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Stefan Molyneux
  • 4/3/2025
FLASH Freedomain LIVE CHAT 24 February 2025

In this episode, I explore philosophical questions and current events, starting with the critical issue of healthcare wait times in Canada and its systemic implications. I discuss the challenges of upholding moral standards amid public hypocrisy and reflect on my creative processes, particularly in "The God of Atheists."

Listeners' questions lead to a conversation about artistic integrity, the role of moral characters, and the decline of warning narratives in modern fiction. We conclude with a candid look at the commercialization of thought, emphasizing integrity over wealth. This episode fosters a deeper understanding of our individual and collective responsibilities.

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Transcript
00:00:00Good evening everybody, hope you're doing well, got a little bit of time, thought I'd have a little bit of a chat with you all.
00:00:06See if you have any questions, comments, issues, challenges, problems, criticisms, makeup tips, and cat litter box suggestions.
00:00:19So I'm, of course, all ears if everybody has, or anybody has, a yearning, burning preference to run your thoughts through the Philosophy Chatterbox brain.
00:00:30I'm thrilled to hear. You can just, of course, raise your hand and we can chat.
00:00:39And welcome, welcome. Oh, James, just teasing me saying, oh, I'm too busy to deal with you tonight.
00:00:48And he's here. Could be James the bot. Always hard to tell. Always hard to tell, but yeah, happy to take your comments, questions, problems.
00:00:57And I'll just give a pause here, see if anybody's got something on their mind. You all have solved every problem known to philosophy.
00:01:10I was just reading about how 15,474 Canadians died waiting for health care in 2023 to 2024.
00:01:23Nearly 75,000 waiting list deaths since 2018 to 19, covering a wide range of surgical and diagnostic services.
00:01:34Very, very interesting.
00:01:40Also was reading about how the National Institute of Health currently funds over 400 projects at $350 million relating to structural racism.
00:01:58691,000 of our health science funding well spent on Our Voices Matter, racial justice activism, intervention to address structural racism and prevent depression in black and Latinx youth.
00:02:09$350 million. So, I mean, racism is big business. Racism is not exactly an organic, or sort of racial, racialism, hysteria about racism and so on.
00:02:24Not exactly an organic thing. It is very, very paid for, and it's going to be very interesting to see what happens to race relations when racial division stops being funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, at least.
00:02:41Probably more over time, but it's far from astroturfed. It is, in fact, racism is to a large degree a government program.
00:02:51Somebody wrote, this is interesting, Barry on X, easiest ways to make money.
00:02:58Men's lust, women's desire for beauty, the health of the elderly, the education of children, rich people's fear of loss, and brookies desire to get rich quickly.
00:03:11Very interesting. Very interesting.
00:03:15Now, I'm also doing mild flybys, although I think I lack my Old Testament moral outrage from back in the day, but I do, in fact, still floating by the Ashley Sinclair issue.
00:03:28The idea of having a baby and making a fortune, isn't that wild? I try to put myself in the mindset of where that's a possible thing.
00:03:41Where if you are a woman, I'm, I guess, young enough to have kids, reasonably attractive. If you are a woman, then you can get knocked up and you can make a fortune.
00:03:59Now, of course, if you happen to get knocked up by the world's $350 billion, or whatever it is, richest man, that is something else. That is something else.
00:04:11Of course, the other big challenge as well, with regards to people who put themselves forward as moralists, and the people on the right and on the left, always put themselves forward as moralists.
00:04:23That's how you can identify what their political beliefs are, because they're putting themselves forward as moralists.
00:04:33Moralists is a tough gig, man. It's a tough gig, because a moralist has to live, like we have to live by our own prescriptions, and I suppose proscriptions as well, but we have to live by our own standards.
00:04:51It's really, really tough to put yourself forward as a moralist. This is right, that is right, the other is right, and then you have to live by that, which, like a rather confused whale, both sucks and blows at the same time.
00:05:16There's good things in it, it's good to live morally and do the right thing, and I get all of that and so on, but it's a tough gig.
00:05:25It's a tough gig, and a moralist should be judged by his or her actions, rather than his or her statements.
00:05:37And of course, I think, or at least I would argue, that there are a lot of people who move into the moral space and then act with rank hypocrisy in order to destroy, or undermine at least, people's faith and belief in morality.
00:05:56It's a very, very common thing. To sort of storm into a space, let's say a right-wing space, and talk about how evil the family courts are, how men should have the right to opt out, since women have the right to opt out of parenthood with abortion and adoption and so on, or the morning after pill for that matter, since women have the right to opt out of parenthood.
00:06:20So, thus, also, should meneth have the righteth to opt out of a parenthood, and this is an argument that's made on the right fairly continually.
00:06:32And of course, opposition to single motherhood, opposition to the alienation of children with regards to their parents, all that kind of stuff.
00:06:42And be a moralist. And it's tough, man. I can tell you this, of course, I'm sure we all have the same experience as a whole, but I can tell you this from deep and vivid personal experience, it's a whole lot easier to talk about morality than it is to, oh, I don't know, actually be moral. A whole lot easier.
00:07:02So, we'll get back to that. I'll hold my horses, because this is a show of dialogue.
00:07:14So, you have, my friend, oh, Icon Lady. Icon Lady, you had raised your hand, all you have to do is unmute, and I'm all ears, and I will return to right-wing hypocrisy after our regularly, well, unscheduled conversation.
00:07:32You just have to unmute.
00:07:33Yeah.
00:07:34Yes, how are you doing?
00:07:35Awesome. Hello. I am great, thank you. Excited to ask this question.
00:07:39Excellent.
00:07:40Okay, so, I just finished The God of Atheists, and Gordon is an awesome character, but how can we come up with an original idea like you or Gordon? Do you have any advice for honing into your creativity? Because you've created a lot of incredible work, like The God of Atheists or The President, and then Gordon and his great idea, but how can we do that, rather than just being mere humble listeners of your show?
00:08:06Yeah. Well, tell me a little bit about what you thought of the book, and why you found Gordon in particular to be compelling.
00:08:14Okay, so, I thought the book was amazing. It's kind of like, it's very much, I found it very much like The Fountainhead, but I would say it's a little less nihilistic than The Fountainhead, or a little less grim and dark.
00:08:30But I really, really enjoyed it. I read it in like three days. I was thoroughly absorbed. All the characters had an insane amount of depth, and it was just a chandelier on people. But, sorry, my brain's not working. It is 11pm right now.
00:08:50Wait, come on. You sound like you're in your 20s. 11pm should be the start of your evening.
00:08:57I am an old, I'm an old person. Sleep is important.
00:09:03Well, you have a young voice, I suppose. Your voice is the opposite of my hair. It makes you sound younger. Okay. All right. Is this, was The God of Atheists the first novel of mine that you have read?
00:09:17No, I read The Present, and I read Real-Time Relationships. But I'd say RTR is definitely the best. But I like The God of Atheists because of all the ideas.
00:09:31Right. I appreciate that. I always try to compress as many sort of thought-provoking concepts, ideas, arguments, and insights into sort of every paragraph. I try to get at least two, hopefully four. So, I can tell you a little bit of the history of that book, just so that you can understand how the creativity came about. Because that's, I think, your question is how to be more creative.
00:09:59Yeah, and I have like a big idea like you or Gordon, because you wrote The God of Atheists. And like a lot of us are listeners of your show. But I'm, I don't know how many of people that listen to you actually then go out and create their own shows afterwards. Hopefully a fair few. But yeah.
00:10:19Right. So, I won't sort of get into the details, but Canada has a sort of premier writing course. I submitted a bunch of writing samples and got into that course. And I basically just had the story of Joanna at the beginning, which was the woman pushing 30s, in her 30s with her standards collapsing. And her, you know, obviously somewhat dissatisfying marriage or relationship with Alder.
00:10:45So, I just had her and I was writing kind of feverishly trying to sort of explore this female character and her life. And I had a writing teacher. He's actually still alive. I checked him out the other day. I had a writing teacher, a fairly famous writer, who had, and I get this sometimes from people in the art world, like a visceral, poisonous, vitriolic hatred for this book.
00:11:10And he said he didn't even think it was any kind of book. And there was just no way that he could teach me. And it was some of the worst stuff he'd ever read. Like, really, not sort of here's how you can reshape it and so on. And I know I'm not a bad writer, but there's people who sometimes just react.
00:11:28And I've had this happen with a publisher with just poor, just reacted such vitriol. And this also happened at the theater school that I went to, just such vitriol and sort of anger. And I didn't really get it back in the day, but I sort of get it a little bit more now.
00:11:43So then I switched from a male writer to a female writer. And it was fantastic. She was really helpful, really loved the book and recommended me to her agent and all kinds of good stuff. And I thought I was a way to the races.
00:11:59So I sort of wrote the first part with Joanna, or Joanne, in a sort of fever burst of creative exploration. And then I got kind of stuck. And I knew that I wanted to pursue the theme of corruption as a whole, because I had sort of recently emerged from a business situation, which was pretty corrupt.
00:12:23So I wanted to write a bunch of stories about corruption as a whole. And I wanted to write about corruption in the family. I wanted to write about corruption in business, in the music industry and academia, because these were things I had some experience with. Certainly, I've been in the business world, I've been in the academic world.
00:12:46And I don't know, I don't have much to do with the music world, but I've read a bunch of biographies of musicians and bands and so on. So I had some fair idea about it. And it really wasn't until I got the little boy, the character of Stephen the boy, and his curiosity and Socratic questioning of his parents, because I didn't want to write a book about corruption without any counterpoint.
00:13:16And so the boy who starts to question his parents, and all of the unraveling that starts to happen from that, to me was very important.
00:13:30And so having experienced corruption in the academic world, having experienced corruption in the business world, having experienced corruption in the family, and of course, in the educational system as a whole, whenever we have questions that are like the more intelligent and perceptive the questions, the more we're attacked.
00:13:47So for me, I wanted to show corruption and its source. And I also wanted to show the solution to corruption, or at least the counterweight to corruption.
00:14:04Now, I didn't want to show, in the sort of Ayn Rand formula, there are these corrupt characters like Ellsworth Toohey and James Taggart and so on. There are just these characters that are just corrupt.
00:14:19And then there's these characters that are just pure and shining. And that, to me, has never been particularly inspiring, because like Howard Roark and John Galt, they have to kind of be born that way.
00:14:32And I wanted to show how people can achieve some sort of integrity and how they can push back against corruption, but I needed the origin story, which was just a certain amount of curiosity on the part of the three kids, right?
00:14:53The boy and the two girls. And I wanted to sort of see their path that way. So I don't like, in particular, look at something like, I mean, it's kind of goofy, but if you look at Superman, you see a story where Superman is the man of steel, and he just came from Krypton, and he landed like a meteor in Smallville, and he's just wonderful and perfect and strong.
00:15:15And that, to me, that doesn't give people any energy to fight. It's like saying some people are just born with giant muscles, and some people are born just kind of anemic and chicken-chested and spindle-armed and so on, and there's no transition between the two of them.
00:15:31What I did want is to say, okay, so we're born kind of weak, but we can exercise and become stronger. And that's why there are these transition points. And certainly when you're young, if you have a fairly decent nature yourself, it's a little hard to sort of comprehend or process how much corruption there is in the world.
00:15:53And then if you do get it, it's easy to fall into despair. So I think, for me, the creativity comes from having a framework of encouragement and saying, most people say, well, the opposite of evil is good. The opposite of evil Lex Luthor is good Superman, right?
00:16:15The opposite of the devil is Jesus or God. But of course, we're not gods, and we're not from the planet Krypton. So I wanted to make a case that the opposite of evil, or let's say the opposite of corruption, is not virtue. The opposite of corruption is curiosity.
00:16:39And of course, that's not exactly my wild idea of originality, because that's Socrates. Socrates was just curious. Like, I mean, the Oracle told me that I was the wisest man. I can't possibly be the wisest man, so let me go and cross-examine all these wise men to solve this paradox that the Oracle cannot lie. The Oracle said I was the wisest, but I know nothing.
00:17:04And so, curiosity is the opposite of corruption. And curiosity brings on a kind of ferocity that even pure virtue does not. You know, just being in the position of asking questions and being curious about the motives and beliefs and processes of corrupt people. I mean, or finding out that they're corrupt through a series of questions.
00:17:26And of course, I slowly penetrated the corruption within my family of origin just by asking a whole series of questions, just being curious. And there's almost nothing more powerful against corruption than curiosity plus optimism. I wonder why people are doing what they're doing. I'm sure they have good motives, but I wonder why they're doing what they're doing.
00:17:49And so, for me, the creativity came out of a particular journey of mine, which is that studying virtue and trying to be virtuous in my life did not uncover corruption in the people around me. However, being kind of naive and curious and just asking questions.
00:18:07How does this fit together with that? Why was this decision made? This doesn't make sense compared to that. Help me understand. And this is, again, Socrates' approach. I mean, at least this is what he claimed. Who knows what the actual truth was? But he claimed, well, I'm just curious because the Oracle said I was the wisest. I know nothing. The Oracle cannot lie.
00:18:34So, I need to find out what the facts are. And just sort of being, in a sense, naive, optimistic, and curious. Well, that engages you with evil in a way that's not combative. And thus, when the escalation occurs, the questioner, the person who's curious, can't be blamed for the escalation.
00:19:00I'm just asking questions. I just want to know. And, to me, the idea that you can fight corruption by asking questions, by just being curious, right?
00:19:13I mean, so, the character, the grad student, right? The grad student is like, well, he's got, Rudy is the more cynical one. But the grad student is like, well, I mean, academia is really into thought and reason and having an effect on the world and doing good research. And I've got this great idea. And, of course, I pulled a lot of that stuff straight out of my own master's thesis and my own experience with academia while doing my master's thesis.
00:19:40And, so, like, people are, if you're just naive and curious, there's great power in that. So, the grad student is like, hey, I've had this great idea. I've done the research. It seems to hold up. I'm going to be very enthusiastic about putting this out into academia. And then he gets all of this hostility, and it's just kind of baffling, right?
00:20:02So, like, people said, oh, we need to have an honest conversation about race. And I'm like, okay, well, this topic seems to be, like, IQ and stuff seems to be kind of under-discussed. It also seems to be important because it could explain a lot. So, then you have an honest conversation, right?
00:20:17So, I think from my own experience was just that the greatest power that you have against corruption is not virtue, but curiosity. And if you're just curious and, in a sense, optimistic, I'm sure there's a good answer for this, but blah, blah, blah, right? It's also a little bit of Columbo. So, I'm sure there's a good answer. Just help me sort of understand, right?
00:20:42I mean, if somebody's embezzling from your company, and you go in and, like, why the hell are you stealing from me this, that, and the other, then you're automatically escalating and so on, right? But if you just go in and you say, you know, I mean, you're my accountant. I'm just trying to figure out a couple of things here. If you could help me out, I don't understand how this number goes to this number. And just curiosity and optimism and so on, I think that's the best way to approach corruption.
00:21:11And that was sort of the idea that I was focusing on. But you have to have gone through some sort of, I think, interesting process yourself in order to be creative in a work of art.
00:21:33I mean, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien went through World War I and then saw the darkening shadows of World War II and then wrote a lot of Lord of the Rings under the shadow of World War II with the one ring, almost like weapons of mass destruction at the end, although I know that that really wasn't revealed until the very end of the war.
00:21:55But there were certainly weapons of mass destruction prior to, I mean, more people died in the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo than in the atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So I think you have to be doing interesting and creative things in your life, and I think that will give you the raw material for creativity.
00:22:14But it's sort of like, if you want to, this is an old criticism that Tom Wolfe had of writers. I think he was talking about John Irving or other people like that, and he was saying, John Irving? No, someone like that. Anyway, he was writing about how, you know, one American writer wrote this whole novel set in India, but he'd never been to India.
00:22:33And I think that perhaps Tom Wolfe had done a little bit too much research. He spent many, many years writing A Man in Full, even spent a huge amount of time in Japan for a section in the novel that ended up being cut anyway. Or you could say Ayn Rand spending five years working in an architect's office to prepare for the novel The Fountainhead or as part of that.
00:23:00So I think you have to have some lived experience, of course. The programmer, of course, was a programmer in the business world, so I kind of understood all of that sort of stuff. But I think you kind of have to be doing interesting and creative things in your life as a whole, and then you can bring that stuff to fiction.
00:23:21But I don't think you can just invent it out of whole cloth itself, if that makes sense. So creativity comes in how you approach various challenges and problems in life. And if you do go through some interesting and creative things in solving problems in life, I think it gives you a pretty good framework for trying to solve these problems or trying to create interesting problems and solutions in fiction.
00:23:47Sorry for the long speech. I hope that makes some kind of sense. So what do you think?
00:24:17Same with Rudy. So maybe that's just the case. It's not just some deep magic idea coming to you. But also, I was going to say, Justin is an incredible character because he's like the character before, like, realizing because he was like, Justin was just so full out as well. All the characters were just so well done, honestly.
00:24:45But thank you for your answer. But I guess, do you have any things you would recommend doing in particular, I guess, to spark that as well?
00:24:53Yeah. So one of the things that's always frustrated me about literature is it sucks. In general, it sucks at helping people solve problems in their actual lives. I mean, I could go sort of on and on, but, you know, great expectations, how many of us end up being forced to help a criminal who later leaves us a huge sum of money?
00:25:19Interesting story. Fun story. But it doesn't help you solve smack in your own life. Or how many of us, you know, are sold into a workhouse and then have to go free and end up being kidnapped by a sort of a criminal-led street gang of urchin robbers and so on.
00:25:41Like, it's an interesting story, all of a twist. It's fine. It's entertaining, but doesn't really help us do or solve much in our life. How many of us are taunted and tormented by a sociopathic wife to kill a king, as in Macbeth? Doesn't really solve anything in our lives.
00:26:03Or how many of us want to murder a porn broker to test our moral theories, as in crime and punishment? And so it's entertaining, it's interesting, it gives you goosebumps, it's exciting, it's a thrill ride. But what does it really solve in most people's lives?
00:26:23And so what I dislike, there's sort of the two poles of 20th century novels, arguably 19th century, but certainly 20th century novels. The two poles are naturalism and romanticism. Romanticism, I mean, Victor Hugo, of course, is 19th century, but romanticism is sort of passionate, powerful ideals.
00:26:49And the Ayn Rand, the Victor Hugos and so on, just sort of larger-than-life characters as Jean Valjean or Howard Rourke and so on. Passionate ideals that, again, don't really seem to help people solve many problems in their own lives, but are entertaining and engaging to read about.
00:27:11Now naturalism was also referred to sort of the kitchen sink dramas. So naturalism was an attempt to turn art into a kind of documentary. Is this how people really talk? Is this how people really behave? Is this how people really act?
00:27:29And so you had abstract values in the pseudo form of people or more accurate people in the absence of really any values whatsoever. So this would be, you know, some of the soap operas, Coronation Street and so on, that there was all of this. And I know that's not a novel, but a show.
00:27:49But in general, you read about people's daily lives, and it doesn't really seem to add up to too much. Or you read about these sort of grand souls that are born massively dimensioned, and yet their choices never seem to reflect your own choices.
00:28:09So people are either swapped up in this grim domino tidal wave of naturalism and don't really get much say in their own lives, or they have these big grand issues like, yes, Inspector Javert has been chasing me for 20 years. It's like, that's not really a thing that people deal with in their lives as a whole.
00:28:33And I guess the third category that emerged last quarter in particular of the 20th century, and that is, you know, just a pure propaganda piece. You know, this is the piece where the woman is hard done by this terrible man.
00:28:51And she finds this sensitive, shaggy-haired lover who is a sculptor downtown and just falls in love with her rather wrinkled butt. And she leaves her brute of a husband and ends up in this sensitive, wonderful, romantic relationship with a wonderful person.
00:29:11This is sort of the sex in the city stuff. Or what was the one where the woman ends up leaving her husband after talking about the war and then ends up opening up a restaurant on the shores of the Mediterranean and having this wonderful life and so on.
00:29:29So this is just dangling the grasses greener on the other side of the fence to middle-aged women in order to leave their husband to destroy the value of marriage and accelerate the collapse of the birth rate. All of it is just, or sleeping with the enemy or all of this kind of stuff, or even things like fatal attraction with Glenn Close and Michael Douglas, which is designed to scare the pants on guys by just saying, you know, here's all these terrible things that can happen.
00:29:55Here's how scary women are. Michael Douglas, I think in the 90s, made a whole career of hard done by men, hard put upon men. And so all of that propaganda stuff, which is just designed to set men and women against each other for purposes of destroying the family unit and so on.
00:30:15And this, of course, is also the brave and heroic single mother trademark, who's just wonderful and perfect and does everything she can for her kids. Gina Davis did this quite a bit as well. And so it is just, that's just the revolutionary undermining stuff. Like, you know, every kid's movie for a certain amount of time, maybe it's still the case. I haven't watched kid movies in a while.
00:30:35But every kid's movie was, there are these wonderful farmland animals who get along and play and dance around in the sun and the pollen and the bees do these little dances in the sky and everyone's happy and singing. And then this evil white capitalist overlord comes along and wants to, you know, pave paradise and put up a parking lot kind of thing, going to build a mall in the woodland animals where they frolic.
00:30:59And they all have to band together to fight the evil capitalists in a Rousseauian orgy of Garden of Eden versus the dark satanic mills of the modern world. And all of this is just designed to make you hate capitalists and, you know, maybe white people and so on. Right? So it was all that could just straight up propaganda stuff was kind of ridiculously common.
00:31:24So I really disliked just naturalism. Yeah, this is how people really are. It's like, why would I want to watch my neighbors? And the naturalism didn't have ways in which people could morally improve themselves.
00:31:39Although if there was an improvement to be had, it always had to do with, in particular, the woman leaving a grim and oppressive situation with a careless and thoughtless man. I mean, the Bridges of Madison County was a prime example of this, of course. I think it was Nicholas Sparks or someone who wrote the book and then Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep were in the movie.
00:32:01And it was just appalling, not as bad as Eat Pray Love, but it was just appalling. This woman is just, she's so hard done by because she has these loud obnoxious boys around her. And don't you know, they just, the door keeps slamming and she doesn't say anything.
00:32:19She just gets sad and frustrated that the door keeps slamming. And then she has this absolutely perfect affair. The man becomes obsessed with her, but nobody gets hurt. She doesn't get an STD. She doesn't get an unwanted pregnancy. He doesn't become a stalker. The husband never finds out. He just loves her from a distance and pines for her at a distance and nobody gets hurt in this perfect bloodless, no victim kind of affair.
00:32:45And this, of course, is promoting this kind of daydreaming outside the marriage. And of course, you have this very funny, esoteric, sophisticated, urban cosmopolitan woman married to this insensate brute of a farmer and of course, or whatever he was doing, some sort of farm thing.
00:33:07Then, of course, there's this gorgeous Clint Eastwood, sexy, sensuous photographer who just is great in bed, loves her to death. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody finds out. It's just perfect and wonderful. It's just rancid, absolutely rancid. And of course, you can't really publish art that promotes happy marriages these days. You can't show them. You can't promote them unless maybe it's, I don't know, biracial couples or something.
00:33:35So, I disliked naturalism because there was no improvement, no moral improvement. But I also disliked romanticism because it was these sort of morally perfect demigods facing off, morally perfect and imperfect demigods facing off against each other in situations that normal, ordinary people never find themselves in.
00:33:59So, either it's like, well, I can identify with this character, but there's no moral improvement, or there is moral improvement or moral combat, but I can't possibly identify with this character. Thor travels through time and fights the Federal Reserve or something, and it's like, yeah, but I'm not Thor who travels through time.
00:34:15I wanted to write a book of morality with ordinary people willing extraordinary morals. So, I didn't just want ordinary people where there's no morals, like kitchen sink dramas and naturalistic dramas, and I didn't want moral combat with gods versus gods. That, to me, has about as much realism as a Transformers battle in the movies.
00:34:39So, I wanted to write a novel where people were facing the kind of corruption and challenges that we all face, and there was something they could do about it, but it was really tough and required a lot of curiosity and was scary and so on.
00:35:01And for me, if I could get those two things together, if I could get those two things together, that here's moral challenges that we all face on a regular basis, you know, moral challenges at work, moral challenges in our relationships, moral challenges with regards to our parenting and peer pressure and so on, to neither be a moral idealist who's ineffective or a cynic who gets things done.
00:35:30I really wanted to write a book where morality could actually help people in situations they could recognize from their own lives, and yet not just have this sort of mad magical moral ability like Ayn Rand's characters or Jean Valjean, who's just amazing, despite the fact that he was decades in prison for stealing a loaf of bread.
00:35:49He was just wonderful and amazing and strong and noble and, you know, it's just, yeah, okay. How does that help me in my daily life become better? So, certainly, I think all new art arises out of dissatisfaction, if not downright hatred, to all existing art.
00:36:09I wrote novels because there was nothing to read that really moved me. I mean, I was moved by the romantic novels, but they were too distant from my life, and the lives that were more close to mine, there was no moral progress or challenge to overcome.
00:36:31So, I wanted to try and put the two together, which was really quite a bit of fantastical. It's a kind of alchemy to try and mix all of these things together and not have it blow up in your face.
00:36:45But, I mean, I remember I had a writing teacher when I was at the National Theatre School, and he sort of got my philosophical bent, and he and the head of the theatre school said that my writing assignment was to write The Trial and Death of Socrates as a play.
00:37:04And I spent a lot of time on it, and courtroom dramas are fun and interesting to write about. And I wrote it, and I hated it. It's just, again, this sort of passionate, virulent hatred that I understand is an antibody response to practical ethics. I understand that now, but I didn't understand it back then. Of course, I was 21 or whatever.
00:37:26And then my writing teacher wrote The Trial and Death of Socrates and said, it should be more like this, and he gave it to me, and I hated his work. I thought, this is just terrible. This is petty, this is not got any of the grandeur. It certainly doesn't have any of the flashes of humor that I think is important for these kinds of things.
00:37:51And so, you know, he hated my writing, I hated his writing, and then he put on a play that he'd written, and I went to go and see the play. I thought it was just terrible. And then he took me to, my writing teacher took me to a French play, and I found it so repulsive, so nihilistic, so dark, so ugly, so spiritually venomous, that I remember I got up and left.
00:38:17I didn't even talk to my writing teacher, I just got up and left. And I remember walking home, I had a little walker with me, and I put on The Honey Dripper's Good Rockin' Midnight, and it just felt like a soul cleanse. Just get rid of that horrible, gallic negativity, and I mean, French culture is founded on exploitation, pedophilia, and child abuse.
00:38:41And I just was like, ugh, I can't, like I just can't. It's like, I remember going to see an Oprah Winfrey movie where the male character turned out to be a pedophile, and I was just like, nope, peace out, I'm tapping out. And it's not like, I mean, pedophiles are an interesting and powerful subject for stories.
00:39:00I mean, Svidrigaïlov in Crime and Punishment is very powerful, and hideous, but deep character. So it's not that, it's just everything is repulsive, everything is ugly. And that's kind of what's going on with art at the moment, is everything's just ugly. Everything's ugly. It's all just in the final stages of collapse and programming you to have no culture that you want to defend so you can be taken over.
00:39:25This is the acid that eats down the barriers so that your walls can be pushed in and you can be taken over. So, yeah, I really wanted to write that. And I had the most amazing review. It was a PhD, a graduate student PhD in literature, wrote the most amazing review I've ever seen of any book, talking about this is finally the great Canadian novel.
00:39:47This is finally a coming-of-age moral story that is practical and powerful, and the characters are vivid, the descriptions are wonderful, blah, blah, blah. And my writing teacher did help me with the descriptions because I was very much writing in my head, and she gave me advice like, you know, how about in the university, how about a woman walks across the quad with a red backpack on, things like that, that just really help make things more grounded and vivid.
00:40:11And I've never seen a review like that. Turns out he actually had a PhD in literature and theology, and he loved the Christian implications of the novel when, of course, I was not pro-Christian back then at all, but he kind of got it.
00:40:24So, I think you have to – well, creativity also comes out of disgust. It comes out of just like a virulent hatred for what is and a desire to replace.
00:40:36You know, if you move in to an apartment and the walls are painted some horrible color, then you'll go out – one of the first things you'll do is you'll go out and you'll buy paint, and you'll repaint the room.
00:40:53You'll say, well, where does all that creativity come from? Where does all of that energy to go and find the right paint and pick the right paint that matches your furniture or matches the furniture? And it's because you hate the color of the wall. You hate it. And so, you go out and do something new. You go out and paint something new. Go out and make something new. Go out and get something new.
00:41:12So, a lot of people think that creativity is just this elevated positive thing that points towards a new and beautiful thing, and there is that aspect of it. But I think people underestimate just how much creativity is driven by sort of hatred and contempt for what is in the art world already.
00:41:34And I think I very much wrote The God of Atheists in contempt and recoil. Because, you know, I was struggling in life like we all do with corruption and liars and cheats and all of that, sophists. And I remember reading a bunch of books and like, there's nothing here for me. There's nothing here that's going to help me.
00:41:57It's all extreme situations, or I can identify with the people, but there are no morals.
00:42:05And so, I really wanted to write something to fill the void in guidance that I was not receiving in any of the art that I looked at. And that came out of a particular kind of hatred and contempt for art that was. And of course, I think that's why people had hatred and contempt for what I was creating.
00:42:24I think they sensed that it came out of a hatred and contempt for what they had been creating, if that makes sense. So again, long speech, but I hope that you don't be afraid to let your creativity come out of pure bottomless hatred for what is.
00:42:39Thank you. I appreciate the answer and I appreciate you speaking about The God of Atheists as well. It's great to hear because again, it's inspiring and moving and I like your inspiring speeches a lot.
00:42:54Like I tend to steer away from like the political kind of stuff and like the whole just for more like typical media topics because it's maybe it's the disgust that you're trying to invoke creativity in people.
00:43:09Because you speak about a lot of like the world issues and you were just saying how disgust can spark creativity, but I tend to like prefer more of your like deep inspiring conversations rather than the media style ones.
00:43:26But I guess maybe what people need to hear is the reality of the world to spark. Oh, we need to do something about it.
00:43:35Yes, yes. I think I also want to we don't have too many warning characters anymore. I remember there was an old movie I saw with a girl I was dating at the time scared the crap out of me.
00:43:49I think it was called The Good Father with Anthony Hopkins and it's about a guy who's just volatile and aggressive and distant and so on and ends up just, you know, completely isolated walling up his garden at the end.
00:44:01And that was like a real shot across the bowels and so on that I really need to, you know, follow EM forces commandment to only connect to just find ways to connect with people and life will be better.
00:44:11But we don't have too many warning characters anymore and warning characters are. Here's what happens if you take the wrong path. Here's what, you know, here's what happens if you take the wrong approach or you fail to.
00:44:31Take care of your own integrity or you fail to be honest and and so on and warning characters to me are very, very important.
00:44:41In the world so that you can read things and get used, right? So in my novel, the present, there are a couple of warning characters. Of course, the old aunt and crystal is a warning character of putting ambition ahead of relationships and vanity ahead of connection.
00:44:59And. Arlo Arlo sounds, it sounds like a kind of Greek cheese, so I remember my daughter when I read her one of the chapters, she said, oh, cheese boy is sad. So Arlo, of course, is another that you can you can disconnect from the world out of fear of the future and thus render yourself impotent to change anything and the world will then overtake you.
00:45:23Of course, the character of Rachel is a warning character and also the sister as well, because the warning character is. Don't respond to power, respond to vulnerability because she obeys her boss, but won't put take your child out of daycare because the child has no power and her boss has power.
00:45:43So I think warning characters are really. Really important in literature, and we just don't have them really anymore. There are good guys and bad guys. But and then you watch the good guys beat up on the bad guys.
00:45:59But there aren't warning characters about how to avoid becoming a bad guy because bad guys aren't just born right, they're not doing this pop into existence and they don't just suddenly become evil. Corruption or evil is a step by step process.
00:46:13And trying to find ways to avoid that. And of course, Joanna is a warning character at the very beginning of the book, which is here's what happens if you don't take care of your middle age, you're going to end up horrendously compromised and having to settle for a man you don't respect and so on.
00:46:35So, yeah, I think I think warning characters are very important. And I mean, you could say that Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is a warning character, but Dostoevsky's work was heavily focused on the dangers of rising nihilism, socialism and communism.
00:46:53And of course, he started out his life as a socialist, and then was arrested and thrown in prison and spent, I think, eight months in pitch darkness, so that you could quote, confront your own conscience. And it was so dark and silent, even the guards what felt on the bottom of their boots, so you couldn't even hear them walking.
00:47:09And then he was dragged out, he was about to be shot, his sentence was commuted to years in Siberia at the last minute. And he found God and he found Christianity and he wrote a whole series of warning novels, The Devils and of course Crime and Punishment being the two major ones.
00:47:27But he wrote all of these novels, as did Turgenev with Fathers and Sons, wrote all of these novels saying, you know, these nihilists, these socialists, they're very dangerous, they're very toxic, and so on. And yet, it was not enough to save Russia. Now, I'm not saying that my books will save the West. I think they've been quite ably countered.
00:47:47But I definitely wanted to give it the best shot I could with regards to literature, because I very much got this from Ayn Rand's novels. I mean, I'm not going to write a better anti-government, anti-corruption book than Atlas Shrugged or even The Fountainhead. I'm not going to write something better than that. But those books were unable to solve the problem of power and politics and control of the economy.
00:48:11I remember shortly after Atlas Shrugged was published, a very young Leonard Peikoff was like, well, when people read this, all of these controls will be repealed within a year or two. And of course, that's not what happened. And is there any chance to prevent, you know, the bad things from coming through literature? And I really wanted to give my best shot at that.
00:48:35And then if bad things did come, at least, I would have tried something different than the writers who came before me. And if there was a way to avoid or avoid it, so much the better. So, all right. Do you have any other questions or comments?
00:48:47No, but I think that is what I love most about your novels, the ones I've read. The feeling you get at the end. I remember when I finished The Present, the feeling I got at the end, it was kind of like, it was before I defood and all of that good stuff. So, the feeling I got at the end was just this sort of like abstract, it's kind of like a disgust or just like this inspiration, but it's not an inspiration in a happy way.
00:49:15More like, oh, Fred, you know, you've got to get out and do something. But it's like that feeling you invoke, like the warning sign feeling was, is probably one of the, I'd say that is kind of like your book in the essence. And that's why I love it so much.
00:49:33Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And for more of that, of course, my novel almost is very big about that, because I really wanted to point out how a lot of big things in the world happen out of the most rancid and deep seated family conflicts. And that's very much the scope of history has a lot to do with vengeance within families. I mean, I'm talking about the origins of war. And of course, everyone knows that the First World War was actually a family war.
00:50:01Almost everyone who was involved in charge of countries in the First World War, so the kings and queens and so on, were all related. It was a family battle, and family battles on the big stage are often wars. So, anyway, I hope that helps. And if you wanted to tell me a little bit about your Dfu, I'm sorry to hear that, but I certainly understand the impulse. Did you want to talk at all about that?
00:50:25Oh, it's great. I've got a private call with you tomorrow in two days. So, that will be great there.
00:50:32All right, we'll do it then. And let's not have you spent money ahead of time. All right. Well, thanks. I appreciate that. It's great, great questions. And of course, I do love talking about my theories and practices of novel writing. And so, I do appreciate that.
00:50:48All right. If you have anybody else has questions, comments, issues, challenges, problems, whatever is on your mind, you can just raise your hand. Mr. Nolan. Great. That's a great logo. All right. Go ahead, my friend. What's on your mind?
00:51:05Hey, Stefan. Good to talk to you.
00:51:08You too, man. What's up?
00:51:10This is a much less substantive and important question, but I imagine with your character Arlo in the present, I want to know what happens to him. Are you writing another book on that?
00:51:24I had thought of that in terms of thinking about the next book. So, I will talk about A Guilty Pleasure. And this is unabashed praise for the podcast. It's the only one I subscribe to. And the podcast is called Crime Junkies.
00:51:52I'm your host, Ashley Flowers, and I'm Brit. And it's these two women who are absolutely brilliant at explicating crimes. Now, I find crime interesting to listen to. I actually find it kind of relaxing to go to sleep to for whatever reason.
00:52:14And one of the things that's really fascinating about crime stories is how many of them are unsolved. There were these characters, sorry, not characters. Sorry, let me rephrase that. These three children in the 1960s in Australia called the Beaumont Children.
00:52:32This is sort of back in a high-trust society. They were young, 11 and 5 and, I don't know, 7 or something like that. But anyway, they got on a bus and they went to go to the beach for the afternoon and they just disappeared. Never came back. Never found.
00:52:51And I won't give you sort of the whole story because it's very long and involved. There is a suspect, but he died. And the police would get these tips, oh, they're buried here and here's the reason why, blah, blah, blah. And they'd go and dig up places, never found them and so on.
00:53:10And one of the problems I have with novels, and this is true of movies as well, is that you always know what happens to people. You always know what happens. So, if you have, you know, five guys who go to war, you know, sort of, if you look at All Quiet on the Western Front was recently remade.
00:53:33And if you look at Five Guys Go to War, you know what happens to each of them. But that's not how life is. I mean, there's literally the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which says, I think, it's a permanent fire going on it because you don't know what happens.
00:53:55I mean, crime, murders used to be solved at an 85% rate in America. Now, I think it's down to 50%. And it's not because the criminals are getting smarter, trust me. And so, a lot of times in a situation of social dislocation and so on, I mean, if the economy collapses, you probably won't know what happens to most of your friends.
00:54:22And certainly extended family if they're not, like, you know, living in the same house and so on. And so, you don't know what happens to people in a time of war, in a time of famine, in a time of chaos. I mean, imagine if you are in the Civil War in America, and you're fighting with your brother.
00:54:43And of course, you know, you get separated in the heat of battle, and then you get injured, you get taken to a hospital, and so on. You probably would never know what happened to your brother. I mean, if he was dead, right? I mean, he would just get blown up. You know, the crows would peck out his face. He would get buried in a mass grave. And, you know, maybe you could find out, maybe you couldn't.
00:55:04But, of course, in a chaos of a battlefield, people get killed. Nobody knows who they are. I mean, think of the First World War. You know, people just get machine gunned and blown up with shells, and they're still finding bodies in France.
00:55:19So, what I was interested with that particular story was, I didn't want to cheat, because it's really easy to cheat as an author, because the author is omniscient. I know what happened to Arlo. At least, I could know, because I could just invent it, right?
00:55:43And then I could say, well, Arlo went here, he did this, he met this person, and then he fell down a manhole, and he was washed away in the sewer. Like, I could know, in a sense, exactly what happened to Arlo. But, that's not how disasters work. In disasters, people just vanish. They just despawn, and you never know what happened to them.
00:56:08You know, there are stories of, there's one story of a guy who, you know, his car broke down, and he just wanted to walk to the gas station, which wasn't even that far away. And, last time he was on his cell phone, he's like, oh, I think I took a bit of a wrong turn, it's kind of dark around here. He was never found. Nobody ever found him. Might as well have been beamed up by space aliens.
00:56:31So, you know people very well, and then they just vanish, in times of chaos. But, that's also something that happens in life as well. I'm sure you've had it, or maybe you haven't, but I think most people have had it where you're very close to someone, and it can be for years, and then they move away, and that's about it.
00:57:01You never really talk to them, you never really see them again, and so on. Like, I was just on a call last night with some friends of ours, and they moved, and we don't really have the chance to visit them, and they don't really have the chance to visit us.
00:57:18We used to be sort of an hour, hour and a half away from each other, now we're like a day's travel away from each other. And, you know, we'll probably stay in touch, and touch base, but there are other people in my life, I mean, I've had a friend for 30 years, haven't talked to him in, gosh, I had a friend, no, I had a friend for 20 years, haven't talked to him in 20 years.
00:57:43And so, there are people who just vanish. I mean, people I've worked with in the show before. We're super close, you know, we're in combat together, we're like band of brothers, battle-hardened mercenary veterans, and then we just part ways. For whatever reason, they get busy with their lives, I'm busy with my life, and we just never really touch base.
00:58:04So, I really wanted to explore just, what if I'm not an omniscient author, and somebody vanishes, and you don't know what happened? And I think that to me is interesting, because it's violating, I mean, if I was writing this from the first-person perspective, right, like I, you know, let's say the character was Rachel, right, then I could get away with not knowing.
00:58:33I could get away with not knowing what happened to Arlo, because Rachel may not know what happened to Arlo if she kind of takes off and then, right, he just despawns. But because I'm writing it third-person, right, he, she, they, then I absolutely have the ability to tell you what happened to Arlo, because Arlo cannot hide from the all-seeing, sore-on-eye of the omniscient author.
00:59:02But I wanted people to sympathize more with Rachel, and Rachel wouldn't know, so I wasn't gonna tell the audience something that Rachel didn't know, because that brings the audience closer in sympathy to Rachel. Does that make sense?
00:59:24Oh, no, that makes perfect sense, and I figured it was something like that. I just wanted to ask you, and I think the way you explained it was perfect. It reminds me of, I mean, I grew up in the 90s, and my parents were obsessed with Nancy Grace, and I remember Natalie Holloway, I think, was the blonde girl that was missing, I think, in Aruba or something like this.
00:59:46Ramsey? Jean Benet?
01:00:17Oh, yeah, there were two girls hiking, and they were followed by some guy that even took pictures of him, and then they vanished. But the pictures were too blurry to find the guy, so you literally have a picture of the guy who probably killed and hid the bodies of these two girls, and boom, just can't find him. It's a bit too blurry.
01:00:38And, I mean, of course, in the First World War, I had many distant relatives who just vaporized on the battlefront, and then, of course, as I've talked about before, my grandmother was killed in Dresden, and they only found the clasp of her purse. Now, of course, they kind of knew what happened to her, because she was in one of the worst bombings in human history, but they were never able to find a body.
01:01:03And this was, of course, a huge, sorrowful problem in the World Wars, is that people just vanished, missing, presumed dead, right? Missing, presumed dead, and there's no closure, you don't get a body, and you never know what happened to them.
01:01:18And so, I think it also communicated a general state of chaos, because, you know, the fog of war and the fog of catastrophe is really powerful. Like, you know, society collapses, you're not going to know what happens to 95% of the people you knew.
01:01:34You just, they just, you never, I mean, maybe if power is restored and so on, you can find them again, and so on, but people just, they just vanish in times of chaos. And I thought, if I give tidy endings to every character, that's not giving people a sense of the chaos and lack of knowledge that's going on, if that makes sense.
01:01:54That makes total sense, and I'm glad you wrote it that way. Again, it's just the curious part of me that was wondering if you had, like, some subplot somewhere, but, you know what, I like this way a lot better. Thank you for taking the time.
01:02:08Oh, thanks, and I really do appreciate Arlo as a character, and, you know, Arlo's hollowness and nihilism, to me, is very much explained by his, you know, creepy semi-pedo parents, right, because his parents are in this absolutely pristine condo with the most horrifying art in the world.
01:02:36And I don't know if you've ever seen this kind of stuff, but every now and then, I'm just a curious guy, right, every now and then, if I'm driving along, particularly if I'm with my wife, we're sort of driving someplace, and God help us, it's in that 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday thing, right?
01:02:53But we're driving along, and it's, like, open house, right? And I like looking at houses. I just think it's kind of neat. And so, I remember there was an open house, and it was a really, really expensive house. You know, one of these places with these big giant hallways and wings that go off in either direction, and it's open concept, so open concept you could, like, land a helicopter if the roof was open, that kind of stuff, right?
01:03:22Of course, it's nothing that I would ever buy or anything like that, but anyway, so my wife and I went in, and we were given this tour, and in a good chunk of the rooms was the creepiest, weirdest art, and I've seen some pretty creepy and weird art over the course of my years.
01:03:42Lord knows, stuff was coming out of the Podesta emails that would just make your hair stand on end, but this stuff was just weird. You know, blank-eyed people with, like, weird German outfits, holding rubber gloves with dead dogs at their feet, like, just, like, really weird, weird, semi-demonic stuff.
01:04:04And, of course, the house was completely cleaned out of furniture. There was just this weird art on the walls, and it just was, I remember looking up the artist, it's like, just, like, gives you the shivers, right? I couldn't eat dinner in a place like that for fear of, you know, consuming half a mountain of human flesh or something like that.
01:04:23And so, Arlo's really creepy parents, and the fact that even when they go away, he will only go into the house to flush the toilets and water the plants and gets out as soon as humanly possible, means that, you know, terrible stuff happened to Arlo. And when really bad things happen to people, and they're physically beautiful, they're doomed. They're doomed.
01:04:48Because nobody cares about their inner life because they're so pretty, and the only chance you really have of overcoming trauma is to not be too pretty, because then people might take an interest in your inner life. But because he was so gorgeous, and he was so hauled out by his incredibly horrendous parents and whatever horrible stuff, I mean, this is the kind of family that, you know, they pass kids around their rings, so to speak, right?
01:05:11So, he really didn't have much of a chance to have any kind of better life. And also, Arlo had such a hollow and empty inner life that he may have gone out into the world looking for death. A lot of people who have severe trauma, and nobody's really taking any interest in their trauma. And certainly, Rachel didn't really show any interest in his inner life at all because he was so pretty.
01:05:42Arlo may very well have gone out looking for death. It's a sadly common occurrence with people who've got a lot of trauma, and nobody really cares about that aspect of themselves. So, lordy, lordy, people are going to get me talking about my books. This is a lengthy chat. Anything else that you wanted to bring up or mention?
01:06:03No, I mean, that was perfect. I mean, something that you said about just going on these open house sort of tours with, you know, your wife sort of reminded me of what really turned me off from Jordan Peterson many, many years ago. I remember watching a live stream of his, and I believe it was his house and just seeing some, I was going to say interesting, but really ugly, like communist art. I mean, that sort of just turned me off.
01:06:29And it makes me think about Michaela Peterson and all these different things and her outcomes and stuff. So, yeah, totally agree with you there.
01:06:59And I think that's a real shame. But again, I don't know if this is true, but there were reports on X that he was getting $300,000 plus for a speaking engagement. Honestly, I just find that really gross. I mean, if you have wisdom and things of value to offer this world, there should not be a big giant financial barrier to giving people access to that wisdom.
01:07:25To me, like if Jordan Peterson, of course, is a very strong intellect and a very learned and a great communicator in many ways. And so, the idea that he would charge, you know, at the price of a condo. Now, if this is true or not, again, I don't know if it's true or not, but this is what I read and I can't guarantee it.
01:07:48But if it is the case that he would charge $300,000, $400,000 to go and talk at a university. Now, of course, some of that's going to be security. So, I get that the price of one of the reasons that less left-wing or maybe even more, I don't know if he would be classified as right-wing, but let's just say skeptical of the left-wing.
01:08:14One of the reasons that you get attacked is so that your costs go up for your events and venues are less likely to book you. And then you have to, I mean, when I was in Australia and we were getting a lot of threats, I had to pay for a lot of security. And that, of course, raises the price of things. And so, I'm not saying that that's all his fault, but I mean, I think he has enough money.
01:08:37I mean, he's had two number one best-selling books. He's obviously made a lot of money off his YouTube channel. He's got the Peterson Academy. He had the self-authoring program. I think he's got enough money. And I'm not sure why he would need so much more if it comes at the expense of people receiving a message that's important.
01:09:00So, I assume he would go to a university in order to give a speech that wasn't just something he'd said before. So, it would have to be new information and something like that. And so, why you would have that kind of barrier to entry, I'm not quite sure. But I guess maybe there are good reasons that I don't know about, or maybe the story is false and planted.
01:09:24This is not a criticism of Jordan Peterson because I know, right? This is just, you know, in general, the principle to me is if you have important things of value, in particular, of moral import to say to the world, I don't think that you should have a very high barrier to entry.
01:09:41Now, of course, he could say, well, but it's the university that's paying that, not the students and so on. But that would be a bit facetious because the university has to pay that somehow. It's not like coming out of the personal pockets of the dean. So, yeah, I don't quite understand that. But I think once you have a certain amount of money, you should really focus on getting as much good out of it.
01:10:06I mean, and this is something that Elon Musk is actually quite passionate about. And he was sort of saying the other day that wealthy people should care more about America because if America goes down, their wealth will vanish or at least be severely curtailed. And if America goes down, where are they going to go?
01:10:26And this is why, obviously, Elon Musk is all in on trying to rescue the politics. And of course, he's got a very personal stake in it because I think one of his children ended up going trans because I think he put the child in a very trendy school that I think promotes that kind of stuff. And I think he had issues with that, which whether you like it or don't like it, you can certainly understand a father.
01:10:55And I think it wasn't just a trans thing, but I think his child disowned him and so on. And so, yeah, I think that's a man who's like, well, no, I'm not going to have a barrier to entry. I'm going to try and get as much wisdom. In fact, I'm going to spend my own money to try and save things.
01:11:12And that's always a question I have with people as a whole, which is, okay, well, how much money is enough? How much money is enough? I try to have, you know, I ask for donations, of course, freedomain.com. If you'd like to help out the show, it's very gratefully appreciated. But I'm not jamming this full of ads. And I'm also trying to lower the barrier to entry as much as possible for people to get a hold of what I'm talking about.
01:11:40So maybe there's good explanations for all of that, but it just seems odd to me that very wealthy people are still charging a fortune to hear them. And it's something I don't quite follow, but maybe there's a reason for it that I don't particularly understand. So, all right. Anything else, my friend?
01:12:04No, no, thank you. And by the by, I was interested in looking into one of Jordan Peterson's speaking tours a few years ago, and it was like $300 or $400 a ticket and $50 for an autograph. So, you know, that shut me off at that point when I broke.
01:12:18Wait, it was $50 for an autograph?
01:12:20That's right. Yeah.
01:12:22Really?
01:12:23Yes.
01:12:24Huh.
01:12:27Yeah, everything you're saying is completely on the money. Like yourself, I don't presume to know his intentions or anything like that. But I mean, it's very expensive to hear him talk and to get an autograph from him. And yeah, he's a very rich guy.
01:12:43So, yeah. According to AI, as of September 2024, his speaking fee typically ranges from $200,000 to $300,000 for in-person events in the US.
01:13:01So, my own particular thoughts, I just, I mean, I remember one of my best memories of what was a very vivid trip to Australia and New Zealand, very vivid. I'm very glad that I did it. And one of my favorite memories was sitting with my daughter, and we sold books. I mean, they were very cheap. I think they were at cost plus a buck or two for the fact that we had to get them shipped there.
01:13:29So, we sold my books. And of course, I met people and I signed them all for free, the idea that I would say, oh, a signature is 50 bucks. I mean, that would just make me feel like some sort of cheap, chiseling lunatic. But I just remember my daughter, who was obviously quite young. Well, I was quite young. She was about 10 or 11 back then.
01:13:47And sitting with my daughter, who was very excited because for her, it was like the middle of the night because we were so time zone flipped. But meeting people, chatting with them, and I signed my books and my daughter signed next to me. I just have a great memory of that. But to me, the idea of charging 50 bucks for an autograph is, it's incomprehensible. Honestly, it's incomprehensible because I just want people to really get into philosophy.
01:14:15And not make 50 bucks from a two-second scribble on a piece of paper.
01:14:20Wow, that's really something. And I mean, I don't know. Have people estimated this net worth question or net worth issue?
01:14:31I imagine that the guy's got, he does pretty well for himself.
01:14:37Right. And that is always the question. Is, you know, how much is enough? I don't know. Let's see here. I wonder if, let's see. Let me do some live typing here. I don't know how accurate these things are, but.
01:14:55Eight million. Estimated. Again, who knows whether that's true or not. Some people said 89 million. I don't know about that. That seems a bit high.
01:15:17Eight or 89.
01:15:20Yeah, eight or 89. That's pretty funny. That's pretty funny. Jordan Peterson revealed he once earned $400,000 a month. That was Yahoo Finance? Yeah, I don't know, man. I mean, I'm sort of struck by, I mean, Napoleon said, like, you can only sleep in one bed, you can only eat one meal a night, right? You can only sleep under one roof.
01:15:44Yeah.
01:15:45And I don't know. It's an interesting question. I guess everybody has to ask that for themselves, is how much is enough? And I'm very much like, okay, so every additional bit of money passed a lot is worth less. So, I don't know. And I suppose, I mean, maybe people get stuck into measuring, you know, it's really tough to measure what you do, particularly in the realm of philosophy, right?
01:16:12So, if I were to say, well, I'm going to measure my income. Well, of course, income cratered after de-platforming. Does that mean I'm a worse philosopher? I don't think so. I'm going to measure my quality as a thinker by the number of people who are reading and listening. Well, of course, those numbers went down enormously after de-platforming. Does that mean I'm a worse philosopher?
01:16:37You know, it's really, it's tough to know how to judge things. And, I mean, my approach has just been, how much great work do I think that I'm doing? How much interesting and useful and powerful and insightful and hopefully rational and empirical work am I doing?
01:16:58And I have to measure myself, not relative to dollars or eyeballs or anything like that or live stream participants. Because, you know, I used to stream to, you know, 6,000 plus people and all of that kind of stuff. So, obviously, that's down a smidge. But does that mean that I'm, if it's gone down 95% or whatever, does that mean I'm only 5% as good a philosopher as I used to be? Well, I don't think that's the case.
01:17:24So, I just, you have to, for me, I have to find a way to measure my work independent of numbers beyond my control. I mean, de-platforming when like 90, 95% of people didn't follow me one website over, I didn't have control over how many people followed me.
01:17:46Obviously, I tried to do good work after I was de-platformed and I think, I personally think I've done some great stuff, but I don't have any control over that. So, I try not to measure, I mean, I have to measure things. Otherwise, I'm just, you know, spinning in the wind and it's easy to get self-indulgent if you don't have some sort of way of measuring what it is that you do.
01:18:04But for me, I try to measure what I'm doing relative to creativity and originality with regards to philosophy. Am I providing something new? Am I providing something insightful? Am I providing something actionable? And so on, right?
01:18:21I mean, I did a role play with a listener the other day in a call in where he introduced me to his suicidal alter ego and I took on the devil that was trying to take him down. That's new. I haven't done that before. The Bible series, the series that I'm doing on Bible verses, that's new for me. I did a great one today, I think.
01:18:41So, I have to find a way to measure what I do outside of any numerically objective metric that is beyond my control. And that's a tricky thing to do. That's a tricky thing to do, but I think the best work comes out of that.
01:19:00I mean, I'm sure as you know, one of the most famous painters in history, Vincent van Gogh, or as a Dutch girlfriend I once had told me robustly, it's Vincent van Gogh, Vincent van Herbol. And he sold only one painting over the course of his life. So, he had to find a way to measure what he was doing independent of any material success.
01:19:24Whereas there was another writer who wrote what later became, I can't remember the name of it, a very famous comic novel. Couldn't get it published, killed himself. Well, no more novels coming out of that. Versus, you know, someone like Stephen King who puts child orgies in his books, which is completely repulsive. And of course, he sold about a zillion books and made a zillion dollars.
01:19:44So, how do you measure the value of what you're doing independent of objective metrics beyond your control? Because if you get sucked into objective metrics, then you chase those metrics at the expense of your integrity. Like, if I was chasing eyeballs and income, then I wouldn't have taken on the controversial stuff that I took on, which to me was very important, absolutely essential.
01:20:12And so, you know, if you're chasing numbers, it's real easy to let go of your integrity. But chasing integrity means you have to kind of let go of the numbers, if that makes any sense. So, it's a big challenge. And I think 50 bucks for a signature is probably chasing the numbers a little bit too much, if that makes sense.
01:20:37I agree, Steph. Thank you for taking the time.
01:20:39You're welcome. Great questions. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much.
01:20:43Bye now.
01:20:44All right. Well, look at that. Bitcoin's down over $7,000. I wonder why. I wonder why. I mean, I don't. I'm like, I have this minor like, oh, and then I honestly forget about it within a minute or so. I'm really bad at hanging on to any of this kind of stuff emotionally. But all right, everyone, thank you so much for a lovely evening's conversation. I really do appreciate it.
01:21:06And, of course, all the books we're talking about, you should absolutely check out. They're great, great stuff. And you can get those at freedomain.com slash books to support the show, freedomain.com slash donate. I appreciate that. And I promise not to charge you $300,000 to $400,000 for a speech. So, have a beautiful evening, everyone. Thank you so much. Lots of love from up here, my friends. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.