Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - When to Give Up on Your Dreams
Aired: 2024-12-16
Duration: 06:01


=== When Persistence Pays Off (01:58) ===

[00:00:00]  Alright.
[00:00:02]  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.
[00:00:14]  But they continue to work hard despite all of that until ultimately they achieved success.
[00:00:19]  I think you also mentioned that you have been ignored when you first started this show.
[00:00:22]  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?
[00:00:28]  Thank you.
[00:00:31]  Yeah, that's a good question, right?
[00:00:32]  So there is the fallacy of sunk costs.
[00:00:34]  I did a business call about this recently with a guy.
[00:00:39]  There's the fallacy of sunk costs, which is, well, I can't walk now.
[00:00:44]  I've been waiting for the bus for two hours, right?
[00:00:46]  If you wait only 10 minutes and then you go walk, it's not so bad.
[00:00:50]  But if you've waited a couple of hours for the bus, it's pretty tough to go and start walking, right?
[00:00:58]  It's a fallacy of sunk costs.
[00:01:02]  You don't want to give up on your dreams, but at the same time, sometimes you do, right?
[00:01:11]  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.
[00:01:24]  That's not good, right?
[00:01:26]  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.
[00:01:36]  It's kind of targeted, and obviously it's kind of sinister, to put it mildly.
[00:01:41]  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...
[00:01:54]  We were just not copacetic.
[00:01:56]  We were not simpatico, as it were.

=== Promoting Virtue Globally (04:02) ===

[00:01:58]  And similar with academia, and similar with the publishing industry, and so on, I had a really great mentor.
[00:02:06]  A fairly famous Canadian writer was my mentor.
[00:02:10]  And I actually quite liked her.
[00:02:15]  But...
[00:02:15]  Or him.
[00:02:18]  But, yeah, the publishing industry was just...
[00:02:22]  It's not about the pursuit of deep human truths.
[00:02:24]  It's about the programming of people for the sake of ideology, and I can't stand that.
[00:02:29]  I just can't stand being around people who deny truth for the sake of ideology.
[00:02:33]  It is so manipulative, and to me it's kind of sociopathic.
[00:02:38]  It's the pretense of truth and honor for the sake of exploitation and consuming people.
[00:02:44]  Consuming people.
[00:02:46]  I think it's kind of repulsive.
[00:02:49]  So, is it knowing when it's time to give up and move on?
[00:02:54]  So, for me, it is hard to improve upon that which does the maximum good for the world.
[00:03:04]  It's hard to...
[00:03:08]  Improve on or do better than with my time, life and energy.
[00:03:12]  It's hard to improve on or do better than that which does the most good in the world.
[00:03:17]  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?
[00:03:28]  Well, I could have done some good that way for sure.
[00:03:31]  Could I have done some good in academia?
[00:03:33]  Yeah, I think I could have done some good in academia.
[00:03:35]  Could I have done some good in the business world?
[00:03:37]  I mean, I know that I did.
[00:03:41]  But there's no more good that can be done than direct moral philosophy.
[00:03:45]  This is virtue not by proxy, not by inference, not by art or sophistry.
[00:03:50]  It is the direct promotion of virtue out there into the universe forever and evermore.
[00:03:55]  So, for me, given that, I think that the achievement of excellence in the pursuit of virtue is the highest calling.
[00:04:03]  I'm kind of with Aristotle on that.
[00:04:05]  I can't do better than...
[00:04:10]  Promoting virtue directly to a worldwide audience.
[00:04:13]  There is no better way.
[00:04:16]  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.
[00:04:39]  So that's larger than a village, smaller than a town.
[00:04:46]  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.
[00:04:56]  So if you can make a tweet and make 60,000 people...
[00:05:04]  That's pretty good.
[00:05:05]  And 60,000 people that are probably born two people who care about the future and just had been propagandized, right?
[00:05:15]  You can't really do better than that.
[00:05:19]  Of course, I think of being a massive pronatalist myself.
[00:05:24]  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.
[00:05:34]  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.
[00:05:53]  This is another reason why I'm opposed, right?
[00:05:56]  I mean, there's so many reasons why.
[00:05:58]  Why would we have to pick even one?
[00:06:00]  No reason to pick one.