Dec. 16, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:01
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Alright. | |
| Steph, says someone, a lot of successful people have a story where at the beginning they were ignored and rejected and people told them they weren't good enough or that their thing will never work. | |
| But they continue to work hard despite all of that until ultimately they achieved success. | |
| I think you also mentioned that you have been ignored when you first started this show. | |
| My question is, how do you know if you should keep trying or whether it's time to give up and move on to something else? | |
| Thank you. | |
| Yeah, that's a good question, right? | |
| So there is the fallacy of sunk costs. | |
| I did a business call about this recently with a guy. | |
| There's the fallacy of sunk costs, which is, well, I can't walk now. | |
| I've been waiting for the bus for two hours, right? | |
| If you wait only 10 minutes and then you go walk, it's not so bad. | |
| But if you've waited a couple of hours for the bus, it's pretty tough to go and start walking, right? | |
| It's a fallacy of sunk costs. | |
| You don't want to give up on your dreams, but at the same time, sometimes you do, right? | |
| So, I was reading this thing the other day where this guy was saying that he was a really good actor even at the age of 17, but he was white, so he decided to give it up because there were a lot of auditions saying, you know, basically white males need not apply. | |
| That's not good, right? | |
| You know, denying occupations to entire groups, ethnicities or races, I mean, denying occupations is just a way of lowering the birth rate for that group. | |
| It's kind of targeted, and obviously it's kind of sinister, to put it mildly. | |
| So, I liked acting, but I really disliked the theater environment, and I really disliked most of the actors, and I also quite disliked a lot of the directors and the teachers, and we just... | |
| We were just not copacetic. | |
| We were not simpatico, as it were. | |
| And similar with academia, and similar with the publishing industry, and so on, I had a really great mentor. | |
| A fairly famous Canadian writer was my mentor. | |
| And I actually quite liked her. | |
| But... | |
| Or him. | |
| But, yeah, the publishing industry was just... | |
| It's not about the pursuit of deep human truths. | |
| It's about the programming of people for the sake of ideology, and I can't stand that. | |
| I just can't stand being around people who deny truth for the sake of ideology. | |
| It is so manipulative, and to me it's kind of sociopathic. | |
| It's the pretense of truth and honor for the sake of exploitation and consuming people. | |
| Consuming people. | |
| I think it's kind of repulsive. | |
| So, is it knowing when it's time to give up and move on? | |
| So, for me, it is hard to improve upon that which does the maximum good for the world. | |
| It's hard to... | |
| Improve on or do better than with my time, life and energy. | |
| It's hard to improve on or do better than that which does the most good in the world. | |
| So could I have done good in the world through art, through playwrights, through being a playwright or an actor or a novelist or a poet, say, all of which I put my hand into? | |
| Well, I could have done some good that way for sure. | |
| Could I have done some good in academia? | |
| Yeah, I think I could have done some good in academia. | |
| Could I have done some good in the business world? | |
| I mean, I know that I did. | |
| But there's no more good that can be done than direct moral philosophy. | |
| This is virtue not by proxy, not by inference, not by art or sophistry. | |
| It is the direct promotion of virtue out there into the universe forever and evermore. | |
| So, for me, given that, I think that the achievement of excellence in the pursuit of virtue is the highest calling. | |
| I'm kind of with Aristotle on that. | |
| I can't do better than... | |
| Promoting virtue directly to a worldwide audience. | |
| There is no better way. | |
| I mean, even if you look at that Taylor Swift thread, and I remember doing this math, so given the number of people who saw that Taylor Swift thread, and it was probably majority women, certainly the replies were majority women, I did a rough calculation, and 60,000 babies were born as a result of that tweet. | |
| So that's larger than a village, smaller than a town. | |
| So that's a small town's worth of people that comes out of one tweet, because I goosed women into deciding to have children by reminding them that their eggs are dying on the vine. | |
| So if you can make a tweet and make 60,000 people... | |
| That's pretty good. | |
| And 60,000 people that are probably born two people who care about the future and just had been propagandized, right? | |
| You can't really do better than that. | |
| Of course, I think of being a massive pronatalist myself. | |
| The number of children who've ended up being born, I mean, I know of many, many marriages, and certainly I get the emails all the time, hey, we decided to have kids, we got married here. | |
| So the amount of people that philosophy has summoned into existence, I mean, I can't outdo the, what, Billion abortions, but we can certainly do our part to bring better, more reasonable, more rational life into the world as a whole. | |
| This is another reason why I'm opposed, right? | |
| I mean, there's so many reasons why. | |
| Why would we have to pick even one? | |
| No reason to pick one. |
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