Stefan Molyneux discusses the relationship between wisdom and virtue. He considers wisdom to be broader in scope, covering a wide range of life experiences and decisions, while virtue centers on moral goodness. He points out the need to balance long-term benefits with short-term ones, noting that wisdom helps people manage the complexities of daily life.
He talks about time preference, especially among young people. Younger individuals often focus on immediate enjoyment, like spending time socializing or traveling, and put off building a solid foundation for the future. He shares experiences that show the value of making rational choices during those early years.
Molyneux explains how risk and courage play a role in personal development. He believes many young people today are shielded from real risks, which limits their chance to build bravery and resilience. He contrasts this with his own childhood, which allowed more freedom and exploration. Without healthy opportunities to take risks, he says, children miss important lessons that prepare them for adulthood.
He addresses the intersection of traditional values and the challenges of modern life. The discussion covers ways to encourage creativity and responsibility in younger generations, including those in the growing Bitcoin community who are driving cultural changes. He highlights the value of rational risk-taking and assertiveness in a society that often holds people back through expectations.
He reflects on historical perspectives, including interpretations of Jesus and his teachings. He suggests people should see themselves as capable of significant achievements. Molyneux places this within his philosophical view, arguing that setting perfection as the standard based on religious figures can create feelings of inadequacy. Instead, he favors an approach to ethics and virtue that remains grounded in human experience.
In the end, he stresses the importance of taking action, embracing reasonable risks, and working toward real virtues to improve one's life. He encourages courage, honesty, and active involvement as key elements for reaching one's potential.
0:00:00 - Introduction
0:01:33 - Wisdom and Virtue
0:04:13 - The Temptations of Youth
0:06:39 - The Corporate Grind
0:09:24 - Reflecting on Careers
0:11:12 - The Value of Risk
0:18:32 - Building a Dream
0:19:35 - The Role of Women
0:26:36 - Childhood Adventures
0:32:24 - Societal Courage
0:37:10 - Navigating Public Life
0:40:39 - Closing Thoughts
1:06:41 - Flipping the Script
1:15:27 - The Extra Effort
1:20:57 - Embracing High Ambitions
1:29:27 - Human Standards of Virtue
[0:00:00] Well, we have topics. We also have callers. And Richard.
[0:00:05] Hello, Stefan.
[0:00:07] Hey, how you doing, man?
[0:00:08] I'm okay, thanks. How are you?
[0:00:10] I'm very well, thank you. I'm very well. That's good. I'm eager to hear what you have to say.
[0:00:15] Yeah, sure. I actually have a question, Stefan. I wonder if you could give your opinion on any connection, if any, between wisdom and virtue.
[0:00:29] Hmm. Interesting. So I think there are instances of wisdom that are not specific to virtue, but I'm not sure there are any instances of virtue that are not specific to wisdom. In other words, I think wisdom is a larger category and virtue is a smaller category. And what I mean by that is you could say it's wise to go into a profession where you're going to have long-term enjoyment, where your skill set is good. You're going to have the meaning in what you're doing to push through obstacles. It's wise to do that. Okay. But it's not a question of good or evil.
[0:01:19] Fair enough.
[0:01:20] And it is wise... To be, you know, honest, interact with your friends, but it's not a question of good or evil. But I don't think there's any good or evil that doesn't involve wisdom.
[0:01:34] I think wisdom is a balancing act between long-term and short-term benefits. So if you are a hedonist then you will burn up the pleasure of the future for the sake of the pleasure in the moment and that's unwise if you are too i don't know if you are too much of a miser then you keep deferring gratification
[0:02:07] Until there's really no happiness at all you know the people who sort of scrimp and save their whole lives and then they become such misers they never end up spending any money on anything and they kind of die rich and miserable uh so it is a balance and the reason why we need wisdom is these things change in life sure i mean oh when you're i mean if i remember rightly you're not dissimilar from my age. And each age has its charms, its advantages and disadvantages, except maybe the very last year or whatever of your life.
[0:02:42] But when I was a young man, it was important to go out and carve my way and shoulder my way through every obstacle and push on no matter what. Unless you get older, you're supposed to get a little bit more mellow, a little bit more comfortable in what it is that you've done. So I think wisdom is knowing when to push hard, knowing when to relax a little bit. You don't want a life of endless striving, but at the same time, you don't want a life where you don't achieve anything. So I think finding these balances over changing times, I was very ambitious out there in the world until I became a father almost 80. Well, technically it was more than 18 years ago because you become a father when you get a girl pregnant so sure i was very ambitious in the world and then i became i wouldn't say ambitious because not really but my my big goal was to be a good a good father and and a good husband of course so i think that wisdom is trying to find a balance and again not knowing the things that are going to occur in life trying to find a balance between short and long-term pleasures so that you get a reasonable amount of maximum pleasure and virtue in life, if that makes sense. So that's a very sort of rough outline of wisdom, but what are your thoughts?
[0:04:08] Yeah, that's very interesting, and I would tend to agree with that.
[0:04:14] Would you think time preference plays into this as well? Yeah.
[0:04:21] Yeah, I think so. I mean, when you're young, it's more important to defer gratification because the costs and benefits are quite different. So when you're young, you know, the great temptation when you're young is to chase girls, to go travel, to stay up late, to, you know, maybe go to university and have some fun. And because you've got youthful energy and all of that. So the and of course, you're in the prime of your physical and mental alertness and fitness and health. And so the goal when you're young for a lot of people, and I've certainly fallen prey to this on countless occasions, is to just go out and have fun. Yeah, absolutely. Enjoy yourself. And the problem, of course, is that if you do that too much, then you end up without a firm foundation of skills and abilities and value for the middle and later part of your life. If you spend your life from like 18 to 30 just working dead-end jobs and traveling and drinking and smoking and toking and sleeping around and stuff like that, I mean, hey, that's fun, I guess. I mean, don't get me wrong. But then you're 30 and you got nothing. You got nothing. And I remember, I think I mentioned this story many years ago, a friend of mine would just call him Bob.
[0:05:44] Was a very charismatic and good-looking guy and he worked as a bartender okay and then he he went to school for marketing or something like that and then he went on an overseas like backpack across europe sleep in hostels and so on and then he came back and he saw his boss who lived in the neighborhood and his boss was like, Hey man, you got to come back to the bar. Everybody misses you. And he was like, yeah, the bar was like really good money.
[0:06:19] You know, I got to meet a lot of girls and have a lot of fun and, you know, and all of that. And that's where my skill set is. And he's like, but he had to sort of shake himself and say, no, no, no, I've got to go and get a job in an office and I got to go and start the corporate grind.
[0:06:36] And I've got to start Because there's no future in particular in the bartending world. And, of course, every job that you have where you live the opposite is a job for weirdos. You know, like bartenders are – like every job you have where you're working while everyone is playing and you're sleeping while everyone else is working is just a job that leads straight to this sort of Stigian weirdo, nose-piercing, tattoo-laced underworld. World and it's like actors and you know karaoke hosts and bartenders and and things like that and even waiters right because waiters work when everyone else is eating and playing and off work and so on i mean that's kind of the nature of the business you know hotel clerk and so on and so yeah he just had to kind of grit his teeth and he ended up having a a good career in the world of marketing and business and and so on and but yeah it's it was it was really tempting he knew the bartending world he knew it was going to work out well he knew he could make some good money but also there really wasn't going to be anywhere
[0:07:41] He could go further or forward much more doing that. So yeah, when you're young, you just have to defer gratification,
[0:07:52] When you're youthful energy these days, what do you want to do when you're young? Well, we're sort of trained to go hunting. We're trained to go to war. That's sort of what our instincts are. That's what nature has trained us for. And sometimes you've got to suit up and just grind in a cubicle or maybe start a business and whatever it is. And you've got to try and find some way to really increase the value that you can add to the world from an economic standpoint. Otherwise, your middle age and later tends to be like, i know i know a lot of people when i was younger when i was first in university and you know they they went to computer stuff they did computer stuff and what happened was they stayed in the computer world and they stayed as programmers and with programmers the problem is i remember had a friend of mine was good at the the language called mantis like the the insect and there was a whole bunch of code at some company that was written in mantis and he had to maintain it and update it and y2k it and all that kind of stuff but with programmers you get good at a particular language and then you get stuck on that language right because you're the guy who's good at that language and there's you know millions of lines of code i mean my first programming job was with cobalt 74 ibm stock recently took a hit because ai is figuring out cobalt and that's common
[0:09:16] Object business oriented language. I think COBOL or something like that always makes me think of the little creatures in Dungeons and Dragons,
[0:09:23] But it's COBOL.
[0:09:24] But those guys all had great careers doing maintenance programming and made good money. It was boring as hell. It was not creative. I remember being given a code. I was given this code base And it was a program to determine optimal haircutting, which is a sort of technical term in the investment world. And it was like, I don't know, 50,000 lines of code, and there was a bug in it somewhere that was producing some, and I had to step through it line by line on a tandem operating system, and you had to query each variable content as it was stepping through. And it was just like, I remember printing it out and drawing all these big logic maps, And it's like, oh, you know, it is about as exciting as archaeology, not in the Spielberg movies, but in real life, where most of the time you're just not doing anything of particular interest.
[0:10:25] Yeah, yeah.
[0:10:26] And so these guys, they all got into coding. And then they kind of got stuck on this maintenance coding. And I remember them saying to me, like, hey, it's good money, but I want to shoot myself, you know. That's the problem in life it's good money because they had to pay them good money to keep them on this code because this code executed tens of millions of dollars of trades every day I really jumped in on the deep end when it came to programming and
[0:11:00] So they went for the money they didn't defer the gratification deferring gratification would have been okay well I'm going to take a pay cut
[0:11:09] And I'm going to go do something entrepreneurial. I'm going to do something in this new, the web languages that were just coming out and so on. And I remember I worked in the same room with like five guys and they were great guys. They were great guys. I really enjoyed working with them. We had a lot of fun and they introduced me into a lot of sort of good business practices and work practices and so on. And I remember the one guy I was friends with was like, man, you take your job too seriously, man. It's not that serious. And it's like, hey, it's not that serious for you. You come from money. It's pretty serious for me. I don't. I can't get you another job, no problem. And I remember when I was quitting, they said, oh, you're quitting, man. You've only been here a year. And I'm like, well, yeah, but I want to start a business, right?
[0:11:57] Yeah, yeah.
[0:11:58] And there was this flick, this flicker across their face, right? Flicker across their face like, oh, man. And then they'd look at their bills. They'd look at their kids. They'd look at their private school tuition fees. They'd look at whatever, right? And it'd be like, oh, man, I wish I could come with you, but I'm chained to this desk with golden metal or something like that. Yeah, yeah, golden handcuffs,
[0:12:18] Yeah.
[0:12:18] Yeah, and so I think that they did not defer the gratification of
[0:12:25] Having making less money and and getting into something entrepreneurial but it was like a i need the money and b you know my wife would kill me if i took on something entrepreneurial because that would be 60 70 80 hours a week and so a different phase of life or whatever but you know i i just stay in touch with them for a while after that we would have lunch periodically for the next i don't know sort of three to five years until it's sort of inevitably tailed off but yeah they were still doing the same jobs and still making money and i just remember one of them over lunch saying man i cannot remember any individual work day from like the last 10 years i was just like oh no oh that's the saddest thing i've ever heard you can't remember any individual i mean i remember so i won't get into it because i know you've got questions but i just i remember just about every day doing this show for the last 21 years because they've all been so different and so interesting And of course, I have records on them. But I remember the guy doing the Mantis code was like, yeah. I said, oh, I had lunch with him. He was like, hey, what's you doing this morning? He's like, oh, man, it was rough. So I'm supposed to find a bug in this 100,000-line Mantis program. And I kept paging through it until I hit the bottom. And then I realized I haven't absorbed anything. So I'd go back up to the top, and I'd page down. And then I'd get to the bottom and say, well, geez, what have I really learned or thought of or whatever? And so he basically said, okay, just hit the page down and stared like a guppy at the screen. It's like that was his day.
[0:13:52] Yeah, that's brutal, right? Yeah. Sorry.
[0:13:54] I'm sorry. That's a bit of a side quest. No, no.
[0:13:57] It's good. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of interesting, isn't it, in the Bitcoin community how, you know, you and I are old farts now. You're not officially an old fart yet. Given September coming, you might be.
[0:14:09] I'm not an old fart, but I'm getting gassy.
[0:14:13] Anyway, but the Bitcoin community is quite interesting, isn't it, in the sense that there's an enormous amount of creativity and mostly young people, right? Young guys, mostly. And it's, you know, it's, I find it really quite exciting in the sense that, And a lot of these young guys are like very, you know, low time preference guys. They're all kind of getting into that mindset. And, yeah, that gives me great hope.
[0:14:41] Yeah. Yeah, I think so. That really is a moral mission to change the world. And sometimes, you know, I would certainly say this to younger people, like, take rational risks, for heaven's sakes. Yep. I mean, don't just, you know, jump off a cliff and hope something will catch you. But you know take rational risks you really really should look back upon your life with one big risk you've taken one big risk yeah yeah that you've taken i mean hopefully more than one as a whole yeah but if you play it safe you're not living yeah yeah if you play it too safe play it too dangerous you're almost dying play it too safe you're barely
[0:15:23] Living yeah yeah you.
[0:15:25] Got to look back and you say, okay, well, at least I took that risk. At least I took that risk.
[0:15:29] Yeah, yeah.
[0:15:30] So looking back on your life, just so I don't ramble everyone into oblivion, give me some of the things you look back on with some pride at risks that you took.
[0:15:39] Hmm, risks. That's interesting, right? Yeah, I've always been, I've always felt like... I've been not risk-averse at all, not that much, and I feel like if you don't take a chance on life, then what are your hopes and dreams, really? Like, you know, so, you know, like, take, for example, there was this project where at the time my partner and I, there was this house for sale, and it was a wreck, and there'd been a fire in it, there'd been a bunch of meth heads living it, and creatures as well.
[0:16:24] And I said, you know,
[0:16:24] Come on, let's, let's, let's fight.
[0:16:26] Sorry, did you say meth heads and creatures?
[0:16:29] Yeah, creatures, not creatures. I don't know what the difference is. But anyway and that was amazing because she said oh yeah for sure let's do it kind of thing whereas in my previous time going back in time a ways when I was married and.
[0:16:48] At the time we'd only been married a couple of years and we moved to, a place in Ontario that was a kind of depressed place and you could buy property there like for next to nothing almost and I said oh come on let's buy this and then she was like oh my god, but look at it, it's kind of too ugly and you know, it isn't, and I said no, no, that's perfect, come on, we can fix it up, we can do something with this, and it was like, oh no, no, no, I've got to find a place that's kind of perfect to begin with. So when this other, later on in my life, when I met this other woman and we took on this place, and it was just so fantastic because I thought, oh my god, thank goodness, I've got this person who's not so risk averse, everything's got to be perfect, and we made this house into an incredible place. It was so exciting. I was always being really good with tools in my hands and creativity and all that. But back at that time, actually, you could download SketchUp. You remember that? And it was free for download. Now it's all been taken over by Google and stuff. But so I downloaded SketchUp, learned how to use it, measured the whole place, and redesigned the whole place using SketchUp. up. And then we just gutted this place, completely gutted it, reconfigured the whole place, and then it was just like, oh my God, it was just amazing when we finished it. It was just so beautiful.
[0:18:09] I just completely dove down the well of creativity. We both did. And it was just exciting to take that risk. And then at the end of it, see how it paid off. It was wonderful. And, yeah, it was – Sorry.
[0:18:28] I didn't mean – you sounded like you were any day waiting for me to come in, and that's totally fine.
[0:18:33] So that's good. That's good, yeah. So maybe we can sort of make that a theme if people want to talk about rational, reasonable risks. I think it's a very interesting topic.
[0:18:43] Yeah, yeah.
[0:18:43] I think that young men are not really taught much about risk these days in particular, which is why I think young men are, you know, porn and video game addicts, because those are ways of having pretend achievements, but without the actual risk. And I think that comes a lot from just having, I mean, obviously there's the kind of low trust society stuff, but then there's also just the women are kind of anxious a lot of times. I don't have any particular problem with that. I think that's actually, that's good. That's kind of why we all make it through to adulthood is because women are kind of anxious.
[0:19:27] I was reading this article today, which was about women and serotonin. Now, I know serotonin is supposed to be associated with mood and all of that.
[0:19:42] Yep.
[0:19:42] And it was talking about how hugely low serotonin is relative to amends that men have just more mood buoyancy and so on and this is one of the reasons why women will often fall into you know anxiety and depression and these sort of negative states of mind because women are have evolved to worry about um often things uh some things obviously beyond their control you know for most of human history or at least our evolution women had to bury children, then they could do really nothing to save them. They'd turn to these ridiculous witch doctors, AKA modern psychiatrists, and wouldn't really be able to save their babies or anything like that. And this is why I think women as a whole need men to help regulate their emotions.
[0:20:38] Absolutely. Because, uh, Oh yeah, a hundred percent.
[0:20:40] Sometimes, yeah, sometimes male practicality can be a good antidote to, um, to female anxiety and of course women have things to offer men as well which is women being on a shorter reproductive clock will often try and get men to settle down and take life more seriously when they're younger yeah so uh women are essential for men taking life more seriously and men are essential for helping women take life less seriously and i think that sort of combination is really productive and good yeah absolutely yeah so i think that young men if you're raised with this sort of bubble wrapped anxious mother don't do that don't do this don't do that kind of mindset then you just don't learn how to handle or manage risk and if you don't learn how to handle or manage risk i think most people end up living lives that are too risk averse because There's too much anxiety. I remember, of course, when my daughter was learning her acrobatics and so on, it would make my wife's heart jump into her throat to watch my daughter do these crazy jumps off walls and, you know, no hands and so on. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's alarming. It's alarming. You know, don't get me wrong. I agree with you. It's alarming.
[0:22:05] No, I mean, it's awesome. No, it's awesome.
[0:22:08] Well, yeah, and look, I mean, it was a little easier when you had expendable kids, right? Yeah, right. It's a little easier, but now we don't really have expendable kids anymore. Yeah, yeah, sure. And so it's pretty tough. But it is really essential for kids to go through that whole process. But it's very tough on the moms, but it's essential for the kids. Yeah. And I just don't think kids are going through that. What was your sort of mom and dad and risk stuff when you were growing up?
[0:22:34] Well, when I was really young, I had a pretty awesome childhood up until when my parents broke up. And my whole childhood was really basically being left to my own devices. And just going out and exploring the world and, you know, getting all into it.
[0:22:54] Sorry to interrupt right when you're starting. Just for the younger people, because the word devices now means iPads, being left to your own devices means having no money, no toys, no car, no bus fare, no money at all. Being left to your own devices means you have to invent your own fun. And my God, it was glorious. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[0:23:17] Sorry, my mistake there, right? devices means a whole different thing these days yeah for sure yeah my device yeah left to my own creativity let's put it that way right and yeah and it was awesome i mean my goodness me i've got so many incredibly rich memories of those early childhood days and we just go out and just like, you know like not not wreak hat not wreak havoc at all but have just like so much fun and getting into you know like possibly dangerous situations we spoke about this before you know like long before parkour became a thing. You know, I was leaping over buildings and doing all kinds of nonsense like that with my friend. Yeah, and we would just find really kind of interesting things to do, like climbing on the pier at the coastal town where I lived and was brought up in England. Yeah, and we'd figure out a way of, like, climbing onto the pier and there's this big overhang. And we thought, okay, that's a challenge. Let's do that. And we figured that out. And there's all these old guys fishing off the side of the pier. And all of a sudden, these kids would be clambering over the railing from God knows where, and they were looking at us like, where did you come from? We were just like, oh, yeah, we beat that challenge, right? And that was just like the theme of my childhood. And I feel so sad for kids if they don't experience that or some version of that, put it that way.
[0:24:35] Well, they don't anymore. Kids stay home, and part of that is over-diversity and a sort of lack of comfort with all of the various cultures and religions and languages and who knows what from who knows where that's floating around neighborhoods. A lot of this is too much female power in relationships and marriages and a lack of assertiveness for the men to say, in particular, let boys be boys.
[0:25:01] Yeah, let boys be boys.
[0:25:02] Because every time a boy takes his hands off his bike, handle, right? The mother, what does the mother see in her mind's eye? She sees sirens. She sees bone shards sticking out of skin. She sees maybe a visit from the government. She sees every negative, conceivable, horrifying. She sees that there's a, in a movie, was it the 70s, I think, called Kramer vs. Kramer.
[0:25:34] Right, okay, right.
[0:25:36] There's a scene where the boy, it's about a couple that splits up, and I found it actually quite an interesting movie, but it's about a couple that splits up. And what happens is the father is taking care of the boy, and the boy falls from the
[0:25:59] Play center falls from the top of some climbing bars or something like that. And the dad is running down the street, and he's injured and so on. And this comes up in the divorce. This comes up in the custody battle that the dad, the child was injured under the dad's watch. Right, right. And to me, if you're watching a kid for years and years, and that kid doesn't get injured at all, I can't even think that you're a good parent.
[0:26:31] I can't because you are choking that child's capacity to evaluate risk. I remember that really vividly in the theater, like, oh, my God, he fell. And all the women in the movie theater were like, oh, my God. And it was like, yeah, so he did something foolish and he fell. And he did not break an arm. He did not like he just, I don't know, I can't remember what happened. He got some strawberry elbow or something like that. Or maybe he did break his arm. I don't know. But so he did. So he did. You know, there was a guy, a boy in the neighborhood who was really into dirt biking, like with motorized dirt biking.
[0:27:11] Yeah, yeah.
[0:27:12] And I think he broke his arm twice.
[0:27:14] Yeah, yeah.
[0:27:16] And the option is what?
[0:27:17] Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. I can remember my first motorcycle, right? I was like 16 or something years old. And it was a dirt bike, right? And you could throw an L plate on the back of a dirt bike back then and just kind of go off on your own. And it was a 250cc thing. I was just in love with that. And I remember going, I wasn't very aware of traffic really, to be honest with you.
[0:27:44] I was going
[0:27:44] Up the street. It was a very quiet town with lots of older folks in it and stuff. I'm going up the street, and all of a sudden, this old lady pulls out in her Morris Minor. I run straight into the side of it, come off the bike. The bike goes under the vehicle. I slide across the tarmac, smash my head on the car, and then my dirt bike comes flying across and leaves tire tracks on my helmet. And I jump up. Nice. I know I was pretty hurt, right? But I jump up and I was like, oh, man, you know, like, tell her to stop. Get her foot off the gas because she still has her foot on the gas, right? And it was just fine. And I go home and it's like, oh, my bike's kind of written off.
[0:28:28] But there was no like,
[0:28:29] Oh, my God, there was no panic or any of that stuff, right? And I was like, okay. I had a few bruises and bang my knees up and whatever. And I kept that helmet as a kind of a point of pride because it had these tire tracks over the top of it. and I was like, oh, yeah, I've passed some kind of test here.
[0:28:48] You know what I mean?
[0:28:49] And I don't know. And it was just like there was no kind of like big deal about it. It was serious and everything, and obviously took away some kind of lesson from that. But there was nobody kind of panicking about it. I broke my wrist at school and sprained the other one at the same time. And my dad came over and took me to hospital and got a cast and all that kind of stuff. But there was no kind of overreaction to me getting hurt. And I was kind of always injuring myself because I was always pushing the envelope. And yeah, and it was okay. You know what I mean? It wasn't like there was no feedback at all, but there was an appropriate amount of feedback, I guess. You know what I mean? and it felt just right.
[0:29:42] Well, and from an evolutionary standpoint, women look at individuals and men look at entire societies. And again, both the collective and the individual have their importance and their relevance. But evolutionarily speaking, if you have tribes, you know, tribe A and tribe B, and tribe B allows the male children to explore risk and get injured and learn the limits of their physical capabilities and thus develop courage. Because you can't develop courage in the absence of risk.
[0:30:14] Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[0:30:15] I mean, how courageous can you be on a video game? I mean, you can't be that courageous. You can just reload a save or, you know, like it's not really anything serious.
[0:30:24] Yeah, there's no feedback, right?
[0:30:26] Well, no, there's feedback in that you could lose.
[0:30:29] No, I don't mean that. I mean, there's no feedback in the sense of like reality feedback, right?
[0:30:33] Yeah, there's no reality. You're not going to get injured, right? I mean, I remember when I used to play Facing Worlds, capture the flag in Unreal Tournament, and sometimes I would just charge down the main hallway with a hail of rockets raining down on me. And sometimes it would work, most times it wouldn't. But if it didn't work, no biggie. Maybe we lose the game or we do another one, but there's no injury, no negative. So you can't develop courage without risk. And keeping the kids bubble wrap, particularly the boys, have some unable to develop actual courage. So if you've got tribe A and tribe B, tribe A bubble wraps the kids and the boys and doesn't teach them anything about danger and keeps them from doing anything risky and so on. And then they don't develop courage. And then when tribe B who has let their boys do all of that come over the hill to take their stuff, tribe B is going to win.
[0:31:25] Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Without doubt.
[0:31:27] You can almost, you can almost see that happening. As a whole, like I think about, you know, the changes that are going on in Ireland, which, you know, are very much against sort of traditional Irish identity. And when I was a kid, man, I was told from almost as soon as I remember anything to, you know, if you're waiting at the bus stop and there's a bank there, you've got to run because it could be a bomb from the IRA. You know, the IRA was going to protect England and was going to, sorry, protect Ireland and get the British out of Ireland and all of this. And they were, you know, pretty feral and ferocious and so on. And now when, you know, arguably some big challenges, to put it mildly, are kind of happening in Ireland, like nobody's anywhere to be seen.
[0:32:12] Yeah, yeah, I know.
[0:32:13] And I think it has a lot to do with the bubble wrap childhoods that people don't have a lot of courage anymore because they weren't allowed to experiment with
[0:32:22] genuine risk and danger when they were kids. And that just simply means, evolutionarily speaking, You just get taken over by the tribe that allows their kids to experience risk.
[0:32:31] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are real consequences to this, aren't there? Yeah. And we're seeing it happen, right? You know, there's no free lunch, you know, as they used to say, you know, that.
[0:32:41] No. And so the mothers are looking at each one of their individual, say, sons, and they're saying, well, you know, but Bobby and Jimmy and whoever, they... They can't take these risks because they could break their arm. There was a comedian way back in the day who used to talk about how all the mothers in the neighborhood had a sudden lowered voice that they would talk about. And they would say to their kids, if you ride your bike without holding onto the handlebars, you're going to end up like little Bobby up the street who now can't even write his own name. A little whisper of horror. And listen, again, that's fine. That's natural because risk is one of these things that you have to have an Aristotelian mean. Yeah, yeah. And your society becomes a whole bunch of fraidy cats that can't push back against a hedgehog. Too much risk and, you know, kids get wiped out in bizarre experiments of physical danger and so on. Yeah. And I just think that way too much maternal fear and concern because if there's too much maternal fear and concern and kids are kept away from risk, then the entire society falls apart in the long run because there's no way to resist an invasion from other cultures that are more comfortable with risk and have developed more courage, if that makes sense.
[0:34:02] Yeah, 100%. I mean, I remember the first time I came home with a black eye from school, this is when I was secondary school, high school, they call it over here, right? And.
[0:34:13] Yeah, my mom kind of goes, oh my, what happened to you? I goes, oh, yeah,
[0:34:16] I got into a bit of a fight. She goes, oh, well, okay, let's put some ice on that. And that was it. It was the end of it. There was no, like, panic or over-the-top kind of, like, anything. And I just thought, yeah, okay, that's right. That makes sense. You know, I kind of took it out on this guy, and his bigger friend came back and punched me in the face. So, good. That was good. That was a good lesson.
[0:34:38] Yeah, yeah. There's always a bigger kid around the corner. and you're not picking on the kid. You're picking on the kid and his three older brothers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it's a good lesson. And it's funny, you know, because I have never been in a fight.
[0:34:53] Oh, okay.
[0:34:54] Now, you know, there's this sort of joke about the good-looking guy, the guy who's a model, and he gets into a fight, and he's like, not the face, not the face! Because, you know, that's how he makes his living. For me, it was always like I was willing to take just about any risk but not anything that might hurt my brain not the brain not the brain i'm gonna make my living or something like that but yeah i've never i've always been able to talk my way out of things yeah or you know the one or two times that i was in some big physical altercation i remember the time i've talked about when i was like 12 and the 17 or 18 year old bullies were keeping my friend and i confined in the woods and for a couple hours and just bullying us and making fun of us and so on. I mean, I did stand up to them verbally. I got punched in the stomach. You know, whatever, right? I just sort of pick on someone your own size, you cowards. But I've never, I've always been able to talk my way out of things. I also have a really good spider sense of when things are going to go Yeah, that's a great thing to have,
[0:35:54] That is for sure.
[0:35:55] Yeah, I'm always able to just like hit the eject button.
[0:35:58] Oh, yeah.
[0:35:59] Because you can just see, you know, when somebody, when that sort of black cloud is gathering around someone's head and slowly seeping into their ears, I'm pretty good at figuring that stuff out.
[0:36:09] Yeah, yeah.
[0:36:09] And, you know, not being around because I don't in particular see the plus of it. But, yeah, I mean, I exercise, I'm good at sports and all of that. But, yeah, I've never been. And, you know, some guys are like, oh, you don't even know who you are unless you've been in a fistfight. I'm like, yeah, maybe. But I'm actually pretty proud to have gotten to the age of, I mean, as you know, I have a big old mouth, man.
[0:36:31] Well, you've taken with, hey, man, you've put yourself in the fight, you know, you've put yourself in the fight in such bigger ways than I've ever have. Do you know what I mean?
[0:36:40] Oh, I appreciate that.
[0:36:41] I mean, sometimes I prefer a physical fight.
[0:36:43] To all of this, you know, SPLC reputational destruction. and it's all like mean girl shit.
[0:36:49] No, no.
[0:36:50] But I mean, I prefer dueling in a way, but I actually am quite proud to have gotten to, you know, I don't think I'm going to get into too many fistfights going forward, but I'm quite proud to have taken that. And I think that the risks that I took as a child and in particular as a teenager
[0:37:08] were pretty good at teaching me how to balance risk. Because when I sort of look back at my career and sort of my time in the public square in the public space and i compare myself to you know it's hard not to compare yourself to people it really i mean it's impossible for me at least i i sort of look because for a while like i was down jordan peterson was doing his big tours and he signed with uh caa or creative artist agency to do his tour and these are the guys who were happy to represent harvey weinstein so i consider them to be a hive of scum and villainy, so to speak.
[0:37:46] You know, Jordan Peterson is up, and I'm down, and now I'm doing okay. Jordan Peterson is out with, it sounds like, from his daughter, Akathasia from benzodiazepine addiction plus toxic mold or something like that. I don't quite follow some of this stuff as a whole. And, you know, Milo was up, and I was down. I'm doing okay. Milo's around and still doing his thing and all of that. And it's just funny how the sort of wheel of fortune, you know, like if you don't like where you are in the hierarchy, just wait five minutes. Yeah, yeah. And I think having navigated a bunch of really topsy-turvy stuff over the course of my career and, you know, coming through, I wouldn't say unscathed. Obviously, I have some battle scars and I've landed a few blows and, you know, a lot of blows have been landed on me too. But I think I had pretty good risk management because I tell you, last thing I'll say, and I appreciate the chat, it's pretty wild if anybody else wants to join. I know there were some other people who stepped up and I'll just wind up here. It's pretty wild, I've got to tell you, like the stuff that was insanely controversial in 2011, 2012, 2013, and of course I took, I was off Twitter for like, I don't know, five years or something like that, right? I mean, I'd browse from time to time, but I was off Twitter for like five years. And, man, coming back and engaging in the conversations, it's kind of odd.
[0:39:10] Yeah, yeah.
[0:39:11] Because I used to be such an edgelord, and now I'm, like, completely middle of – in fact, I'm really conservative and boring on X in many ways at the moment because I sort of have these old fast-twitch PTSD battle scar muscles of, like, ooh, I could post this, and then I sort of scroll through the feed and, like, things 10 times stronger than anything I could even think. Being sort of currently discussed in and i mean obviously i had a little bit to do with that there's a lot of people who've been moving that overton window yeah yeah for sure it's pretty wild uh to go back on x and to realize ah young pedawan you have all learned very well and there's nothing that i need to add to this it's a pretty wild phenomenon because i can't think of a time in history when things have changed from utterly bandworthy, sorry, utterly bandworthy to relatively banal in a half a decade.
[0:40:09] It's just crazy. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Hey, listen, I'm going to end here, right? Because you have other callers and I hate to take up all the... Bandwidth you know the time kind of thing and i really really appreciate your uh input and and i love your show and i love listening to you and all your podcasts or sorry all your episodes or whatever and uh yeah 100 100 thank you thank you
[0:40:38] thank you stefan you're very.
[0:40:40] Welcome and i really do appreciate you calling in it's oh i don't want to say it's a blaster in the past because it makes us sound like we're sort of two old men muttering on a porch while whittling uh outlines of our first girlfriends or something
[0:40:53] Like that. And thanks to James as well. James P. Yeah.
[0:40:59] Why, what's James been doing?
[0:41:01] Oh, I, you know, I know he's part of your thing and he helps out. And, you know, I think that, you know, I'm good. I just want to say thanks to him as well, you know.
[0:41:12] Oh, good. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Sorry, I thought he'd done something particular for you. And that's actually, it's a good coincidence because that's actually on James's job description and on his business card. part of Stef's thing. That's what he's doing.
[0:41:24] That's awesome. Thanks so much, Stef.
[0:41:26] All right. Thanks, Richard. Always a pleasure. And I appreciate your support, and I appreciate your conversation.
[0:41:31] Thank you so much. Bye.
[0:41:32] So, if other people wanted to step up and chat up, I would be happy. There was a guy where I say was. He's dead now. He died it wasn't even too long ago. He died kind of old. He died in no, no, sorry. He died in 1998, gave his final lecture a few weeks before he died. He was 82. He was 82. Now, he spent his career studying other scientists
[0:42:04] At bell labs bell labs was like this did they come up with the mouse and and uh gooey interfaces and so on all the stuff that see jobs and bill gates you know kind of half ripped off from everyone and he gave a lecture in 1986 i know that sounds obscure and ancient and so on but this guy richard hamming he won the turing award he invented these error correcting codes that made bottom computing possible, you know, the stuff where you say in most computer languages, you have an error handler. Oh, trying to get too nerdy. But so an error handler is, let's say that you ask someone for their data book. And this is sort of back in the day. Now you spin all of these wheels and you can't enter anything wrong, right? Because they say, you know, month, day, year, and you've got to pick these pinwheels, and boy, you know, you're getting older when you've got to scroll for 20 minutes to get to your birth year. But he came up with these error correcting codes, and I think what they are, I'm not an expert on his sort of history of programming, but if you had a text input and you couldn't control what people would type in, and you'd say, enter date of birth, and they would say,
[0:43:18] Uh february 31st 1975 and you'd say well even on a leap year there's no february 31st it's only february 29th so february 31st is not a valid date and so in computer parlance there are a number of different data types right there's bytes which are true false integers minus 3200 and minus 32767 to plus 327 767 no no decimals and then there are longs and then there are doubles which is a whole bunch of decimals and there are blobs which are just a bunch of different uh varicars just any any data you want you can stuff in it and generally with coding you want to say the variable like the user input is going to go into a particular date data kind a particular kind of data so if you say to someone enter your age and they type in a b and you take that back and you try and put a b into a variable the variable is a little pocket of memory where you store some data and if you say well obviously the age has to be a number and i don't care about decimals i'm like 46.7 is not an age that would make much sense so i've got an age and it has to be a number because I'm going to put it in a variable, a little pocket of memory, and I've defined that pocket of memory as a number.
[0:44:47] Now, if somebody says, somebody, what's your age? And they type in 47, like F-O-R-T-Y-S-E-V-E-N, 47.
[0:44:55] And you haven't expected that and then you say okay put this bunch of letters into this little memory pocket that can only take numbers the computer's going to say no can do sinor depends if you've bought it in tijuana or something like that but the computer is going to say that's an error because obviously you can't take the text called 47 and put it into a little memory pocket that is only designed for numbers. And certainly back in the day when memory was at a premium, I mean, the first computer I took home from the computer lab at my junior high school had 2K of memory, which means it could store 2,048 characters. That was it, 2K, right? There's K, then there's megs, then there's gigs, and now terabytes and so on. It's a ridiculously tiny slice of data. And then the first computer that I bought had 8K of memory, which I later expanded to 48K of memory. And then, gosh, I had a computer with 640K of memory, which Bill Gates famously said ought to be enough for everyone.
[0:46:04] And then uh we don't have to list through it all then we don't have to list through i think i then had did i have a meg of memory on my atari sd anyway so a computer if you try and put text into a number memory pocket the computer will say i don't know what to do with that this is only supposed to take numbers and it will throw up an error and what this guy did was he designed I think, and I could be wrong about this, but this is my understanding, he designed computer programming that would let the computer say, oh, there's an error, and it would return to the programmer the type of error it was. So this would be a type conversion. The type is text, and you have tried to put text into a number memory pocket, a memory pocket that can only you take numbers and you had to really define all your variables because it's a way of catching errors as well. And so in basic, you would say on error, go to, and then you would have a named part of the program, ERR, underbar, handler, colon, or something like that. And then you'd say, okay, well, this type of error, right? So a type conversion error where you try and put text into a number,
[0:47:22] Would give you a particular error code. And a lot of times you would define particular numbers and give them actual variable names. So instead of maybe the error code for stuffing text into a number pocket is error 47 or 46 or something like that, but you'd make it more user-friendly for the programmer who might have to debug your code, and you'd say ERR underbar type underbar conversion equals 46. And so if you say, okay, so if the error equals ERR type conversion, then send a message to the user that says, sorry, you need to enter two-digit numbers, right? So if you're doing it for work, nobody's nine who's there and nobody's 100 who's there. And so you'd say, you got to enter a two-digit number. And so those would be hard errors.
[0:48:14] And so this guy created this whole system where the programming language would throw an error you'd have to catch the error and you'd have to tell the user to to change it right and those are hard errors soft errors would be somebody enters 99 so you've got two numbers that you accept and they enter 99 and i mean if you're doing a a payroll program the odds of there being somebody on the payroll who's 99 years old are very low so you might not reject it but you might say are you sure that you're 99 years old and either you would or wouldn't let it continue or what he might log the error for to be checked later or something like that so uh this sort of error stuff came about in this kind of way now this guy was really interesting because he studied really, really powerful thinkers, people who had achieved an enormous amount in the realm of mathematics or physics or science. He just went through and just observed. You know, one of these people who just observes, just observe and absorb, right?
[0:49:33] So he spent 30 years sitting in a cafeteria, just observing people, chatting, and he tried to figure out which scientists become memorable, world-changing, legendary scientists, and the other ones who, you know, they show up, they do, okay, work, you know, it's fine. And then, you know, eight minutes after they retire, people can't even remember what they look like.
[0:49:57] So he had a theory. It's a tripod-type theory, tripod-type theory about success. And, again, I'm happy to take your comments or questions, if you like, about this. The tripartite theory of success. I want you guys to be as successful as you can be. So he said that it was not just luck. It wasn't just IQ. We assume that everyone at the top tier of Bell Labs is super smart. And, of course, as you know, Einstein's IQ was only in the 120s. There are people who've got far higher IQs who've achieved far less than someone like Einstein. So raw IQ is not it. Luck is not it. Now, one of the things that I think is interesting about this, the first habit, he said, and this is the one that's toughest to hear for a lot of people. So in any field, there are the big, giant, monolithic, intractable problems, right? The unified field theory. Can we tie all the strong and weak atomic forces together with gravity and electromagnetism and all the other things, fission, fusion, all the other things that go on? Is there a single theory for everything? That's the biggest holy grail in physics by far.
[0:51:17] So that's the big, meaty, challenging problem in physics. In philosophy, it's a rational proof of secular ethics, or, as it will be known in the future, my big charge and achievement. I'm working on a short movie about all of this at the moment, freedomain.com/donate if you would like to help out, thank you, thank you, thank you. But the big one in philosophy is a rational proof of secular ethics, which you can get in the last third of my book, Essential Philosophy. You can also get the book University Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics
[0:51:58] At freedomain.com/books. I hope you will check it out. That's the big one. In other fields, I don't know, I'm not that much of an expert in other fields. The big one in biology, of course, was evolution. That was sometimes called the single greatest idea any individual human being has ever had, other than my mother and father conceiving me, of course. But that is, my daughter's just giving me a yapping gesture.
[0:52:31] Is that right?
[0:52:33] I just walked down and I hear it's the second greatest idea other than, I can't even talk conceiving me. I'm just laughing at what's going on. Laughing with joy and pride. What a career. What a career. That's right. Talking at home. All right. So, so he said with regards to the scientists, he said, look,
[0:52:59] You are afraid to take on and tackle the very biggest problems in your field because you're too afraid of failure. You're too afraid of failure. Because if you say, as I have said, if you say, I have solved the biggest problem in the history of philosophy, which I never imagined I was going to do, by the way. I never imagined I was. I've been very tentative in approaching any value I have to add in the world. I assume at the basis, at the very bottom of things, I assume I have no value to add at all, and every shred of value I have to really earn and work my hardest to achieve. So when you hear me say i have solved the biggest problem in the history of philosophy and the most important intellectual problem to solve in the history of humanity i have solved it of course your first instinct and i i don't fault anyone for this at all this is not a complaint because
[0:54:07] I would be the same.
[0:54:09] Way and if i would be the same way and i am the standard of value blah blah but no that your first your if i make this claim i have solved the biggest problem in the history of philosophy the most essential problem in humanity as a whole i mean you may cough it but you're thinking bullshit right you're thinking oh come on don't be ridiculous some guy on the internet i mean you don't even have a phd in philosophy you're not teaching at harvard or stanford or anything like that man who on earth are you to make this completely ridiculous claim it's not true that it cannot be true and of course if you know about the history of philosophy you know that a lot of significant contributions to philosophy come from outside the academic world right in the same way that einstein was a patent clerk right and then of course but of course einstein was The government liked him because he gave them nuclear weapons, right? So that's a big plus.
[0:55:12] So one of the reasons why people fail is they don't aim themselves in their minds at the very biggest problems for two reasons. One, they're afraid they're going to fail. And two, they're afraid they're going to be mocked, attacked. Even if they say, I'm working on the very biggest problem in physics. I'm spending, like, I'm working on it. I'm going to solve it. Because, you know, you're not going to work on something unless you really feel you can solve it. And I remember when I was so frustrated and angered at not having a rational proof of secular ethics that I remember sitting down like 20 years ago and saying, I remember sitting down with a big cup of coffee and I'm like, I don't care how much I have to pee. I am not, not getting up from this table until I've solved this problem. And oh my God, it was horrendous. It was a horrendous process to work on solving that problem. I felt like my brain was melting and dripping down my spinal cord. It was horrendous.
[0:56:17] I wouldn't say it's the most intellectual labor effort that I've ever put into anything, but it was certainly up there. So people are afraid if you say, I'm going to – I mean, if you were on the faculty, like at Harvard or something like that, you're on the faculty and people say, oh, you've got a sabbatical coming up or we want to hire you. Or something like that and then you say i want to solve the entire problem of secular ethics i want a final rational proof for the problem of secular ethics um people would just be like oh come on man the greatest minds in human history have been working on that one for 3 000 years and nobody's ever achieved it who are you to think what oh you're just so smart that you just get what everyone else doesn't get and so on.
[0:57:11] And obviously, I think I'm smart, but my big thing is that I have the intelligence honed by brutal child abuse, but also I've dealt with the brutal child abuse with years of therapy. And so I have all of those skills and the focus, consistency, commitment, and virtue to be able to work on ethics without them condemning me, right? Very few people have been able to work on ethics without feeling condemned by ethics. So anyway, that's sort of a bit of a sidebar, but... Can you imagine? Imagine just going to the faculty and saying, I'm going to solve the problem that no philosopher in the history of the world has ever solved.
[0:57:52] They would think you were mental. They would think you were deranged, that you had a serious mental health issue, that you had, oh, you're a megalomaniac, you're mad, you're grandiose, you're whatever, like you've got some sort of narcissistic insanity, personality disorder where you just think that you can do everything and people would get really upset and roll their eyes and think you were crazy and and people don't want to do that they don't want to go through that process of having ridiculously high ambitions because you're afraid of failure you're afraid of wasting your time it takes a ridiculous i wouldn't say it takes a ridiculous amount of self-confidence or rather confidence in your ability to consistently apply reason it takes a ridiculous amount of confidence to even think you could i wasn't even that confident i was just really pissed off and you know being pissed off is a pretty good necessity is the mother of invention i really wanted to be a public philosopher but i also didn't really want to just repeat what other people had said i mean i am not a cover band i want to do my own material right so it is very tough
[0:59:06] For people to aim at the very biggest problem and what they do of course is they say you know i'm gonna tackle something else i'm gonna tackle i'm you know maybe i'll compare the metaphysics of nietzsche to the epistemology of hume or something like that you know and and it's something that's okay it's not terrible it's not that interesting and and it's certainly not going to change the world so a lot of thinkers they avoid the big big big problem in the field
[0:59:42] And they picked something not too complicated not too challenging i mean i remember when i was doing my graduate degree in the history of philosophy and i mean it was a history degree but i really focused on the philosophy aspect and i said uh i have a thesis that i want to prove with reference to four major thinkers, Plato, Kant, Locke, and Hegel, that those who believe in a higher reality must always end up proposing dictatorship as their ideal political model. And I could not find anybody who was willing to let me do that. They said it was way too ambitious, it was way too big, I didn't speak enough German to be able to do it, and it probably would be good to know ancient Greek so I could read Plato in the original and so on. And there were just all these barriers. And I spent months combing all over the faculty, just trying to find someone who would let me do this.
[1:00:54] And I won't say I bullied, because what could I do? I was just a grad student, but I ended up getting a professor to let me give it a shot. And I handed in the first draft, and he said, I don't know if you've done it. I don't know. And so I worked on a bunch of different drafts. And I ended up graduating because it took them forever, the committee that gives you the graduate degree or not. It took them forever. And i ended up getting an a but it was it was a brutal process to get my thesis approved to get it supervised i i just went to so many so many people who will i mean they just rolled their eyes and said come on you just it's not even a phd this would be this would be insane for a phd thesis this is just a master's degree what are you doing And this is like, but the question isn't, why am I doing it? The question is, why aren't you doing it? Why would you want to live in some corner office mouthing the same platitudes you have for decades and decades and boring the pants off everyone? Why wouldn't you want to go for broke? Go big or go home? So that's the number one reason why people fail is they simply refuse to take on the biggest issues out of a fear of failure, a fear of mockery, a fear of being ridiculed. Now, the other thing that he noticed was doors, believe it or not, doors.
[1:02:22] Now, he noticed that the scientists at Bell Labs, I mean, there were two kinds of scientists. One kept their doors closed all the time, and the others kept their doors open.
[1:02:36] Now, if you keep your door closed, of course, you get a lot more work done in the short run. You're not getting interrupted and so on. If you keep your door open, people knock, hey, Bob, have you heard the latest, or can you believe this, or I thought you might be interested. And they come in, they sit down, and they're constantly interrupting you, persons from Porluck style, right? And so you don't get as much work done in the short run, but, but, but you're getting much more exposure to the general tenor, ebb, and flow of thought in your field this way.
[1:03:13] And so one of the reasons why i don't work in isolation is because that's why i'm constantly asking for questions i constantly doing call-ins and so on i'll do solo shows sure but i want to stay in conversation because i want the thoughts of the world to pass through my mind it opens up great topics great perspectives i thought we had a great chat with richard this evening about security and safety, that temporary safety is, in fact, suicidal risk in the long run. Overprotecting your children will cause your civilization to fall because you don't end up with a generation of men who have the courage that can only come from working with real risk as children. And so I thought I wouldn't have had that conversation if, in a sense, my door hadn't been open, if that makes sense. Now, the third habit is inversion.
[1:04:10] So Hamming wanted to do something in computer science, the scientist, mathematician. He wanted to do something in computer science. And he went to his superiors, his supervisors, his bosses, and he said, I'm going to need a team of programmers. And they went back and forth. But eventually they said, no, we don't have the money. We don't think it's a good enough project. And so he didn't get what he wanted.
[1:04:35] Now he like most people you you ask and you're really passionate about your project and if other people aren't passionate about your project you get kind of mad at them right obviously and he stewed on this for weeks and weeks until and i don't know if he's ever explained this process he flipped the script flipping the script is one of the most important things you can do in life i have been joyfully married for like 24 years every day is a blast uh we laugh half the day it's it's so much fun and uh absolute furnace of my heart and the gravity of my soul is embodied in the lovely form of my wife now of course i dated before i met her and of course every breakup was like oh man you know either oh man i'm going or oh man she's going or whatever right and it would be a negative and of course now looking back upon it i'm like i i would like to publicly thank every single woman who ditched me because that left me free to meet and marry the woman who became my wife. Let's flip in the script. De-platforming, I've talked about this before, I'll keep it really brief. De-platforming freed me to work on projects that were the most important to me.
[1:05:47] I've written three books since de-platforming, and I had the great opportunity to engage in more jazz club discussions with people, and I ended up producing work that has far more relevance in the long run. I mean, when I was on the politics treadmill, the current events treadmill, which I didn't mind. I thought it was interesting and fun and fine. There's nothing wrong with it, but it fades. i mean nobody cares what i had to say about some political events 10 years ago but some of the work that i've been doing since then is longer lasting is more foundational and so i got freed from audience capture because my audience grew when i did politics i got freed from audience capture i got
[1:06:37] to have much more intimate conversations and i got to do work that will last the test of time. And what I sort of said to myself was, when I was sort of wrestling with this, because sometimes it can be, it could be a little tough to see the good in the bad. And what I said to
[1:06:57] Will people 100 years from now, 500 years from now, will they be happy that I was deplatformed or not? And given that what I talk about now will be more relevant to people in 100 years than anything I ever did in politics or all the things I did in politics put together, which were helpful in the now, but not so much helpful in the future, it goes back to this question of Mark Twain. How many people read Mark Twain's newspaper columns versus the novels that he wrote? Well, nobody reads his newspaper columns and everyone reads his novels or at least knows those stories.
[1:07:36] And so I don't know why Mark Twain wrote these novels, but let's say that Mark Twain wrote these novels because he got fired from his newspaper job. Well, he'd say, man, this is a real drag. I got fired from my newspaper job. That was a steady source of income, and I had hundreds of thousands of readers and was moving the needle on current events and so on. And that's very tempting in the here and now, but in the future, they will be very happy that I was deplatformed. In other words, deplatforming me gave me no choice but to abandon. Well, it did give me a choice, but the incentives pointed towards abandoning the treadmill and the audience capture of politics and working on things that were more foundational, long-lasting, and will produce more effects in the future that are positive than effects in the present that are transitive. So it was a plus. So when Hamming, the guy I'm talking about, when he couldn't get his programmers, he said, okay, well, I'm going to make this good. So I can't get the programmers. What if I get the computer to write the program itself? And that pushed him right to the frontier of computer science. If you can flip the script,
[1:08:54] You haven't been dumped. Your heart has been opened for a better person. You haven't been fired. You have been released to find something that fits your skills better. I mean, I've been fired a couple of times over the course of my life. Yeah, it kind of sucks, but I ended up exactly where it is best for me and best for the world. And that was the third thing, flipping the script. The fourth thing is something that makes sense in hindsight, but it's a little tough to see up front. And what makes sense in hindsight is if you just think about it at the surface level, you say, you know what, I'm just going to work 10% harder than the guy next to me. And you say, okay, so I'm going to end up with a career that's 10% better. No, that's not how it works.
[1:09:47] You know, compound interest is the only math that is really magical in terms of most people's everyday understanding of how their lives can be improved mathematically. You know, that old thing, like the guy says to the king, I will, uh, I want you to give me, put out a chessboard, one grain on the first piece, two, four, eight, 16, 32, 64, 1.28, 2.56, 10.24, 20.48, 40.96, and so on. And of course, by the end of the chessboard, he owns more grain than the king can ever produce. So if you work 10% harder, you don't end up with a career that's 10% better.
[1:10:34] You end up with a career that's 100 times better because the 10% compounds every year if you go the little bit of an extra mile all you feel that day is a little bit of extra mile that you put out it's all you feel some guy stays eight hours right and you stay an extra what 45 minutes 50 minutes oh man i'm out 50 minutes i mean i'm not talking about necessarily hours it could be concentration right so some guy works at 75 and you work at 85 percent yeah i mean you're 10 points up it's a little bit more than 10 because 10 of 75 would be 7.5 right 82.5 so it's a little bit more 11 12 now but that compounds every day every month, every year it compounds and I over the course of my life have worked just a little bit harder than other people and taken a little bit more risk than other people
[1:11:48] And when I was in university, I wrote extra papers. I read extra books. I worked extra hard. I wrote my papers ahead of time. And sometimes I worked too hard in an area that I thought had a future that didn't, right? So when I was in my undergraduate, I spent way too much time acting in plays and writing plays, and both acting and writing and producing and directing plays. I thought that there was something in that for me going forward. And, I mean, the skills weren't terrible going forward. I mean, I think that acting training and voice training and so on has helped me quite a bit in what I do here.
[1:12:31] But I've always worked a little harder. And I'm not crazy work that way. I mean, what's it Tim Pool was saying, like, 16 hours a day, 14? And he's like, bro, you have a kid. For heaven's sakes, go home. You know, go home, Mr. Beanie. It's literally not that serious. you're not changing the world with every show but i think he has is it he or crowder have got like 17 employees and so on so i there's other people who work harder for sure there's no question right i mean i've i've put in my hours my lord i mean i remember there were a couple of years before oh um certainly 2018 20 yeah 2019 like i was traveling i was doing documentaries i was giving speeches like i was all over the man and a half i spent like a third of my year traveling with my family which was you know interesting and fun but you know my daughter obviously wanted more stable relationships and that all made good sense so certainly there were times when i was putting in a lot of hours and you know even over the last couple of years i've
[1:13:35] And peaceful parenting i wrote my novel the future i wrote my novel the present i wrote my novel four books and i wrote my novel called dissolution it's all great books and i also recorded the audiobook of almost which is 24 hours or 26 hours 28 hours 30 hours it's a huge book 320 000 words
[1:13:58] And of course I've done all these shows and I've done a lot of work and I'm happy with it, I'm pleased with it and it really compounds, it really compounds I've done some debates as well some good and useful stuff and I went down and did Sam Hyde's show I went down and did that live it's uh it's taking a while to come out and the sm contacted me because i said hey what's happening with my show he says oh we had to put on a guy who's looks maxing and i said hey man that implies that i am not looks maxing how is this conceivable apparently it's conceivable i don't know how but it is that's fine come on he's a comedian he should put me on as a looks maxer that would be hilarious so i've done i've done some work i'm i'm pleased with the work you can always do more i get that but not always actually since there is there is a work is an aristotelian mean as well there is a a level at which work uh diminishes there's diminishing returns right i think we've all been there i'll study more it's like i'll never sleep I've certainly been there. So that is the fourth habit, right?
[1:15:28] Is just put in that little bit of extra effort and i know it's a drag at the time i know it is i know it's a track at the time but
[1:15:40] Absolutely compounds. I mean, just spend an extra 10% of time at the gym working hard, and it changes your entire physique. Just put in the extra effort. Any competent boss will notice it. You know, if you've never been a boss, I'll give you a big secret. Big secret here. Bosses know everything. Just so you know. Just so there's no shock in this. Bosses know everything. Bosses know exactly how hard you are or are not working. I mean, we have an instinct for these kinds of things. Oh, I've had to have some conversations over the years. Competent bosses, good bosses, know exactly how hard you're working, and they know exactly whether you're putting in any extra effort, energy. And it's not to do with hours necessarily, but bosses know if you're putting in that extra effort or energy or not. They know. They have a massive, massive instinct for these kinds of things. It's kind of why they're the boss, because they know how productive people are or are not.
[1:16:52] So just be aware of that. All right, so sum it up, sum it up, shall we? So don't avoid the big issues. Don't avoid the big problems. You know, if you're a salesman, don't go for the easy sale that doesn't make that much. Go for the big sale. If you've got any problem anywhere, try and figure out what that problem is and just absorb it. Be like a big gelatinous cube. Just flow around it and absorb it. And don't worry about being considered overambitious. Being considered overambitious is just to cope from people who haven't achieved their own potential and stay away from people like that.
[1:17:33] Talk to people. Don't be isolated with your problems. Don't just sit there and work on them on your own. Talk with people. Communicate with people. Go back and forth with people. This is the open doors versus the closed doors of the mathematicians at Bell Labs. Very, very important.
[1:17:50] Flip the script, man. It's a cheesy but very real statement. Every setback is an opportunity. Every disaster can be judo-style turned into an advantage. Do not let circumstances dictate how you think and respond to things in the world. What matters is not what happens to you. What matters is what you think about it. And you and I and no one are ever smart enough to know whether it's going to be good or bad down the road. I mean, de-platforming cost me money, cost me audience, but it's been entirely worth it to have moved the Overton window, to have written the books that I have written since. It's well worth it to have had the great close conversations, and in particular, peaceful parenting. Peaceful parenting, I don't think, would have happened without de-platforming. I needed the time. So, take on the big issues. stay in conversation with people flip the script put in the extra effort consistently and your life ends up in a completely different place all right richard did you uh want to come back Can you hear me? Yes. All right. That was awesome. Thank you.
[1:19:18] I have a bit of a truth bomb to let go. And this is tied into exactly what you were just talking about.
[1:19:30] Oh, good. I like synchronicity. Right. Anyway, this is all for the
[1:19:37] Christians out there.
[1:19:41] And this is going to be harsh,
[1:19:42] And I'm not saying it in a cruel way. Jesus was not a Christian. And in one of the, I think it was the book of John 14, 12, Jesus tells his followers that the work he does, that they will do greater works. And I feel like if that was actually taken seriously, then people would appreciate that you are doing the greater work. And I feel like people need to take this seriously.
[1:20:29] This meaning what? That you are doing the greater work.
[1:20:34] When he came, the time and place that he was born in wasn't really ready. He shook things up.
[1:20:41] Okay? There's no doubt about that. But the problem
[1:20:45] Being is that.
[1:20:46] You know, it's ironic. I find it ironic that all the
[1:20:52] Bullshit starts up as soon as someone dies.
[1:20:57] And it's easy to construct some ideology around anybody once they're dead. Because they're no longer around to speak for themselves.
[1:21:11] But if we take what he said seriously,
[1:21:14] Then I feel like he was saying, no, listen, listen up, you will do greater works than he has done. And I feel like he was speaking to the future in that sense, and people didn't get it at the time. And I feel like, yeah, we are in that place now where you have taken up that mantle, and, You are carrying that torch.
[1:21:41] If you like, and not from
[1:21:43] A supernaturalist standpoint.
[1:21:46] No, I get that I'm not walking on water.
[1:21:48] No, no, no, I'm not talking about any of that.
[1:21:50] No, that's very kind. I appreciate that. That's high praise, and I very much appreciate it. And I will say that, I mean, the question of whether Jesus was a Christian to me is interesting, and the parallels would be something like, was Aristotle a logician? Because aristotle largely invented the modern discipline of logic was was socrates socratic did he employ socratic reasoning i would say yes yeah i would say yes that aristotle was a logician though he invented logic or discovered logic or synthesized logic from reality i would also say that socrates employed socratic reasoning though it wasn't called that and in the same way that einstein came up with the general and special theories of relativity and therefore he was an einsteinian although he was in fact einstein so in the same vein i would say that jesus was a christian in that he derived christianity by taking traditional judaic principles and universalizing them as a whole and injecting far more empathy for the other than had prior or hitherto existed so So I appreciate that. But what I would also say is that one thing I've really disliked about,
[1:23:09] Or one of the things I don't like about religion, is that you have a perfect creature at the center of the religion, a perfect god, or in this case, an amalgam between the human and the divine.
[1:23:24] So in Christianity in particular, you have a perfect human being, half human, half God, and so on, whose virtue we can never, ever hope to even get close to because he was infinitely good, infinitely perfect, and so on.
[1:23:45] Of course, we could think of other religious figures who have the same absolute perfection. And to me, that is such an unrealistic standard for human beings that, in general, it gives people more of an excuse for their own bad behavior. I remember there was some snippet from a cop show I was flipping through many years ago where some cop was going to do something ugly or vicious or nasty or something like that, and he was a Christian.
[1:24:16] And somebody said, it's like, hey, but you're a Christian. What would Jesus do? And he said, Jesus is perfect. I'm not. And that really struck me as quite a powerful statement that because you have a standard of behavior that is absolutely impossible for human beings to even approach, human beings can approach the perfection of jesus in the way that a human lifespan can approach immortality yeah and a human lifespan in the face of immortality ceases to exist in all but the most minuscule dimensions it is a division by zero error yep and so if you have an infinitely perfect human being that you are supposed to emulate, because it is a standard you will never, ever be able to achieve, it is almost like an excuse for bad behavior. Well, Jesus is perfect. I'm not. I can't ever hope to approach the perfection of Jesus. I will never—the virtues that I'm capable of consistently maintaining fade to atomic nothingness in the face of Jesus's infinite perfection. Thank you.
[1:25:37] And I just don't like it. I mean, I've always said, and you've heard it a million times in the show, like, I struggle with these things too. I'm far from perfect. I'm still, you know, I've said this even in the show last night, you know, that I still have to remind myself to be as honest and direct as possible. It's not a habit that I was raised with, but it's something that I really need to continue to remind myself to work to do and to achieve. Yeah and the fact that you know i mean i originated a lot of these ideas although a lot of them of course predate me i just synthesize them and communicate them hopefully effectively but i struggle with these things i have challenges with maintaining these virtues there are times when i fail my own courage there are times when i fail my own integrity there are times when i fail my own honesty and these are not divine standards these are not at all impossible to achieve or to maintain. I think I do a pretty good job it's kind of like diet and exercise. I'm not going to win any competition anytime soon, but I think I do a pretty good job. And the fact that we have these ideal standards is fine. A standard called honesty, but the standard is not actionable. The standard does not act any more than you can drive over the blueprint of a bridge.
[1:27:02] Right.
[1:27:03] So the standard does not act. The standard is a useful guide, but it is only human beings that act. And the maximum human virtue should be what we aspire to that can be achieved. We think if somebody lives to, what is it, serve as a meme today, Dick Van Dyke has lived to be 100, which means he can now not officially play with Lego because it's 3 to 99. And so we think Dick Van Dyke's lived to be 100. Man, that's pretty good. I think Clint Eastwood just passed 100 skinny guys who exercised a lot. Good for them, right? Good for them. You don't see a lot of old, fat people. But...
[1:27:46] Live to 100 we say that's a good life we don't say that sucks in the face of eternity that's a good life we have to have a human achievable standard of virtue otherwise the lack of infinity and the lack of perfection becomes an excuse yep it would be like somebody who's 80 looking at Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime and saying I'm never going to look like that what's the point of exercising at all, because it's impossible for him to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's impossible for Arnold Schwarzenegger to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, and he still works out.
[1:28:21] So I think that the standard of perfection provides way too many excuses for people to say, well, Jesus is perfect. I'm not. And it's kind of an excuse. And so I appreciate your kind words. I do think that we have a long way to go as far as virtue and integrity as a species or even just basic honesty sometimes hopefully i can model that and other people can model it to me and and so on my wife is very honest and direct and i've learned an enormous map from her about these things and it's it's beautiful and so i hope that we can all keep going because that's the beauty somebody was posting today like what is the real actual purpose of life it's like tell the truth do good fight evil i mean that's the most human thing we can do. Animals can't tell the truth or lie. Animals can't fight evil. Animals can't promote the good. It is the most specifically human things that we can do. That which is appropriate to human beings must be that which only human beings can do. Tell the truth, fight evil, do good. These are the most specific and powerful
[1:29:25] and positive human actions that we can take. All right. Thank you for that speech. If there's anything else you wanted to mention?
[1:29:30] No, that's great. And thank you so much, Savannah. I was just trying to say, it's the edifice that is built up around people when they're dead, yeah it's too bad I think right I was trying to bring the story back to him as a human being and not as some, something else that was brought up after the fact that he was dead that's all I was trying to make.
[1:29:59] Yeah and of course if he is divine and perfect then everything he says must be divine and perfect I myself think that when he said on the crucifixion on the cross when he said, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Yeah. I think that was a cry of shock and horror. I think that we look at Jesus as a man who tried to take tribalism and merge it with universalism. He tried to take tribalism of his environment and merge it with the Greco-Roman focus on philosophy, reason, and universals.
[1:30:34] Yeah.
[1:30:34] And I think that he was expecting to be saved. I think he was honest when he said, why have you forsaken me yeah me too and that to me humanizes jesus and makes what he did attainable in a human dimension rather than everything he said and did had to be perfect you know like he he took the demons from people and put them into pigs and the pigs ran off a cliff well if he can do anything why doesn't he just into a stone or a tree? Why does he have to put them into pigs that have to run off a cliff? But because he's perfect, you have to then explain that as the most moral thing to him, other than maybe he just made a mistake, and maybe he didn't know he could put them into trees. Maybe he was still toying with his omnipotence and so on, right? I mean, if I woke up tomorrow being able to do miracles, I don't think I'd do them very well at all to begin with. So, maybe he was just learning. So, I think that keeping morals in the human dimension is really essential because otherwise it's way too easy to excuse what
[1:31:33] We do yeah 100 yeah.
[1:31:35] All right well thanks everyone for a wonderful evening of conversation and thanks in particular to richard for summoning great thoughts from the conversation and i really do appreciate that freedomain.com/donate to help out the show please don't forget some great books freedomain.com/books peaceful parenting.com shop.freedomain.com and freedomain.com/documentaries you should check them out and also call-in shows man you know if i think for the first time in 21 years i'm not booked up solid so please please uh come and get a call-in show they're free or you can pay for private ones if you want to keep it off the internet freedomain.com/call love you guys we'll talk tuesday at 10 a.m bye
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