MERRY CHRISTMAS - MY GIFT TO YOU!
https://cdn.freedomainradio.com/FDRP/FDR_Xmas_eve.mp3
This episode explores insecurities, effective communication, taboo topics, redefining success, parallels between philosophy and being a doctor, using adversity for growth, and ends with gratitude and warm wishes.
Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free! Get my new series on the Truth About the French Revolution, access to the audiobook for my new book 'Peaceful Parenting,' StefBOT-AI, private livestreams, premium call in shows, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and more! See you soon!
https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022
Brief Summary
In today's episode, we explore insecurities and their impact on interactions. We discuss effective communication and bridging gaps between engineers and salespeople. We also tackle taboo topics, emphasizing compassion and moral courage. Success is redefined as the result of willpower and choice, not external factors. We highlight the parallels between philosophy and being a doctor. Privilege is discussed, emphasizing the use of adversity for personal growth. We express gratitude, share a promo code, and extend warm wishes. Love to all, signing off.
Chapters
0:00:00 Recap of the Year: Podcasts, Novels, and History Lessons
0:04:14 The Importance of Perspective in Different Stages of Life
0:07:58 The Unseen Impact of Negative Friendships
0:12:42 Merry Christmas greetings and introduction
0:16:05 Curiosity about the age at which change becomes unlikely
0:17:24 The Demon of Dangerous Optimism
0:20:30 The Lottery: Everyone Loses, Exceptions Are Rare
0:23:36 The Danger of Pointing Out Exceptions and Derailing Conversations
0:27:31 The Sabotage of Dating Advice
0:29:01 The Irritation of Nitpickers
0:35:35 Cold Weather and Bad Traffic Woes
0:37:28 The Toxicity of Hope and the Definition of Insanity
0:42:31 Hope as a Drug and the Time and Place for Hope
0:48:24 The pros and cons of tinkering with technology
0:57:44 Creating a Fully Functional Database for a Chinese Company
1:03:52 Judging and evaluating others' worth and choices
1:07:54 Paying what the show is worth and the choice to free ride
1:12:19 Resenting being a younger sibling
1:16:10 The Difficulty of Creating Hit Songs
1:19:13 The Resentment Towards Salespeople
1:23:32 Importance of Sales and Marketing in Determining Success
1:30:31 Handling Public Displays of Child Abuse
1:34:08 Philosophy, Hardship, and Verbal Abuse
1:38:52 Moral Courage in Dysfunctional Environments
This episode explores insecurities, effective communication, taboo topics, redefining success, parallels between philosophy and being a doctor, using adversity for growth, and ends with gratitude and warm wishes.
Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free! Get my new series on the Truth About the French Revolution, access to the audiobook for my new book 'Peaceful Parenting,' StefBOT-AI, private livestreams, premium call in shows, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and more! See you soon!
https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022
Brief Summary
In today's episode, we explore insecurities and their impact on interactions. We discuss effective communication and bridging gaps between engineers and salespeople. We also tackle taboo topics, emphasizing compassion and moral courage. Success is redefined as the result of willpower and choice, not external factors. We highlight the parallels between philosophy and being a doctor. Privilege is discussed, emphasizing the use of adversity for personal growth. We express gratitude, share a promo code, and extend warm wishes. Love to all, signing off.
Chapters
0:00:00 Recap of the Year: Podcasts, Novels, and History Lessons
0:04:14 The Importance of Perspective in Different Stages of Life
0:07:58 The Unseen Impact of Negative Friendships
0:12:42 Merry Christmas greetings and introduction
0:16:05 Curiosity about the age at which change becomes unlikely
0:17:24 The Demon of Dangerous Optimism
0:20:30 The Lottery: Everyone Loses, Exceptions Are Rare
0:23:36 The Danger of Pointing Out Exceptions and Derailing Conversations
0:27:31 The Sabotage of Dating Advice
0:29:01 The Irritation of Nitpickers
0:35:35 Cold Weather and Bad Traffic Woes
0:37:28 The Toxicity of Hope and the Definition of Insanity
0:42:31 Hope as a Drug and the Time and Place for Hope
0:48:24 The pros and cons of tinkering with technology
0:57:44 Creating a Fully Functional Database for a Chinese Company
1:03:52 Judging and evaluating others' worth and choices
1:07:54 Paying what the show is worth and the choice to free ride
1:12:19 Resenting being a younger sibling
1:16:10 The Difficulty of Creating Hit Songs
1:19:13 The Resentment Towards Salespeople
1:23:32 Importance of Sales and Marketing in Determining Success
1:30:31 Handling Public Displays of Child Abuse
1:34:08 Philosophy, Hardship, and Verbal Abuse
1:38:52 Moral Courage in Dysfunctional Environments
Transcript
00:00:00 So let's get started on our Christmas Eve show. It's just 11 a.m. on the 24th of December 2023.
00:00:07 241223. Those probably are the dimensions of somebody in Barbie Universe.
00:00:15 So, wanted to do a quick recap of the year. Sometimes we do this New Year's Eve, but here's the thing, man. Here's the thing.
00:00:24 I'm not going to try and praise my own work ethic, because I think the numbers do it for us. But what have we done this year to date, right? Not quite the end of the year. We've got a week to go, whatever.
00:00:34 So, we have 248 podcasts in the main feed. That's of course close to one a day.
00:00:41 We have 128 premium podcasts, another five going out tomorrow.
00:00:46 49 premium podcasts produced in 2023. Some of the premium podcasts are remastered and summarized and transcribed from older shows.
00:00:56 I did a whole bunch of, maybe, yeah, a 12-part series in the French Revolution, which is over 13 hours.
00:01:06 History of Philosophers, some of them went out this year. I wrote and recorded a whole novel called The Present, 29 chapters. I don't even know how many hours in the audiobook that is, but that is an F-ton of work.
00:01:21 I'll just tell you that right now. So, in total, released 425 podcasts.
00:01:28 History of Philosophers series, at least good chunks of it, an entire novel. The whole history of the French Revolution I got back into doing some interviews and truth-abouts and so on.
00:01:40 So, that's a lot of work. I'd like to apologize to all of the future scholars who are going to have to go through all of this stuff.
00:01:48 I guess I want to be one of these really verbose and prolific kind of guys that's going to create a cottage industry down the road of people analyzing everything I said.
00:01:59 Oh, yeah, we also developed and released StephBot, which was quite a bit of labor and experimentation with a variety of platforms.
00:02:07 So, it's a lot. It's been a lot. And, of course, great thanks to Jared and James for helping all of this along and making some of it happen completely.
00:02:18 And thank you, of course, for your help and support over the course of this year. Next year should be even cooler. I won't even say it could be. It should be, and I'm actually going to commit.
00:02:31 Yeah, that's right. It will be. It will be even cooler. And thank you again so much for your support for all of this.
00:02:39 Now, I am here for you, my friends. Questions, comments, issues, challenges, problems, criticisms. How's my head wound healing up? A little bit.
00:02:49 My daughter is a snack monster, and she has one mission in life. Squirrels gather nuts for the winter, and my daughter gathers healthy snacks and places them in Indiana Jones-style tremulous walls of death in the pantry.
00:03:05 So, I wanted to grab something from the pantry. The wall of healthy snack death came down. I tried to push back on it so it wouldn't all hit the ground, and I hit the shelf with my head.
00:03:15 So, it is not a very seasonally inappropriate mosquito bite with a lance. It is just a head wound from the shelves, the very shelves I put up myself.
00:03:26 So, it's only fair. I drilled them. They smack me. So, fair enough. It's like a lot of my dating when I was younger.
00:03:33 All right. No, it wasn't. Just a funny joke. Just a funny joke.
00:03:37 So, yes, good morning, good morning. Merry Christmas. Let's get to your questions right away.
00:03:42 Hey, Steph, what would be your advice on cutting ties with an old childhood friend because they've been going down a very destructive path, and all my attempts have resulted in futility to help them?
00:03:56 They claim self-ownership, but yet choose to indulge in drugs and needless sex with randoms. We're both single young men.
00:04:07 Yeah. Well, I'm going to give you some deeply earned wisdom of age, deeply earned wisdom of age, and I'm going to try and rip off the band-aid of youth that covers your eyeballs.
00:04:28 When you're young, you care about what's in the past, and that's fine. I mean, you know, the past is the majority of your experience, so you really care about what's going on in the past when you're young.
00:04:43 My friends and family and all of this stuff means a huge amount to you. I'm not complaining. It's no criticism. It's just a simple fact.
00:04:53 Now, around middle age, there's a midlife crisis. So, around middle age, that, if you're wise, it changes. And I'm sort of trying to throw back a couple of messages in the bottle here to help you understand that process.
00:05:05 So, right now, from a youth perspective, you look at your friend, you care about your friend, you think about all of the history that you have with your friend, and that makes perfect sense, and I appreciate it.
00:05:19 And, of course, your friend is a significant majority of your social life and socializing as a young man. Makes total sense. I understand and I sympathize.
00:05:31 Now, that having been said, it's a different thing. It's a different thing when you get a little older, and I'm going to try and give you that wisdom so that you don't have to wait and suffer but can get this wisdom right away.
00:05:46 Now, when you get older, you don't look at what is, because you're not as focused on the past. What you do is you focus on what could be.
00:05:59 In other words, you don't look at sunk costs from an economic standpoint. You don't look at sunk costs, you look at opportunity costs.
00:06:09 So, the sunk costs are the amount of time, effort, and energy you have invested in your friend. Those are your sunk costs. And when you're young, sunk costs mean a lot.
00:06:19 Nothing wrong with it, it's inevitable. But, when you get older, it's the opportunity costs that you begin to tally up.
00:06:27 So, with regards to your friend, I'm going to try and shift your mindset from your sunk costs to your opportunity costs.
00:06:36 The sunk costs, of course, are all the time, effort, and energy you've put into this friendship. And that's not unimportant, I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't matter, it does.
00:06:44 But the opportunity costs are the things you can't see, because you're staring into the black hole of your friend's spiral into self-destruction.
00:06:53 What you can't see are all the good friends who aren't there.
00:07:00 So, empirically, you have a friend who's spiraling. But, conceptually, philosophically, this is the difference you know between the government invests $5 million to create 50 jobs, and everyone says, "Wow, those are 50 jobs, that's cool."
00:07:17 But they don't see the 150 jobs that would have been created if the government hadn't taken the $5 million to begin with.
00:07:24 So, the seen versus the unseen. So, when you're young, everything's empirical, it's kind of impacting your consciousness, you've got a lot of invested time and effort and energy in things.
00:07:34 And you don't see the unseen. That's the tipping point when you get older and a little wiser. And again, I'm really trying to transfer this back hard to you.
00:07:42 The important thing is not your friend who's dragging you down. The important thing is all the friends who aren't there who are pulling you up.
00:07:53 That's the unseen. That's what philosophy aims to uncover.
00:07:58 Philosophy is all about turning the obvious into the non-obvious, because you don't need philosophy for the obvious.
00:08:04 My hands in front of my face. You don't need philosophy for the obvious.
00:08:08 You need philosophy to take you from the obvious to the non-obvious.
00:08:11 The obvious is your messed up friend. The non-obvious is all the quality people in your life who aren't there because of your messed up friend.
00:08:19 And it's not like they come and they look at your messed up friend and your relationship with him and they say, "Oh gosh, that's probably not very productive. I don't really want a part of that."
00:08:26 It's the whole aura. It's the circles you move in. It's the body language this gives you. It's the worry, the concern, the lack of emotional availability, the lack of buoyancy, the lack of positivity, the lack of happiness, the lack of capacity to inspire others.
00:08:40 The heavy weight, the burden.
00:08:42 Like you hear this in the call-in chairs. You know, some people, they just call in with these kind of voices like they're just carrying a burden and they've got a lead balloon hanging off every syllable and morpheme in the known universe.
00:08:52 And it's tough. You talk like that, people don't want to be around you.
00:08:55 So your friend is dragging you down and that weight is carried with you everywhere you go and probably showing up in your dreams as well.
00:09:02 Look, a simple fact of the matter is, he's not your friend.
00:09:12 If he was your friend, he wouldn't be putting you through this kind of suffering.
00:09:17 Out of caring for you, he wouldn't be putting you through this kind of suffering.
00:09:21 Or if he was dedicated in some masochistic manner to the destruction of his own life, he would release you from the friendship.
00:09:34 He would tell you, "Get away. Get lost."
00:09:38 Like we can think of some father who's being mauled by some pack of wild animals who's screaming at his children to get to safety.
00:09:44 He would be driving you away. He wouldn't be dragging you down.
00:09:47 If he cared about you at all, he would either reform so that you wouldn't have this burden or he would lift this burden by refusing contact with you.
00:09:55 But the fact that he stays in contact with you and is dragging you down means that he is the worst kind of person in a personal relationship standpoint.
00:10:05 He's the infectious loser.
00:10:06 Some people lose at life.
00:10:09 I don't want to sound harsh. I don't like the term loser.
00:10:13 But some people lose at life.
00:10:19 Have you ever known someone?
00:10:20 I certainly have.
00:10:22 They just lose at life.
00:10:24 There's a game called life.
00:10:26 There's a game called life and some people gamble and lose.
00:10:30 And it's not their gambling that causes them to lose.
00:10:33 It's their mindset.
00:10:34 And the mindset becomes bolted into their brain and becomes functionally immovable.
00:10:39 So some people just kind of lose at life.
00:10:49 And it's not accidental.
00:10:55 It's not like they roll the dice and just, "Ooh, snake eyes," right?
00:10:58 But some people just lose.
00:11:00 They just lose in life.
00:11:01 They make the wrong choices, they make the wrong decisions, and then they double down on all those wrong choices and wrong decisions.
00:11:06 They just double down on that.
00:11:08 And your choice is, what do you do when you're surrounded by the losing team?
00:11:20 What do you do when you're surrounded by the losing team?
00:11:28 Well, if you want to win a relay race and you're surrounded by people who refuse to run, what do you do?
00:11:36 Do you stand there for the rest of your life trying to conjole them into running when they say, "I have no intention of running"?
00:11:41 And they are smoking like chimneys and not exercising?
00:11:49 Is the rest of your life and your precious energies in the universe to be dedicated towards the attempt to rouse people who don't want to be roused?
00:11:59 You know, when you're engaged in a battle to try and pull someone up, nine times out of ten, they're engaged in an equal battle to try and pull you down.
00:12:10 To pull you down.
00:12:18 To pull you down.
00:12:20 And that's the battle.
00:12:22 And if you don't understand the seriousness of that battle...
00:12:25 And now, you may not, then you're in grave danger, like you are in grave danger.
00:12:31 If you don't understand the seriousness of the battle, you're trying to pull them up, they're trying to pull you down.
00:12:36 Let me just get your comments here.
00:12:44 Yes, we have 363 hours of main feed podcast released this year to date.
00:12:50 Not even counting everything else.
00:12:52 All right, Merry Christmas from Cairo.
00:12:56 Ah, Friends of Mr. Great song.
00:12:59 Merry Christmas to you all.
00:13:01 Merry Christmas.
00:13:02 Buon Natale.
00:13:03 Natale?
00:13:04 Buon Natale.
00:13:05 Merry Christmas to everyone else who is listening.
00:13:08 Thanks, Bob.
00:13:09 Happy Christmas.
00:13:10 Thank you, Nina.
00:13:12 I wish you back.
00:13:13 Happy Christmas.
00:13:14 Merry Christmas.
00:13:15 Is this the right place to discuss philosophy?
00:13:21 There's a picture of a sign.
00:13:27 Society for asking stupid questions.
00:13:29 Someone comes up and says, "Excuse me, is this the Society for asking stupid questions?"
00:13:33 Merry Christmas.
00:13:36 Merry Christmas back to you, Michelle.
00:13:39 Appreciate that.
00:13:40 Merry Christmas to the Freedomain community.
00:13:42 Thank you so much.
00:13:43 I often think of a friend from high school as a quintessential example of a loser.
00:13:46 I constantly think of what I would do with her talents or abilities, right?
00:13:49 You're absolutely right.
00:13:51 He's winning in terms of the financial realm, but maturity-wise, it's a loss.
00:13:55 A lot of people can make a lot of money by destroying their lives.
00:13:59 It's like you can actually create a fair amount of heat by setting fire to yourself, I guess,
00:14:03 especially if you're a chubby.
00:14:08 The doubling down is the worst part to see.
00:14:10 I fought so hard with a few friends to not double down, I kept trying to save my pseudo-family.
00:14:14 Yes.
00:14:15 Well, welcome, J. Cody.
00:14:16 Merry Christmas.
00:14:17 My first live stream.
00:14:18 Well, here's hoping it doesn't suck for you.
00:14:20 Thank you, David, for your Christmas tip.
00:14:24 I appreciate that.
00:14:25 I hope that you notice just how much work comes pouring out of the big, chatty forehead
00:14:32 in conjunction with you guys as well.
00:14:34 All right.
00:14:35 I got your question about the IT stuff.
00:14:37 Let me just make a note of that.
00:14:38 But I will give, I mean, personally, I have a three-rule limit.
00:14:46 First of all, for me to even try to help someone is rare, like in my personal life, because
00:14:52 I don't want to help people in my personal life.
00:14:54 Right?
00:14:57 I don't want to help people in my personal life.
00:14:58 What I want to do is I want people in my personal life I don't need to help, or maybe it's
00:15:04 just a little bit of aid here and there, a couple of questions here and there.
00:15:07 But I don't have anybody in my life who I fundamentally need to change.
00:15:10 Like I just, I mean, it's part of the privilege of age.
00:15:14 By the time you get into your 50s, and not everyone is my age, of course, who's in my
00:15:17 life, but by the time you get into your 40s and 50s, anything that hasn't changed ain't
00:15:23 going to change.
00:15:24 Well, let me ask you this.
00:15:25 What do you guys think is the limit where the tipping point is whatever hasn't changed
00:15:28 by then isn't going to change?
00:15:30 What do you think the tip, is there an age that you have or you've noticed?
00:15:34 As far as all of this goes.
00:15:35 Thank you for the tip, my friend.
00:15:38 I really, really appreciate that.
00:15:40 That's very kind and much, much appreciated.
00:15:42 Much appreciated.
00:15:44 And yeah, what is your age?
00:15:48 Right?
00:15:50 I mean, obviously it's not eight, it's not 10, not 12.
00:15:52 What is your age?
00:15:54 What is the age where you say anything that hasn't changed isn't going to change?
00:16:03 Do you have that?
00:16:04 Because you should have that.
00:16:06 You should have that.
00:16:08 And maybe you should have that within yourself as well in terms of like self acceptance or
00:16:13 something like that.
00:16:14 But what is your age?
00:16:15 What is the age you have?
00:16:17 I'm curious.
00:16:21 So what do we got here?
00:16:23 27, 24, 25, 25, 35, 35.
00:16:26 Oh, Michelle, you're so very lovely, nice and kind.
00:16:30 So until 30, what is that the old thing?
00:16:32 A man dies after eating 183 chicken nuggets and then somebody wrote underneath.
00:16:36 So the limit is 182.
00:16:38 34.9.
00:16:42 Change is imminent.
00:16:43 I mean, it's a tipping point.
00:16:45 It's a little bit of a sliding scale, right?
00:16:46 It doesn't like go from black to white.
00:16:47 It's a dimmer switch, right?
00:16:48 But yeah, I'm always kind of curious about that.
00:16:52 Do you have in your mind, do you have in your mind a time when change is no longer
00:16:59 something you expect?
00:17:00 Jared says, I think early to mid twenties, I'm 34 and feel like I'm constantly changing.
00:17:05 It's not what I'm talking about.
00:17:07 What I'm not talking about people who are in the process of changing.
00:17:10 I'm saying, when do you give up on people starting to change?
00:17:12 30 at the very latest.
00:17:14 I think if you don't start changing by 32, you won't change.
00:17:17 30 at the very latest.
00:17:27 I think I was fully me by 36.
00:17:30 I grow and learn, but my character was set.
00:17:32 Well, and your character is set as growing and learning, right?
00:17:35 Now, of course, how do you deal with the inevitable exceptions?
00:17:41 Maybe this one person is the exception.
00:17:43 Maybe they're 40 and they go through some massive Ayahuasca-laced revelation and they
00:17:47 just start to change and change and change.
00:17:49 What?
00:17:50 How do you keep that demon of optimism at bay?
00:17:56 What is your mental state or your story for keeping that demon of dangerous optimism at
00:18:01 bay?
00:18:02 Optimism, nine times out of 10, optimism is a form of spiritual suicide.
00:18:07 Optimism is the belief in a positive outcome against reason.
00:18:16 Otherwise, it's not optimism.
00:18:19 It's just acceptance.
00:18:22 I mean, I'm not optimistic I'll live to see tomorrow.
00:18:30 That's not a hope.
00:18:32 So how do you deal with, well, what if this person is the unicorn?
00:18:37 What if this person is the person who changes?
00:18:40 How do you do that?
00:18:43 Thank you for your tip.
00:18:45 I appreciate that.
00:18:46 Hard to say.
00:18:48 Habits are cemented, says Hannah.
00:18:51 Hannah Palindrome.
00:18:53 Hard to say.
00:18:54 Habits are cemented.
00:18:55 However, my 62-year-old mother seems to be better since joining a church.
00:18:58 Better company than the alcoholics she used to be around.
00:19:01 I moved her five provinces to sober up.
00:19:04 Wow, good for you.
00:19:05 Difficult to think other people aren't like you.
00:19:07 Yes, yes, yes.
00:19:09 The best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior.
00:19:12 Getting rid of negative influences can bring about some pretty massive changes.
00:19:18 You know, it's tough, man, because until, it's one of these things that
00:19:22 until you've experienced the lifting of the burdens of losers in your life
00:19:26 is really hard to explain just how incredible it is.
00:19:30 Something major has to take place.
00:19:35 Breakup, childbirth, marriage, etc., etc.
00:19:38 Yeah, if you are weighed down by the burdens of trying to live life for others,
00:19:47 I mean, isn't that how we try to help people a lot?
00:19:49 We try to take our energy, our positivity, our capacity for change
00:19:52 and forcefully, enthusiastically, like, inject it into the veins of other people.
00:19:57 It's demonic. It's demonic.
00:20:00 It's demonic to try and change other people to that degree
00:20:03 because what you're trying to do is possess and displace their actual personality and choices.
00:20:07 Get out of the way!
00:20:08 I'm taking over the meat robot and I'm moving the levers in the way that I think they should go.
00:20:15 You can't possess people.
00:20:17 It's pretty nasty to even think.
00:20:20 So the way that you avoid this stuff is you just think of the lottery.
00:20:25 You just think of the lottery.
00:20:28 Now, in the lottery, everyone loses.
00:20:34 I mean, that's the standard you have to take.
00:20:36 Ah, but a few people win big.
00:20:40 I'm not talking about the $50 scratch.
00:20:42 I'm talking about the $5 million, right?
00:20:44 So, in the lottery, the practical approach is that everyone loses.
00:20:52 Everyone loses.
00:20:54 Ah, but there's exceptions.
00:20:56 It's like, right.
00:20:58 But I don't care. Everyone loses.
00:21:01 I mean, even the people who win the lottery
00:21:04 are just getting massive amounts of unearned income from taxpayers and debt
00:21:09 and children who aren't even born yet.
00:21:12 So, when I look at the lottery and I say, "Everyone loses,"
00:21:18 people, they can't help themselves.
00:21:20 They can't say, "No, no, no. Don't be ridiculous. Of course some people win the lottery."
00:21:25 But no, everybody loses.
00:21:28 Everybody loses.
00:21:32 Because even the people who are playing the lottery
00:21:34 are holding out hope and constantly being disappointed.
00:21:37 And even if they win the lottery, they're probably going to be disappointed
00:21:40 because they're going to be kind of miserable.
00:21:42 So, everybody loses in the lottery.
00:21:47 Everybody loses who gambles.
00:21:50 Pointing out exceptions is quite female behavior.
00:21:54 That's interesting. Yeah, I was thinking about that the other day.
00:21:57 Is the nitpicking for exceptions?
00:21:59 So, I will tell you this.
00:22:01 I will tell you this. This doesn't mean I'm right, but I'll tell you this.
00:22:07 Pointing out exceptions is classic narcissism.
00:22:10 It's megalomania. It's main character syndrome.
00:22:16 What is it I read the other day on X?
00:22:19 Somebody said, "You know, I'm 35 and I've yet to receive my call to adventure.
00:22:22 I'm beginning to suspect I might not be a protagonist after all."
00:22:25 So, pointing out exceptions is narcissism.
00:22:29 Right? So, the reason why people play the lottery is they think,
00:22:35 obviously, they think they're going to win.
00:22:37 Right? And pointing out exceptions is thinking that you're the exception.
00:22:41 Everybody who points out exceptions always thinks that they're the exception,
00:22:44 which means they're narcissists, which means that they do not have
00:22:47 a good grasp of statistics and they think that that which is massively improbable
00:22:52 is inevitable for them.
00:22:54 So, when people point out exceptions, I run.
00:22:59 It's a whole... In my life.
00:23:01 When people point out exceptions, I run.
00:23:05 And, of course, they only go one way.
00:23:07 Right? Is it impossible to imagine?
00:23:09 Well, we all know that some people were happy under National Socialism.
00:23:14 We know that some people were happier under Communism.
00:23:18 Ayn Rand's sister missed Stalin when Ayn Rand met her many years later.
00:23:22 And she missed that. Right?
00:23:24 So, do we say, "Well, these systems..."
00:23:26 Slavery. Were there some slaves who preferred being slaves?
00:23:28 Maybe. I don't know. But we can imagine such a situation.
00:23:31 So, then do we say, "Well, you know, slavery isn't all bad because..."
00:23:34 Like, the exceptions never go that way. Right?
00:23:36 But, yeah, you've got to...
00:23:37 When people give you the exceptions, they're tripping you up.
00:23:40 They're stalling conversation. They're persons from Porlock.
00:23:43 They're saboteurs. They're narcissists.
00:23:46 Because anybody with half a brain knows that the exceptions are implicit.
00:23:51 Right?
00:23:52 So, all they're trying to do is they're sort of agents of incomprehension
00:23:56 and mental paralysis who throw their little verbal bombs into a conversation
00:24:00 to distract anyone from making any kind of progress whatsoever.
00:24:03 And so that you have to put so many caveats into everything you say
00:24:06 that no one can ever get anywhere.
00:24:08 All they're doing is loading rocks on the camel's back until it breaks. Right?
00:24:15 So, yeah. The exception thing is...
00:24:18 It's one of the tests I have in my life.
00:24:19 Like, I'll make a general statement.
00:24:21 And if I'm sort of in some social situation, I'll make a general statement.
00:24:25 And I'm actually at the point now where I'll just say, "Well, that's just stupid."
00:24:31 I remember once at a dinner party, I made a general statement.
00:24:34 Somebody pointed out the exception.
00:24:36 And I just went and said, "Okay, hands up, everybody.
00:24:38 Hands up if you didn't already understand that general exception."
00:24:41 Like, if I say, you know, "Women are shorter than men."
00:24:43 I know a tall woman. Does everybody understand?
00:24:45 Like, we all understand that this is not an absolute statement,
00:24:48 but it's a statement of generality.
00:24:50 Right.
00:24:51 So, I say, "You're not contributing anything when you point out what everybody already knows
00:24:56 and think that you're adding something to the conversation. You're not.
00:24:59 You're just in the way of us adults talking. Right?
00:25:03 You're just in the way of us adults talking."
00:25:05 You need to shame people who do that, in my humble opinion.
00:25:08 All right.
00:25:09 Cody says, "This is oddly applicable to my life."
00:25:13 [laughs]
00:25:16 That's very funny. I don't mean this in any negative way.
00:25:18 That's actually very funny.
00:25:19 Maybe that should be our new tagline.
00:25:21 It's not "Free domain, the logic of personal and political liberty."
00:25:25 It's "Free domain, oddly applicable to your life."
00:25:29 Maybe that should be our new slogan.
00:25:31 Maybe we get that tattooed, "Oddly applicable to your life."
00:25:34 I'll do it in Japanese, but they'll probably write something like,
00:25:36 "This space for rent," in Japanese, and I'll think it's something else.
00:25:39 Sorry, Cody, let me get on.
00:25:41 You recently returned, he said, "I recently returned from a holiday trip to see my older brother,
00:25:45 and it hit me that he is a loser.
00:25:46 He's a raging sex addict and a whole host of mindset issues that accompany that.
00:25:50 He really thinks that someday he's going to find a great wife to have another kid with.
00:25:53 I've sent him resources, I've given him advice, and I feel like an idiot for doing so.
00:25:58 He won't change."
00:26:00 Here's what addicts do.
00:26:03 Addicts spread the addiction by making you addicted to stopping their addiction.
00:26:09 I'm going to say this again. It's really important to understand.
00:26:11 Addicts spread their addiction by making you addicted to stopping their addiction.
00:26:19 Understand that? That's how addiction spreads.
00:26:22 Losers spread their loserdom by making you addicted to stopping their loserdom.
00:26:28 So, every time you're desperate to help an addict, the addict you need the most help is in the mirror.
00:26:36 Remember that. Remember that.
00:26:42 All right, let's see here.
00:26:46 I'm sorry, I have to keep refreshing. It's not updating on its own.
00:26:51 Ah, locals. All right.
00:26:54 "I started my dicking and shifting my attitude to positive and growth-oriented at 26.
00:26:59 I'm late 40s. I've had a few big changes pushed on me and others I decided on."
00:27:04 Ah, let's see here.
00:27:06 "Exceptions are not the rule. What actions have they taken to show they can, will, want to change?
00:27:11 Evidence, please, and we can take it case by case."
00:27:16 And also, why is it that you would want to take on the parental role to somebody you're mentally assigning to be a toddler
00:27:21 by constantly changing and getting them to do things?
00:27:24 And when was the last time the friend you were trying to change helped you for the better?
00:27:30 It's tough, man. Women telling other women who are in their late 20s that they are young and still have time to date around.
00:27:36 But that's just sabotage, right? That's just sabotage.
00:27:39 I don't know if it's more common among men than women, but there is a certain type of broken and tragic noble soul
00:27:45 who tries to educate everyone else on their own mistakes, and there are other people, much more common,
00:27:49 who try to replicate their own mistakes on others so they don't feel alone.
00:27:52 Misery loves company, as the old thing.
00:27:55 People love their exceptions face this every day.
00:27:58 Well, of course, the general argument is that noticing patterns is prejudice.
00:28:04 Like, no, no it's not.
00:28:09 And of course, you think of, I mean, if everybody had taken their lottery money,
00:28:13 the money they spend on lotteries, and put it in Bitcoin, they would have won the lottery for sure.
00:28:20 You know, the opportunity cost of waiting for something is really bad.
00:28:25 Being in anticipation of something, "Oh, my friend will change for the better, I'm going to win the lottery,
00:28:30 things are going to turn around," and so on.
00:28:34 The waiting is death.
00:28:38 Do or don't do. Act, don't act. But the waiting is death.
00:28:45 "Ah, but Steph, I won 50 quid in the lottery back in 1997. I'm optimistic I will again."
00:28:53 Right.
00:28:57 Um...
00:29:01 Yeah, if he's a sex addict, then he's just a monkey in heat.
00:29:08 I mean, he's not acting as a human being.
00:29:13 Pointing out exceptions equals annoying. Pointing out fallacies equals topic of conversation.
00:29:22 I mean, if you come in, and this is life with the nitpickers, right?
00:29:27 Let's do some funny examples. What the hell? Let's do some funny examples.
00:29:31 So here it is, right? You come in, it's like 100 degrees outside, right? In the shade.
00:29:38 And you come in to your friend's place and you say, "Man, it's hot."
00:29:42 And he says, "Not where it's air-conditioned."
00:29:47 "Man, it's hot outside today." "Not in the Arctic, it's not."
00:29:52 Oh, that's... we could literally do these kinds of things all day, and if you want to throw me some, I'm happy to do some.
00:30:01 But the exception people are just crazy.
00:30:09 And you're like a man, "Oh, I'm never going to meet a woman."
00:30:12 "Well, you will in the old age home when you get sponge-bopped in your 90s, it's probably likely to be a female and you'll meet her."
00:30:22 Oh, you can just do this stuff forever and ever. Amen.
00:30:27 But yeah, those people, it's rage, right? It's passive-aggressive rage.
00:30:33 And the paralysis of the mind, because the mind will lead to an analysis of the evil-doers in the environment.
00:30:42 "Hey, Steph, I noticed you had mentioned the board in a lot of your oldest podcasts. At what point did you decide to close the forum? Is there an archive of it?"
00:30:51 Well, the forum was closed because it was a source of... I think it was the DDoS. I think James will remember this a lot better.
00:31:03 But it was a source of paralyzing attacks upon the website, and it was not possible to fix the architecture because it wasn't... like it was another person's product.
00:31:14 And it was no longer supported. I mean, we bought the product and then they switched to some like crazy expensive scheme and there was no upgrade path and all of that.
00:31:27 That's huge! The addiction of addict-saving is a lot of the problems plaguing therapy. The board was great.
00:31:36 James says, "Ran into tech issues in 2018, closed it, don't have an archive currently."
00:31:42 "Misery loves company exactly, or malice. My life is hell so I will make everyone else suffer for my pain."
00:31:49 "Didn't Aristotle make a statement about indecision being a decision in itself?"
00:31:54 So any generalized statement allows progress. All progress is based upon generalized statements.
00:32:04 And I mean, you're here because of generalized experience, right?
00:32:09 Generalized statements, steps, live streams are of value and it's cool to get them live, which you know I can't help but agree with.
00:32:16 So you're here because of a generalized statement and I hope that I provide quality because I've been doing it for quite a while and I don't think I'm about to start sucking at the moment.
00:32:25 The sucking waits for the OnlyFans should donations not improve.
00:32:28 But so all progress is based upon generalized statements.
00:32:34 Right? So if you put a good on sale, right, like you want to sell something and your good goes on sale, you are saying people respond to incentives.
00:32:45 Well, not everyone is going to buy it. I get that. I mean, that's implicit, right? I mean, that would be completely pointless.
00:32:50 We're cutting the price of this good in half. Well, not everyone's going to buy it.
00:32:54 It's like, like, what do you even say to somebody who's that and they're not dumb.
00:32:59 They're not dumb. I don't think it's dumb. What happens is all generalized statements arouse anxiety because once you make a generalized statement, what do you do?
00:33:07 You move on. You move on. You don't have to sit there and evaluate everything.
00:33:11 You don't get to be neurotic. You don't get to be paralyzed. You move on. Get something done.
00:33:17 You move on and get something done.
00:33:21 When people who don't want to move on and get something done, who want to stay stewing in their own paralysis, when somebody makes a generalized statement, they move on.
00:33:28 Like the number of people who say all generalized statements are bigotry, prejudice, whatever it is, right?
00:33:32 They're just people who don't want to get anything done in their lives because the idea that you can't get anything done in your life until, with any generalized statement because there's always exceptions, always exceptions.
00:33:43 And you got to, you can't make any generalized statements while you can't progress in your life. You can't do anything. You can't do anything. Can't do anything.
00:33:51 Everyone you love can be thoughtless and a little mean from time to time.
00:33:59 I know I can be. So everyone you love is going to be. Now, when I say to the people in my life who I love, I say, I love you.
00:34:08 And then somebody says, well, remember that time two years ago when they said something kind of snippy?
00:34:12 There's, no, not going there. Not going there. Because, so the people who are paralyzed in their own lives feel a great deal of anxiety when anybody's making a generalized statement and they need to stall that person because of generalized statements are accepted.
00:34:27 Society progresses. I mean, if somebody wants to start a fire and somebody else says, well, remember that time you couldn't start the fire, right?
00:34:37 They just don't want the fire to be lit.
00:34:44 All right. They genuinely get angry at you for having a little bit of happiness over something, then the bullying and all the over, overt and covert tactics they employ along with that.
00:34:53 There's a misery less company. I think the nitpicking also applies to discussing specific people's behavior to like mutual friends.
00:35:04 Ooh, what's up? Taxes, gas prices, your optimism for a genuine response.
00:35:14 Manual labor jobs commonly have verbal abuse. Well, not when you work alone. That was on this, one of these live streams, right? Yeah, that's, that's pretty funny.
00:35:24 Or it's raining outside, not in between the raindrops. It's not.
00:35:35 It's cold outside, not in front of fires. It's not.
00:35:43 Traffic is really bad today, but not everywhere.
00:35:48 Oh, my gosh.
00:35:52 Yeah, it's, it's just, it's just horrendous.
00:35:57 Would be exciting to use a new board of forum. That's free to man. Locals.com. Right, right where you are.
00:36:02 Please explain what you mean by generalized statements.
00:36:06 Well, the statements of observable empirical trends that are not considered to be absolutes.
00:36:12 So an absolute statement is everyone is subject to gravity.
00:36:17 Right. Another absolute, and that's an absolute statement. Everybody is subject to gravity. Right.
00:36:24 All who are speaking are alive.
00:36:27 Consciousness require is an effect of the brain. Right. These are all absolute statements applies everywhere at all times, no matter what.
00:36:34 Statements of physics or base biology. However, if you say smart people tend to do better in life, that's not saying that only smart people can ever succeed.
00:36:45 That's not saying that every smart person exceeds, succeeds, and it's not saying nobody who's not smart ever succeeds.
00:36:52 Right. If you say tall men tend to be more attractive to women or tall men are more attractive to women, you can say, well, Tom Cruise is short and he's very attractive.
00:37:01 Right. So, yes, but Tom Cruise is gorgeous, her student and an extraordinarily talented businessman, filmmaker and terrible father.
00:37:09 So you can think of all of these exceptions. By the way, I don't know if somehow I stumbled across a picture of Danny DeVito in high school.
00:37:16 Good looking guy, man. Good looking guy. Back in the day.
00:37:20 All right.
00:37:28 I did X in the past. I am not happy. I keep doing it. I keep not being happy.
00:37:33 And do I learn anything from this or fall into Einstein's definition of insanity, which is deep down doing the same thing and expecting a different result?
00:37:40 Well, it's the expectation of the different result that keeps you doing the same thing.
00:37:44 I just say you understand that. Right. It's incredibly toxic to have hope where hope is unwarranted.
00:37:51 Right. I mean, if the bus ain't coming, but you hope it's coming, you'll stay.
00:37:57 Hope and paralysis are often two sides of the same coin.
00:38:03 Hope is a way of time shifting the dopamine from the future to the present, which means you're less likely to achieve it in the future.
00:38:11 It's a way of trying to get the rewards of a better outcome without the better outcome.
00:38:21 I have to do this wee bit refreshed.
00:38:28 The government programs don't help anyone. Of course they do. They help insiders get more money and power.
00:38:33 And of course, everybody has this, you know, I guess it's a fairly red pill moment where they look at the annual salaries of politicians and then you look at their net worth.
00:38:42 It's like, hmm, seems to be a smidge of a jump there.
00:38:49 That's rough. That's rough.
00:38:53 It's really hot. Not in the troposphere, it's not. It's really hot. Not on Pluto, it's not.
00:39:02 Oh, my gosh.
00:39:06 That's rough.
00:39:11 All right. Tips welcome for those just joining. I appreciate that.
00:39:19 Yeah, I mean, the opposite of hope is plan.
00:39:25 I mean, both four letter words, I guess, but the opposite of hope is plan.
00:39:30 I didn't hope to have a philosophy show. I planned and executed.
00:39:34 So a plan is when you expect a good outcome and recognize that you have to work to achieve it.
00:39:39 Hope is when you just hope it's going to come to you and you gaslight yourself about the universe and, you know, the secret and you just have to will things.
00:39:47 So hope is not good.
00:39:49 A plan is like, I don't hope to go out for dinner. I don't hope to go out. I have a plan to go out for dinner.
00:39:57 I hope that going out to dinner is going to make me happier. I can assume that it will.
00:40:03 But yeah, forget about hope. Have plans. Hope is terrible. Hope-ium, right? Have a plan. Right.
00:40:12 I hope that the supply chain keeps running or you have a plan that if it doesn't, right? Don't hope. Don't hope.
00:40:22 If you want a positive outcome, have a plan or abandon it. But don't just have a bunch of stuff floating around that you hope for.
00:40:28 I hope everything's going to work out. Have a plan. Have a plan or get it out of your mind. Does that make sense?
00:40:40 Hope or hopelessness are both addictive. Is there a time and place for hope?
00:40:48 So you understand what you've done?
00:40:55 You understand what you've done here? I don't mean this in any negative way, but it is kind of funny.
00:41:01 I make a generalized statement about hope. And what does our good friend Cody do?
00:41:06 Is there an exception?
00:41:14 Yes, there is a time and place for hope, but you don't want it. There is a time and place for hope, but you don't want it.
00:41:20 You never want to be in a place where there's a time and place for hope.
00:41:25 Because the only time that there is a time and place for hope is when you have absolutely no power over the outcome.
00:41:33 Right. If you're lost in the woods and you're dying, you hope you're rescued because you can't make it out.
00:41:40 You can't get any food. You're too tired. You're too exhausted. Then you can hope when you can't act.
00:41:45 When a plan is impossible, then hope is whatever. Right. I mean, who cares? Right. Sure. Sure.
00:41:54 If you're dying of some illness, you hope that a miracle cure is. Yeah. But you can't do anything about it. Right.
00:41:59 Like you're dying. Right. So, yeah, hope is fine. But it's like morphine when you're dying. Morphine.
00:42:06 Yeah. Is there a time when you can take morphine? Sure. But you have to be dying in general. Right.
00:42:11 Whatever. I'm not giving medical advice, like whatever painkiller that's really, really dangerous or whatever. Right.
00:42:17 If you're dying, it doesn't matter if you get addicted to heroin. I don't think. Right.
00:42:21 I mean, I'm not recommending it, but it doesn't matter. Is there a time and place for massive painkillers that could kill you?
00:42:27 Sure. When you're dying, but you don't want to be in that situation. It's the same thing with hope.
00:42:31 Yeah. Hope is totally fine. But only when you're kind of doomed and you can't.
00:42:36 You can't. You can't affect the outcome. But hope without a plan is a drug.
00:42:46 Hope without a plan. It's a drug. And of course, remember, all of my medical analogies are just analogies.
00:42:52 I don't know anything. Time for hope is in Gulag. Yeah. I hope I hope the I hope that the tyranny falls. Right.
00:43:01 Sure. I understand. Thank you for clarifying. Sure. You're absolutely welcome.
00:43:06 But it was interesting. Right. It was interesting that when I said.
00:43:11 So I would assume that you're addicted a little bit to hope. I could be wrong, obviously, but I was you were addicted a little bit to hope because I say hope is not great.
00:43:19 Hope is. Oh, but is there a place. Right. Can I smoke once in a while? All right.
00:43:26 Hey, Steph, I'm working as a maintenance worker in a big company, but I have some good IT skills like self hosting my own server with email XMPP, NextCloud and etc.
00:43:37 I think etc. is not a product name. And I use Arch Linux. That sounds like a D&D villain.
00:43:43 I use Arch Linux on desktop and Debian on phone. I am passionate about Linux and free software.
00:43:50 I can't find a job in that area. Plus, I speak six languages. My main problem is that I have very poor social skills.
00:43:57 What can I do to upgrade my work life?
00:44:05 Well, with technology, there's there's two kinds of people in technology.
00:44:09 There's two kinds of people involved in technology. I've been both. I've been both. Right.
00:44:15 So there's two kinds of people involved in technology. The first kind of person is the tinkerer.
00:44:24 The tinkerer. Hey, what if I change the one with the setting desk? Oh, I'm going to tinker with this.
00:44:29 Like I remember when I had DOS, I explored every single command in DOS to just figure out what what they did.
00:44:35 I was tinkering. Was I solving any problems? Nope.
00:44:38 There's an old Dilbert about Dilbert saying, I wonder what happened. I think I'm just going to change settings on my computer until something doesn't work.
00:44:46 And then fix it. So that's being a tinkerer. Right. Hit me with a why.
00:44:50 If you've ever been a tinkerer, if you know, if you've ever if you've ever hacked the registry, you might be a tinkerer.
00:44:57 If you've ever changed settings that don't need to be changed until something doesn't work, you might be a tinkerer.
00:45:02 If you ever install unsupported drivers, you might be a tinkerer.
00:45:10 If you're willing to take on new untested upgrades, you might be a tinkerer.
00:45:17 If you've ever edited an .ini file or created a .bat file, you might be a tinkerer.
00:45:26 I mean, I remember I had a notebook 386 SX notebook with one one meg of RAM and a 40 meg hard drive.
00:45:37 That thing was glorious. And it had a 640 by 480 resolution on the screen on the notebook, but it could externally broadcast to an 800 by 600.
00:45:53 If you've ever checked on Windows 3.1 32 bit disk access, you might be a tinkerer.
00:45:59 And I remember when I hooked it up to an external monitor, I had to go into Windows, change the setting and then restart Windows.
00:46:09 Like to go 800 by 600 because I preferred the higher resolution.
00:46:15 So what I did was I created, I had a 640 bat file and an 800 bat file and the bat file would copy the .ini files to Windows to have it start up in the correct resolution so I didn't need to restart it.
00:46:27 You might be a tinkerer. You might be a tinkerer.
00:46:32 And again, nothing wrong with tinkering. It's fun. And you learn stuff.
00:46:37 But yes, okay, we have a lot of tinkerers.
00:46:42 All right, yes, yes, yes, TTT.
00:46:45 Because for my favorite color purple as theme, I in fact, in such a tinkerer, I installed a queen themed audio theme on Windows 3.1.
00:47:00 And when you minimize the window, it would say little low. And when you maximize the window, it would say little high.
00:47:06 Right from little high, little low.
00:47:08 So it had, when you maximize the window, when you open the window, it would say, "Passing the open windows from," I think they did that for some hotel movie that was never used in the movie or something like that.
00:47:23 Not a great song, but anyway.
00:47:25 So yes, tinkering. I used to install custom Android mods on my phone. There you go.
00:47:30 Have you ever side loaded an APK app? You might be a tinkerer.
00:47:35 Yes. I have both committed and been victimized by tinkering. Yes.
00:47:43 Let's see here.
00:47:50 So yes, are you. When blue, it screams, "Mamma mia, mamma mia."
00:47:57 When it blue screens, yeah.
00:47:59 I changed the modern firmware of my phone of a reverse engineering FOSS version.
00:48:04 That's so tinkery, I don't even know what you're particularly talking about. Each individual word I understand except for FOSS.
00:48:09 I don't know what that means.
00:48:11 So yes, you may in fact be a tinkerer.
00:48:17 So if you're a tinkerer, you can't make money.
00:48:24 So tinkering is fiddling around, exploring, and again, there's nothing wrong with it. It's okay. You can learn some stuff.
00:48:36 But at least 50% of the time, doesn't tinkering cause more problems than it solves?
00:48:42 Doesn't it?
00:48:43 I remember convincing when I had my first computer job is when Windows 95 first came out, and I thought it was cool.
00:48:50 New operating system. I'm out, man.
00:48:52 I literally subscribed to Nuance for the sole purpose of every two years they release a new version of Dragon Naturally Speaking,
00:49:01 which is the most fantastic and wonderful program ever invented by man, god, beast, devil, or black hole.
00:49:07 Nuance, Dragon Naturally Speaking is the ultimate productivity tool for anybody who writes or dictates.
00:49:16 I have not written a book in probably 15 years. It's all dictated.
00:49:23 And this is one of the reasons why the dialogue is so good in my books is that I'm talking it, I'm not writing it.
00:49:27 Writing dialogue is usually quite stilted.
00:49:30 Talking dialogue makes it very fluid because you're actually speaking in a way that people would speak.
00:49:36 So every two years or so, they will release a new version.
00:49:41 I will buy it very first day. I don't care the price. I don't care the price.
00:49:44 I'm sorry, I know I'm managing your donation funds. I don't care the price.
00:49:47 Because if it gives me 5% better dictation, it saves my life.
00:49:51 I voice dictated all of Peaceful Parenting. I voice dictated all of my books except for the first couple.
00:49:58 And it's just the most massive and wonderful and fantastic productivity tool known to man.
00:50:03 And those people should take their places on Mount Rushmore as benefactors of mankind and philosophy as a whole.
00:50:11 Love you guys. Thank you so much. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
00:50:14 I'm sorry that my reputation is so bad that you can't use this in your marketing materials.
00:50:18 But anyway, that's just reality.
00:50:20 So tinkering half the time, it's worse. Half the time, it's better.
00:50:27 Never owned a computer until I was given a laptop for college in 2020.
00:50:33 Trained in computers in '89, '90 because I would need it in the future. Spoilers, I didn't.
00:50:37 Yeah, so sorry. I convinced my entire coding team to upgrade to Windows 95.
00:50:43 And it worked fine for everyone except one guy who couldn't connect to Tandem for some reason had to back downgrade to Windows 3.1.
00:50:51 I would rather die than downgrade. Just so you know, I don't downgrade.
00:50:54 Downgrade is the equivalent of cutting my own thighs. I don't, right?
00:51:04 I created a batch file menu that spawned from autowexec.bat.
00:51:07 Yes, did you ever high-load memory? High-load into memory?
00:51:10 So what, there was a couple of areas in memory between 640k and 1 meg that you could high-load TSR, Terminate and Stay Resident programs.
00:51:19 Did you ever do that? I did.
00:51:21 Do you know what TSR means? Terminate and Stay Resident.
00:51:25 Yeah, like wasting two days of college to look cool.
00:51:29 This is why I'm completely the opposite of tinkerers, right?
00:51:33 I usually just tinker in an attempt to save money.
00:51:36 Ex, making, example, making a tool instead of buying a specialized tool.
00:51:39 Yeah.
00:51:40 Yeah, but if you add up all the time you spent tinkering, probably didn't save that much money anyway.
00:51:44 So, tech does so many things I have no idea what any of it means.
00:51:51 Text-to-speech can't understand me and my typing skills are abysmal.
00:51:54 Sigh, never easy.
00:51:56 Well, okay, I'll make that little pitch for Dragon.
00:51:59 You can train it, so you train it on your emails, you train it on your documents and you can train it on your actual speech.
00:52:06 Right?
00:52:07 So, for instance, when I say UPB, Dragon types out universally preferable behavior.
00:52:13 When I say SBM, it types out my name.
00:52:15 When I say I've trained it on free domain, I've trained it on all the specialized terms that I use and so it's just ridiculously crazy efficient and it makes almost zero errors.
00:52:24 Because I've had Dragon since version 9 or something like that.
00:52:29 It's on version 16 at the moment and I've shepherded up my files.
00:52:34 And it's, yeah, it's absolutely incredible.
00:52:37 And every time I edit a book, I will reload it so that it learns better about how I write and the kind of syntax and sequence of words that I use.
00:52:47 So, you can train it on your own voice.
00:52:50 Right?
00:52:51 It will learn from your own voice.
00:52:52 Generic stuff doesn't.
00:52:54 Android or voice to text on your phone doesn't learn from your specific voice.
00:52:59 But Dragon does.
00:53:00 It's personalized.
00:53:01 And, again, if you do any kind of language production and you're not using this tool, I have no idea what to say to you.
00:53:08 Because I mentioned it before, but, yeah, it's just fantastic and beyond glorious.
00:53:12 Learning languages is considered tinkering also.
00:53:17 I mean, not only English, many languages.
00:53:19 Learning languages is totally considered tinkering if you don't speak them for some productive purpose.
00:53:26 So, TSR, Terminate and Stay Resonant.
00:53:33 That's right.
00:53:34 I remember the TRS-80 from Tandy, also known as the Trash 80 computer.
00:53:39 That was pretty bad, man.
00:53:40 That was pretty bad.
00:53:42 So, to the person who is, "Oh, well, you know, I do all this tinkering with tech and I can't make a job out of it."
00:53:48 That's because your tech is tinkering.
00:53:52 Your tech is not what makes money.
00:53:55 Right?
00:53:56 So, what?
00:53:57 Tinkering doesn't make money.
00:53:58 Again, there's nothing wrong with it and it can help you learn a little bit here and there.
00:54:01 But, what is the opposite of tinkering?
00:54:06 It's problem solving.
00:54:07 Right?
00:54:09 Tinkering is when you just explore stuff.
00:54:11 Problem solving is you make something more efficient, you save somebody money, you create something of value to somebody else that they're willing to trade for you.
00:54:20 Like, nobody trades, nobody pays you for tinkering.
00:54:22 And again, nothing wrong with it.
00:54:23 Nobody pays you for tinkering.
00:54:24 What do they pay you for?
00:54:25 They pay you for solving problems or, in the case of philosophy, for causing massive problems in your life.
00:54:29 Right?
00:54:30 So, if you think that you're a value technically because you tinker, I would argue you are very much mistaken.
00:54:38 Tinkering is not going to make you money.
00:54:43 It's not going to give you the kind of skills that save or make money in business.
00:54:49 So, instead of tinkering, you need to be a problem solver.
00:54:55 Now, tinkering is kind of self-contained.
00:54:57 Problem solving has a goal.
00:54:59 So, tinkering is not going to make you any money.
00:55:02 Problem solving is.
00:55:04 So, I tinkered a lot in a sense learning programming, but until I started working and selling my programming services, it was just tinkering.
00:55:11 I was just tinkering around, I was having fun, and I was learning stuff, and I really loved programming.
00:55:15 It was like it really appeals to my rational brain.
00:55:17 Programming is just debating with machinery to get it to do what you want.
00:55:20 It's a beautiful thing.
00:55:24 So, is tinkering like our research and development?
00:55:29 No.
00:55:30 Research and development is trying to find better ways to solve problems.
00:55:34 And I've managed an entire research and development team for many years.
00:55:37 So, yeah, it's trying to find better ways to solve problems.
00:55:41 So, for instance, I'll give you an example.
00:55:45 So, we would alter the database structure for various clients.
00:55:48 So, I wrote a whole database builder program that changed the tables, changed the queries, changed the forms, changed the reports, changed everything.
00:55:55 And that solved the problem because we would actually just give a spreadsheet saying, "What do you want to change?"
00:56:01 And they would fill in that spreadsheet.
00:56:03 I would feed the spreadsheet into my database builder.
00:56:05 The database builder would go through and change everything that needed to be changed in all layers of the database.
00:56:10 You got your reporting layer, you got your forms, which is the screen stuff, you got your queries, which reorganize the data, and then you got your database where each piece of discrete data is stored.
00:56:20 Every single piece of those things needed to be changed.
00:56:23 We also did QBF, or query by form, where you have a copy of the form that you type in whatever you want to filter for, and it had to change all of those.
00:56:30 And then eventually what I did was instead of having query by form saved in the database, I wrote a program that recreated the form in memory and thus inherited all the properties and all of that.
00:56:42 So, yeah, it was really great.
00:56:45 So, yeah, it's just finding ways to make things more efficient.
00:56:49 Once I had the database structure in a database itself, then we could also—I wrote a program that read the database structure and even all of the navigational elements, like the buttons on the left to navigate around the database.
00:57:04 And what it did was it recreated a web interface for the database, which allowed you to navigate, to view, to filter, to sort, to report on, and to enter data, to delete data.
00:57:16 And so we didn't need to ship out an interface to remote regions, which would then require updating when things changed.
00:57:23 And so I had a program that read the structure of the database, including the location of everything on the form, and would then recreate a web interface to the database, which had full functionality with no further intervention.
00:57:36 Otherwise, we had to create everything in HTML by hand, which was brutal.
00:57:39 And one thing changes, and everything has to change.
00:57:42 I also wrote a program which validated every single element that was required for the program functionality.
00:57:48 So, you know, whenever there was a number field, you would double-click on it and get a calculator.
00:57:51 Whenever there was a date field, you'd double-click on it and get a calendar picker and so on.
00:57:56 And just all of those elements needed to be present on the double-click event of the control on the form.
00:58:00 So, again, I don't want to overly labor.
00:58:02 I was actually just thinking the other day, if I have a copy of my old program, kind of—it'd be fun to do a demo at one point of what I was demoing 25 years ago.
00:58:09 Because it was a great program, man. It was really, really fantastic programming.
00:58:13 And I remember we sold a version of the database to a Chinese company.
00:58:19 And it took two hours to produce a fully functional, completely Mandarin-translated web interface to the entire database.
00:58:30 Now, they provided the translation, and it didn't automatically translate back in the day.
00:58:34 But it took—I remember it took—it was an hour or two hours, and we were able to show them.
00:58:39 We started the meeting. I called the guys and said, "Here. Here's the information."
00:58:43 And I gave them the translations, and the coders put it into the database format, and then we were able to produce—by the end of the meeting,
00:58:52 they said, "Here's your database on the web."
00:58:55 Now, you know, back in the '90s, that was a huge deal. That was a huge deal.
00:59:00 That's solving problems. That's making things faster, more efficient, cheaper, more consistent.
00:59:05 We save time on quality assurance, quality control, and we save time on production.
00:59:09 And our competitors couldn't compete with that, because either they would say, "Well, we don't change our database,"
00:59:14 in which case, if it didn't match the requirements of the customer, they couldn't make the sale.
00:59:17 Or they'd say, "Well, we'll change the database, but it's going to take forever," whereas we could do it enormously quickly.
00:59:23 So that's not tinkering. That's solving problems.
00:59:29 Speaking Swahili in your spare time, not as useful. Speaking Swahili at the UN, more useful, yeah.
00:59:37 I usually get inspired by the useful work of someone else. Then I'll tinker to better understand how they did it.
00:59:42 So tinkering is pretty much a hobby, in your opinion. Yeah, I think that's a fair way to put it.
00:59:47 Tinkering may pay in the long term.
00:59:53 Do you see how inevitable this is?
00:59:58 I make a generalized statement that tinkering is not productive, and he says, "But there's this exception."
01:00:09 You understand, it's an almost obsessive OCD human compulsion. Almost, right?
01:00:17 To say, "Well, I can think of a situation where tinkering turned out to be valuable."
01:00:21 Of course, I already said that. I said I tinkered when I learned programming, and eventually I was able to sell the services.
01:00:26 He says, "Tinkering may pay in the long run. For example, one that learns Linux knows how to operate a lightning network node that can route transactions and get paid for it."
01:00:38 Yes, but you can learn how to operate a lightning network node without the tinkering in Linux beforehand, right?
01:00:44 That's cool. Very interesting to hear you explain the code. Oh, I'm so proud of that.
01:00:49 Have you seen the big short?
01:00:52 Kind of ironic, because you know, if it's big, it's not short, and if it's short, it'll be.
01:00:56 The brilliant guy who knows math makes good money selling stock, not so much as engineering.
01:00:59 But the CEO is the one who is filthy, stinking, nine-figures wealthy, knows nothing about the products.
01:01:07 He knows how and when to buy and sell and position the company to keep making money.
01:01:12 Not fair he gets paid, not the smart guys. Maybe, but one of them makes shareholders money.
01:01:20 Um.
01:01:24 What can I say?
01:01:27 It is a massive waste of your life to be an econ nag.
01:01:33 To be an econ nag.
01:01:36 These people are underpaid. These people are overpaid. These people are making too little money for the value that they produce.
01:01:46 These people are making too much money for the value they produce.
01:01:50 That's just farting in a windstorm, man.
01:01:54 That's just farting in a windstorm.
01:01:56 And it's a fundamental misunderstanding of how the economy works.
01:02:00 It's a fundamental misunderstanding, and it incredibly limits your potential economically.
01:02:10 Like, you will be broke with that mindset probably your whole life.
01:02:13 But the CEO makes more money.
01:02:20 That's unfair, that's wrong. The guy who's doing this should make more money, and the waiter should make more money, not the manager.
01:02:26 None of that means anything.
01:02:31 How much money should you make?
01:02:41 How much money should you make?
01:02:47 What is your value?
01:02:52 What is my value?
01:02:55 What should the tips be today?
01:03:00 What should donations be today?
01:03:05 Should I rage at the unfairness of the people who gain value, and they don't pay me?
01:03:10 Right?
01:03:13 You get what you negotiate.
01:03:31 If Brad Pitt's willing to take a massive pay cut to work with Matt Damon, 'cause they're friends, does that mean it's unfair?
01:03:40 No, he's willing to do it. If you're willing to do it, and no one's got a gun to your head, it's entirely right, just, fair, and okay.
01:03:53 Being an econ nag, "This person shouldn't have won, that person should have won. This person should be paid less, that person should be paid more. That's an excessive profit, that's a deficient profit.
01:04:03 I don't understand what you're doing.
01:04:09 I don't understand what you're doing. Why are you econ nagging?
01:04:15 Well, this woman shouldn't be with this guy, she should be with me, or some other guy.
01:04:21 Should? What do you mean, should? That's what she's chosen.
01:04:27 What's that old line from Harold and Kumar go to White Castle or something?
01:04:33 Just 'cause you have a big brain doesn't mean that you should be a doctor, just because you have a big dick doesn't mean that you should be in porn.
01:04:42 "The CEO is unjustly making all this money, but the people who do it..."
01:04:46 That's econ nagging.
01:04:50 That's econ nagging.
01:04:55 The should-be-doing people, the armchair quarterbacks, the should-be-doing people.
01:04:59 "Well, this guy shouldn't be dancing like that, he should be dancing like this, and this woman shouldn't..."
01:05:03 Just go out and dance. Stop nagging, stop observing, stop judging, stop evaluating, 'cause nobody cares.
01:05:09 Except other resentful people, and you're just sowing that resentment.
01:05:12 "Ooh, it's unfair, life is unfair, the world is unfair, the smart people don't get paid, but the shiny people in shiny suits make all the money, and it's unfair, and this and that and the other," right?
01:05:24 Instead of evaluating what's fair and unfair, add to your value and demand recognition of that value.
01:05:38 Just become more valuable, and ask for recognition of that value.
01:05:44 And if you can't get people to recognize your value, either you're not providing value, or you are providing value and they can't recognize it, in which case you need to start your own business,
01:05:53 or find people who do recognize your value.
01:05:59 Everybody... look, here's a fundamental thing in life. Everybody wants everything.
01:06:03 Everybody wants everything. All the time. Everybody wants everything, all the time.
01:06:09 No question. Everybody wants everything, all the time.
01:06:17 And if you can convince people you're worth X, then you are worth X.
01:06:25 It's just a fact. There's no objective value. I mean, there are objective values in terms of morality, but what are you worth?
01:06:33 What is a painting worth?
01:06:36 Nothing.
01:06:40 Except what people want to pay for it.
01:06:45 The economic value of what I'm doing is what people are willing to pay for it.
01:06:52 Nothing more, nothing less.
01:06:54 I ask, you choose.
01:06:59 Now, is there a minor moral thing that if you're consuming a lot of value you can afford to pay, but you don't?
01:07:07 I think there could be a minor integrity thing.
01:07:13 But you're not breaking any contracts.
01:07:15 The deal with this show is pay what you feel it's worth when you can.
01:07:21 Well, the "when you can" is kind of implicit. I don't want anybody's last two bucks, obviously, right?
01:07:25 So pay what you feel. You pay what... what is this show worth to you?
01:07:28 Well, you pay it. Or you don't.
01:07:31 You're not breaking any contracts with me.
01:07:33 If you decide to free ride off everyone else, and everyone else has to pay for the price of income, salaries, expenses, blah, blah.
01:07:40 If you want a free ride, that's... and everybody who donates knows that they're paying for a bunch of free riders, and they're a bunch of free riders.
01:07:46 But that's the deal. I'm not... you're not breaking any contracts.
01:07:49 You're not violating the non-aggression principle.
01:07:51 You're not violating any property rights.
01:07:53 You're not stealing, because that's the deal.
01:07:55 Consume what you want. Pay what you feel it's worth.
01:07:57 Now, I have some control. I can remind you to pay.
01:08:00 I can produce better quality content.
01:08:03 And the times when things are just totally cooking, brain firing on cylinders I didn't even know I had, yes, donations tend to go up.
01:08:09 Sure, I get that.
01:08:11 But playing econ nag judge is staying out of the game, and don't stay out of the game.
01:08:17 Life is the game, and the more you judge what's the rightness and wrongness and appropriateness, the more you're out of the game.
01:08:24 Stop judging, and get in the game.
01:08:26 Stop being an armchair quarterback.
01:08:28 Get your fucking boots on, and get on the field.
01:08:31 Stop judging how people are dancing, and go shake your ass, and shake your money maker.
01:08:36 I'm very passionate about the people who distance and judge.
01:08:41 "This is right. This is wrong. This is good. This band's overpaid. She shouldn't be with him. She shouldn't be...
01:08:46 He's wearing the wrong thing. She shouldn't dance like that.
01:08:49 This car is inappropriate. This guy should live here. This is a stupid hobby. Oh my God!"
01:08:54 Every time you judge, you die a little.
01:09:00 Every time you distantly sit back like some alienated, deific god of the universe who doesn't exist and isn't even here and judge everything that's going on,
01:09:09 you are not in the game, if you are judging the players.
01:09:15 Why would she go out with him?
01:09:20 Why would she go out with him?
01:09:23 There's no answer to that question. She's choosing to go out with him.
01:09:28 Now, if there's a him out there that women tend to like more, you can become that.
01:09:33 Why is he going out with him? Well, he's got some muscles. Okay, then go work out or shut up.
01:09:36 Stop judging. Evaluating.
01:09:39 It's like that...
01:09:42 It's this meme of this woman who's like, "Every time my husband does something that annoys me, I hold a fork up to him in the distance and pretend he's in jail."
01:09:50 Or, you know, there used to be an old... Oh gosh, what was the name of that comedy show? SCTV?
01:09:57 I crush your head, right? I crush your head, right? Like, they'd be, "I crush your head at the people in the distance," right?
01:10:03 I mean, I knew... Kids in the hall on SCTV, yeah, thank you.
01:10:12 So, I knew for a fact that there were some girls who wouldn't date me...
01:10:18 Or balding, or they could sort of see that pattern going, right?
01:10:24 Now, I could sit there and seethe, right? Ah, so unfair. I mean, I'm a good guy, and I'm smart, and I'm a good companion, and I got a future, and I'm making some money, and these girls should absolutely go out with me because...
01:10:36 They shouldn't judge me because I'm bald. It's not my fault, right?
01:10:40 And I could go down that route, obviously. There's always that great devilish temptation to go down that route of resentment.
01:10:46 Because all judgment is based on resentment in this kind of way, right? You resent, and I can...
01:10:50 And I appreciate you posting this, and I'm sorry if I've got it completely wrong with regards to your intentions, but...
01:10:54 What the hell? I'm in the middle of a rant. I'm not turning back now. I'm not downgrading to a regular conversation, but I'm rant-infested.
01:11:00 But all of these judgments are based on resentment.
01:11:05 "Oh, the people doing the real work aren't getting paid." It's like the communists in there.
01:11:07 "Oh, the people doing the real... The people actually making the widgets aren't getting paid as much as the people who just sit in their office."
01:11:12 All this judgment is based on resentment.
01:11:16 And people who are positive and productive in life don't want to be around resentful people.
01:11:21 We don't want to be around resentful people.
01:11:24 So, of course, there are people... And I understand this, right? I get this a little bit.
01:11:28 Right? There are people who say, "Well, how come philosophers don't make one-tenth of one-tenth of one percent of what pro baseball players make?"
01:11:36 "It's that massively unfair and outrageous... Oh my God, these...
01:11:44 This guy just got signed in Japan. 700 million dollars. God.
01:11:48 Yeah." Right? "Think what I could do with 700 million..." Whatever.
01:11:52 Or people who are like...
01:11:54 "Crappy propagandists on mainstream TV make a lot more money than wise philosophers who are deeply changing people's lives for the better." Whatever. Right?
01:12:06 Resentment. Resentment. Resentment.
01:12:09 [silence]
01:12:19 What does it add up to?
01:12:21 What does it add up to?
01:12:25 It's like being a younger sibling forever.
01:12:28 When you're a younger sibling... I don't know if you are a younger sibling. You could let me know if you've had this experience.
01:12:33 But if you're a younger sibling, you spend a fair amount of time resenting things.
01:12:42 My brother... I remember this when I was little. Very little.
01:12:47 My brother was supposed to be able to stay up five minutes later than I was.
01:12:50 I'm not proud of this. I'm just saying that, you know, I was a younger sibling and it was a dysfunctional household.
01:12:54 But I remember my brother was supposed to be able to stay up five minutes later than I was.
01:13:02 Because he was older. I resented that. He got more money. He got to stay up later. Right?
01:13:06 I resented it.
01:13:08 So what would I do?
01:13:10 Well, I knew that five minutes was 300 seconds.
01:13:16 Right?
01:13:19 So what would I do?
01:13:21 I'd go to bed.
01:13:22 And I'd go, "One, two, three."
01:13:27 And I would wait until I caught to 300 and then I'd say, "Bedtime!"
01:13:30 [laughs]
01:13:32 I do remember one time. One time.
01:13:34 Unfortunately, I fell asleep because counting is kind of hypnotic.
01:13:39 I fell asleep.
01:13:42 I woke up an hour later.
01:13:45 And I woke up with resentment.
01:13:48 And I went out.
01:13:50 And my mother and my brother were making cookies.
01:13:56 Oh my sweet Zeus, the horror.
01:14:02 Now, the only plus side was that my mother's cookies were basically hockey pucks that you could use to fire a cannon like through probably six to eight plate-class steel things.
01:14:13 Or they were things you could use as doorstoppers with the caveat that they would probably break the doors.
01:14:19 So my mom was not a very good cookie maker.
01:14:21 She'd always say, "I'm making cookies!" and I'd be like, "Mmm, it's going to be digestives with chocolate."
01:14:26 Nope.
01:14:27 Unfair!
01:14:31 Unfair.
01:14:33 That's a good point.
01:14:35 Thanks, Chris.
01:14:36 If you're not participating, you're just a spectator.
01:14:37 It's easy for the spectator to throw peanuts from the gallery compared with actively participating.
01:14:41 That's not fair. Why does she get to do it?
01:14:45 So I had the choice, right?
01:14:48 I had the choice.
01:14:49 I've got a fair amount of hair side and back, right?
01:14:51 The hair sort of... I'm not like one of these total thin-strip horseshoe hair guys, right?
01:14:55 I have more than enough hair if I wanted to get hair transplants and it would look pretty normal.
01:15:00 Right?
01:15:01 It would look pretty normal.
01:15:02 I could get hair transplants.
01:15:03 So if I wanted the girls who wouldn't date me because I was balding, then I either get hair transplants or give up that expectation.
01:15:17 Give up that hope. Give up that wanna, right?
01:15:20 And it's like, okay.
01:15:21 And of course, I have to look in the mirror.
01:15:23 It's really sad.
01:15:25 It's really sad.
01:15:26 So of course, when I was younger, I'd be like, "Oh, what do you mean this girl doesn't want to go out with me because I'm balding?" Right?
01:15:32 It's like, "Well, it's just a physical appearance thing."
01:15:34 And it's like, "Well, yes, but why do you want to go out with her? Because she's pretty."
01:15:37 Which is exactly the same thing.
01:15:40 I was really enraged that they didn't match me in shallowness.
01:15:46 "Hey, man, why aren't you as shallow and ridiculous as me?
01:15:49 How could you possibly reject me for a physical characteristic that's beyond my control when I'm only pursuing you because of a physical characteristic called prettiness that's beyond your control?
01:15:59 How dare you apply my own standards back to me? Ah!"
01:16:04 Oh, it's just, it's really tragic.
01:16:13 And this is, the resentment hid me from my own hypocrisy.
01:16:16 Right?
01:16:18 Resentment just hides you from your own hypocrisy.
01:16:20 Like all the people who were like, "Oh, you know, hit songs are just, they're just so easy.
01:16:25 They're just monotone. They're just so predictable."
01:16:28 It's like, "Well, go write one.
01:16:29 Go write one.
01:16:31 Come on, go write one."
01:16:32 Think it's so easy?
01:16:34 I don't think it's easy.
01:16:35 I've tried writing a couple of songs in my life.
01:16:37 Not easy.
01:16:38 Not easy.
01:16:41 I can't believe those people get paid so much.
01:16:43 They don't do anything.
01:16:44 Okay, well, go get paid that much.
01:16:45 Go get paid that much.
01:16:48 See, people look at the movie The Big Short, and they look at the guy, Jeremy Irons.
01:16:55 He plays the CEO, whatever he is, right?
01:16:57 So, Jeremy Irons, first of all, he has a look and looks count.
01:16:59 He looks very aristocratic.
01:17:00 He always has.
01:17:01 Looks count, right?
01:17:02 And also, he has confidence to say, "Explain it to me like I'm five years old."
01:17:09 Right?
01:17:10 And the reason he's doing that is so that he can explain it to other people who are
01:17:14 not as smart as anyone in the room, right?
01:17:16 So, he's not pretending to know things he doesn't.
01:17:20 He's got humility.
01:17:21 He's got looks.
01:17:22 He's got the confidence to understand and absorb an explanation and then be able to
01:17:28 pass it along to other people.
01:17:29 Because he's the communicator, right?
01:17:31 He's the communicator outside the corporation because the corporation is investing money
01:17:35 that other people have to give them.
01:17:37 So, he has to communicate with those people, and those people don't understand the
01:17:40 technical terms.
01:17:41 So, if you're not willing to translate your technical terms into general consumption,
01:17:44 you're not that valuable, right?
01:17:47 So, having one of the things that was very valuable about me in my business career was
01:17:53 I could do all of the deep level grunt work that I could do in my business career.
01:17:57 I could do all of the deep level grunt work coding from the ground up.
01:18:01 And I could also explain the business value of the software, which is why I was always
01:18:06 dragged along on sales calls because I basically did the whole demo and then the salesperson
01:18:11 would pick up the check, which led me to certain levels of resentment.
01:18:16 But if you realize that there's a problem in the pricing of mortgaged-backed securities,
01:18:30 right, you realize there's a problem, how much is that worth?
01:18:34 Well, if you can't communicate it, it's worth nothing.
01:18:38 If you communicate it badly and confuse people, it could have negative worth, right?
01:18:43 So, the people who are able to crystallize complex technical topics and communicate them
01:18:48 in a generally digestible format are worth an enormous amount of money.
01:18:52 Because it is on that communication that all the value of the technical is predicated.
01:18:58 If you have a great product, but you can't sell it, right?
01:19:00 You've written some wonderful piece of software, but you can't sell it, then it's worth nothing.
01:19:04 In fact, it's a negative worth because all that time you spent building the software,
01:19:08 you didn't spend producing something that's going to have value.
01:19:10 What is the value of a great product if nobody knows about it?
01:19:13 The value is negative. It's negative.
01:19:15 So, all the engineers look at the salespeople and get mad at them and say,
01:19:21 "Well, I did all the work and they're just picking up the slack."
01:19:23 Then go sell, go sell your software.
01:19:25 I did. Go learn sales techniques, go learn how to communicate with people,
01:19:30 go get some better clothes, maybe shave properly, some hygiene, whatever, right?
01:19:36 Whatever the engineer cliche is, right?
01:19:38 That if you're resentful at the salespeople, you can just sit there and judge it's negative.
01:19:42 They just shine in with their shiny suits and their patter and they just come and swoop and slap.
01:19:49 But without them, your work is less than useless.
01:19:53 It's a negative.
01:19:55 If it's so easy to go and sell, go and sell.
01:20:03 Do you see what I mean?
01:20:04 Resentment paralyzes you as opposed to, "Wow, those salespeople get paid a lot.
01:20:10 I should really learn how to sell."
01:20:12 Take some courses, read some books, practice.
01:20:16 Go with the salespeople, observe what they do.
01:20:18 Ask them. Salespeople are very garrulous.
01:20:20 They'd love to tell you what they do and how they do it.
01:20:22 Instead of resenting, capture.
01:20:32 Instead of resenting the girls who wouldn't date me because I was balding,
01:20:36 I just recognize that they're doing me a favor and they're teaching me something about myself,
01:20:42 which is not pretty or pleasant to look at, but which was absolutely essential.
01:20:45 Margin call.
01:20:46 Jeremy Irons is in that, but not the big short.
01:20:49 Yeah, margin call. Sorry about that.
01:20:50 Yeah, Jeremy Irons is a great scene.
01:20:51 It's a great scene.
01:20:52 He's like, "I don't understand this.
01:20:53 Explain it to me like I don't know what anything."
01:20:55 But he's got a gravitas and he's got a communications capacity that is almost second to none.
01:21:01 Almost second to none.
01:21:05 Hi, Steph.
01:21:11 Regarding the theme of unfairness, why do you think people place such an emphasis
01:21:14 on your supposed IQ in determining your success?
01:21:16 Do you mean my success or people's success in general?
01:21:19 I just want to know.
01:21:28 Sorry, I want to make sure that if people are like, "Oh, Steph's got a high IQ.
01:21:31 That's why he's successful."
01:21:33 Total lie.
01:21:34 It's a total lie.
01:21:36 It's a total lie.
01:21:40 So, yes, for Icy Nature, if you could just give me clarity,
01:21:44 are you talking about me or people with high IQ in general being successful?
01:21:47 Well, the big short was Batman, right?
01:21:53 Sorry, I'm just waiting to…
01:21:59 I don't want to go off on a tangent here if I don't get the…
01:22:02 Do you mean my particular success or the success as a whole?
01:22:06 My success.
01:22:07 Okay.
01:22:08 So, have you ever taken a sales class?
01:22:10 I have been around salespeople for a lot of my business career.
01:22:15 Because I'm a fairly decent communicator, at least I was back in the day,
01:22:19 and because I understood the technology and could answer every single question,
01:22:22 right?
01:22:23 So, here's what happens, right?
01:22:24 You go on a sales call for something technical, you get a bunch of business
01:22:26 people, you get a bunch of finance people, and you get a bunch of tech people.
01:22:30 Now, I could answer to some degree the finance people by giving the ROI.
01:22:36 I could answer to some degree the business people, but that was a little bit
01:22:38 more on the salesperson.
01:22:39 But as far as technical questions, I could answer everything because I wrote
01:22:42 most of the code.
01:22:44 So, I could answer and knew exactly how it worked with things, right?
01:22:47 So, the more answers you can make, sorry, the more answers you can give in a
01:22:54 single meeting, the fewer meetings you need to have.
01:22:57 And having fewer meetings accelerates the sales enormously.
01:23:00 So, I was involved in sales from pretty early because I was in acting, right?
01:23:07 And in acting, you do auditions.
01:23:08 And auditions is you marketing yourself as an actor.
01:23:14 So, I've been around salespeople, involved in sales and marketing.
01:23:21 I was director of marketing and, of course, had to understand how sales and
01:23:26 all of that worked in order to provide the leads and materials for the
01:23:30 salespeople to be most effective.
01:23:32 And, of course, this whole thing has been about selling philosophy,
01:23:35 selling philosophy to you.
01:23:37 So, yes, I'm not taking a sales class, but I've read, I can't even tell you
01:23:41 how many business and sales books and they're very, very important,
01:23:44 very, very important.
01:23:46 What was it?
01:23:47 There's a guy named Cohn.
01:23:48 I mentioned this.
01:23:52 Cohn, I think his name was, negotiation book.
01:23:57 I read this in my early--yeah, you can negotiate anything.
01:24:02 The world's best negotiator tells you how to get what you want.
01:24:05 Herb Cohen, some of it was a little amoral, without a doubt.
01:24:10 He said that if you want to get a good deal on a washing machine,
01:24:12 you could just scratch it yourself.
01:24:14 And he said, "Hey, I'm just telling you how to get a good deal.
01:24:16 It's not particularly moral."
01:24:17 So, I read a bunch of sales book in my teens long before.
01:24:20 I mean, I just had a rabid curiosity about everything all the time,
01:24:22 no matter what.
01:24:26 And, bye and Merry Christmas.
01:24:36 But I don't think I've taken a formal sales class.
01:24:38 Oh, no, I did.
01:24:39 I think I've dragged along to a sales class a bunch of--
01:24:42 I was helping some guy wire up his house for internet when I was in my early 20s.
01:24:47 And I wasn't quite kidnapped, but I ended up sleeping there because I didn't have a car.
01:24:51 It was too late to drive me home after I'd finished.
01:24:53 And then the next day, they took me on a sales course and a sales class and all of that.
01:25:02 Oh, is that boiler room?
01:25:05 Did you see the tips from a couple of minutes ago?
01:25:07 Sorry about that.
01:25:08 Let me check here.
01:25:10 Ah, yes, there it is.
01:25:11 Thank you, Jared.
01:25:12 I really, really appreciate that.
01:25:13 Of course, tips are more than welcome.
01:25:14 This is going to change.
01:25:16 Any particular book I would recommend?
01:25:20 Honestly, nothing is particularly popping to mind.
01:25:22 But it was a lot of it, of course, was just verbal, right?
01:25:26 I mean, in terms of like I had a CEO who was like, "I need you to finish the product
01:25:33 because this is the burn rate of the company.
01:25:35 And if you don't finish the product, here's when we're going to run out of money."
01:25:38 And so, you know, just getting that connection between the coding and the income was really important.
01:25:46 So, okay.
01:25:47 So let me get to this question about IQ.
01:25:53 Why do you think people place such an emphasis on your supposed IQ in determining your success?
01:25:58 Because my success is not based upon IQ.
01:26:03 I mean, you could say it's necessary but not sufficient for me to succeed.
01:26:07 Like IQ is necessary but not sufficient.
01:26:09 Like to be a good basketball player, you need to be tall, but not every tall person is a good basketball player.
01:26:17 So what is it that has determined my success?
01:26:23 How was I for a time such a successful guy in the alternative media and podcasting world?
01:26:29 What is it that has determined my success?
01:26:33 It's not IQ.
01:26:34 There's tons of smart people in the world.
01:26:36 What is it that has determined my success?
01:26:39 What do you think caused it?
01:26:44 Let me just get your comments here.
01:26:50 The actual sales communication doesn't bother me.
01:26:52 It's a sports talk during the lunch or dinner that I dread.
01:26:56 Well, that's passive though.
01:26:58 That's passive.
01:26:59 First of all, would you give up a massive amount of income in order to avoid learning about sports?
01:27:04 You can learn about sports and also you can just come up with other things to talk about.
01:27:08 Don't be passive, right?
01:27:09 Come up with other things to talk about.
01:27:14 Solving problems, persistence?
01:27:15 No, lots of people solve problems.
01:27:18 And I think this show for a lot of people has caused more problems than it solved.
01:27:21 It's not persistence.
01:27:22 Lots of people hang in there long past their due date.
01:27:25 In my view, I could be wrong about this because I'm viewing it from the inside,
01:27:28 but from my view, there's one thing and one thing only that has determined the success of this show,
01:27:34 and that's just a willingness to talk about taboo topics.
01:27:40 A willingness to talk about taboo topics.
01:27:43 You can go and get political analysis from a bunch of places.
01:27:46 You can go and get, I guess, philosophy from a bunch of places or a bunch of smart people and good communicators and so on.
01:27:52 But don't we circle this particular conversation for the exploration of the taboo?
01:27:59 To me, the success is based on moral courage.
01:28:03 It's based on walking towards the fire rather than pretending there is no fire and getting burnt up into inconsequentiality.
01:28:12 I mean, from the very beginning.
01:28:15 I was a libertarian.
01:28:16 I think my second or third show was about child abuse
01:28:20 and its effects on morality, on the non-aggression principle, on statism and so on.
01:28:26 Voluntary relationships, taking that as a principle and applying it to personal relationships first
01:28:30 and not worrying so much about the Federal Reserve, that is what made the success.
01:28:40 It is the moral courage to take on the taboo topics.
01:28:49 Somebody says, "Thank you, my friend. Your drive, character, unique position, I can't think of another philosophy show."
01:28:54 Well, there's a reason why.
01:28:55 The reason why.
01:28:56 Setting high expectations?
01:28:58 Makes sense, yes.
01:28:59 I think that would be my analysis.
01:29:01 Again, I'm from the inside.
01:29:03 So while it may sound kind of ridiculous, while I can't tell you why I'm successful,
01:29:07 I very much remember those points where you're standing on the edge of the cliff
01:29:12 and you're like, "Should I take the plunge?
01:29:16 Should I take the plunge? Should I step off the cliff and hope that the air will hold me?"
01:29:23 Those were very, very challenging moments.
01:29:26 It's not automatic.
01:29:28 It doesn't happen on its own.
01:29:29 You have to wit it.
01:29:31 You have to say that a society that's severely screwed up probably has the healthiest topics as its greatest taboos.
01:29:40 Somebody who's really messed up, it's the thing they want to talk about least
01:29:44 that is going to help them the most.
01:29:47 Because it's the topics they've been avoiding that have produced the dysfunction.
01:29:53 So for me, it was recognizing that that which society least wants to talk about
01:29:57 is that which is going to help society the most.
01:30:04 That make sense to you?
01:30:06 Someone says, "These are the topics I always wanted to hear and ponder
01:30:10 that everyone trains you not to talk about."
01:30:14 So the government schools and the corrupt majority culture programs you to avoid certain topics
01:30:21 while slowly enslaving you.
01:30:23 Well, wouldn't the topics they program you to avoid be the ones that would most liberate you?
01:30:32 I work as someone part-time at a major corporate retail store
01:30:34 and I frequently witness parents threatening their kids and all sorts of abusive dialogues.
01:30:38 It really bothers me how one ought to handle public displays of child abuse.
01:30:43 It makes my blood boil.
01:30:44 I would say if you can't do it from a place of compassion,
01:30:46 it probably is going to be very tough to do it.
01:30:49 Yeah, conversations akin to the emperor has no flaws.
01:30:51 Yeah, that which you can't talk about is what you most need to talk about.
01:30:54 And that's true in families too.
01:30:55 That which you can't talk about is what you most need to talk about.
01:30:58 So with regards, if you can't say to the parents something like,
01:31:01 "Oh, I can't help but notice you're being pretty harsh with your kid."
01:31:05 I mean, that's probably not what you want to be doing as a parent.
01:31:07 And when you want to become a parent, this probably isn't how you saw it playing out.
01:31:11 And there's other options.
01:31:12 If you can't come from a place of relative compassion,
01:31:14 because if you shame them, they're just going to turn on their kids even more.
01:31:17 So if you can get to a place, and it's not easy, right?
01:31:20 But if you can get to a place of relative compassion,
01:31:22 then I think that you can do some productive good.
01:31:26 But if your blood is boiling and you're going to come from an aggression and shaming perspective,
01:31:30 then it may do more harm than good.
01:31:32 So again, I don't have any particular answers, but that would be my suggestion.
01:31:39 All right. Did we get to--oh, the IQ thing, yeah.
01:31:43 So everybody wants to say that the reason she's a supermodel is because she's pretty.
01:31:49 Nope. That's not the reason she's a supermodel.
01:31:53 Lots of pretty girls aren't supermodels.
01:31:57 She's a supermodel because she had the drive, ambition, talent, self-restraint, not eating, or whatever it is.
01:32:04 And she showed up on time, she worked hard, she did what was needed.
01:32:07 Maybe she slept with the right people.
01:32:09 I don't know how the modeling industry works, but it seems pretty skeevy to me, certainly at the lower areas.
01:32:13 So, you know, everybody wants to ascribe somebody else's success to anything other than will and choice.
01:32:19 And that's how they comfort themselves.
01:32:21 They comfort themselves by saying, "Well, I just don't have Steph's interstellar IQ, so I can't be successful." Bullshit!
01:32:27 You think it's the IQ that made me successful? No. It's not the IQ that made me successful.
01:32:33 I mean, it's necessary but not sufficient.
01:32:35 But, you know, I assume that there are tons of people out there in the world with much higher IQs than I,
01:32:40 but they don't have the moral courage to take on the difficult topics.
01:32:45 Right. So.
01:32:48 It's like saying, "Trump only became president because he's a billionaire."
01:32:53 It's like, "No, tons of billionaires are presidents."
01:32:55 And I can't remember who it was, but there was some, I think he was a Democrat,
01:32:58 who tried to become the governor of New York and spent, I don't know, a hundred million dollars on his campaign and lost completely.
01:33:03 So, not about the money.
01:33:05 All right. I just want to make sure I got to everyone.
01:33:07 If I didn't get your question, please let me know.
01:33:09 Please, I don't want to leave you hanging on Christmas.
01:33:12 There's smoke coming from your ears, Steph. Great stuff today.
01:33:15 I appreciate that and thank you for the tippy tip.
01:33:21 Sounds like a general, it sounds like it may be a general principle.
01:33:25 I like strength training but hate aerobic training.
01:33:27 I should probably be doing more aerobic.
01:33:31 Well, you know how you become a great athlete?
01:33:33 You become a great athlete by working on your weaknesses.
01:33:36 Right.
01:33:37 You become a great athlete by working on your weaknesses.
01:33:40 That which is most difficult for you, you must do more of.
01:33:43 Right. So, if you're a tennis player and your backhand sucks, but your serve is great, there's no point working on your serve.
01:33:48 Your serve is already great.
01:33:49 You have to work on the stuff that you're bad at and the stuff that you dislike and the stuff that's the most difficult for you.
01:33:53 That's how you become a well-rounded and excellent player as a whole.
01:33:57 The idea that philosophy is about your comfort or your success rather than about that which is good for society, no matter what, is incomprehensible to me.
01:34:08 It's like being a doctor and saying, "Well, the purpose of being a doctor is my own prestige and income."
01:34:13 It's like, "No, no, no. The purpose of being a doctor is to help people's health as much as humanly possible, even if it's uncomfortable for you."
01:34:21 Right. So, we've got this weird comfort thing that comes from, you know, whenever society is very successful, you get this weird comfort thing where everybody just does what is comfortable because they're not used to hardship.
01:34:31 Now, part of my childhood, of course, was getting me used to hardship, hostility, rejection, and the fact that I had to step out of taking verbal abuse seriously in order to have any success in what I'm doing.
01:34:42 I had to completely ignore.
01:34:44 When I was a kid, in order to succeed at all, I had to completely dismiss the value or legitimacy of verbal abuse.
01:34:51 I had to do that.
01:34:53 And so, when I became an adult and a philosopher and a public intellectual, there was lots of verbal abuse, of course, and there still is lots of verbal abuse. Kind of psycho.
01:35:04 And the fact that I had been trained in hardship and that I had to have moral courage just to escape the trash planet I was raised in, and the fact that I had to discount verbal abuse in order to achieve anything in life meant that verbal abuse doesn't frighten me that much.
01:35:19 It really doesn't.
01:35:20 So, I can talk about forbidden topics because the response is verbal abuse, which I don't take seriously anyway.
01:35:28 All right.
01:35:30 "They attribute your success to your fortune, IQ." Yeah, I didn't earn my IQ.
01:35:34 "Rather than choices and actions you made." You earned it. Yes, that's right. That's right.
01:35:41 I mean, somebody may have a genetic predisposition to becoming muscular, but they still have to lift the weights, right?
01:35:52 There's always the Bobby Fischer example.
01:35:57 I don't know what. Bobby Fischer, the chess player, right?
01:36:01 Yeah, he had an innate talent to chess, but he also had his weaknesses and he had to work on those weaknesses.
01:36:05 I mean, the famous tennis player who refused the Vax, he almost gave up in tennis because he was too much in his head and he had to have a coach lead him back to what he most loved about the game.
01:36:19 Then he kept going and overcoming that.
01:36:22 He's good at tennis. It's kind of tautological, right?
01:36:26 So, the other thing too is that, let's say that I have some massively stellar IQ, but if I can't translate the products of that massively stellar high IQ into things that are understandable and actionable both for you and for me, then what's the point?
01:36:41 Then I'm a guy doing computer programming in the Middle Ages. Nobody understands what the hell I'm writing.
01:36:47 There's no market for it, right?
01:36:50 So, being good at something without being able to make it useful to others is worse than useless, as we were talking about with tinkering, right?
01:36:57 You say, she says, "So true. After so much hardship, if something is easy for me, I feel like I'm getting away with something."
01:37:02 Well, at this point, no, right?
01:37:04 I remember Roger Waters. He does this big spectacular, obviously controversial shows, The Wall or whatever, and he's touring in his 60s and 70s and people are like, "Wow, you're touring in your 60s and 70s?"
01:37:14 Like, "Oh, this is easy." You know, what's hard, let's say, spending time with a baby and a toddler, raising a kid, that's hard work.
01:37:20 This, I just go and yell on stage, right?
01:37:22 And I remember Christe Berg, when I saw her, I've seen him live like three times, and I remember him saying, "Oh, this is easy."
01:37:28 You just stand and yell at a microphone, right?
01:37:30 And it is easy, right? It's easy for them.
01:37:32 And so, after a certain amount of experience, I'm sure it was tough at the beginning, but after a certain amount of experience, if things aren't easy for you after a certain amount of experience, you're doing the wrong thing, right?
01:37:39 It should be easy, right?
01:37:41 If you've been a waiter for five years and you're still struggling with getting food out on time.
01:37:45 Djokovic, yeah, thanks.
01:37:47 All right, any last Christmas greetings, wishes for The Me?
01:37:53 The Me. I really appreciate your time.
01:37:56 There was a little bit more data that the great James and Jared were able to produce for me about the productions of the shows.
01:38:06 What have we got here?
01:38:10 363 hours of main feed podcasts.
01:38:14 And French Revolution total time is about 11 hours and 30 minutes.
01:38:20 Yeah, I did The Truth About the Wild West, I did The Truth About Bitcoin, I did The Truth About AI, two Truths About AI, I think it was, or two Truths About Bitcoin.
01:38:26 So, back into doing interviews with Naomi and with Dr. Pesta and so on.
01:38:31 So, yeah, 363 hours, that's more than an hour a day. And I just know you've all listened to every single one of them, every single hour.
01:38:42 Yeah, there is that joke about I'm from the future and there's electricity.
01:38:48 Oh, how do they make it? I don't know.
01:38:50 Hi, Steph. If...
01:38:55 Have moral... I think there's a typo there. Please, if you're going to send me messages, please proofread them first, I'm begging you.
01:39:01 I have to decipher them and hopefully get them right.
01:39:03 Hi, Steph. If you have... I assume that's you have. If you have moral courage because it was necessary to escape your dysfunctional environment,
01:39:09 does this mean that a dysfunctional environment gives birth to moral courage? Or can moral courage be fostered in a peaceful environment?
01:39:15 I don't know. I mean, that's very theoretical.
01:39:20 So, are you saying that everybody from a dysfunctional environment has moral courage? No.
01:39:26 Lots of people from dysfunctional environments are kind of fraidy cats, and I say that with understanding and sympathy, their whole lives.
01:39:33 There are people who come from entirely privileged environments who have no virtues, morals or values, right?
01:39:43 They're terrible, right? They're champagne socialists and so on, right?
01:39:46 So, it's the judo move, right? Right? If you know judo, then someone rushing at you is to your advantage because you use their momentum to hurt them, right?
01:39:55 So, if you study judo, somebody attacking you, you can use to your advantage.
01:39:59 If you don't know judo, some big guy rushing at you is going to knock you over and you're going to lose the fight.
01:40:03 So, philosophy is like the judo, right? So, some guy rushing at you doesn't mean you're willing to fight.
01:40:07 The difference is do you know judo. So, coming from a situation of verbal abuse and wanting to succeed, of course, I knew,
01:40:14 and this is not brain surgery, this is not a high IQ thing at all, I knew that if I wanted to succeed, I couldn't submit myself to or be defined by the verbal abuse I experienced as a child.
01:40:24 I couldn't, right? I mean, if your mother screams in the middle of the night that she hates you, you can't internalize and absorb that if you want to succeed at all, right?
01:40:35 You have to say that she was a messed up woman who had the emotional maturity of your average coked up toddler and discounted as irrelevant and unpleasant, of course, but you can't take that stuff seriously.
01:40:47 Of course, if you want to succeed, you can't take the people who curse your very existence seriously, and so I had to have that understanding.
01:40:56 I don't think that's a high IQ thing, right? If somebody says, "You're trash, you're terrible, you're horrible, you're evil," and you want to succeed, then you have to discount that person, right?
01:41:04 I mean, all the people who think I'm like the worst guy in the known universe, I have to discount those opinions.
01:41:09 A) Reason, B) Evidence, and C) They're just terrible people as a whole to say that about me and not, like, obviously really violent and terrible people.
01:41:18 There is no automatic route to success. There is no automatic route to success. All success is earned. All success is willed. And the only people who want to take that away are the people who don't want to take the risk.
01:41:37 All right. Thank you everyone so much for a wonderful live stream. Merry, merry Christmas to everyone. I appreciate your support. If you are listening to this later, even later today, I would appreciate your help and support.
01:41:49 freedomain.locals.com. Don't forget to use the promo code ALLCAPSUPB2022 if you end up subscribing. That would be a wonderful birthday gift for myself and for the James and for the Jared.
01:42:03 We all await with bated breath the incoming of the support that keeps us in vittles. So, thanks to everyone. Thank yourselves for your support of philosophy.
01:42:13 If you've supported, you are the reason I'm here and talking. I hope you're enjoying my blue room, blue face. I've got a lot of blue on today, but the blue eyes.
01:42:21 So, I hope that you have a wonderful Merry Christmas. I'm sure I will talk to you before New Year's. Lots of love to everyone from up here. Take care everyone. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
01:42:29 Bye.
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