can because when you understand your backstory, you change it, right?
When you understand something about your past, it's no longer fixed.
You've changed it, right?
So I have a novel called Just Poor where a woman tells the truth to the point where she destroys herself.
Okay, well, once I understood that, I changed what I do in the present.
So now the backstory is no longer the backstory.
It's no longer a novel I wrote.
It's an instruction manual I gave for myself in the future so that I wouldn't self-destruct on honesty.
As the saying goes in the novel, the truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs.
He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.
So everyone has the backstory.
Now, when you meet someone, they have a huge backstory.
The backstory of their entire life, the backstory of whatever happened.
And I sort of say this, you know, if I'm driving along with my daughter, and someone is just driving like mad, you know, just cutting corners and zooming around and cutting in between cars and so on, right?
If somebody's just driving like mad, and she's like, oh, that's terrible, that's dangerous, it's like, yes, maybe, just maybe, his wife...
Is about to give birth and he's got to get to a hospital.
Maybe. I don't know. Maybe he could just be an asshole driver.
But maybe there's a good story.
And, you know, if we meet someone, you know, you ever have this where it's the utterly depressed service worker?
You ever seen that? The utterly depressed service worker.
Because, you know, most service workers are like, oh, yeah, you know, it's pretty positive and so on.
I guess there's a little bit of the utterly depressed service worker in this.
You know, anybody whose job is handing out cones for people to feed animals with, you know, maybe not hitting the ideal, but she's a teenager, so it's different, right?
I didn't have great jobs when I was in a teenager either.
But the utterly depressed service worker, or the utterly depressed waiter is even worse.
Yeah, what do you guys want?
You know, right? And, well, you know, my daughter might sometimes say, wow, this...
It's a pretty bad service, right?
I said, yeah, but maybe her mom just died.
I'm not trying to make excuses, but everybody has a backstory.
You can't just think of it in terms of yourself.
Everybody comes into an interaction with you having had good or bad things happen to them over the course of that day or whatever, right?
Or that week or that month or that year or that lifetime.
And I'm so fascinated by people's backstories that I've done thousands of calls with people saying, so tell me about your childhood, and tell me about what happened here, and tell me, because I just love to know, love to know.
I would stop everyone and ask their backstory all the time, everyone on the street, everyone on the street.
If I could freeze time, I would absolutely ask everyone, hey, what brings you here, and why are you here today, and what's your story?
When I meet people who live in unusual situations, we go to a duck farm, pick up ducks, Hey, how did you end up with a duck farm?
You know? My daughter and I once biked down to the end of a real lonely street and at the very bottom of the street was a little lake and there were swans with ducklings and there was a family out there who lived at the end of the street in the middle of nowhere.
Like, beyond here is dragons and marshes and Gondor.
There's nothing beyond here.
And I was like, hey, please tell me, like, how did you end up Living here?
It's like, oh, this was my parents' place and then, you know, they went into an old-age home.
I originally came here just to take care of it and I ended up loving it and it's like, wow, you know, like, how did you end up here?
If I'm around and I see someone hobbling around with a foot cast on, I'm like, hey, what happened to your foot?
I want to know! I want to know everything and drink up everything about everyone.
I'm a vampire! Of curiosity about everyone.
But I can drink deep from the characters in my stories.
Because they never stop surrendering their secrets.
They never stop. This is why my books tend to be somewhat long and veer between crazy, wild action and significant depth and introspection.
So yeah, I would say as a whole, do try to stay away...
Well, I try to stay away from art where it's a clear...
There's a clear propaganda purpose to it.
There's a clear propaganda purpose to it.
Right? So, I mean, one of the things that is pretty obvious to notice is that in...
And I can understand why, but in just about all modern shows, everyone in authority is black.
The police captain is black.
The doctor is black. The judge is black.
And I understand this is to make up for historical blah blah blah.
But, you know, this is not a spontaneous...
Expression of the human condition.
This is calculated to produce an effect.
I try to stay away from that stuff because it's just not honest.
Now, of course, there are judges who are black.
I mean, one who's, I think, losing his black card is Clarence Thomas these days, and there are wonderful doctors who are black.
I get all of that. But just when everyone in authority position is black, that's just...
That's too an effect. That's not an honest, spontaneous exhibition of the depth of the human experience and ways in which we can learn through truly understanding other people's histories and how they affect the present.
That, to me, is what the great purpose of art is.
It's an instruction manual. You know, there was a line, we read to know that we're not alone.
It's like, eh, we know we're not alone.
It's a kind of boring way to put it.
But that's from Shadowlands, I think.
It's a pretty good movie. But we read so that we understand that our depth is matched by the depths of others.
Because how do people become dangerous?
They become dangerous when they're the only deep people around.
Because when you're the only deep person around, You lack empathy.
Empathy is recognizing the depths of others.
And what art does is it drills down into the depths of others outside your consciousness to remind you that everyone is deep.
Everyone has a history. Everyone has a backstory.
That's called empathy. You think of the criminal who's like, well, I need money.
And they take money by force from someone else or fraud.
And then if someone takes the money they stole from them, they're really angry.
Because their needs are the only thing that matters.
Other people's needs don't exist, don't count, don't matter.
But well-crafted literature, well-crafted books.
I mean, can you not feel in the scene that I read to you from my new novel the unbelievable pain that's right at the bottom of this father who is enraged at his son because he can't figure out why his son doesn't seem to like him very much.
He feels rejected by his son and he reacts with rage.
There's such a deep wound at the bottom of that, and again, we find out later on what that wound is, but there's such a deep wound in there.
And what is it that happens?
We see someone acting in a mean and despicable manner, as this man is clearly doing, and then what happens is we fall into the backstory, and we find out the wound that we believe domino-like produces the bad behavior in the present, and then we fall into sympathy and over-empathy.
Sentimentality. Sentimentality is when we say someone's backstory excuses their present cruelty.
No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't.
It doesn't at all. We can understand how something comes about without forgiving it because there is no domino in life.
There are no dominoes.
You know, I have had a whole cluster of people calling in lately.
It's happened before, too. I have so many call-in shows, like, I don't know, dozens that I haven't released yet.
I'll get around to it. But they're all calling in and saying, well, My mother did these bad things.
I say, oh, that's really sorry.
I'm really sorry about that.
That's really terrible. I have huge sympathy.
I say, no, no, no, but she had an alcoholic mother.
She was beaten. She was...
And I say, don't give me dominoes.
What are you talking about? Don't give me dominoes.
The fact that your mother had a bad childhood doesn't mean that she did bad things.
Are you saying it doesn't have an effect?
Yeah, but it can have an effect either way.
I say, like you're...
You'll realize that you're calling into a guy with a bad childhood who became a great father.
You're calling into a guy with a bad childhood who became a great father.
So no dominoes for me, or if there were dominoes, they went the opposite way.
My parents taught me everything not to do.
So you can't call into a guy who turned a bad childhood into being a good father and say, well, my mother was a bad mother because of a bad childhood.
Because you're literally calling into a guy who did the opposite, saying this is a universal rule.
It's like... Calling into a guy and saying, well, I completely believe in free will because you are the example, but I also believe that everyone is completely determined by their history.
You can't have free will and determinism in the same species.
I'm the same species as your parents.
Your parents chose not to deal with their shit and did bad things, but that's still a choice.
So whatever deepens you, and this is not just my theory.
It's not just my theory because the studies are very clear.
That reading novels promotes empathy, and it's no accident that the rise of the novel with Defoe and Moll Flanders back in the late 18th century, that the rise of the novel coincided with the rise of empathy.
Why were there no novels throughout human history?
I mean, there was Beowulf, which is a fantastic sleep aid, and there was Homer, there was the Odyssey, There was Shakespeare, Milton, but not until the late 18th century do we get the novel.
Ah, you see, but the novel is the stimulus for empathy because you get to fall into somebody else's mind which you can do no other way.
You can't do it through conversation because conversation is always filtered.
You can't go directly into somebody else's mind.
Only the novel gives you a realistic portrayal of the people around you.
Shakespeare is heightened.
Beowulf is heightened. The Odyssey is heightened.
Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained are heightened.
They're like worse than superheroes in a way.
Theology is heightened. The study of Jesus is heightened.
It's a perfect divine being.
But the novel introduces you to people like you that you can go deep into, understand their backstory, and experience what it is like to think as they do.
Until childhood was improved and the novel fostered empathy, we couldn't get the modern world.
After the novel comes the breakdown of the aristocracy.
After the novel comes the end of slavery.
After the novel comes America and the relative freedom which the West enjoyed for a long, long time.
The fall of the novel is coinciding with the fall of empathy, the fall of liberty.
The novel is the phalanx standing guard against The self-obsession of narcissism, which is why in my novels, I go spine-deep into people's minds and thinking.
You could read that scene that I read to you 20 times, Lord knows I have, and get more out of it each time.
What's going on? What's happening?
What's his motivation? What's the result?
You ignore me, I ignore you, says the father, punishing the child for preferring the ducks.
The ducks that give him pleasure.
Now, the son, you see, is also showing empathy in the scene.
The father is showing unbelievable self-righteousness, entitlement, and cruelty.
But what does the son do?
The son picks up food and tries to feed the ducks.
Now, if you've ever had a child, you know that there's a moment, at least if the child is raised with empathy, there's a moment where the child starts to feed you back!
It's beautiful! They'll take some food and they will try to feed you.
And they're saying, well, it's not just about taking.
I understand that I'm a person, you're a person, and they feed each other.
It's beautiful. It's beautiful.
And what's replaced the novel?
What's replaced the novel?
Why don't people read anymore?
Why don't they read novels anymore?
Ah, you see, because they want the movie.
Now, the movie... As an art form, it's not that it can do, and I like movies as a whole in many ways, but the novel as an art form cannot give you empathy because it's all from the outside in.
Now, you can say if you have a monologue, right, the character saying, well, I woke up this morning and I did this and I thought that and I said, okay, maybe they're telling the truth, maybe they're not, but generally there's not an omniscient narrator.
The omniscient narrator cannot lie.
That's a rule. If they can lie, then they're not omniscient.
There's a morality in the narration of a novel.
Can you imagine if I described this scene and then later said that scene never happened as the narrator, not as the character.
The character might remember it and then it turned out it was a fantasy, a psychotic break, a dream, they were on drugs, whatever, right?
But if I, as the narrator, gave you that scene and then later said that incident with the duck never happened, that would be incomprehensible because the narrator has to tell the truth.
Characters can lie. The unreliable narrator is a trope in books.
The characters can lie, but the narrator cannot lie.
Now, in a movie, you have a narrator who never speaks, and the narrator is the camera.
It says, look here, look there, focus on this, take a break from the story.
The story resumes tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock when they burst into the cafe with guns or whatever.
So they're constantly skipping you around and dragging you around.
But the narrator is the camera.
But the narrator can't go into people because the narrator is just a camera pointed at the outside.
It doesn't go into people.
It doesn't go into their depths. It doesn't go into their thinking, into their unconscious, into their motivations, into their history.
The actor might try and do that with soulful stares into nothing, but...
The camera is a sociopath because it only sees the outside and it can't go in.
The novel can go in through the eyes, up the nose, in the ears, into the mind, not just in the present, not just into the unconscious, but in all the way back through history.
And this is why I started out as a novelist.
This is why I love writing novels and this is why I love novels as an art form.
The novel is empathy.
What's replaced novels?
Video games! You run around shooting people.
You swipe candies around.
There's no depth. There's no humanity.
There's no people there.
Never. No matter what you're doing, you're never going into people's minds.
Only the novel can do that. Now you can say, well, technically you could do it with poetry and so on.
Yeah, but that's not really what poetry is for.
Poetry is an attempt to create the mechanics of dreaming on the page because it's sensually intense, it's scattered, it's allegorical.
But the novel is a story that leads you into the depths of other people Which stimulates empathy.
And the loss of the novel and the rise of the movie and the video games, well, I think we can all see what that has done to empathy.
And the answer is not good things.
All right. Well, thank you so much, everyone.
What a great set of questions.
What an enormous pleasure it is to have these conversations with you.
My gosh, nine o'clock already.
All right. Please, please, please You can check out my novels.
Most of them are free. You can go to justpoornovel.com.
You can go to almostnovel.com.
You can go to fdrurl.com slash TGOA for The God of Atheists.
You can check out my novels and hopefully understand in practice what I'm talking about here in theory.
And they will be very good for you.
These books, these are a tonic to loneliness.
These are a tonic to isolation.
These are a tonic to a lack of empathy.
They will grow your heart guaranteed pie sizes.
3.14159628 sizes.
They will grow your heart.
They grew mine enormously and helped me to become a better father, a better philosopher, a better friend, a better husband, a better person.
They are a tonic for what ails you.
And please check out my new novel right now.
It's for Locals subscribers, freedomain.locals.com.
You can subscribe for a couple of bucks.
You get a hold of the novel.
It's pinned right there on the top. You can get it in audiobook format, on ebook format, and so on.
And I hope that you will avail yourself of it.
I think it's certainly going to be some of my biggest contributions that have ever occurred.
Thank you everyone so much.
Freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out the show.
Please, please rescue me from the consequences of my own honesty.
Which I accept, but you can help with freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Thanks everyone so much. Have yourself a wonderful evening.
I guess we'll chat for the European listeners in particular on Sunday 11 a.m.
Lots of love from up here. I hope you're doing well.
▲
Export Selection