In this episode, Vance Crowe sits down with author Devon Erickson to explore why he calls himself a compulsive explainer and how he sees the role of an intellectual: not to end debates, but to start them with powerful metaphors and fresh lenses. They dive deep into empathy as a writer’s core skill—simultaneously inhabiting a character’s inner world and anticipating the reader’s experience—and how that practice shapes Devon’s science-fiction novel, Theft of Fire. From first-person perspective and memory palaces to the mechanics of metaphor in thought, they wander into bigger terrain: how online discourse reveals public preoccupations, why villains must believe they’re right, and what it takes to write convincingly across gender and worldview.
Their conversation also ranges into contested civic ground: the difference between empathy and sympathy, the dynamics of thug mentality and civilized restraint, the risks of escalating political tribalism, and the notion of “soft off-ramps” in American politics. They talk about immigration enforcement as theater versus necessity, institutional capture, and the appeal of centralized control to academics. Then they zoom back to the personal: metabolic health and processed food, the economic pressures on families, inflation as time theft, Bitcoin as an intergenerational lifeboat, and why some boomers feel out of touch with younger realities. They close with Devon’s passion project—the cinematic, full-cast audiobook of Theft of Fire—and the promise of classic sci-fi spirit with modern tech rigor.
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(00:00:04) Opening: Sharing insights vs. repeating talking points
(00:03:11) Host intro: Meeting Devon Erickson and The Theft of Fire
(00:06:12) Metaphor as the engine of thought and memory
(00:14:44) Empathy as a writer’s core skill—villains, readers, and realism
(00:19:59) Modeling minds: conversational load, perspective taking, and audiences
(00:26:06) Writing across gender and identity—finding Miranda’s voice
(00:29:08) Speculative craft: writing what does not exist
(00:30:04) Online discourse: empathy without sympathy and confronting hostility
(00:36:55) Self‑defense mindset: lines, intent, and preparedness
(00:41:49) Civility, uncivil actors, and the ‘soft off‑ramp’ in politics
(00:49:31) Purpose of a military and cultural standards debate
(00:51:58) Media narratives, ICE, and dealing with the uncivilized
(01:02:00) Marxism, envy, and institutions—power vs. merit
(01:11:55) Inflation’s danger and policy priorities ahead
(01:14:16) Immigration, budget crises, and administration choices
(01:14:32) Foreign influence and defining America’s interests
(01:18:14) Money tech: inflation, Bitcoin, and future‑proofing exchange
(01:21:15) Order vs. chaos: El Salvador, gangs, and state response
(01:37:07) Feminism, industrialized food, and metabolic syndrome
(01:46:33) What causes the obesity wave? Processed food vs. lifestyle
(01:51:22) Inflation, two‑income households, and policy timelines
(01:57:25) Cats, granaries, and guarding civilization’s value
(01:57:35) Generations: anti‑boomer sentiment and being out of touch
(02:02:18) Time as money: assets, risk, and financial education
(02:12:06) Economics in sci‑fi: Marcus, Miranda, and post‑government markets
(02:18:00) Building a cinematic audiobook: casting, direction, perfectionism
(02:25:01) Closing: Why Theft of Fire and where to find it
[00:00:05]
Unknown:
Somebody saying something on the Internet that draws attention tells people tells me what people are thinking about, tells me what they care about. And then I look at it and I say, well, do I have any insights about this? Is there is there anything where I have maybe a little different angle on it? And I can provide some clarity that people are going to enjoy. Because, you know, I get passionate about things, but the world is, and the internet, are full of people being passionate about something, saying the same things, the same talking points again and again and again. So, you know, if I just feel the same way as everybody else I shut up.
But if I have some sort of like, oh, try looking at it like this, then that's what I tend to share because, you know, well I found out that that's what people like, but it's also what I like to say, because I'm a compulsive explainer.
[00:01:12] Unknown:
A compulsive explainer. Mhmm. Meaning that you, like, see the way the world is, and you're like, I think that people are not getting this right. Well, I see a way the world is.
[00:01:24] Unknown:
You know, a lot of people, they think oh the world is this way'. And, you know, everybody has their their set of beliefs, but I think sometimes what's almost as important as your beliefs is the sort of the set of lenses, the set of metaphors that you use to look at the world. And so when I say something, you know, I try to remember that the role of an intellectual, and you know I never thought I would be describing myself this way because I came up as an engineer, but the role of an intellectual isn't to prove things and to end conversations.
It's to come up with a possibility and start conversations. And then that conversation percolates through the internet, through society, and people make up their own minds. And that's sort of what an intellectual is for, is to throw an idea out there and see if it floats. And so I think that, you know, everybody is on the internet and some people just love, love, love to do research. You get some characters like data republican or whatever, and they're gonna drill down and they're gonna find out the facts. So unless you're that research guy, your role really isn't to tell people what is.
It's to say, here's a possible way of looking at it. See what that does for your worldview.
[00:03:12] Unknown:
Alright. I wanna break in here just to orient you to what's happening. The man sitting with me is Devon Erickson. He is the author of a book called The Theft of Fire. Now I had known about Devon through some friends, and I had even had a chance to read his book. But I thought, I don't know. Sci fi, some new author. This is not gonna be good. But I happened to see Devon out on x, and some of the commentary that he made about other people's posts was really insightful. It really called into question things that I had even thought. And I found myself thinking, man, I really wish I would have had that guy on the podcast when I had the chance.
So I picked up his book, and I started reading it. And I have to say, it has been a wild ride. Not only is it science fiction about a distant future, but not an extremely distant future. This, I think, is the hardest space to write in. It has to draw from things that are going on in today's day and age, and yet it has to inhabit a world that doesn't exist. From this conversation with Devon, you are about to hear more than just his books and some of his hot takes on x, but actually deep diving into the mind of people that think entirely differently than you and I.
I really found myself enthralled with the way that Devon can handle both having his perspective and the perspective of someone completely different. And I find myself being completely wrapped up in everything that we're talking about. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. As you're listening, you can look out and know that the holidays are far off, but not that far off. If you've been thinking about getting a legacy interview for your loved ones, you have a couple of options. One, we could try and do their legacy interview during the holidays. If they're around town or you know they're going to have a break from harvest, you can bring them to our studio and we can do this recording, giving them this amazing experience of having somebody be deeply interested in helping them recall the most important events in their lives and those wisdoms and bits of learning that they've had that they wanna pass on. Or you can give this as a gift at Christmas time. You'll be able to go to your parents and say, we have a wonderful gift for you. We think that you are going to enjoy talking about yourself, having an entire crew of people, making sure that we capture you, looking your best and sounding your best.
But the actually greatest part about this gift is not the experience for you, grandma and granddad. It's that your grandchildren are gonna get an opportunity to really know the stories that should be passed on. So if you're interested in having me sit down to record the stories of your loved ones, whether we do this over the holidays or as a Christmas gift, go to legacyinterviews.com and sign up to have a conversation with me about the stories you'd like to capture. Alright. Let's get back to this conversation with Devin. You know, you were talking about the metaphors that you use to describe the world. I I just read something recently about how basically that is how our mind works and that whatever metaphor you use to understand an idea, that it actually while the benefit is you, you know, you kinda get your arms wrapped around it, the downside is, until you have a new metaphor to replace it, it's almost impossible to change your ideas. And that the the author was arguing that most of thinking is metaphorical.
[00:06:47] Unknown:
How does that strike you? I would say that all of thinking is metaphorical. Okay. Because you're using a symbol to represent an object. When we speak of trees, the sound that is leaving my mouth and entering this microphone when I say the word tree has nothing to do with those objects growing out the window there. We just created this symbol object relationship, so that we could manipulate the symbol instead of the object, which is much easier than moving actual trees around to try to communicate what we're saying. So, in a certain sense, even the symbolic nature of language is a metaphor.
And so the nature of the symbols we use sort of has an influence over how we think about things. And so we can't think about things without making metaphor on some level. And when we first learn something, we have a metaphor we learn it through. But then, as this author you were referencing was saying, this makes it sometimes hard to break out of the initial metaphor. And so, you know, maybe we get a little more flexible in our thinking and able to have more realizations if we try looking at something with a different metaphor. So we have one or two or three things that we can alternate ways of looking, of understanding the same thing.
And you know, this is how brains work. This is how neural nets work. They make connections. They make physical connections that pass electrical impulses around. So, yeah, I don't know if you've heard this saying, 'neurons that fire together wire together.'
[00:08:45] Unknown:
No.
[00:08:47] Unknown:
Well, that's how we remember things. We remember them by association. So, like for example, if you smell something that can bring back memories of what you saw and heard the last time you smelled it. And when we learn things, it can be very difficult at first to recall them because they don't have these connections to the other virtual networks in your brain. So people who learn to remember things real well by making something like a memory palace, that's a visual metaphor where you take parts of this visualized space and you associate it with certain memories. So what they're doing is they're rewiring their brain so that memories which would be inaccessible become accessible because of those connections.
[00:09:47] Unknown:
You know, the memory palace thing has never been, a trick that I've been able to use. Do you use it?
[00:09:56] Unknown:
A little bit. I find that I mostly don't need to. My memory is very good, and hopefully, as I age, it will stay that way. At least for things that are important to me, my memory is good. Well, what that makes me think of is,
[00:10:09] Unknown:
my, my friends and I all have this, like, kind of mental test that we give to people. And it's not complicated. There's no way to get it right or wrong, but it's it's a way of understanding how do people how does this person think about things? And the question is, if I were gonna ask you to draw this room, how would you do it? From what vantage point would you imagine this room? First person perspective or from above, like a blueprint?
[00:10:37] Unknown:
Well, I think I think that would depend on what I was trying to do with the drawing. But if you if you just said draw the room, I would say that my first impulse when you said that was my brain started laying out sectors that were visible from my perspective, and started inventorying what was in them. So that I could, okay, there's what appears to be a crystal sculpture of some sort over there. There's a studio light over here. There's a mirror over there. It's all against this backdrop of these windows looking out over St. Louis. And some of the blinds are drawn and some are not. There's cameras here and there. So I started laying out the scene mechanically, but I was imagining it drawn from the perspective of where I'm sitting now.
[00:11:29] Unknown:
So my hypothesis, and I don't know if it's true, but Mhmm. People have one of two of these perspectives. Like, if you ask my wife who, like you, she's an engineer, she will immediately go to the above view. That's Yes. That's how she sees things. And my sense is that, these people are more in the world of logic, whether that's mathematics or engineering. You may be disproving this because you're an engineer. And the people that are first person perspective are experiential people. Right? They're the ones that are, like, I none of the walls will be two dimension in my in my drawing. They'll be all off. But the amount of fidelity of what all is on these walls will be way higher, typically, than the person that sees things from above. Well, consider this as a possibility.
[00:12:18] Unknown:
I am working on a series of books that is all written in first person present tense precisely because it's all about getting into the perspective and into the stream of consciousness of the characters that I'm writing from. So maybe in five years, if you ask me that question, I'll give a different answer. And maybe five years ago, I would have given a different answer. Well, I've noticed that about Theft of Fire. The the book that, I mean, you I don't know. When did you publish this book? This was, 11/11/2023,
[00:12:55] Unknown:
and we're just coming up on the sequel right now. So that that book is written from at least I'm 60% of the way through it. The the book is written from the perspective of the man that has his ship hijacked. Mhmm. And it is so clear to me. It is it is an incredibly interesting book, a fascinating book for for me because he is experiential and I am experiential. Right? Like, everything he's describing about the cargo holds and about the spin in order to be able to get gravity and the interaction he has with the other characters, it speaks so clearly to my way of interacting with the world that it is as though I am inhabiting him. I like, I don't I don't know that I've ever read a book quite
[00:13:38] Unknown:
in the first person perspective like this. Well, that's what I think one of the primary draws of fiction is, is you get to see and feel what it's like to be somebody else. And you don't have to write in the first person to do that, but always when we're reading a book, we're getting somebody else's experience. And, you know, that can be very close to ours if we're reading contemporary thrillers. Or we can go read science fiction or fantasy and we're we're pushed into a universe where we don't you have any experience of even the basic laws of physics, and we get to have this voyage of discovery.
But always we're getting this 'here's what it's like to be another person.' You know, one of the things I like to say is that the primary profession skill of a writer is empathy. And I always wince a little bit when I say that, because the word empathy has been very much misused
[00:14:52] Unknown:
lately. Oh dude. I got in one of the worst Twitter fights I have ever been in when I went out to x and said, empathy is not a virtue. Mhmm. People went fucking crazy on me over that one. Yeah. And it's because that word has been Yeah. So hijacked. Empathy is not a virtue, it's a skill.
[00:15:12] Unknown:
Feeling sorry for someone is not empathy, that is sympathy. That is feeling what they feel. Synpathy. Feeling the same. Empathy is understanding what people feel and how they think. It's understanding what's going on in their heads. One one piece of advice that I give sort of new writers who are trying to write more convincing villains, like, oh you've got a Saturday morning cartoon villain. Well, you don't empathize with your villain. You haven't come up with a bunch of reasons why he's doing what he's doing that sound reasonable in his own head. So go read Mein Kampf.
Go read Mein Kampf and understand Hitler's worldview, and then you will be able to write villains that seem reasonable to themselves and are not just caricatures of
[00:16:18] Unknown:
I want to do evil. Yeah. That's I mean, the the movie, The Social Network. Right? The one of the key things that Aaron Sorkin said when he was writing the dialogue for that was every character had to know that they were right. Yeah. And that they were not, like, hatching a plan
[00:16:35] Unknown:
to, you know, be evil. Yeah. They were just arguing from their point of view. That's one of the promises I made to myself when I started writing stories is I'm not going to write anyone who's just there to be wrong. What they're saying will always make sense from a certain point of view. And so, what I mean when I say the primary skill of a writer is empathy, is that when you're writing you have to empathize in two directions at the same time. You have to empathize with the character, so you can write his thoughts and actions realistically. So that he does what he would do instead of doing things so the plot can happen.
But at the same time, you have to empathize with the reader. To understand how the reader is going to experience this. What the reader knows, and what the reader does not know, and what they need explained and what they don't need explained, and how they're going to feel seeing this, and how what you're writing is going to hit them. And you can't alternate between the two, you have to do both at once. So if you can empathize with a hypothetical audience of people, a mass of them, and you can empathize with a fictional character who doesn't exist, and you can do these two things at the same time, then you might not be a good writer, but you can learn to be one because you have talent.
And so this this empathy is is really the essential skill of a writer. And so I want like, okay, I'm going to take these this audience and understand their mindset. I'm going to take this fictional character, I'm going to understand his mindset, and then I'm going to bring the audience in behind the eyes of the fictional character. Here's what it's like to be a twenty second century asteroid miner who has his ship hijacked by someone who won't tell him why.
[00:18:59] Unknown:
What what makes me think of is so, we talked about this before they started turning the cameras on. When I do legacy interviews, oftentimes, somebody will bring their mother in. Mhmm. You know, the frail mother, she's 80 years old and, you know, they say, well, I'll just sit in here with you, right, in the recording studio. And I learned years ago, don't let that happen. Because if a person is trying to tell their stories just to me Mhmm. They don't have to worry about what this person over here is thinking about the story that they're telling. The more people you have to empathize with at once, the more difficult it is. Yes. And and for most people, they just collapse in on themselves. They tell very thin stories in order to be able to, like, handle the the intellectual load that that requires. But I've never put words to that before. You've you've really nailed why
[00:19:50] Unknown:
that happens. Yeah. Every time we communicate with another human being, we need to have empathy or we're not going to be able to get what we want. Because we commune we want something when we talk to people. Even if it's abstract or ephemeral, we talk to other people because we want something. And in order to get whatever that something is from them, even if it's just a feeling of fellowship, we have to be able to imagine something about what's going on in their heads. We can't see them as just an automaton or a piece of furniture. So that means we have to create a model of that person in our head, and if we really want a model of that person, we have to create a model inside our model of that person, of their model of us.
And then inside that is their model of our model of their model. And it's turtles all the way down. It's infinite regression, but the point is how far can you keep that straight? And the further you can keep that straight, the more you can understand other people. And this is not quite like intelligence, because intelligence is, you know, intelligence is you get what you get. You can't make yourself smarter. But this is also partially a skill that can be learned.
[00:21:26] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, so I I read an insane amount when I was a little kid, and I think that, that probably did make me far better at communicating with people. And I think about when when I'm speaking on a stage and you have to find, like, how do I connect with this audience of people who is really different? Like, everybody in that audience is their own separate person, and it's trying to figure out the right blend because it's not well, I'll just find the mean of what everybody kind of thinks, like, then then you're mushy and you're nothing Yes. To anybody. And so you have to find a way to connect with people, but not by being nothing. Not by being Well, the mean is bland. The mean is elevator music.
[00:22:12] Unknown:
But there are common denominators that people are passionate about. And it's also not when you're speaking to an audience, it's not just about empathizing with them. It's about allowing them the opportunity to empathize with you. I find that when I'm speaking to audiences, when I'm talking to other writers at conventions, you know, when I was trying to pick up women. Sometimes the most appealing thing is just to be passionate about something. That you can let them into your worldview of why you are so passionate about this, and then they get to experience the world through your eyes.
And they get to feel what it feels like to be passionate about something, even if they don't particularly care about, say, science fiction or whatever it is you're talking about, they get to take a little tourist journey through your worldview, and that can be very interesting. It is very interesting because everybody is interested in people. Everybody.
[00:23:28] Unknown:
I the you're really, nailing something here for me. I mean, like, in in my experience so when I was younger, I was always on the search for people that could, talk about the the crazy thing that I wanted to talk about, whatever it was. And I would just run over people, you know, like, if you didn't wanna talk about I would say Bitcoin now. But even before that, when I was much younger. Trends. Yeah. Whatever whatever it was. Right? Like, I am just going to talk about this thing until I, you know, until you you force me to stop. Uh-huh. And, now I don't have that. Because now I've built up a group of friends that I can talk about with these ideas. I have a podcast. I have, you know, speeches that I get to go go do. And so, it's my world is very different than it used to be, but I remember that the only reason I think people let me bowl them over with what I wanted to talk about was because I was passionate about anything.
And most people, maybe they are, but getting in touch with that passion is very hard. They don't encounter very many people that are passionate about things. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes
[00:24:35] Unknown:
sometimes you can you can make something you care about very compelling. And I think we've all had that experience of meeting someone who is very, very passionate about something that's not really our thing or our hobby at all and we've never considered it, And he starts to talk about it and you find yourself asking a few clarifying questions, and it's interesting. And, you know, it doesn't change your life in the sense that, you know, now I'm interested in going and rebuilding old car engines. But it's like, now I understand what it feels like to be someone who's fascinated by repairing old car engines.
It doesn't change what I care about in my daily life, but now a broader segment of humanity makes sense to me. And that is what I enjoy doing when I write science fiction. You know, I'm working right now on my second novel. I just started out as a novelist. And
[00:25:54] Unknown:
there's Is it the sequel to Theft of Fire? The sequel to Theft of Fire. Okay.
[00:25:59] Unknown:
And there's this other sort of main character, starts out as kind of an antagonist in Theft of Fire, Miranda. He's she's this Don't tell me you're gonna you're no. No. This is not spoilers.
[00:26:11] Unknown:
Well, now I know she doesn't die.
[00:26:16] Unknown:
Well, you knew that already. And she's this heavily genetically modified sort of post human. And I was like, okay, in the sequel I was like, okay, I want to make her a point of view character. And it's like, now I have to get so far inside the female mindset that I can write convincingly what it feels like to be a woman, so that I can write convincingly what it feels like to be this woman. And it's like, I thought I understood women fairly well because I was always good at talking them into going to bed with me. But it was like I had to, I had to delve into a whole new level.
And I spent like four or five months just writing stuff and throwing it away, and writing stuff and throwing it away, and reading stuff written by women, and reading stuff, you know, written about women, and reading stuff that female readers particularly loved, and talking to people who like to read that. And finally, there was this sort of click moment where I felt like I had the voice right. And it was like, now I can take all this work that I did, and I can give that to readers, and I can have male readers understanding what women's internal landscape feels like, and female readers reading that, and then reading Marcus' parts, and understanding what the male internal landscape feels like.
Because a lot of the themes of this book and the entire series are about relationships between men and women.
[00:28:15] Unknown:
I mean, your arguments between the two characters Uh-huh. Is so on point that I'm like like, you really know how this goes. Like, that is like the inner workings of marriage or something. Right? Where where, you're you're fair to her, but you also, as a male, are sitting there being like, that is something a woman would say. Uh-huh. Like,
[00:28:38] Unknown:
it's Yeah. Well, this goes back to nobody is there to be wrong. Right. They both have a point. That's right.
[00:28:46] Unknown:
And, it's I I couldn't even begin to write from a a woman's perspective in a way that they would be that they would be like, yeah. That's me. That's how I think. I could maybe articulate what they think about things. Right? But, like, to take it that step further and and and be as though you are representing the ideas from their own mind, that's a whole another level. Yeah. Well, when you are a science fiction writer, or if you are a fantasy writer,
[00:29:14] Unknown:
write what you know just kind of falls down. You can't do it. Because you have to write what doesn't exist, otherwise it's not science fiction. You know, I have to write what it's like to live in the twenty second century and have a cybernetic eye, and then I have to write what it's like to be post human, and then I have to write what it's like to be a prototype artificial intelligence. And, you know, no one has had those experiences. You have to extrapolate. But the exercise of extrapolating is a worthy one.
[00:29:48] Unknown:
Yeah. I agree. I think, it it it makes me want to try and find a way to talk about so you on x, you put things out there in reaction to other people. Are you thinking about empathy in the same way when you're writing this up? When you're talking about it? Oh, yes.
[00:30:06] Unknown:
It's it's understanding what other people are thinking and feeling. And that doesn't necessarily mean being more compassionate or more sympathetic to them. Yeah. Because I think that there are a number of people physically in our nation who are very, very opposed to Western civilization, and they want to tear it down, and we must defeat these people. And if we have to hurt them to defeat them, then that's what we have to do. So feeling sympathy for them, feeling compassion for them is bad, especially if they're doing what they do and taking advantage of that compassion. But at the same time, you have to feel you have to have empathy.
You have to have an understanding of their mindset.
[00:31:08] Unknown:
So I wanna make this real for people that are not familiar with your work. I was just working out maybe yesterday morning and read your tweet about the guy who was not afraid that he was having a sniper, Yeah. Red dot put on him. Kind of lay that out. What what did you encounter and then how did you respond to that? Well, this is what I was talking about is this is this is the criminal thug mindset.
[00:31:32] Unknown:
So somebody said, you know, oh, his heart must have dropped when he saw that.
[00:31:39] Unknown:
And I'm like, no. When he saw a laser dot on him, because he's chasing this guy, the guy responds, hey, man. That red dot on you is the sniper right up there. And the guy's like, I don't give a fuck. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And he said and somebody comments saying, this guy's heart must have dropped. No.
[00:31:56] Unknown:
No. That is not how criminal underclass thugs work. You see, you and I think of toughness as willing as ability to endure hardship and commit violence. Right? You would think of like a Marine Scout sniper, or a green beret, or you know one of the unit guys. You know, where they're very, very, very capable of enduring great hardship and enacting violence swiftly to accomplish a goal. So thugs do exist in a society of civilized people and they don't see toughness that way. They see toughness entirely as ruthlessness. They are proud not of their ability to commit violence, but their willingness to commit violence.
Because the only they don't they don't understand any of these civilized impulses where someone doesn't want to commit violence on principle. They think if you're not willing to commit violence, you must be afraid. So if I am willing to punch you in the face for looking at my girlfriend a fraction of a second longer than I'm comfortable with, then I am brave and you are a coward. So when they confront someone who is a civilized person, they are not afraid at all because they have this headspace where they say, oh this guy is a pussy, he'll never pull that trigger.
There is no possibility that I am going to get hurt. And that's why the moment they push a civilized person too far and somebody does wreck their shit,
[00:33:59] Unknown:
they immediately turn into sniveling cowards. This is what happened with that kid that shot him when he was being chased, back during the riots. I can't remember his name. You're you're thinking of Kyle Rittenhouse. Kyle Rittenhouse. And all those people being like, I can't believe he shot him. And you're like, he waited as long as he possibly could to shoot you. That's the thing is, is those were a bunch of underclass
[00:34:22] Unknown:
thugs scum. And they thought, you know, oh, you know, we inflict the suffering and you endure it because you are a coward. And then suddenly somebody gets his bicep vaporized by a rifle shot. And it's not just that he is being fought against, it's not just that he is injured, it's that his whole world view has been turned upside down. Wow. It's his the thing that gave him this mental illusion of his invulnerability, this idea of no one is willing to strike at me, has just been upended. So this is something I reference when I teach people how to use firearms, you know, how to act in self defense, is that because you are civilized, you are reluctant to do this.
And if you just examine your scruples in the moment, you will wait too long. What you have to do is decide in advance when you will fight. You know, you can't wait to to consider this philosophical question when you're lying on the sidewalk with your head smashed in. It's too late. You have to think in advance, you know, when will I resort to violence? And one of the things I advise people when they're drawing or pointing a firearm in self defense is if someone walks toward you when you have a drawn firearm, They have violent intent towards you.
They are trying to neutralize that firearm so they can do something to you. They're trying to get an arm's reach so they can grab it, so they can push it away, whatever. What you need to do is you stand where you are. You don't back up. Because if you back up you're signaling that you're not willing to fight. And you draw a mental line in your imagination on the sidewalk or whatever. Okay. This is this is close enough. And you decide in advance if this person crosses that line, I will shoot him. I will use whatever tools of violence I have at my disposal because now I am being attacked.
[00:36:55] Unknown:
The Charlie Kirk thing Mhmm. Really has thrown our nation for a loop because at least the civilized people have been like, hey, the civilized thing to do is to always be willing to talk. Mhmm. Right? Always. You know, just we can always come back. We can always talk about things. Mhmm. And now they shot the guy that was perfectly willing to talk. Mhmm. And so the answer is likely not, let's just go go commit random acts of violence. Mhmm. It does not appear, I don't think people feel like we're getting justice out there from the the thug underworld that you're talking about, and talking doesn't work. How how do you think we should or will or I don't even know that what's the response?
[00:37:41] Unknown:
Well, the big upset there was not was not Charlie Kirk being shot, because I think everybody knows that the Left has its crazies that have really, really, really bought into the propaganda, and they sincerely believe that somebody who gets on a stage and talks, that that is equivalent to genociding them or whatever. Because they've they've bought the hyperbolic rhetoric as literal. We all knew those people existed.
[00:38:18] Unknown:
I don't think I did. I don't I don't think I really re I I think I was horrified by this. I I was I will admit naivety. I did not really think that. Okay. Well,
[00:38:28] Unknown:
then I will say that a lot of us knew those people existed. But what a lot of people didn't realize is that the moderate left will cheer for these people. You know, it's not, you know, it's not people being surprised that someone is out there who's willing to shoot them for, you know, because Charlie Kirk was a moderate conservative. You know, if They had no idea. If they're willing to shoot him for his opinions, then, you know, wait till they meet me. You know, I shoot back. It's not that there was someone out there who is willing to shoot moderate conservatives for being moderate conservatives and for being effective voices for moderate conservativism.
It's that the so called moderate left will cheer for those people, will egg them on, will encourage them, will celebrate when it happens. And so the realization has to be that civilized behavior is not how you deal with everyone. You cannot deal with an uncivilized person in a civilized way. You know, civilized people, we have conversations, we use our words, and that either resolves our differences or just makes us understand each other, and we feel as if something has been accomplished. Well, most of the world isn't like that. Most of the world is separated into this is your tribe, this is my tribe, this is your ideology, this is my ideology, and if you don't share my tribe and my ideology and my religion and whatever it is, I'm going to do anything I can to hurt you.
So I'll argue with you and try to appeal to your sympathy and mimic the behavior of a civilized person, if I am weak and you are strong. But the moment I have an opportunity to physically hurt you, I will. And we need to understand not only that these people exist, but that these people, when they're near us, they spend most of their time pretending to be civilized. You know, this guy who walks up and says, you know, get off the street, stop filming us, He's appealing to our mercy not to hurt him. He's saying, you know, you won't hurt me because you're civilized, but the moment I have an opportunity to, I will hurt you.
So the off ramp from this, you know, there are a bunch of off ramps from this, and the simplest one, the soft option, is the Trump administration. You know, a lot of the left doesn't understand that Trump isn't the right's last chance. He's the left's last chance. Wow. He is the soft option. He is, we do this all according to the rule of law with government power.
[00:42:13] Unknown:
It's just it's shattering of my mind, but you're right. As soon as you say it, I'm like, I think that's because Yeah. Like I said earlier, people that think that Trump is, like, an extreme right winger have no idea what extreme right wing is. Trump is an eighties Democrat. Yeah.
[00:42:33] Unknown:
Trump is is basically a reskinned version of, you know, John Kennedy.
[00:42:42] Unknown:
Same political positions. The policies are not that different than Bill Clinton. Yeah. Yeah. Same political possessions. So what's next after Trump? If if the left doesn't understand it after Trump, what comes next? Well, what comes next is a gradual descent
[00:42:59] Unknown:
into more and more Balkanization and civil strife. And, you know, people who are talking about a civil war, I think they don't fully appreciate the extent of the problem, because a civil war is when you have the North and the South that are in, you know, geographically different locations, and the South says, well, you know, we're tired of being economically disadvantaged. The Civil War was about tariffs. It had very little to do with slavery. It was the South was no longer confident that it would get a fair shake in Congress anymore. It was one of the largest economies in the world at that point and it was just being taken to the cleaners by the North using the legal process.
So they said, okay we're going to secede. And the North says you can't do that. And then you're in these geographically different locations and you draw battle lines between them and you have a fight. Civil conflict in twenty first century America doesn't look like that, Because it looks like a Rwandan machete party. Because you have people from both sides living at close quarters to each other. But it looks like a Rwandan machete party that grows very slowly. So what happens is not, oh one day all the fighting breaks out. It's gradually there's more and more Charlie Kirks, and then the Right decides, okay, we can no longer handicap ourselves by trying to limit ourselves to the individuals responsible.
We have to start targeting the Left as a group. Because, you know, ordinary people, they don't know where to find the guy who shot Charlie Kirk. They don't know where to find DeCarlos Brown. But they know which houses in their neighborhoods are flying rainbow flags. And the sort of the thread that the Left is hanging by at this point is the people on the Right are not willing to hold somebody flying a rainbow flag responsible for the death of Charlie Kirk, even if they have an ideological connection and they encouraged it and they celebrated it and they are partially responsible.
[00:46:02] Unknown:
I mean, I heard the other day, a good friend of mine, pretty pretty strong, I would say, I don't know, pacifist, but certainly a civilized guy Mhmm. Describes seeing the trans flag being flown inside of his office building and him being like, that's the flag of the people that killed Charlie Kirk. Mhmm. So what you were saying to me
[00:46:22] Unknown:
maps exactly to what is happening. Well, it starts with tearing those flags down. And then the tearing the flags down escalates into fist fights over tearing the flags down. And then it escalates into hitting each other with chairs and whatnot. And eventually, if you keep going down this road, and this takes years, is that those rifles start coming out of closets. And you see guys patrolling their you see young men patrolling their neighborhoods. Like, this is a Republican neighborhood. You don't look like you fit. Move on.
[00:47:03] Unknown:
Man, I saw this when I lived in Africa. I saw this. They they had vigilante groups because there were people getting robbed, and then the there were no police. So the local community paid these kids, you know, 18 year olds that were out of work, money to go, you know, go patrol. And eventually, those mobs, they they're sitting there. They see things in the dark. They they're getting riled up. They eventually go to a neighboring community, pull two people Yeah. That they said don't belong here, put tires on them, poured kerosene on them, lit them on fire, and killed them. Yeah. And that was when I realized, mobs, vigilante groups, that is the most powerful force on Earth. And once it begins, there's nothing that can stop it. It can only burn itself out. There's no there's no extinguishing that fire.
[00:47:47] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. And here in America, it's it's not just, like, groups of boys with AKs. It's It's groups of young men led by military vets who know exactly what they are about. You know, they if and there's no way to use the military to put a stop to that, not just because the military is vastly outnumbered. I mean, if American gun owners were considered as an army, they would outnumber every army on earth put together by like 10 to one. I forget the exact number, but it's something like that. It's ridiculous. You know, America is too big. You can't military occupy it. There's there's too much territory.
There's too many cities. There's too many communities. You can't do it. But not only can you not do that, you can't count on the military to not split into allegiance to one of these factions. You know, you have the left wing military guys, the right wing military guys, and they're supporting their faction instead of being a tool that you can use for peacekeeping. If the the sort of the sense of shared Americanness decays that much.
[00:49:07] Unknown:
I was watching that Pete Hegseth, you know, speech where he's like, I don't wanna see fat people out of shit people. Yep. To me, I've I've saw that and, it seemed to me to be a purge of we know who we don't want in here, and we are going to, we're going to tilt the military in a different direction. Am I reading that right?
[00:49:31] Unknown:
To to most of the right, the way that speech read is the military is not your hog
[00:49:39] Unknown:
box.
[00:49:41] Unknown:
It's not here for you to celebrate your identity. It's not here for you to be yourself. It's not here for you to have free college, or for you to have a jobs program, or for you to build your resume. You know, the military is for shooting people in the face. And if that line made you wince, then you have no business being in it. You know, the military is, if you imagine the nation as a person, you know, the military is the handgun he carries around under his coat. You know, it is for violence if we choose to do violence as a nation.
And that means that your only excuse for doing, for being in the military, your only excuse for serving, is that you are part of that preparedness to effectively commit violence. You know, it's not here for you to get hormone therapy, or dress up weird, or you know, whatever the hell else it is they're doing instead of being prepared to fight a war.
[00:51:08] Unknown:
When when I I have a good friend out of the West Coast, and we play this game. We don't play it very often, but every once in a while, we'll be like, what's going on in your news feed? Like, what do you and basically, it's a comparison of how is the news being presented to you among your, like, people. And, when he brought up the ice raids, I barely know about him. Like, I'll occasionally see something on x about it, but, you know, he was saying, like, basically, his entire feed is, people wearing masks and, you know, SWAT team outfits jumping out of vans and dragging innocent people away. And then this is, like, this is the most tyrannical thing that could be happening. And that everyone he knows perceives that ICE is just breaking down the doors of political enemies essentially and dragging them away. Mhmm.
[00:51:58] Unknown:
That's because they've constructed a group of thugs and parasites as being political prisoners, instead of thugs and parasites. So this goes back to what I said earlier. Most of the world is not civilized. Most of the world does not use their words unless they are at a disadvantage where they have to use their words, and then they're going to pretend to be someone that uses their words. And the only way to deal with uncivilized people is to be able to use uncivilized behavior yourself. Because they use violence, you have to use violence. You can't go up and talk to someone and say, 'I know you broke into my country illegally, you know, I know you are not welcome here, you came here anyway, but I'm going to sit down and talk to you and try to persuade you to leave. I'm going to use my words. You can't do that. They'll stab you.
So you have to be able to speak to your enemies in a language that they are compelled to understand. I think that people obviously, if I may just finish this. Obviously that's going to look like uncivilized behavior to people who are still assuming that we can always be civilized.
[00:53:42] Unknown:
Okay. I mean, that's okay. I think that's fair because my buddy, smart guy, I like him a lot, respect him. Mhmm. I think you're probably right, because what I was going to say to your point is, I think that they may say, yeah. The the guy that's here illegally may not want to leave, but he would sit down and tell you, look, I've got a family here, and I'm working a job, and I'm contributing. Why you wanna kick me out? Like and then you'd hear his point of view, and you'd start to relax, and then we could find some middle ground here.
[00:54:11] Unknown:
Well, there's no middle there's you don't negotiate a middle ground with somebody who breaks into your house. He has to leave. There's no middle ground. You know, the middle ground is you stay in your house and I stay in mine. The middle ground is you never came here in the first place. You know, and someone who says, okay, I'm going to go to this country. I'm not going to respect the rules that the people whose country it is have made for who is allowed in and who is not. Already this person has shown, I don't care about your point of view. I don't care how you feel.
I just care what I can get. That is the distinguishing feature of the uncivilized. They don't care how you feel unless you are a member of their tribe, unless you are their relative, unless you are part of what they see as themselves. So they will never deal fairly with you, and you cannot appeal to their sense of fairness because it only exists for their group. It doesn't exist for you.
[00:55:41] Unknown:
So this balkanization, we started to say Trump is the is the the last Yeah. He's the last soft off ramp. What happens, is there any off ramp? Like, are we headed towards Balkanization and and a sort of Rwandan civil war and it's inevitable?
[00:55:59] Unknown:
I don't think so. You don't think so? That's good. I really don't think so. Because if you think of the previous ten years, with all the manipulation of the media that is now being exposed, with all the redirection of government money through NGOs to propaganda outlets, you know, with all of this corruption, with all of these attempts to create the illusion of consensus, the best the Left was able to do is create the impression of a country split down the middle. The country is not split down the middle. You know, the people who are still on the left, and I'm not talking about liberals here, because Elon Musk is a liberal.
Joe Rogan is a liberal. Donald Trump is a liberal. You know, most of your old school classical liberals are now voting Republican. So the new Republican coalition, the Make America Great Again Guys, you know, that consists of both liberals and conservatives, and this is the majority of the country. You know, the modern hard Left who are still voting Democrat, you know, they're very powerful because they are entrenched in the bureaucratic institutions of our society. Having done a long march for seventy five years to capture these institutions.
You know, they wield a lot of power, but they do not represent a plurality or a majority or even a large percentage of the population. You know, they just look that way because they're loud.
[00:58:10] Unknown:
I mean, I I can totally see that. It doesn't take very many people that are radicals to kick off a thing. You know, they say there were only a thousand Bolsheviks. Right? The the Mhmm. But it does appear to me that the people that were cheering for the Charlie Kirk, murder Mhmm. Are pretty large in number. They're a lot more than a thousand.
[00:58:33] Unknown:
Well, there are millions, but there aren't 50,000,000.
[00:58:39] Unknown:
Okay.
[00:58:41] Unknown:
And what that means is that the opportunity here for a sitting administration is to treat these people as criminals because they are. Which means that you have to be aggressive, and you have to be focused. And that's what ICE is doing. You know, you can't you can't target people who are, you know, making fun of Donald Trump on The View or whatever. And they're not. You know, these ICE raids are about, okay, who's employing and sheltering people who are illegally in this country? We're going to go and round them up and deport them. And you know, you're seeing a lot of this stuff where these masked guys are, you know, on the streets and they're tossing people around.
But the thing to remember is that the people that they are tossing around are the people who are going out and standing in front of their trucks. And this gives the lie to the left's narrative about this, because it's like, wait a minute, you say that I'm a fascist with no humanity. And you're afraid for your life because I am a fascist with no humanity who is willing to murder you under color of authority. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna go stand in front of a 13 ton vehicle that I am at the wheel of and say, I'm not going to let you move.
They are they're doing exactly what you said. They're appealing to me. If you really if you really thought I was a fascist, you would be afraid to do that because if I really was uncivilized, I would just step on the throttle and you would vanish with a wet crunching sound. But the fact that you're willing to do that means that you know that these people, these federal agents, are actually civilized and are not willing to do that. And of course, that's what they do. They get out and they take these people and they grab them and they toss them to one side. And then, you know, these people, you know, they sort of writhe around on the ground like a soccer player trying to draw the penalty card.
Oh, I am hurt. I am hurt. This is political theater. This is political theater because if you really believed that you were dealing with merciless killers, you wouldn't act like this. They don't believe it themselves, so why should we believe
[01:01:47] Unknown:
it? It seemed like there was a lot of the institutions supporting not just liberal thinking, but leftist thinking. Mhmm. Why were they doing that? Were they trying to be kings of the ash heap? What do they want when they support this? They've been infiltrated.
[01:02:03] Unknown:
This is this is Marxism. And Marxism is is the philosophy of envy. You know, it's one command is 'thou shalt not be better than me.' They represent people who have merit, because in a capitalist society, merit gets rewarded. It's not the only thing that gets rewarded in a capitalist society. But the thing that capitalism has going for it is that merit does get rewarded. And they don't like that. They want everybody to be equal so that no one will be better than them. That's your that's your typical hard left voter. Your typical waving a flag, throwing Molotov cocktails, throwing rocks, you know, street soldier.
Also, you know, but see the thing is, is that on a political level, on a leadership level, envious mobs are highly exploitable. You know, it's a lot better on a personal, on a wealth level, on a power level, to be a state official in a communist society than in a capitalist society. Oh wow. Because in a capitalist society, it's like you got all this, you know, you've got to persuade people, and you've got to win an election, and it's got to be a fair election, and then you got term limits like eight years and you're out. And, you know, if you do insider trading they'll bust you and you're not allowed to take bribes.
Well, none of that exists in a socialist society, in a bureaucracy. You know, in a bureaucracy you get into your position, you're in for life. You have a better standard of living. You're not accountable at all. And ordinary people, you know, they kiss up to you because they're afraid of you. And it's like if you look at Soviet Russia, you don't really have to look past the past everybody's desktop at work. They've all got a picture of Lenin. You know, why did everybody have a picture of Lennon? Was that the policy? Well no, there was no policy. It's that if one guy puts a picture of Lennon on his desk, it's like why don't you have a picture of Lennon on your desk, comrade?
And that's how socialism is. That's what living with socialism is like.
[01:05:05] Unknown:
You know, Eric Hoffer's book, The True Believer, he has a very interesting point in there. There many. I I found that book to be fascinating. But one of the things he talks about is the people that join mass movements are not the poor. The poor are too busy just trying to make it. It's the middle class kid that doesn't think he's going to do better than his parents, that now decides better to burn it down or to shake that snow globe as as hard as you can because I might end up on top in that scenario. But if we just keep going in the ordinary way, I'm sliding backwards.
[01:05:42] Unknown:
I don't think when you talk about a 19 year old university student, you can really describe them as that calculating. You know, and if Marx described religion as the opiate on the masses, I think that Marxism is the opiate of the intellectual and the academic. And intellectuals are drawn to Marxism because an intellectual's job is, you know, an intellectual, as defined by Thomas Sowell, is someone whose work product is ideas. So when you are an intellectual, you come up with these ideas. How do you get them implemented? Well, if you're a free market sort of intellectual in a capitalist society, what you do is you write about your ideas.
And this starts a decades long conversation that everybody participates in. And you have to persuade all these people. And eventually, if you're really successful as an intellectual, you move the needle a little bit and you change people's minds and you see your ideas being supported by popular acclaim. But you are a raindrop in a storm. You are one of many voices saying this. But imagine if you're an intellectual and you don't have the patience for that. You start saying to yourself, oh, if only there were some big central power that controlled everything, and I could just go to this one place and say, I have a brilliant idea, oh, central power.
And the central power says, yes. Let us implement the idea immediately. And we don't need to consult with or persuade anybody else because we have guns and cattle prods, and they don't. And that is that is the appeal of centralized socialist governments to the intellectual. You know, communism has always been academia. Communism has always been the academic class. And even when it took the form of peasant revolutions, the peasants didn't care about theory. You know, the peasants didn't read Das Kapital. What they wanted was land reform. They wanted land distribution.
And the industrial workers in the cities, you know, they wanted wage controls. You know, they didn't care about theory either. So now the modern far left has reached sort of a crisis, because capitalism has created so much wealth that the working class is no longer interested. You know, your typical general building contractor in Wichita, Kansas doesn't want a communist revolution, he wants a union. You know, he wants capitalism with unions. He wants steady work and a good wage. So they had to turn to another source of support, and that's this criminal underclass of thugs and you know, the imported sweepings of the third world.
[01:09:54] Unknown:
Because the the working man wasn't gonna do it, so they had to The working man got a better deal from capitalism. You know, the the, I'm reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my daughter right now. And, one of the things I realized is there's things in that book that you don't I don't know if you've ever read it. I have. Long time ago. But, like, the family is literally starving. They they talk about, like, they're eating a half a potato a day. We don't have that here. Like, there's no one I mean, people argue with me about but if if in The United States you are hungry, you can get food. There's no, that's not even a question. Yeah. Our underclass is fat. Too many calories, not Yeah. Never gonna start with it. Yeah. Well, you know,
[01:10:42] Unknown:
the food they're eating isn't very healthy. And that's another discussion about, you know, feminism and the industrialization of food. But they're not starving, you know? And I think that the leftist sort of visions of the hungry and virtuous and industrious poor are mostly the product of old fiction. Because in the 1800s, you know, you could have a lot of perfectly psychologically functional people, who they don't have the connections to opportunities. They're poor. You know, nowadays that same person, they're not in poverty and starving. You know, maybe, you know, they're living in a trailer park, but, you know, maybe they're living in mobile homes and, you know, they have to look around and see people who have a lot more than them.
But they they don't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.
[01:11:56] Unknown:
As I'm saying this though, there's another voice in my head that talks about the extreme danger of inflation. That whatever whatever people have earned, if they have not converted that into an asset,
[01:12:10] Unknown:
the value of everything that they have is being sucked out of their money. Well, even if they have converted into it, it into an asset, because the assets are delineated in dollars.
[01:12:22] Unknown:
Right. So, to me, the off ramp that you describe about, well, maybe there are, you know, enough people that are liberal that are the center of the mass that, you know, you you'd be able to stop the leftist. I sense as more and more people feel life getting hopeless, that they will join these intellectual pursuits. Is that wrong?
[01:12:45] Unknown:
Well, it really kind of depends on, again, how the Trump administration and the Vance administration handle, if that's what we get, handle the next couple of years. Because, you know, we have an immigration crisis. You know, we have this the stuff that the Trump administration is trying to deal with now, the immigration and the infiltration of our institutions by leftists, you know, that's an existential crisis for the Republic. But then, if you manage to get that under control, you then have to deal with the next existential crisis, which is the federal budget.
And, you know, there's been sometimes a little bit of infighting on the right over which of these two crises is more urgent. And I think the Trump administration made the right choice, because until until you get the rats out of the storehouse, you can't possibly store up enough grain for the winter. They just keep eating it. But you but we do have to get the federal budget under control and stop printing money.
[01:14:17] Unknown:
Well, this is a subject I I wanna come back to. But the the the third subject that I hear people talking about a lot, college age men, for example, is the influence of Israel over US politics. Is this just a sideshow to all of this craziness that's going on in the world, or is this also an existential issue?
[01:14:41] Unknown:
Well, I really think that it it's a symptom rather than a disease. Because what you basically have going on when you have a nation that is so successful, and so large, and so powerful, and so wealthy, what happens is that you accumulate this store of value. You create a walled garden. You cultivate it. You fertilize it. You water it. Things grow. And so you start storing up value. And then what happens is some of the people outside the walled garden say, well, there's a lot of value over there. Let's see how we can get our hands on it.' And it's not just it's not just oh there's a lot of money. The value can be intangibles as well. The value can be, for example, the military power, which allows you to influence policy all over the globe.
The value can be technology. The value is lots of things. There's lots of value created by America. And so we can point at, you know, Israel or any number of different nations saying, look, you know, they are meddling in US politics. Well of course they are. Everyone is. Everyone is. You know, the only people who don't meddle in US politics are the ones who can't, who don't have the power. Because US politics has become the highest stakes game in the world with the biggest prizes. So what we have to do, if we wish to preserve the America that we love, that has been such a force for good in our lives and in the world, is we have to say no, America is not some sort of idea.
America is not the government of the world. America is not a special economic zone. America is not an all star team where we pull in the best and the brightest from 64 different cultures. America is a nation like any other nation, and its job is to take care of the people of that nation. And we reject any foreign influence. I don't know how much influence Israel in particular has, as opposed to say Russia or Ukraine or China. But I know that every nation with a stake in the on the world stage, is going to try to play US politics to their individual benefit rather than ours. And we have to put a stop to all of it.
[01:18:14] Unknown:
That seems like it's all order. In particular, as we were talking earlier about inflation. I mean, The US's inflation is the best in the world, and it sucks pretty bad. Yeah. Everybody else is a lot worse. You talk to Canadians, and I mean, things are burning hot and fast there. Things are not good there. Yeah. Well, you Canada's not even the worst of them at all. Yeah. Well, you get this problem where if you if you let people print money,
[01:18:41] Unknown:
the temptation to do so is irresistible. So, fixing the technology of exchange is something that, you know, there's no political fix for that. You need a technological fix. And we have it. Yeah, well we we have the beginnings of it. Bitcoin, as it currently exists, has a few technical aspects that prevent it from being ideal as a daily medium of exchange. Like what? Processing delays and its inability to scale as a medium of exchange. So, you know, you would bring the system down if you tried to if everyone in America tried to pay for their coffee with bitcoin. You know, we don't have the computing infrastructure to handle that.
And, you know, you have the problem that bitcoin in its current form is not quantum resistant. So when I talk about bitcoin in Theft of Fire, what I am imagining is some evolution of cryptocurrency that uses the name and the basic technological ideas. But I am assuming that one hundred years in the future, you know, some smart guys have refined itself. Certainly, Bitcoin will will I mean, that's you have, you know, nips that you add to where you're where you're adding on. You can Yeah. You know, the core is changing. Oh, yeah. I'm absolutely not arguing that these problems cannot be solved. They can and they will. They need to be. Right.
[01:20:41] Unknown:
And, do you see nations adopting Bitcoin in the next few years?
[01:20:47] Unknown:
Well, I think that El Salvador is already moving in that direction. And I I'm liking what I see from that that, atmosphere.
[01:20:58] Unknown:
Wild? I look at I look at El Salvador and, I mean, I can remember less than twenty years ago, my brother planning to go to El Salvador and me trying to talk with my dad, like, dad, this is like, I've been in Central America. That is not a good place. This is dangerous. Yeah. And they have brought their murder rate down real low, but at the expense of being I mean, are they just gathering up everybody? Are they putting non, you know, innocent people in in jail?
[01:21:27] Unknown:
What what you can do is I'm not a reporter with boots on the ground in El Salvador. But the problem of the problem of antisocial people was solved thousands of years ago by guys with names like Hammurabi, and it involved a tree and a rope. You know, the fact is that there's that when we look at these sorts of antisocial acts in our nations, it's not a large percentage of the people. It's not, you know, some guy had a bad day, and now he's on the top of a bell tower with a sniper rifle. That is not how this works. It is the people who don't care how other people feel.
There is a small percentage of humanity that is broken, and they don't act right. And they do it again and again and again and again. And every time on the news when we hear about somebody being stabbed in the neck on light rail, you know, it's never like, you know, oh this was a middle class white guy with a wife and two kids and no criminal record. No. You know, the the it's it's it's he had 14 prior convictions and now he's somehow out walking around, or he's been arrested 39 times, or, you know, he's committed three armed robberies in the past. But the perception, the metaphor that people are holding in their minds come from
[01:23:14] Unknown:
thousands of movies Mhmm. Where the the white cop that you meet is secretly in the Ku Klux Klan. Yeah. This is made by leftists in Hollywood. I mean, it's so wild. I don't there are so many movies. I mean, I barely watch movies anymore. It turns out it turns out
[01:23:30] Unknown:
that a small amount of the people are causing all the actual problems and you can just get rid of them. And there's absolutely no bad side effects. Things just get better for everybody but the psycho murderers. And this is this is why El Salvador is so successful and why everybody is crying about it, because the Left doesn't want us to realize how easy this problem is to fix. I mean, I think they would point at you and say: 'fascist.' Right? You want to be
[01:24:05] Unknown:
a dominator that doesn't
[01:24:08] Unknown:
give justice and mercy. They certainly would. They certainly would. And here's what I would say to that: If you if you tell people that everything they want is fascism, they will eventually conclude that fascism is everything they want.
[01:24:27] Unknown:
I remember I was at this, convention thing called the Battle of Ideas in in London. It was a bunch of academics, and they opened the panel with what is fascism, and those people would not give a definition. They wouldn't they they absolutely flat out refused. They were, well, you know, it's a lot of the but they were definitely wielding fascism
[01:24:46] Unknown:
at everyone. Yeah. Well, they don't they don't call you a fa they don't want to kill you because you're a fascist. They call you fascist because they wanna kill you. Yeah. It's it's their excuse, You know, and so it is it is a mask they will put over any exercise of government power. And if you agree that the government has any legitimate function at all, then, you know, this doesn't make sense. Because locking up criminals is what the government is supposed to do. And you see these videos out of El Salvador dragging these guys into prison. They've all got, you know, facial tattoos of gang symbols.
Like these people have deliberately and you know this is how gangs operate. They make you ostracize yourself from ordinary society so that you will be loyal to the criminal brotherhood. Yeah, because you can't go back once you have a spider on your neck. Yeah. Well, yeah. Once you have, you know, like the teardrop tattoos under your eye, everybody knows what that means. So you can't go back and join normal society. They're very, very concerned about loyalty because they don't want anybody to turn state's evidence. So, you know, they have deliberately removed themselves from society and become parasites.
And then you lock them up and the problem goes away.
[01:26:27] Unknown:
You know, you as you talk about this locking up, I've said this many time on the podcast that, I, live in graduate school. I live with this guy from Afghanistan. And he said, you know, the Americans have the story of of the Taliban all wrong. You guys think that the Taliban fought their way in here with guns. But what you don't know is that the villagers actually welcomed the Taliban in because the government was so corrupt. If you went to them for somebody raped your wife or your daughter, they wouldn't do anything. If you went to them with a property dispute, the regular government wouldn't do anything. You had to pay bribes. They were corrupt. The Taliban, although they were harsh, would come in and they would solve problems. And they were not unfair.
They were fair
[01:27:11] Unknown:
probably using Hammurabi's code. Well, you know, they're they're using, you know, Islamic codes. And that's what tends to happen when you have chaos, is that when you have chaos any source of order starts to look appealing. Even the sources of order that are tyrannical, such as, you know, actual fascism, or such as Islamic theocracy. Because in these kinds of very, very authoritarian civilizations, at least the rules are clear, and if you follow them you can expect to be okay. You know, the communist societies, you don't know what to do to be safe, because the orthodoxy of one moment is the heresy of the next moment that has to be purged.
So yes, people who people who have tasted chaos fear chaos. People who have tasted tyranny fear tyranny. And you know Afghanistan, what he's saying is we have tasted chaos and we prefer Islamic theocracy because that's the available alternative. So yeah, it's it's just another failure of this sort of idea of liberal hegemony, where very very arrogant both Republicans and Democrats thought that we could just export American democracy to the entire world in an unchanged format, and everybody would say, 'yay, thank you saviors!' And, you know, the rest of the world does not want liberal democracy.
It doesn't work for them. They're right not to want liberal democracy because in their society with, you know, their people and their land and their economic circumstances, it's not gonna work. They knew that.
[01:29:27] Unknown:
You know, it's I heard a guy talking not that long ago saying, you know, there's all this movement within The United States that we should expose ourselves to Eastern philosophy. Right? That we should know about Buddhism and that, you know, we should bring meditation. And he was saying, actually, I don't know that I agree with this. In fact, I don't think we should bring these, Eastern religions into our worldview because they don't map to our culture. And that actually there are some, I don't know who's using kind of, like, disease terms about this. Mhmm. How does that strike you?
[01:30:05] Unknown:
Well, it strikes me that, there are a lot of people who want to seek wisdom outside their culture. And, you know, the term Orientalism is sometimes applied to this. This idea that you have to go to another culture to find the secret wisdom that your culture doesn't have. Except we happen to be members of the culture that everybody wants to come here. Everybody wants to come here and get what we have. Sometimes destroying what we have in the process. But it's like they all want to come here. Nobody's clamoring to get let into the People's Republic Of China. Nobody's clamoring to be admitted to Pakistan.
You know, nobody is is trying to escape India and reach, you know, Uganda, or Nigeria, or Liberia. They want to come here. They want to come to England. They want to come to France. So, you know, you judge a tree by its fruit. And Western civilization, by even by the even according to its greatest critics, Western civilization is better. Now they wouldn't agree with that. They would say, oh no, Western civilization is horrible. And I'd say, you're here, aren't you? You're here, aren't you? You're dressed in a Western fashion, you know, you are participating in the Western lifestyle.
We are on a Western talk show talking about this stuff, You know, and you're saying, oh, Western civilization is bad? Well, your words say that you believe that, but your actions don't lie. They reveal your real beliefs. You know, you're not criticizing Western civilization because you actually think it's bad. You're criticizing it because that's your grift that you think will get you a bigger piece of it. You know, there is there are very few people who think that Western civilization is actually bad, and if they do, they're not creating problems for us because they're over there doing something else. You know, if you want to go be a part of, you know, a socialist society, there are socialist societies you can go to. If you want to be a hunter gatherer, go do that.
[01:33:04] Unknown:
Well, it seems like there are some like, Europe appears to be overrun by people that wanted the fruits of Europe. Mhmm. Are they too far gone? Are they is Europe going to be an African nation, an Islamic nation?
[01:33:19] Unknown:
I think it could go either way. The the the prediction, the the behavior of large populations is very difficult to predict. So, you know, if you're an actuary, you know, your job is to predict what happens to large populations like this many people are gonna get skin cancer. And treating that is gonna cost this much. And that's well I don't want to say it's easy to do, because it's a very hard job. You have to do a lot of math. But it's a tractable problem. Because if I get cancer, that doesn't make you get cancer. Those probabilities are independent, so they average out.
But if I become politically radicalized, and I talk to you, then you can become politically radicalized. So the odds of your behavior are dependent on what happens with my behavior and vice versa. So when you're looking at the social opinions and the political behavior of large groups of people, it becomes extremely unpredictable. And it can hinge on, you know, who comes up with that one shot killer meme? You know, where would we be if Donald Trump hadn't turned his head a little bit? You know, it's impossible to say, but we do know that things would be far different.
So, you know, I'm not going to play the game of this is what's going to happen.
[01:35:08] Unknown:
The only game you can play is this is these are some of the things that could happen. Alright. I wanna break in here for just a moment to talk about this class that I've developed that I think you might find valuable. If you enjoy the conversations that I have or you've heard about legacy interviews and you think, man, that would be a skill that I would love to have to be able to draw people out so that they would share their life stories, then you might wanna consider my interest based communications course. This is a course I developed for my business partner, Benjamin. When he left my company, he went out and raised millions of dollars in startup capital for a biotech firm. Then he hired these great scientists, and he said to me, Vance, I want these scientists to be able to talk persuasively, to introduce their ideas, to be able to deal with conflict in a much better way, and how to present their ideas so that other people wanna listen. Would you create the class that really was all of the information you taught me when we were working together? And so I did.
This class became something even bigger than I imagined. I have now delivered it for hedge funds and pharmaceutical companies, and it is truly becoming a versatile class. We've held it for salespeople. We've held it for communications teams, and we've even done it with people that are just saying, I wanna be better at speaking. I wanna feel more comfortable and confident knowing how to negotiate and how to get my ideas out. So if that sounds like you or you have an organization that you think you'd like to share this with, go to vancecrow.com and look up the IntraSpace communications course.
Then sign up on our contact form, and let's have a chat about what your goals are and how this class could help you reach those goals. Alright. Let's get back to the conversation with Devon Erickson. You mentioned a pairing of two ideas that I want to go back and explore. It was, feminism and industrialization. Of food. Yes. Of food. Yeah. Tell me about that. Okay. Well,
[01:37:10] Unknown:
so a lot of younger people, people your age and younger, they don't understand that we are living in an epidemic of metabolic syndrome and obesity. Everybody is sick. And they don't understand that because they look around them and they say fat people. And you know the problem isn't fat people, it's it's metabolic syndrome, but being fat is the visible symptom of that. And they say, well, okay, a certain number of people are just fat. You know, either they're genetically programmed to be fat or they are, you know, gluttonous and slothful, and they're fat, and this is normal.
Well, no. No. You talk to somebody who is 45, 50, and we have a different perspective. We remember a world where almost nobody was obese
[01:38:13] Unknown:
and relatively few people were fat. Yeah, we had one obese guy in my town. Everybody knew his name.
[01:38:19] Unknown:
Yeah, Yeah. And so it's not genetics, because the human genome didn't suddenly change. And it's not gluttony and sloth, because we didn't suddenly have a generation born for no reason at all that had weak character. This is something changed on a biological level, and that something is the food we ate. And this tracks pretty much perfectly with women leaving the home and joining the workforce. Now, I don't want to pontificate on whether that's a bad or a good thing. It has benefits and drawbacks and you could debate this all day.
That would be great fun. We don't have time. But one of the things it does is it moves you towards now you want your food ready to eat. Because you have families with a bunch of children and two working adults with full time jobs. And so now your food is not made from meat and vegetables that you bought up bought at the market, and you cut them up and you cook them on a stove. Now it's something wrapped in plastic, or that you ordered from DoorDash because, you know, you want to call a cab for your burrito, or whatever. And so the people who are making this food are large companies that can put all sorts of exotic things in it, which is, you know, it makes it easier to store.
It makes you buy more of it. It makes it easier to sell. And, you know, does it have long term health effects? Well yes, it does. You know what Crisco is? It's cottonseed oil. Why would you eat cottonseed oil? You don't eat cotton. That's not something that you're meant to eat. You know, seed oils, and there's there's a big debate over is this harmful. I don't care whether you whether I'm not interested in having a study that studies the effects of seed oils for ten years. That stuff is not food. That's what I'm talking about. That stuff is not food. We're eating things that are not food. What the hell is maltodextrin? And why are they putting it and stuff? Why are they putting high fructose corn syrup and everything?
You know, I don't know which pieces of this processed food make people fat and sick, but I know that in the 70s we stopped eating this stuff, and right on that same timeline,
[01:41:42] Unknown:
people started getting more and more fat and sick as time wore on. So I have I mean, I I certainly believe now that I'm raising three kids, both my wife and I have our own businesses, and inflation is running wild. So your time is being sucked away. Right? Yeah. It's very, very little time. Yeah. And so, definitely, the food choices that we make now versus the food choices we made when it was just me and my wife and we were working for somebody else are totally different. I track with the idea hyperpalatable food that is designed to make you wanna eat as much as possible, probably created with the low you know, in order to get the highest margins, you create the lowest quality. Well, but also not just hyperpalatable, but insulin resistance
[01:42:28] Unknown:
that spurs insulin resistance. And then you take out the fiber so that it is easy to freeze and store.
[01:42:38] Unknown:
But I would say that the, like, there are other things that I think we can tack on to this that are important part of it. So for example, you know, this was a brutal summer. Right? But you didn't know it was a brutal summer if you were working in an office that's 70 degrees, and your house is 70 degrees, and your car is 72 degrees. And I believe that humans eat really different when it's hot out. And now all of a sudden, we've created this climate control that is making it so it feels as though it is, you know, the middle of of of autumn all the time. Well, how old are you? I'm 45.
[01:43:16] Unknown:
Okay. Well, we had air conditioning in the eighties. I personally didn't have it because we were poor,
[01:43:23] Unknown:
but, you know, we had air conditioning in the eighties. Well, I mean, I'm the exact same boat. We it existed, but it didn't exist at my home. And, having lived in Africa, having lived on a ship and in Central America, like, the temperature that we experience has an impact on what we now, am I saying that's Do we have do we have fat people in Canada?
[01:43:47] Unknown:
Sure. Do we have fat people in Minnesota?
[01:43:49] Unknown:
Yeah. But those people have fat people in Washington? Yes. Of course. I mean, all these people use air conditioning. Right? He he most most houses in in some of the northern places don't have air conditioning because they don't need it. I I am not arguing on behalf of the industrial food system. Okay. No no one would do that. Right? They they would say, this is the system that we have, things need to change, And I know on a very deep level the things that need to change in farm policy to change that. Yeah. The but I'm saying, I believe it is more complicated than just the food. And that that there are huge components of the way that we are manipulating the world around us that are having, I would say, a
[01:44:34] Unknown:
comparable impact on this. That is one of the hazards of talking about these sort of society wide phenomenons, phenomena, is that when you try to focus on any one cause and say this is a problem, you always get a bunch of people saying but what about this over here? And it's like, okay, I can only talk about one thing at a time. You know, when you start to say, oh, let's let's look at, you know, 67 different elements of modern lifestyle. You know, maybe that's something you can do with a body of statistical research. But it creates a very convenient shelter for two attitudes.
First of all, it allows Coca Cola to point the finger at other people. You know, it allows them to say, oh look, we're going to invent a measurement called calories and we're going to pretend that all calories are the same. So, you know, if you consume 500 calories of Coca Cola, that's going to hit your body the same way as 500 calories of carrots, which of course is ridiculous. But it allows them to shift blame. You know, a calorie is only a calorie if you are a fire. Because, you know, that's how you measure calories. You burn it and you see how much heat it gives off. Well, your body is not a fire. Your body is a complex biological factory And it uses different raw materials and fuel sources differently.
So that allows the people who are responsible to dodge. And it also allows us to slip into this territory of being of saying, well, oh, it's the modern lifestyle as a whole.' To where we slip into this sort of weird Luddite territory, to where, you know, we propose a solution and nobody's going to accept it. You know, oh, you're fat? Well, you know, give up your air conditioning and go hunt antelope with a spear. Well, yes, that would fix the problem. Except it won't because nobody's gonna do it. If you have a solution and you don't have any idea how you get you how you're gonna get people to do it, you don't have a solution. You have half a solution.
So, you know, maybe people would be less fat if they gave up their air conditioning. But how about we just stop poisoning ourselves and see if that's enough?
[01:47:36] Unknown:
And when you when you are thinking about changes to the industrial system, are you thinking laws? Are you thinking education? What do you where would you go with this? Well, then the question becomes, okay, how do we implement this? Is what you're asking.
[01:47:51] Unknown:
Well, you know, the first thing is that, you know, I pointed the finger at feminism. You know, women wanting to work full time. And of course, that's sort of the third rail of politics, and nobody really wants to touch it. But what I'm focusing on here is not so much, oh this entire sociological thing, you know, inevitably leads to this, is that someone has to be cooking or we're going to be eating processed food. How we accomplish that is up in the air. But you can't become unhealthy eating the things that people ate for thousands of years and not being unhealthy.
You know, butter isn't bad for you Unless you're lactose intolerant because you come from a race of people who never ate dairy.
[01:48:58] Unknown:
Even then there's not that much lactose in getting butter. Yeah, people have been eating butter and cheese
[01:49:06] Unknown:
and red meat for thousands and thousands of years, and they were fine. So clearly that's not sufficient to be the problem. So if we if we ate, if we eat what we ate five hundred years ago,
[01:49:26] Unknown:
we would stop having this problem. So the the But I think the the do that? The the the like, I don't really think I was doing whataboutism. I think I was saying it's very easy to say, like, this is the thing, and then we go after it. I think if we compare how we ate five thousand years ago, what we did was we had, access to carbohydrates for about four months out of the year, and then those carbohydrates were gone. You know, maybe you could save some potatoes Mhmm. If if your country happened to have, you know, gotten them from Peru. And then you could eat, you know, certain parts of, meat for certain parts of the year, and then you would eat dried meat. I mean like, if we were rolling back to the We didn't start becoming obese
[01:50:13] Unknown:
when we had access to carbohydrates year round. We didn't start becoming obese when we had refrigeration. You know, the timeline doesn't line up. We started becoming obese in the late 70s and early 80s. And what this tracks with is not sugar availability, it's not refrigeration, it's not year round availability of carbohydrates, it's processed food. That's the one where the timeline lines up. So again, where I talk about the role of an intellectual is to start conversations, not finish them. So I'm saying, I'm not saying this is the culprit. I'm saying this is the most likely suspect.
Let's bring him in and interrogate him, and see if we can solve this crime. You know, if we stop eating the processed food and the problem is fixed, you know, that case closed.
[01:51:22] Unknown:
Yeah. I don't think we will get rid of processed food until we stop inflation. I think processed food is That is quite possible. And and women going into the workplace. So because of my legacy interviews, I have had a chance to talk with all these people that are right at the generation where either they were the last generation in their family to have the mom stay at home, or the first generation where mom started going into work. Yeah. And it's almost always as a supplemental income. It was all when they're starting out, it's like, I was there for the kids, and then once they were in grade school, I could go get insurance by working at the local bank or, you know, doing some other job.
But all of this being a function of, like, it tracks really closely with when we got off the gold standard Yeah. Is when we started getting overweight. It changed well, one of the things that created this change was a change in the economic landscape.
[01:52:15] Unknown:
You know, now it's how it's like now if you want to be a housewife and mother, you can't. Because that's a luxury. That is an economic luxury now that most people can't afford. Right. So yes, it's like you, you most people, when they're looking for the cause of something they're mad about, they ask why, and they ask why, and they ask why again, until they reach the thing they want to be mad about. Like you could ask why about the the food problems and the obesity epidemic until you get to feminism. And then if that's your bugbear, you stop there. You stop asking why and you say: oh that's the culprit.
But then you ask: okay, why did women want to join the workforce? What were the social and economic pressures, and where did those come from? And so, you know, then we look and it's pretty clear that something happened in the 1970s. And arguably, and I think this may have been where you were going, is we get off the gold standard, we start to be able to print money, and now we start inflating the currency. And now people need more income, so the wife starts to work, and then we're not making our own food, and we're not taking care of our own kids. And so they grow up screwed up, and everything's downstream from there. That's exactly right. And I would I would say,
[01:53:55] Unknown:
if if people calculated inflation the way we calculate taxes, then all of a sudden, we would realize that we are not in the, democratic state that we believe we are in, or we're we're in something else entirely for how we how we fund things. Yeah. And we would say, it's not that we got off the gold standards, that we changed our entire political system in the nineteen seventies. And fifty years later, we have people that are, you know, morbidly obese and have metabolic disorders and Yeah. These problems because we stole their time through our new our new government
[01:54:35] Unknown:
system. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, inflation, you know, there's a lot of libertarians running around saying taxation is theft. And it's like, okay, you have an argument for that. You're not entirely wrong, but you're focusing on one thing, and let's hear a little bit more about how inflation is theft. Because there's arguably, and this is something that Nayib Bukele has some very good speeches on, you know, you are not paying taxes in order to fund the government. You are paying taxes to hide the fact that the government is funded by the money printer. And that sucks the value out of everyone's savings.
And so we have more and more units of currency than ever before, But we get less and less for it, and we have to work harder and harder. And the federal budget gets more and more bloated, which all is going into somebody's pocket. So it goes back to this metaphor that I create of you create a walled garden and you create value and there's a big storehouse of grain and pretty soon the rats come along. Well, what you need when you have this society and you have these granaries and you have these storage of this storage of abstract value, is you need cats. You know, cats enabled the agricultural revolution.
Cats enabled civilization because they eat mice and rats. And the problem you know, one of the base problems we have in Western civilization right now is that the rats have banded together to convince everybody that the cats are fascists.
[01:56:56] Unknown:
Yeah.
[01:56:58] Unknown:
Yeah. That's right. So if you wonder why my Twitter profile picture is a cat.
[01:57:04] Unknown:
That's awesome. I love that. I, you know, I've talked a lot about agriculture. I've never thought about the empowerment of cats as far as particularly grain societies, anybody that was doing store housing. Yeah, we've got pesticides now and we keep cats around because we think they're cute and funny.
[01:57:20] Unknown:
But we needed cats for thousands of years.
[01:57:25] Unknown:
So a growing battle we talked about a lot of different groups that are that are kind of in conflict, and the one that, is definitely growing is the anti boomerism. Mhmm. It's, you know, it's this, like, hey, these boomers, they started off on third base, you know, bought a house for $80,000 and now wouldn't give it up for 1,500,000.0, and then they wonder why our wives have to work and we put our kids in daycare. Yeah. How does this play out?
[01:57:53] Unknown:
Well, I think I think a lot of people are just a little bit confused about why younger generations are mad at boomers. It's not and boomers themselves are confused about this. They're like, you're mad at me because I have more than you do. No. No. You know, they're mad at boomers because the boomers don't understand their situation. The boomers have a tendency to believe that the country is the same as it was forty years ago, fifty years ago. And to advocate solutions that were relevant fifty years ago, and to lack empathy and sympathy for the different situation that their grandchildren are in, and most of all to vote in ways that exacerbate the problem.
So I think, you know, we a lot of people will say, oh look at this vast portion of the wealth that boomers have, and they're not leaving any of it to their kids. Well, that's one way of describing it. But really, what they're angry about is this phrase, out of touch. It's like, you don't understand what life is like for your children and your children's children. And it's very hard to get you to understand that because you can't be told anything.
[01:59:43] Unknown:
You know, you ever had you ever had met someone who just can't be told something? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the most grating things. Right? Yeah. If if you're talking to somebody that will not change no matter what happens, it's the same as talking to a wall. There's no point in it.
[01:59:59] Unknown:
Yeah. So, you know, and generally boomers get very upset when you talk about this because they feel like they're all being tarred with the same brush. And you know, obviously nothing that's true of a generation is true of a 100% of that generation. But we have to speak in generalities because if you don't speak in generalities you can't say anything. Right. And you are speaking in generalities is sort of a rhetorical weapon that is used to silence things people don't want to hear. So it's not like every boomer is 100% out of touch and has no idea what has happened they they don't have an attitude of sort of emptying their cup and listening when someone younger than them says, this is what it's like for us.
[02:01:06] Unknown:
Yeah. I think you're, you know, I I get to meet a lot of boomers and so this is not a knock on them. Mhmm. But the experience that I've had is when you try and talk with a boomer about, like, okay, your stock is $1,500,000. Yeah. Who has the money to buy that from you Yeah. When you want to go to cash out? How is how is a couple?
[02:01:35] Unknown:
You know, you were raised, you know, you were three years old running around this house, right? Like, now this house costs $2,000,000 How is anybody who's, you know, they're 27 years old, the wife's pregnant, how are they going to buy that house? How is the next three year old going to run around in this house?
[02:02:05] Unknown:
The number of hours that it costs you to buy that house, number of hours of work versus the number of hours of work that this other people are, it's not that they're lazy. It's it's that they're the value of their hours has been stolen from them. Yeah. And that's
[02:02:20] Unknown:
that you've mentioned this idea of time several times, and this makes me think about a conversation that we were having, I think before we started recording. But you we were talking about looking at things through different metaphors.
[02:02:37] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[02:02:38] Unknown:
You know, I get on Twitter and I see something and I think, oh, do I have a different lens to look at this through?' So one of the things that I like to say is money is a value of fucks is a measure of fucks given. And that's one way to look at money. That's one way to look at value, you know? Somebody gives you money because they give a fuck about something you do. You give money to somebody else so that they will give a fuck about something you want. You created art and somebody gave enough fucks that they would give you that. Exactly. And that's one way to look at money. But what I hear you suggesting is, okay, here's another metaphor that we can also use to talk about money, and that is time.
Because we can envision everyone being born with a certain amount of time. We don't know how much, but at some point they're gonna die. So you you only have x amount of time, and there right now there isn't any way to spend money and get more. You know, maybe Brian Johnson's gonna come up with something cool. I certainly hope he is. But right now you can't buy more life. And since most people, not everybody, but most people have to trade their time for money, they only have so much time that they can trade for money. So if you were to calculate, okay, what is like every every moment in someone's life that they could conceivably work?
And you multiply this by what kind of wage they can realistically expect, that is the maximum amount of money that they can have in their lives. But this also means that you can convert the price of everything into hours. And when the price of certain things like housing becomes like, okay, this little maneuver is going to cost you twenty years of your life, well then a 20 year old can't have that thing. A 25 year old can't have something that it costs twenty years to earn because you would have had to start when you're five.
[02:05:05] Unknown:
One of my good good friends, Kate, was, we were in a group chat, and we had decided back in the spring, hey. This thing is gonna cost $500, and we're gonna pay it in Bitcoin. So she went out to the market and bought $500 worth of Bitcoin. And then when it was time to make the payment, we all said, alright. This is the strike date. And it was just a couple days ago. Right? And so she already had more Bitcoin than what $500 would be worth now. And so she started to calculate, well, if you made $50 an hour, which would be an excellent wage. Right? Mhmm. She just through holding that Bitcoin from spring until, this time, there was there was, I think it was a $100 difference. I mean, it wasn't a huge amount. Yeah. But it and and now she was like, that's two hours worth of time that I earned just by owning that asset. Yeah. And this to me Yeah. Is, like, wildly amazing that you, you know, that is what you hope with an asset is that it's it that by owning it and not utilizing its purchasing power now, not not taking Yeah. The, the high time preference idea and wanting the whatever it is that you want right now,
[02:06:18] Unknown:
that you can buy something and have it create more time. Yeah. Well, if you do something that people give a fuck about and you delay getting paid, It's sort of an IOU from society, except of course if you have inflation and people start draining the value out of those IOUs. But, you know, this is actually something that comes up in some of those conversations in Theft of Fire that you were talking about, is that there's a part where he's talking to Leila and he says, you know, people trade their time for money, but you can't get rich doing that because you can't buy more time to sell. So you have to own something that can scale and your time doesn't scale.
You have to own something that earns, except we have to realize that not everybody can play that game. Somebody has to sweep the floor, and somebody has to cook the food, and somebody has to build the houses, and those people are selling their time. So those of us who make it out of the selling your time game, whether it's by buying bitcoin, or you know starting a company that makes widgets, or starting a company that makes rockets, you know, whatever. We have to those people have to keep in mind that the game can't be too rigged against the people who sell their time.
That the time can't be too cheap. That we can't import a bunch of third world indentured servants to replace everybody and pay less wages, because the people who sell their time, we need them to make things. Right. And we need them to survive. And the third world hordes cannot replace them because if they could, the third world wouldn't be the third world. So you can only prosper for so long unless some of that prosperity makes it off Wall Street to Main Street.
[02:08:48] Unknown:
Yeah. This is I mean, you're we'll get back. I wanna return to theft of fire. Uh-huh. But for like, this is why with, people that do babysitting for me or other work for me, I will always sit down with them and be like, let me show you Bitcoin. Hey, would you mind if, like, if it's just extra hours, can I pay you in Bitcoin? Because it's it's a way for them to finally have time on their side.
[02:09:13] Unknown:
And, if you don't do this It is a way to to educate them because that is that is really a lot of what is missing. You know, I grew up very poor with parents who were not very, sort of, financially savvy. And my father was an engineer, he worked at JPL, but he didn't really know how to manage money. He came from poverty, so he was always about saving rather than about investing. And so it took me until very late in life that I realized if I had a lot of money in the bank, I was robbing myself. And I very much wish that there had been somebody who could sit me down when I was 13 years old and say: here's what you do with the money you have.
You know, it's it's not just, oh, go to college and go to get a good job. It's once you have one, here's what you do so you can actually retire later and enjoy yourself. You know,
[02:10:20] Unknown:
I've had a chance to interview a few of the people that are at, like, the point o o o 1% of Mhmm. Society. Like, they have that much money. And, the book that they all recommend, all of them, 100% of them. Yeah. Do you know what it is? I do not. Rich Dad Poor Dad. Uh-huh. All of them. Have you ever read that book? I've read some pieces of them. It's I mean, the guy, just really simplifies. He gives you a metaphor. Yeah. Poor dad says, hey, you gotta work in your job, but get a comfortable job, and put that money into a savings account. Yeah. Rich dad says, you make money, you work hard, but as soon as you can, you need to buy things that will produce money for you. Yeah. And that anytime you buy something that is not an income producing asset.
[02:11:02] Unknown:
And I I think one of the big pieces there is the most terrible thing you can do to a child is make them risk averse. Mhmm. Mhmm. Because the reason that investments make money is that they carry risk. They are payment to incentivize the risk. So a lot of parents raise their children thinking, oh, the most responsible thing I can do is teach them to be responsible and safe and not take risks. But if you don't take risks, you don't get rewards.
[02:11:45] Unknown:
Yeah. All you can do is keep things going linear at best Mhmm. And you'll never get that growth. So Yeah. This is a a perfect, jumping off point. I normally hate when fiction writers talk about economics. Mhmm. Normally, it makes me so angry that I'm like, I wish I didn't know that this is what you think. Uh-huh. I love Theft of Fire. Like, your economics so far, I'm 60% in. Right? Is that So you've heard most of the arguments between Marcus and Miranda about different financial perspectives. They got into the different
[02:12:20] Unknown:
situations there. And you're you're past the chapter entitled half. Yes. Okay. Okay. I don't wanna spoil anything for you. So it's it's,
[02:12:29] Unknown:
I think that that's a mark of, of this being such an excellent book because you're talking about things that cannot be known in the future, this science fiction. But the undergirding is not just the physics that you appear to know so well about, how many rotations you have to do to create this gravity, but also economic realities that are not going to change whether we are flying past Neptune or we're just here grounded on Earth. Yeah. Where's your economic background coming from?
[02:13:02] Unknown:
Lots of reading. Slowly learning how to invest and trying to make up for all the all the ignorance of my youth, obviously. I'm not very young anymore, but I do what I can. And again, it comes back to this idea of empathy. So both Marcus and Miranda, you know, they live in what could very much be described as a post governmental society. And, you know, obviously there are rules that come from various entities, like, okay, you own this station, you're gonna make some rules. But they, so there's elements in orbital society that fill the role of government, but not in the same way that modern governments do.
So you have an argument about economics between two anarcho capitalists, but they consider themselves to be on opposite ends of a political spectrum, of an economic spectrum, because their spectrum is different than ours. Now, if you suggested an income tax, Marcus would push you out the airlock. And if you suggested an income tax to Miranda, she would ask Marcus to push you out the airlock. So they're both very, very hard right from our modern perspective. But one of the sort of insights that I developed writing this was that they're not going to have that modern perspective. They're going to have their own political spectrum.
So Miranda is existing in this universe with the perspective of being raised by a family of venture capitalists. And Marcus is going to approach this sort of economic spectrum with the standpoint of someone who was a worker and just trying to start a business, and it didn't turn out too well.
[02:15:27] Unknown:
Well, it's to me, Marcus maps precisely to the American farmer. Mhmm. They get this business from their family Yeah. In order to be able to keep up with the the rate that everybody else is. They have to take on huge risk by taking out loans. And then if that doesn't pay off Yeah. They they don't go from, like, oh, well, we'll just pack it up or we'll try again. You're like, no. You've lost everything. Yeah. You don't have a you don't have something to invest to try again.
[02:15:58] Unknown:
Yeah. And and I hadn't thought about farmers specifically. Oh, man. It's so on land. I was actually thinking about crab fishermen.
[02:16:07] Unknown:
Okay.
[02:16:08] Unknown:
Where you own this boat that cost a million dollars, but it's financed to the hilt. And you're working very, very hard to make a middle class lifestyle, you know, despite having all these sort of tangible business assets. And the eco what they're arguing a lot of it is the specific economics of these Starlight Corporation fusion drives, to where the availability of them is so restricted and you have to lease them, you can't buy them, and what the effect this has on the people who have to use them for work. And, you know, I won't spoil anything, but I will tell you we're gonna find out more about how that technology works,
[02:17:01] Unknown:
and a lot more things are gonna make sense. Well, I'm I'm looking forward to it because the Starlight Drive is the modern American, combine in The United States. And, like, everything we were talking about before about boomers, where you have these boomers be like, well, we didn't need the air conditioning and the, you know, slow ride, the bench on there. And the meanwhile, their kid that's buying this giant combine is like, yeah. But I now have to farm 3,000 acres Yeah. In order to be able to make enough money. Yeah. And by the way, if I pop a tire, it's going to cost me a quarter of an acre of all of the work that I did that I just have to give away in order to get that fixed. Mhmm. Too many things go wrong. Yeah. And now I'm paying you to farm, not me getting paid to farm. Yeah. Yeah. So I think your Starlight drive is excellent. You guys just got, the audio version. You guys are about ready to release the there's gonna be an audio version of the We are,
[02:18:01] Unknown:
we well, this has taken us about a year because I had to fire two sound engineers. And we have had we sort of we we sort of had to we had to teach ourselves first how to be a publishing house, and then we had to teach ourselves how to be an audiobook studio. And you know most self published authors, when they go to have an audiobook, they're like, okay I'm gonna find a guy who does audiobooks, I'm gonna hand him my book, and he's gonna record the audiobook by reading it, And then, you know, I'm gonna pay him, you know, 3,000, $5,000 or whatever, and then I'm gonna release my audiobook and hope that I can make that back.
And I said, well, you know, I don't want to do that. I don't look at audiobooks that way. I think that audiobooks are becoming more popular, and we're almost looking at a return to the age of the 1930s radio play. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think what people really want is really good acting and different voices. I went I didn't include too many actual sound effects because I think they're distracting, but we did a lot of things with the voices to to show the environment. And so I decided, okay, I'm gonna do a Kickstarter for this, and I'm gonna see if I can do a really, really, really elaborate audiobook.
And I ended up being able to raise about $42,000 on my first Kickstarter, which I thought about that. And you were only looking for like $5,000 or something like that? Well, we only asked for $5,000 We were hoping for more. This is great! Yeah, yeah. It's almost a 10x. Yeah, so what I and that was due to not only a lot of people who pre ordered the audiobook, but due to some very generous, high dollar value donors who believed in what I was doing. Thank you guys, you know who you are, thank you. And I said, okay, I'm gonna get a full cast. I'm going to hire the best people and have have each of the three main characters played by a different person.
And I'm gonna we're gonna get online and I'm gonna direct it all myself. And so we went through and we did it like a movie without the visuals. We did directed scenes and I was making these poor actors do like ten, twelve, 15 takes on some of these lines. Just, you know, to get it exactly right. And I found some amazing actors. Like, the woman who plays Miranda is a consummate professional and she can do some incredible things with her voice. And then, you know, I was listening the guy who plays Marcus I was listening to all these auditions, because I got hundreds and hundreds of auditions, and I'm spending my entire weekend just listening over and over again to the same section of the words I wrote with different actors reading it. And I'm listening to these guys who are, you know, really, really professional voice actors. They're charging like $500 per finished hour hour and whatnot.
And I come to this one guy, and he just absolutely makes my jaw drop. Because his voice is good, but his diction is just so clear, and he has such an understanding of the material, and he puts that all into his voice. And I'm like, okay. This is our guy. I have to listen to all of them, but this is our guy. So I just gritted my teeth and I listened to all the rest of the editions and I go, okay, I'm gonna hire this guy. I contact him. Turns out he's a bus driver in North Dakota.
[02:22:27] Unknown:
Wow!
[02:22:29] Unknown:
And he's just this amazing talent. You know, I think this is the next Ray Porter. I don't know if you know who that is, but if you like audiobooks, you know, a lot of people who like audiobooks know who that is. But, you know, he is really amazingly talented. And I had these two actresses who are amazingly talented and we just we we just ground on this with the editing for months and months and months and we're finally we've we're just eliminating the final bugs now. And so I actually have the final version on my phone right now and I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet.
But it's out with beta listeners, so we're just going to go through, confirm that the bugs are finished, and then finally release these things to our backers who have been waiting for a year. And guys, I know that's a long time. I know that's a horrendously long time. We had to teach ourselves how to do this, But when you hear it, you're gonna understand why we were that perfectionist.
[02:23:39] Unknown:
Well, the just watching your face, like, and see how passionate you are about this, it's it's,
[02:23:44] Unknown:
it's definitely heartwarming. It was so frustrating to take this long and have so much, you know, to just have to learn so many new things, you know. You never realize how complicated something is until you try to do it. And just to finally be able to produce something you're proud of. And I think so much of the modern publishing industry, so much of the modern movie industry, so much of the modern entertainment industry, is just these big companies with lots of money hiring people who just kind of phone it in and they produce slop.
[02:24:30] Unknown:
We're in the fiat high time preference world, right? And you created a low time preference thing. Yeah, and that's
[02:24:37] Unknown:
what I'm gambling my career on this. Because the advice to most self published authors is you should be turning out a book every three months. And it's like, I'm sorry. If you write a book every three months, you're producing slop.
[02:24:54] Unknown:
Well, I absolutely hate to do this, but I I told you we would do only, so long and we've gone way over. But I wanna I wanna give a plug for this. Oh, dude. I just missed my bus. I I am, 60% into the book, and it is awesome. I had a choice last night. I could speed read it and try and get done, or I could just let it go. And I was like, I think this is a book that goes on my shelf for, you know, my top 100 books. You know, the books that I definitely wanna capture. And, so I am loving this book. To find out that you're coming out with the second one makes me delighted. Yeah. And, man, I I if if you were gonna give a quick overview of, like, what's your best pitch for the book, what what is it?
[02:25:40] Unknown:
Remember the feeling you got from reading the classic science fiction of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Do you wish that people still wrote like that? Yes. Well, let me put it this way. The only thing I updated is the technology.
[02:26:03] Unknown:
It's a great book. If people wanted to get the audiobook, where would they go? Devonerickson.com.
[02:26:10] Unknown:
We are taking preorders
[02:26:11] Unknown:
right now, and we will be delivering that in about a week. Great. Well, I will, this will this will be released as that is open, and I will put a link in the show notes.
[02:26:21] Unknown:
Okay. So if you're listening to this, it's probably already live.
[02:26:25] Unknown:
Devin, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming by. This was a truly great interview. Thank you for inviting me. It was it was a real pleasure. I was just enjoying myself getting on my soapbox and rattling on. It was great. Thank you, man. Okay. That's gonna do it for this week's episode. If you are still here, then you have been in for a wild ride. And I'm so glad we got to go on this together. You know, I should probably admit that after this recording was done, I asked my editing team to get it back to me as fast as they could so I could share it with some of my close friends. I can definitely tell that there was some heat in this conversation. We are talking about subjects that are sometimes walled off from us that we're not supposed to talk about or think about. And that's what was so wonderful about talking with Devon.
I know that they have just released their audiobook, and it is supposed to be something that is rich in character and depth and acting, and it really sounds like an amazing thing. So you can go to devonerickson.com and, or just look up Theft of Fire. I'm sure you'll find it. It is everywhere right now. If you're interested in having me sit down with your loved ones, go to legacy interviews dot com, and there, we can sign up to have them record their most important memories from their childhood to their career and all of the wisdom that they learned along the way. And if you're interested in developing your own communication skills or you have a team of people that you'd like to bring together to make them all have the sorts of skills that allow them to navigate conflict, negotiate when things are tight, and present their ideas, then go to vancecrowe.com and then look up interest based communicating.
Alright. We'll be back soon with another intense interview.
Somebody saying something on the Internet that draws attention tells people tells me what people are thinking about, tells me what they care about. And then I look at it and I say, well, do I have any insights about this? Is there is there anything where I have maybe a little different angle on it? And I can provide some clarity that people are going to enjoy. Because, you know, I get passionate about things, but the world is, and the internet, are full of people being passionate about something, saying the same things, the same talking points again and again and again. So, you know, if I just feel the same way as everybody else I shut up.
But if I have some sort of like, oh, try looking at it like this, then that's what I tend to share because, you know, well I found out that that's what people like, but it's also what I like to say, because I'm a compulsive explainer.
[00:01:12] Unknown:
A compulsive explainer. Mhmm. Meaning that you, like, see the way the world is, and you're like, I think that people are not getting this right. Well, I see a way the world is.
[00:01:24] Unknown:
You know, a lot of people, they think oh the world is this way'. And, you know, everybody has their their set of beliefs, but I think sometimes what's almost as important as your beliefs is the sort of the set of lenses, the set of metaphors that you use to look at the world. And so when I say something, you know, I try to remember that the role of an intellectual, and you know I never thought I would be describing myself this way because I came up as an engineer, but the role of an intellectual isn't to prove things and to end conversations.
It's to come up with a possibility and start conversations. And then that conversation percolates through the internet, through society, and people make up their own minds. And that's sort of what an intellectual is for, is to throw an idea out there and see if it floats. And so I think that, you know, everybody is on the internet and some people just love, love, love to do research. You get some characters like data republican or whatever, and they're gonna drill down and they're gonna find out the facts. So unless you're that research guy, your role really isn't to tell people what is.
It's to say, here's a possible way of looking at it. See what that does for your worldview.
[00:03:12] Unknown:
Alright. I wanna break in here just to orient you to what's happening. The man sitting with me is Devon Erickson. He is the author of a book called The Theft of Fire. Now I had known about Devon through some friends, and I had even had a chance to read his book. But I thought, I don't know. Sci fi, some new author. This is not gonna be good. But I happened to see Devon out on x, and some of the commentary that he made about other people's posts was really insightful. It really called into question things that I had even thought. And I found myself thinking, man, I really wish I would have had that guy on the podcast when I had the chance.
So I picked up his book, and I started reading it. And I have to say, it has been a wild ride. Not only is it science fiction about a distant future, but not an extremely distant future. This, I think, is the hardest space to write in. It has to draw from things that are going on in today's day and age, and yet it has to inhabit a world that doesn't exist. From this conversation with Devon, you are about to hear more than just his books and some of his hot takes on x, but actually deep diving into the mind of people that think entirely differently than you and I.
I really found myself enthralled with the way that Devon can handle both having his perspective and the perspective of someone completely different. And I find myself being completely wrapped up in everything that we're talking about. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. As you're listening, you can look out and know that the holidays are far off, but not that far off. If you've been thinking about getting a legacy interview for your loved ones, you have a couple of options. One, we could try and do their legacy interview during the holidays. If they're around town or you know they're going to have a break from harvest, you can bring them to our studio and we can do this recording, giving them this amazing experience of having somebody be deeply interested in helping them recall the most important events in their lives and those wisdoms and bits of learning that they've had that they wanna pass on. Or you can give this as a gift at Christmas time. You'll be able to go to your parents and say, we have a wonderful gift for you. We think that you are going to enjoy talking about yourself, having an entire crew of people, making sure that we capture you, looking your best and sounding your best.
But the actually greatest part about this gift is not the experience for you, grandma and granddad. It's that your grandchildren are gonna get an opportunity to really know the stories that should be passed on. So if you're interested in having me sit down to record the stories of your loved ones, whether we do this over the holidays or as a Christmas gift, go to legacyinterviews.com and sign up to have a conversation with me about the stories you'd like to capture. Alright. Let's get back to this conversation with Devin. You know, you were talking about the metaphors that you use to describe the world. I I just read something recently about how basically that is how our mind works and that whatever metaphor you use to understand an idea, that it actually while the benefit is you, you know, you kinda get your arms wrapped around it, the downside is, until you have a new metaphor to replace it, it's almost impossible to change your ideas. And that the the author was arguing that most of thinking is metaphorical.
[00:06:47] Unknown:
How does that strike you? I would say that all of thinking is metaphorical. Okay. Because you're using a symbol to represent an object. When we speak of trees, the sound that is leaving my mouth and entering this microphone when I say the word tree has nothing to do with those objects growing out the window there. We just created this symbol object relationship, so that we could manipulate the symbol instead of the object, which is much easier than moving actual trees around to try to communicate what we're saying. So, in a certain sense, even the symbolic nature of language is a metaphor.
And so the nature of the symbols we use sort of has an influence over how we think about things. And so we can't think about things without making metaphor on some level. And when we first learn something, we have a metaphor we learn it through. But then, as this author you were referencing was saying, this makes it sometimes hard to break out of the initial metaphor. And so, you know, maybe we get a little more flexible in our thinking and able to have more realizations if we try looking at something with a different metaphor. So we have one or two or three things that we can alternate ways of looking, of understanding the same thing.
And you know, this is how brains work. This is how neural nets work. They make connections. They make physical connections that pass electrical impulses around. So, yeah, I don't know if you've heard this saying, 'neurons that fire together wire together.'
[00:08:45] Unknown:
No.
[00:08:47] Unknown:
Well, that's how we remember things. We remember them by association. So, like for example, if you smell something that can bring back memories of what you saw and heard the last time you smelled it. And when we learn things, it can be very difficult at first to recall them because they don't have these connections to the other virtual networks in your brain. So people who learn to remember things real well by making something like a memory palace, that's a visual metaphor where you take parts of this visualized space and you associate it with certain memories. So what they're doing is they're rewiring their brain so that memories which would be inaccessible become accessible because of those connections.
[00:09:47] Unknown:
You know, the memory palace thing has never been, a trick that I've been able to use. Do you use it?
[00:09:56] Unknown:
A little bit. I find that I mostly don't need to. My memory is very good, and hopefully, as I age, it will stay that way. At least for things that are important to me, my memory is good. Well, what that makes me think of is,
[00:10:09] Unknown:
my, my friends and I all have this, like, kind of mental test that we give to people. And it's not complicated. There's no way to get it right or wrong, but it's it's a way of understanding how do people how does this person think about things? And the question is, if I were gonna ask you to draw this room, how would you do it? From what vantage point would you imagine this room? First person perspective or from above, like a blueprint?
[00:10:37] Unknown:
Well, I think I think that would depend on what I was trying to do with the drawing. But if you if you just said draw the room, I would say that my first impulse when you said that was my brain started laying out sectors that were visible from my perspective, and started inventorying what was in them. So that I could, okay, there's what appears to be a crystal sculpture of some sort over there. There's a studio light over here. There's a mirror over there. It's all against this backdrop of these windows looking out over St. Louis. And some of the blinds are drawn and some are not. There's cameras here and there. So I started laying out the scene mechanically, but I was imagining it drawn from the perspective of where I'm sitting now.
[00:11:29] Unknown:
So my hypothesis, and I don't know if it's true, but Mhmm. People have one of two of these perspectives. Like, if you ask my wife who, like you, she's an engineer, she will immediately go to the above view. That's Yes. That's how she sees things. And my sense is that, these people are more in the world of logic, whether that's mathematics or engineering. You may be disproving this because you're an engineer. And the people that are first person perspective are experiential people. Right? They're the ones that are, like, I none of the walls will be two dimension in my in my drawing. They'll be all off. But the amount of fidelity of what all is on these walls will be way higher, typically, than the person that sees things from above. Well, consider this as a possibility.
[00:12:18] Unknown:
I am working on a series of books that is all written in first person present tense precisely because it's all about getting into the perspective and into the stream of consciousness of the characters that I'm writing from. So maybe in five years, if you ask me that question, I'll give a different answer. And maybe five years ago, I would have given a different answer. Well, I've noticed that about Theft of Fire. The the book that, I mean, you I don't know. When did you publish this book? This was, 11/11/2023,
[00:12:55] Unknown:
and we're just coming up on the sequel right now. So that that book is written from at least I'm 60% of the way through it. The the book is written from the perspective of the man that has his ship hijacked. Mhmm. And it is so clear to me. It is it is an incredibly interesting book, a fascinating book for for me because he is experiential and I am experiential. Right? Like, everything he's describing about the cargo holds and about the spin in order to be able to get gravity and the interaction he has with the other characters, it speaks so clearly to my way of interacting with the world that it is as though I am inhabiting him. I like, I don't I don't know that I've ever read a book quite
[00:13:38] Unknown:
in the first person perspective like this. Well, that's what I think one of the primary draws of fiction is, is you get to see and feel what it's like to be somebody else. And you don't have to write in the first person to do that, but always when we're reading a book, we're getting somebody else's experience. And, you know, that can be very close to ours if we're reading contemporary thrillers. Or we can go read science fiction or fantasy and we're we're pushed into a universe where we don't you have any experience of even the basic laws of physics, and we get to have this voyage of discovery.
But always we're getting this 'here's what it's like to be another person.' You know, one of the things I like to say is that the primary profession skill of a writer is empathy. And I always wince a little bit when I say that, because the word empathy has been very much misused
[00:14:52] Unknown:
lately. Oh dude. I got in one of the worst Twitter fights I have ever been in when I went out to x and said, empathy is not a virtue. Mhmm. People went fucking crazy on me over that one. Yeah. And it's because that word has been Yeah. So hijacked. Empathy is not a virtue, it's a skill.
[00:15:12] Unknown:
Feeling sorry for someone is not empathy, that is sympathy. That is feeling what they feel. Synpathy. Feeling the same. Empathy is understanding what people feel and how they think. It's understanding what's going on in their heads. One one piece of advice that I give sort of new writers who are trying to write more convincing villains, like, oh you've got a Saturday morning cartoon villain. Well, you don't empathize with your villain. You haven't come up with a bunch of reasons why he's doing what he's doing that sound reasonable in his own head. So go read Mein Kampf.
Go read Mein Kampf and understand Hitler's worldview, and then you will be able to write villains that seem reasonable to themselves and are not just caricatures of
[00:16:18] Unknown:
I want to do evil. Yeah. That's I mean, the the movie, The Social Network. Right? The one of the key things that Aaron Sorkin said when he was writing the dialogue for that was every character had to know that they were right. Yeah. And that they were not, like, hatching a plan
[00:16:35] Unknown:
to, you know, be evil. Yeah. They were just arguing from their point of view. That's one of the promises I made to myself when I started writing stories is I'm not going to write anyone who's just there to be wrong. What they're saying will always make sense from a certain point of view. And so, what I mean when I say the primary skill of a writer is empathy, is that when you're writing you have to empathize in two directions at the same time. You have to empathize with the character, so you can write his thoughts and actions realistically. So that he does what he would do instead of doing things so the plot can happen.
But at the same time, you have to empathize with the reader. To understand how the reader is going to experience this. What the reader knows, and what the reader does not know, and what they need explained and what they don't need explained, and how they're going to feel seeing this, and how what you're writing is going to hit them. And you can't alternate between the two, you have to do both at once. So if you can empathize with a hypothetical audience of people, a mass of them, and you can empathize with a fictional character who doesn't exist, and you can do these two things at the same time, then you might not be a good writer, but you can learn to be one because you have talent.
And so this this empathy is is really the essential skill of a writer. And so I want like, okay, I'm going to take these this audience and understand their mindset. I'm going to take this fictional character, I'm going to understand his mindset, and then I'm going to bring the audience in behind the eyes of the fictional character. Here's what it's like to be a twenty second century asteroid miner who has his ship hijacked by someone who won't tell him why.
[00:18:59] Unknown:
What what makes me think of is so, we talked about this before they started turning the cameras on. When I do legacy interviews, oftentimes, somebody will bring their mother in. Mhmm. You know, the frail mother, she's 80 years old and, you know, they say, well, I'll just sit in here with you, right, in the recording studio. And I learned years ago, don't let that happen. Because if a person is trying to tell their stories just to me Mhmm. They don't have to worry about what this person over here is thinking about the story that they're telling. The more people you have to empathize with at once, the more difficult it is. Yes. And and for most people, they just collapse in on themselves. They tell very thin stories in order to be able to, like, handle the the intellectual load that that requires. But I've never put words to that before. You've you've really nailed why
[00:19:50] Unknown:
that happens. Yeah. Every time we communicate with another human being, we need to have empathy or we're not going to be able to get what we want. Because we commune we want something when we talk to people. Even if it's abstract or ephemeral, we talk to other people because we want something. And in order to get whatever that something is from them, even if it's just a feeling of fellowship, we have to be able to imagine something about what's going on in their heads. We can't see them as just an automaton or a piece of furniture. So that means we have to create a model of that person in our head, and if we really want a model of that person, we have to create a model inside our model of that person, of their model of us.
And then inside that is their model of our model of their model. And it's turtles all the way down. It's infinite regression, but the point is how far can you keep that straight? And the further you can keep that straight, the more you can understand other people. And this is not quite like intelligence, because intelligence is, you know, intelligence is you get what you get. You can't make yourself smarter. But this is also partially a skill that can be learned.
[00:21:26] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, so I I read an insane amount when I was a little kid, and I think that, that probably did make me far better at communicating with people. And I think about when when I'm speaking on a stage and you have to find, like, how do I connect with this audience of people who is really different? Like, everybody in that audience is their own separate person, and it's trying to figure out the right blend because it's not well, I'll just find the mean of what everybody kind of thinks, like, then then you're mushy and you're nothing Yes. To anybody. And so you have to find a way to connect with people, but not by being nothing. Not by being Well, the mean is bland. The mean is elevator music.
[00:22:12] Unknown:
But there are common denominators that people are passionate about. And it's also not when you're speaking to an audience, it's not just about empathizing with them. It's about allowing them the opportunity to empathize with you. I find that when I'm speaking to audiences, when I'm talking to other writers at conventions, you know, when I was trying to pick up women. Sometimes the most appealing thing is just to be passionate about something. That you can let them into your worldview of why you are so passionate about this, and then they get to experience the world through your eyes.
And they get to feel what it feels like to be passionate about something, even if they don't particularly care about, say, science fiction or whatever it is you're talking about, they get to take a little tourist journey through your worldview, and that can be very interesting. It is very interesting because everybody is interested in people. Everybody.
[00:23:28] Unknown:
I the you're really, nailing something here for me. I mean, like, in in my experience so when I was younger, I was always on the search for people that could, talk about the the crazy thing that I wanted to talk about, whatever it was. And I would just run over people, you know, like, if you didn't wanna talk about I would say Bitcoin now. But even before that, when I was much younger. Trends. Yeah. Whatever whatever it was. Right? Like, I am just going to talk about this thing until I, you know, until you you force me to stop. Uh-huh. And, now I don't have that. Because now I've built up a group of friends that I can talk about with these ideas. I have a podcast. I have, you know, speeches that I get to go go do. And so, it's my world is very different than it used to be, but I remember that the only reason I think people let me bowl them over with what I wanted to talk about was because I was passionate about anything.
And most people, maybe they are, but getting in touch with that passion is very hard. They don't encounter very many people that are passionate about things. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes
[00:24:35] Unknown:
sometimes you can you can make something you care about very compelling. And I think we've all had that experience of meeting someone who is very, very passionate about something that's not really our thing or our hobby at all and we've never considered it, And he starts to talk about it and you find yourself asking a few clarifying questions, and it's interesting. And, you know, it doesn't change your life in the sense that, you know, now I'm interested in going and rebuilding old car engines. But it's like, now I understand what it feels like to be someone who's fascinated by repairing old car engines.
It doesn't change what I care about in my daily life, but now a broader segment of humanity makes sense to me. And that is what I enjoy doing when I write science fiction. You know, I'm working right now on my second novel. I just started out as a novelist. And
[00:25:54] Unknown:
there's Is it the sequel to Theft of Fire? The sequel to Theft of Fire. Okay.
[00:25:59] Unknown:
And there's this other sort of main character, starts out as kind of an antagonist in Theft of Fire, Miranda. He's she's this Don't tell me you're gonna you're no. No. This is not spoilers.
[00:26:11] Unknown:
Well, now I know she doesn't die.
[00:26:16] Unknown:
Well, you knew that already. And she's this heavily genetically modified sort of post human. And I was like, okay, in the sequel I was like, okay, I want to make her a point of view character. And it's like, now I have to get so far inside the female mindset that I can write convincingly what it feels like to be a woman, so that I can write convincingly what it feels like to be this woman. And it's like, I thought I understood women fairly well because I was always good at talking them into going to bed with me. But it was like I had to, I had to delve into a whole new level.
And I spent like four or five months just writing stuff and throwing it away, and writing stuff and throwing it away, and reading stuff written by women, and reading stuff, you know, written about women, and reading stuff that female readers particularly loved, and talking to people who like to read that. And finally, there was this sort of click moment where I felt like I had the voice right. And it was like, now I can take all this work that I did, and I can give that to readers, and I can have male readers understanding what women's internal landscape feels like, and female readers reading that, and then reading Marcus' parts, and understanding what the male internal landscape feels like.
Because a lot of the themes of this book and the entire series are about relationships between men and women.
[00:28:15] Unknown:
I mean, your arguments between the two characters Uh-huh. Is so on point that I'm like like, you really know how this goes. Like, that is like the inner workings of marriage or something. Right? Where where, you're you're fair to her, but you also, as a male, are sitting there being like, that is something a woman would say. Uh-huh. Like,
[00:28:38] Unknown:
it's Yeah. Well, this goes back to nobody is there to be wrong. Right. They both have a point. That's right.
[00:28:46] Unknown:
And, it's I I couldn't even begin to write from a a woman's perspective in a way that they would be that they would be like, yeah. That's me. That's how I think. I could maybe articulate what they think about things. Right? But, like, to take it that step further and and and be as though you are representing the ideas from their own mind, that's a whole another level. Yeah. Well, when you are a science fiction writer, or if you are a fantasy writer,
[00:29:14] Unknown:
write what you know just kind of falls down. You can't do it. Because you have to write what doesn't exist, otherwise it's not science fiction. You know, I have to write what it's like to live in the twenty second century and have a cybernetic eye, and then I have to write what it's like to be post human, and then I have to write what it's like to be a prototype artificial intelligence. And, you know, no one has had those experiences. You have to extrapolate. But the exercise of extrapolating is a worthy one.
[00:29:48] Unknown:
Yeah. I agree. I think, it it it makes me want to try and find a way to talk about so you on x, you put things out there in reaction to other people. Are you thinking about empathy in the same way when you're writing this up? When you're talking about it? Oh, yes.
[00:30:06] Unknown:
It's it's understanding what other people are thinking and feeling. And that doesn't necessarily mean being more compassionate or more sympathetic to them. Yeah. Because I think that there are a number of people physically in our nation who are very, very opposed to Western civilization, and they want to tear it down, and we must defeat these people. And if we have to hurt them to defeat them, then that's what we have to do. So feeling sympathy for them, feeling compassion for them is bad, especially if they're doing what they do and taking advantage of that compassion. But at the same time, you have to feel you have to have empathy.
You have to have an understanding of their mindset.
[00:31:08] Unknown:
So I wanna make this real for people that are not familiar with your work. I was just working out maybe yesterday morning and read your tweet about the guy who was not afraid that he was having a sniper, Yeah. Red dot put on him. Kind of lay that out. What what did you encounter and then how did you respond to that? Well, this is what I was talking about is this is this is the criminal thug mindset.
[00:31:32] Unknown:
So somebody said, you know, oh, his heart must have dropped when he saw that.
[00:31:39] Unknown:
And I'm like, no. When he saw a laser dot on him, because he's chasing this guy, the guy responds, hey, man. That red dot on you is the sniper right up there. And the guy's like, I don't give a fuck. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And he said and somebody comments saying, this guy's heart must have dropped. No.
[00:31:56] Unknown:
No. That is not how criminal underclass thugs work. You see, you and I think of toughness as willing as ability to endure hardship and commit violence. Right? You would think of like a Marine Scout sniper, or a green beret, or you know one of the unit guys. You know, where they're very, very, very capable of enduring great hardship and enacting violence swiftly to accomplish a goal. So thugs do exist in a society of civilized people and they don't see toughness that way. They see toughness entirely as ruthlessness. They are proud not of their ability to commit violence, but their willingness to commit violence.
Because the only they don't they don't understand any of these civilized impulses where someone doesn't want to commit violence on principle. They think if you're not willing to commit violence, you must be afraid. So if I am willing to punch you in the face for looking at my girlfriend a fraction of a second longer than I'm comfortable with, then I am brave and you are a coward. So when they confront someone who is a civilized person, they are not afraid at all because they have this headspace where they say, oh this guy is a pussy, he'll never pull that trigger.
There is no possibility that I am going to get hurt. And that's why the moment they push a civilized person too far and somebody does wreck their shit,
[00:33:59] Unknown:
they immediately turn into sniveling cowards. This is what happened with that kid that shot him when he was being chased, back during the riots. I can't remember his name. You're you're thinking of Kyle Rittenhouse. Kyle Rittenhouse. And all those people being like, I can't believe he shot him. And you're like, he waited as long as he possibly could to shoot you. That's the thing is, is those were a bunch of underclass
[00:34:22] Unknown:
thugs scum. And they thought, you know, oh, you know, we inflict the suffering and you endure it because you are a coward. And then suddenly somebody gets his bicep vaporized by a rifle shot. And it's not just that he is being fought against, it's not just that he is injured, it's that his whole world view has been turned upside down. Wow. It's his the thing that gave him this mental illusion of his invulnerability, this idea of no one is willing to strike at me, has just been upended. So this is something I reference when I teach people how to use firearms, you know, how to act in self defense, is that because you are civilized, you are reluctant to do this.
And if you just examine your scruples in the moment, you will wait too long. What you have to do is decide in advance when you will fight. You know, you can't wait to to consider this philosophical question when you're lying on the sidewalk with your head smashed in. It's too late. You have to think in advance, you know, when will I resort to violence? And one of the things I advise people when they're drawing or pointing a firearm in self defense is if someone walks toward you when you have a drawn firearm, They have violent intent towards you.
They are trying to neutralize that firearm so they can do something to you. They're trying to get an arm's reach so they can grab it, so they can push it away, whatever. What you need to do is you stand where you are. You don't back up. Because if you back up you're signaling that you're not willing to fight. And you draw a mental line in your imagination on the sidewalk or whatever. Okay. This is this is close enough. And you decide in advance if this person crosses that line, I will shoot him. I will use whatever tools of violence I have at my disposal because now I am being attacked.
[00:36:55] Unknown:
The Charlie Kirk thing Mhmm. Really has thrown our nation for a loop because at least the civilized people have been like, hey, the civilized thing to do is to always be willing to talk. Mhmm. Right? Always. You know, just we can always come back. We can always talk about things. Mhmm. And now they shot the guy that was perfectly willing to talk. Mhmm. And so the answer is likely not, let's just go go commit random acts of violence. Mhmm. It does not appear, I don't think people feel like we're getting justice out there from the the thug underworld that you're talking about, and talking doesn't work. How how do you think we should or will or I don't even know that what's the response?
[00:37:41] Unknown:
Well, the big upset there was not was not Charlie Kirk being shot, because I think everybody knows that the Left has its crazies that have really, really, really bought into the propaganda, and they sincerely believe that somebody who gets on a stage and talks, that that is equivalent to genociding them or whatever. Because they've they've bought the hyperbolic rhetoric as literal. We all knew those people existed.
[00:38:18] Unknown:
I don't think I did. I don't I don't think I really re I I think I was horrified by this. I I was I will admit naivety. I did not really think that. Okay. Well,
[00:38:28] Unknown:
then I will say that a lot of us knew those people existed. But what a lot of people didn't realize is that the moderate left will cheer for these people. You know, it's not, you know, it's not people being surprised that someone is out there who's willing to shoot them for, you know, because Charlie Kirk was a moderate conservative. You know, if They had no idea. If they're willing to shoot him for his opinions, then, you know, wait till they meet me. You know, I shoot back. It's not that there was someone out there who is willing to shoot moderate conservatives for being moderate conservatives and for being effective voices for moderate conservativism.
It's that the so called moderate left will cheer for those people, will egg them on, will encourage them, will celebrate when it happens. And so the realization has to be that civilized behavior is not how you deal with everyone. You cannot deal with an uncivilized person in a civilized way. You know, civilized people, we have conversations, we use our words, and that either resolves our differences or just makes us understand each other, and we feel as if something has been accomplished. Well, most of the world isn't like that. Most of the world is separated into this is your tribe, this is my tribe, this is your ideology, this is my ideology, and if you don't share my tribe and my ideology and my religion and whatever it is, I'm going to do anything I can to hurt you.
So I'll argue with you and try to appeal to your sympathy and mimic the behavior of a civilized person, if I am weak and you are strong. But the moment I have an opportunity to physically hurt you, I will. And we need to understand not only that these people exist, but that these people, when they're near us, they spend most of their time pretending to be civilized. You know, this guy who walks up and says, you know, get off the street, stop filming us, He's appealing to our mercy not to hurt him. He's saying, you know, you won't hurt me because you're civilized, but the moment I have an opportunity to, I will hurt you.
So the off ramp from this, you know, there are a bunch of off ramps from this, and the simplest one, the soft option, is the Trump administration. You know, a lot of the left doesn't understand that Trump isn't the right's last chance. He's the left's last chance. Wow. He is the soft option. He is, we do this all according to the rule of law with government power.
[00:42:13] Unknown:
It's just it's shattering of my mind, but you're right. As soon as you say it, I'm like, I think that's because Yeah. Like I said earlier, people that think that Trump is, like, an extreme right winger have no idea what extreme right wing is. Trump is an eighties Democrat. Yeah.
[00:42:33] Unknown:
Trump is is basically a reskinned version of, you know, John Kennedy.
[00:42:42] Unknown:
Same political positions. The policies are not that different than Bill Clinton. Yeah. Yeah. Same political possessions. So what's next after Trump? If if the left doesn't understand it after Trump, what comes next? Well, what comes next is a gradual descent
[00:42:59] Unknown:
into more and more Balkanization and civil strife. And, you know, people who are talking about a civil war, I think they don't fully appreciate the extent of the problem, because a civil war is when you have the North and the South that are in, you know, geographically different locations, and the South says, well, you know, we're tired of being economically disadvantaged. The Civil War was about tariffs. It had very little to do with slavery. It was the South was no longer confident that it would get a fair shake in Congress anymore. It was one of the largest economies in the world at that point and it was just being taken to the cleaners by the North using the legal process.
So they said, okay we're going to secede. And the North says you can't do that. And then you're in these geographically different locations and you draw battle lines between them and you have a fight. Civil conflict in twenty first century America doesn't look like that, Because it looks like a Rwandan machete party. Because you have people from both sides living at close quarters to each other. But it looks like a Rwandan machete party that grows very slowly. So what happens is not, oh one day all the fighting breaks out. It's gradually there's more and more Charlie Kirks, and then the Right decides, okay, we can no longer handicap ourselves by trying to limit ourselves to the individuals responsible.
We have to start targeting the Left as a group. Because, you know, ordinary people, they don't know where to find the guy who shot Charlie Kirk. They don't know where to find DeCarlos Brown. But they know which houses in their neighborhoods are flying rainbow flags. And the sort of the thread that the Left is hanging by at this point is the people on the Right are not willing to hold somebody flying a rainbow flag responsible for the death of Charlie Kirk, even if they have an ideological connection and they encouraged it and they celebrated it and they are partially responsible.
[00:46:02] Unknown:
I mean, I heard the other day, a good friend of mine, pretty pretty strong, I would say, I don't know, pacifist, but certainly a civilized guy Mhmm. Describes seeing the trans flag being flown inside of his office building and him being like, that's the flag of the people that killed Charlie Kirk. Mhmm. So what you were saying to me
[00:46:22] Unknown:
maps exactly to what is happening. Well, it starts with tearing those flags down. And then the tearing the flags down escalates into fist fights over tearing the flags down. And then it escalates into hitting each other with chairs and whatnot. And eventually, if you keep going down this road, and this takes years, is that those rifles start coming out of closets. And you see guys patrolling their you see young men patrolling their neighborhoods. Like, this is a Republican neighborhood. You don't look like you fit. Move on.
[00:47:03] Unknown:
Man, I saw this when I lived in Africa. I saw this. They they had vigilante groups because there were people getting robbed, and then the there were no police. So the local community paid these kids, you know, 18 year olds that were out of work, money to go, you know, go patrol. And eventually, those mobs, they they're sitting there. They see things in the dark. They they're getting riled up. They eventually go to a neighboring community, pull two people Yeah. That they said don't belong here, put tires on them, poured kerosene on them, lit them on fire, and killed them. Yeah. And that was when I realized, mobs, vigilante groups, that is the most powerful force on Earth. And once it begins, there's nothing that can stop it. It can only burn itself out. There's no there's no extinguishing that fire.
[00:47:47] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. And here in America, it's it's not just, like, groups of boys with AKs. It's It's groups of young men led by military vets who know exactly what they are about. You know, they if and there's no way to use the military to put a stop to that, not just because the military is vastly outnumbered. I mean, if American gun owners were considered as an army, they would outnumber every army on earth put together by like 10 to one. I forget the exact number, but it's something like that. It's ridiculous. You know, America is too big. You can't military occupy it. There's there's too much territory.
There's too many cities. There's too many communities. You can't do it. But not only can you not do that, you can't count on the military to not split into allegiance to one of these factions. You know, you have the left wing military guys, the right wing military guys, and they're supporting their faction instead of being a tool that you can use for peacekeeping. If the the sort of the sense of shared Americanness decays that much.
[00:49:07] Unknown:
I was watching that Pete Hegseth, you know, speech where he's like, I don't wanna see fat people out of shit people. Yep. To me, I've I've saw that and, it seemed to me to be a purge of we know who we don't want in here, and we are going to, we're going to tilt the military in a different direction. Am I reading that right?
[00:49:31] Unknown:
To to most of the right, the way that speech read is the military is not your hog
[00:49:39] Unknown:
box.
[00:49:41] Unknown:
It's not here for you to celebrate your identity. It's not here for you to be yourself. It's not here for you to have free college, or for you to have a jobs program, or for you to build your resume. You know, the military is for shooting people in the face. And if that line made you wince, then you have no business being in it. You know, the military is, if you imagine the nation as a person, you know, the military is the handgun he carries around under his coat. You know, it is for violence if we choose to do violence as a nation.
And that means that your only excuse for doing, for being in the military, your only excuse for serving, is that you are part of that preparedness to effectively commit violence. You know, it's not here for you to get hormone therapy, or dress up weird, or you know, whatever the hell else it is they're doing instead of being prepared to fight a war.
[00:51:08] Unknown:
When when I I have a good friend out of the West Coast, and we play this game. We don't play it very often, but every once in a while, we'll be like, what's going on in your news feed? Like, what do you and basically, it's a comparison of how is the news being presented to you among your, like, people. And, when he brought up the ice raids, I barely know about him. Like, I'll occasionally see something on x about it, but, you know, he was saying, like, basically, his entire feed is, people wearing masks and, you know, SWAT team outfits jumping out of vans and dragging innocent people away. And then this is, like, this is the most tyrannical thing that could be happening. And that everyone he knows perceives that ICE is just breaking down the doors of political enemies essentially and dragging them away. Mhmm.
[00:51:58] Unknown:
That's because they've constructed a group of thugs and parasites as being political prisoners, instead of thugs and parasites. So this goes back to what I said earlier. Most of the world is not civilized. Most of the world does not use their words unless they are at a disadvantage where they have to use their words, and then they're going to pretend to be someone that uses their words. And the only way to deal with uncivilized people is to be able to use uncivilized behavior yourself. Because they use violence, you have to use violence. You can't go up and talk to someone and say, 'I know you broke into my country illegally, you know, I know you are not welcome here, you came here anyway, but I'm going to sit down and talk to you and try to persuade you to leave. I'm going to use my words. You can't do that. They'll stab you.
So you have to be able to speak to your enemies in a language that they are compelled to understand. I think that people obviously, if I may just finish this. Obviously that's going to look like uncivilized behavior to people who are still assuming that we can always be civilized.
[00:53:42] Unknown:
Okay. I mean, that's okay. I think that's fair because my buddy, smart guy, I like him a lot, respect him. Mhmm. I think you're probably right, because what I was going to say to your point is, I think that they may say, yeah. The the guy that's here illegally may not want to leave, but he would sit down and tell you, look, I've got a family here, and I'm working a job, and I'm contributing. Why you wanna kick me out? Like and then you'd hear his point of view, and you'd start to relax, and then we could find some middle ground here.
[00:54:11] Unknown:
Well, there's no middle there's you don't negotiate a middle ground with somebody who breaks into your house. He has to leave. There's no middle ground. You know, the middle ground is you stay in your house and I stay in mine. The middle ground is you never came here in the first place. You know, and someone who says, okay, I'm going to go to this country. I'm not going to respect the rules that the people whose country it is have made for who is allowed in and who is not. Already this person has shown, I don't care about your point of view. I don't care how you feel.
I just care what I can get. That is the distinguishing feature of the uncivilized. They don't care how you feel unless you are a member of their tribe, unless you are their relative, unless you are part of what they see as themselves. So they will never deal fairly with you, and you cannot appeal to their sense of fairness because it only exists for their group. It doesn't exist for you.
[00:55:41] Unknown:
So this balkanization, we started to say Trump is the is the the last Yeah. He's the last soft off ramp. What happens, is there any off ramp? Like, are we headed towards Balkanization and and a sort of Rwandan civil war and it's inevitable?
[00:55:59] Unknown:
I don't think so. You don't think so? That's good. I really don't think so. Because if you think of the previous ten years, with all the manipulation of the media that is now being exposed, with all the redirection of government money through NGOs to propaganda outlets, you know, with all of this corruption, with all of these attempts to create the illusion of consensus, the best the Left was able to do is create the impression of a country split down the middle. The country is not split down the middle. You know, the people who are still on the left, and I'm not talking about liberals here, because Elon Musk is a liberal.
Joe Rogan is a liberal. Donald Trump is a liberal. You know, most of your old school classical liberals are now voting Republican. So the new Republican coalition, the Make America Great Again Guys, you know, that consists of both liberals and conservatives, and this is the majority of the country. You know, the modern hard Left who are still voting Democrat, you know, they're very powerful because they are entrenched in the bureaucratic institutions of our society. Having done a long march for seventy five years to capture these institutions.
You know, they wield a lot of power, but they do not represent a plurality or a majority or even a large percentage of the population. You know, they just look that way because they're loud.
[00:58:10] Unknown:
I mean, I I can totally see that. It doesn't take very many people that are radicals to kick off a thing. You know, they say there were only a thousand Bolsheviks. Right? The the Mhmm. But it does appear to me that the people that were cheering for the Charlie Kirk, murder Mhmm. Are pretty large in number. They're a lot more than a thousand.
[00:58:33] Unknown:
Well, there are millions, but there aren't 50,000,000.
[00:58:39] Unknown:
Okay.
[00:58:41] Unknown:
And what that means is that the opportunity here for a sitting administration is to treat these people as criminals because they are. Which means that you have to be aggressive, and you have to be focused. And that's what ICE is doing. You know, you can't you can't target people who are, you know, making fun of Donald Trump on The View or whatever. And they're not. You know, these ICE raids are about, okay, who's employing and sheltering people who are illegally in this country? We're going to go and round them up and deport them. And you know, you're seeing a lot of this stuff where these masked guys are, you know, on the streets and they're tossing people around.
But the thing to remember is that the people that they are tossing around are the people who are going out and standing in front of their trucks. And this gives the lie to the left's narrative about this, because it's like, wait a minute, you say that I'm a fascist with no humanity. And you're afraid for your life because I am a fascist with no humanity who is willing to murder you under color of authority. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna go stand in front of a 13 ton vehicle that I am at the wheel of and say, I'm not going to let you move.
They are they're doing exactly what you said. They're appealing to me. If you really if you really thought I was a fascist, you would be afraid to do that because if I really was uncivilized, I would just step on the throttle and you would vanish with a wet crunching sound. But the fact that you're willing to do that means that you know that these people, these federal agents, are actually civilized and are not willing to do that. And of course, that's what they do. They get out and they take these people and they grab them and they toss them to one side. And then, you know, these people, you know, they sort of writhe around on the ground like a soccer player trying to draw the penalty card.
Oh, I am hurt. I am hurt. This is political theater. This is political theater because if you really believed that you were dealing with merciless killers, you wouldn't act like this. They don't believe it themselves, so why should we believe
[01:01:47] Unknown:
it? It seemed like there was a lot of the institutions supporting not just liberal thinking, but leftist thinking. Mhmm. Why were they doing that? Were they trying to be kings of the ash heap? What do they want when they support this? They've been infiltrated.
[01:02:03] Unknown:
This is this is Marxism. And Marxism is is the philosophy of envy. You know, it's one command is 'thou shalt not be better than me.' They represent people who have merit, because in a capitalist society, merit gets rewarded. It's not the only thing that gets rewarded in a capitalist society. But the thing that capitalism has going for it is that merit does get rewarded. And they don't like that. They want everybody to be equal so that no one will be better than them. That's your that's your typical hard left voter. Your typical waving a flag, throwing Molotov cocktails, throwing rocks, you know, street soldier.
Also, you know, but see the thing is, is that on a political level, on a leadership level, envious mobs are highly exploitable. You know, it's a lot better on a personal, on a wealth level, on a power level, to be a state official in a communist society than in a capitalist society. Oh wow. Because in a capitalist society, it's like you got all this, you know, you've got to persuade people, and you've got to win an election, and it's got to be a fair election, and then you got term limits like eight years and you're out. And, you know, if you do insider trading they'll bust you and you're not allowed to take bribes.
Well, none of that exists in a socialist society, in a bureaucracy. You know, in a bureaucracy you get into your position, you're in for life. You have a better standard of living. You're not accountable at all. And ordinary people, you know, they kiss up to you because they're afraid of you. And it's like if you look at Soviet Russia, you don't really have to look past the past everybody's desktop at work. They've all got a picture of Lenin. You know, why did everybody have a picture of Lennon? Was that the policy? Well no, there was no policy. It's that if one guy puts a picture of Lennon on his desk, it's like why don't you have a picture of Lennon on your desk, comrade?
And that's how socialism is. That's what living with socialism is like.
[01:05:05] Unknown:
You know, Eric Hoffer's book, The True Believer, he has a very interesting point in there. There many. I I found that book to be fascinating. But one of the things he talks about is the people that join mass movements are not the poor. The poor are too busy just trying to make it. It's the middle class kid that doesn't think he's going to do better than his parents, that now decides better to burn it down or to shake that snow globe as as hard as you can because I might end up on top in that scenario. But if we just keep going in the ordinary way, I'm sliding backwards.
[01:05:42] Unknown:
I don't think when you talk about a 19 year old university student, you can really describe them as that calculating. You know, and if Marx described religion as the opiate on the masses, I think that Marxism is the opiate of the intellectual and the academic. And intellectuals are drawn to Marxism because an intellectual's job is, you know, an intellectual, as defined by Thomas Sowell, is someone whose work product is ideas. So when you are an intellectual, you come up with these ideas. How do you get them implemented? Well, if you're a free market sort of intellectual in a capitalist society, what you do is you write about your ideas.
And this starts a decades long conversation that everybody participates in. And you have to persuade all these people. And eventually, if you're really successful as an intellectual, you move the needle a little bit and you change people's minds and you see your ideas being supported by popular acclaim. But you are a raindrop in a storm. You are one of many voices saying this. But imagine if you're an intellectual and you don't have the patience for that. You start saying to yourself, oh, if only there were some big central power that controlled everything, and I could just go to this one place and say, I have a brilliant idea, oh, central power.
And the central power says, yes. Let us implement the idea immediately. And we don't need to consult with or persuade anybody else because we have guns and cattle prods, and they don't. And that is that is the appeal of centralized socialist governments to the intellectual. You know, communism has always been academia. Communism has always been the academic class. And even when it took the form of peasant revolutions, the peasants didn't care about theory. You know, the peasants didn't read Das Kapital. What they wanted was land reform. They wanted land distribution.
And the industrial workers in the cities, you know, they wanted wage controls. You know, they didn't care about theory either. So now the modern far left has reached sort of a crisis, because capitalism has created so much wealth that the working class is no longer interested. You know, your typical general building contractor in Wichita, Kansas doesn't want a communist revolution, he wants a union. You know, he wants capitalism with unions. He wants steady work and a good wage. So they had to turn to another source of support, and that's this criminal underclass of thugs and you know, the imported sweepings of the third world.
[01:09:54] Unknown:
Because the the working man wasn't gonna do it, so they had to The working man got a better deal from capitalism. You know, the the, I'm reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my daughter right now. And, one of the things I realized is there's things in that book that you don't I don't know if you've ever read it. I have. Long time ago. But, like, the family is literally starving. They they talk about, like, they're eating a half a potato a day. We don't have that here. Like, there's no one I mean, people argue with me about but if if in The United States you are hungry, you can get food. There's no, that's not even a question. Yeah. Our underclass is fat. Too many calories, not Yeah. Never gonna start with it. Yeah. Well, you know,
[01:10:42] Unknown:
the food they're eating isn't very healthy. And that's another discussion about, you know, feminism and the industrialization of food. But they're not starving, you know? And I think that the leftist sort of visions of the hungry and virtuous and industrious poor are mostly the product of old fiction. Because in the 1800s, you know, you could have a lot of perfectly psychologically functional people, who they don't have the connections to opportunities. They're poor. You know, nowadays that same person, they're not in poverty and starving. You know, maybe, you know, they're living in a trailer park, but, you know, maybe they're living in mobile homes and, you know, they have to look around and see people who have a lot more than them.
But they they don't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.
[01:11:56] Unknown:
As I'm saying this though, there's another voice in my head that talks about the extreme danger of inflation. That whatever whatever people have earned, if they have not converted that into an asset,
[01:12:10] Unknown:
the value of everything that they have is being sucked out of their money. Well, even if they have converted into it, it into an asset, because the assets are delineated in dollars.
[01:12:22] Unknown:
Right. So, to me, the off ramp that you describe about, well, maybe there are, you know, enough people that are liberal that are the center of the mass that, you know, you you'd be able to stop the leftist. I sense as more and more people feel life getting hopeless, that they will join these intellectual pursuits. Is that wrong?
[01:12:45] Unknown:
Well, it really kind of depends on, again, how the Trump administration and the Vance administration handle, if that's what we get, handle the next couple of years. Because, you know, we have an immigration crisis. You know, we have this the stuff that the Trump administration is trying to deal with now, the immigration and the infiltration of our institutions by leftists, you know, that's an existential crisis for the Republic. But then, if you manage to get that under control, you then have to deal with the next existential crisis, which is the federal budget.
And, you know, there's been sometimes a little bit of infighting on the right over which of these two crises is more urgent. And I think the Trump administration made the right choice, because until until you get the rats out of the storehouse, you can't possibly store up enough grain for the winter. They just keep eating it. But you but we do have to get the federal budget under control and stop printing money.
[01:14:17] Unknown:
Well, this is a subject I I wanna come back to. But the the the third subject that I hear people talking about a lot, college age men, for example, is the influence of Israel over US politics. Is this just a sideshow to all of this craziness that's going on in the world, or is this also an existential issue?
[01:14:41] Unknown:
Well, I really think that it it's a symptom rather than a disease. Because what you basically have going on when you have a nation that is so successful, and so large, and so powerful, and so wealthy, what happens is that you accumulate this store of value. You create a walled garden. You cultivate it. You fertilize it. You water it. Things grow. And so you start storing up value. And then what happens is some of the people outside the walled garden say, well, there's a lot of value over there. Let's see how we can get our hands on it.' And it's not just it's not just oh there's a lot of money. The value can be intangibles as well. The value can be, for example, the military power, which allows you to influence policy all over the globe.
The value can be technology. The value is lots of things. There's lots of value created by America. And so we can point at, you know, Israel or any number of different nations saying, look, you know, they are meddling in US politics. Well of course they are. Everyone is. Everyone is. You know, the only people who don't meddle in US politics are the ones who can't, who don't have the power. Because US politics has become the highest stakes game in the world with the biggest prizes. So what we have to do, if we wish to preserve the America that we love, that has been such a force for good in our lives and in the world, is we have to say no, America is not some sort of idea.
America is not the government of the world. America is not a special economic zone. America is not an all star team where we pull in the best and the brightest from 64 different cultures. America is a nation like any other nation, and its job is to take care of the people of that nation. And we reject any foreign influence. I don't know how much influence Israel in particular has, as opposed to say Russia or Ukraine or China. But I know that every nation with a stake in the on the world stage, is going to try to play US politics to their individual benefit rather than ours. And we have to put a stop to all of it.
[01:18:14] Unknown:
That seems like it's all order. In particular, as we were talking earlier about inflation. I mean, The US's inflation is the best in the world, and it sucks pretty bad. Yeah. Everybody else is a lot worse. You talk to Canadians, and I mean, things are burning hot and fast there. Things are not good there. Yeah. Well, you Canada's not even the worst of them at all. Yeah. Well, you get this problem where if you if you let people print money,
[01:18:41] Unknown:
the temptation to do so is irresistible. So, fixing the technology of exchange is something that, you know, there's no political fix for that. You need a technological fix. And we have it. Yeah, well we we have the beginnings of it. Bitcoin, as it currently exists, has a few technical aspects that prevent it from being ideal as a daily medium of exchange. Like what? Processing delays and its inability to scale as a medium of exchange. So, you know, you would bring the system down if you tried to if everyone in America tried to pay for their coffee with bitcoin. You know, we don't have the computing infrastructure to handle that.
And, you know, you have the problem that bitcoin in its current form is not quantum resistant. So when I talk about bitcoin in Theft of Fire, what I am imagining is some evolution of cryptocurrency that uses the name and the basic technological ideas. But I am assuming that one hundred years in the future, you know, some smart guys have refined itself. Certainly, Bitcoin will will I mean, that's you have, you know, nips that you add to where you're where you're adding on. You can Yeah. You know, the core is changing. Oh, yeah. I'm absolutely not arguing that these problems cannot be solved. They can and they will. They need to be. Right.
[01:20:41] Unknown:
And, do you see nations adopting Bitcoin in the next few years?
[01:20:47] Unknown:
Well, I think that El Salvador is already moving in that direction. And I I'm liking what I see from that that, atmosphere.
[01:20:58] Unknown:
Wild? I look at I look at El Salvador and, I mean, I can remember less than twenty years ago, my brother planning to go to El Salvador and me trying to talk with my dad, like, dad, this is like, I've been in Central America. That is not a good place. This is dangerous. Yeah. And they have brought their murder rate down real low, but at the expense of being I mean, are they just gathering up everybody? Are they putting non, you know, innocent people in in jail?
[01:21:27] Unknown:
What what you can do is I'm not a reporter with boots on the ground in El Salvador. But the problem of the problem of antisocial people was solved thousands of years ago by guys with names like Hammurabi, and it involved a tree and a rope. You know, the fact is that there's that when we look at these sorts of antisocial acts in our nations, it's not a large percentage of the people. It's not, you know, some guy had a bad day, and now he's on the top of a bell tower with a sniper rifle. That is not how this works. It is the people who don't care how other people feel.
There is a small percentage of humanity that is broken, and they don't act right. And they do it again and again and again and again. And every time on the news when we hear about somebody being stabbed in the neck on light rail, you know, it's never like, you know, oh this was a middle class white guy with a wife and two kids and no criminal record. No. You know, the the it's it's it's he had 14 prior convictions and now he's somehow out walking around, or he's been arrested 39 times, or, you know, he's committed three armed robberies in the past. But the perception, the metaphor that people are holding in their minds come from
[01:23:14] Unknown:
thousands of movies Mhmm. Where the the white cop that you meet is secretly in the Ku Klux Klan. Yeah. This is made by leftists in Hollywood. I mean, it's so wild. I don't there are so many movies. I mean, I barely watch movies anymore. It turns out it turns out
[01:23:30] Unknown:
that a small amount of the people are causing all the actual problems and you can just get rid of them. And there's absolutely no bad side effects. Things just get better for everybody but the psycho murderers. And this is this is why El Salvador is so successful and why everybody is crying about it, because the Left doesn't want us to realize how easy this problem is to fix. I mean, I think they would point at you and say: 'fascist.' Right? You want to be
[01:24:05] Unknown:
a dominator that doesn't
[01:24:08] Unknown:
give justice and mercy. They certainly would. They certainly would. And here's what I would say to that: If you if you tell people that everything they want is fascism, they will eventually conclude that fascism is everything they want.
[01:24:27] Unknown:
I remember I was at this, convention thing called the Battle of Ideas in in London. It was a bunch of academics, and they opened the panel with what is fascism, and those people would not give a definition. They wouldn't they they absolutely flat out refused. They were, well, you know, it's a lot of the but they were definitely wielding fascism
[01:24:46] Unknown:
at everyone. Yeah. Well, they don't they don't call you a fa they don't want to kill you because you're a fascist. They call you fascist because they wanna kill you. Yeah. It's it's their excuse, You know, and so it is it is a mask they will put over any exercise of government power. And if you agree that the government has any legitimate function at all, then, you know, this doesn't make sense. Because locking up criminals is what the government is supposed to do. And you see these videos out of El Salvador dragging these guys into prison. They've all got, you know, facial tattoos of gang symbols.
Like these people have deliberately and you know this is how gangs operate. They make you ostracize yourself from ordinary society so that you will be loyal to the criminal brotherhood. Yeah, because you can't go back once you have a spider on your neck. Yeah. Well, yeah. Once you have, you know, like the teardrop tattoos under your eye, everybody knows what that means. So you can't go back and join normal society. They're very, very concerned about loyalty because they don't want anybody to turn state's evidence. So, you know, they have deliberately removed themselves from society and become parasites.
And then you lock them up and the problem goes away.
[01:26:27] Unknown:
You know, you as you talk about this locking up, I've said this many time on the podcast that, I, live in graduate school. I live with this guy from Afghanistan. And he said, you know, the Americans have the story of of the Taliban all wrong. You guys think that the Taliban fought their way in here with guns. But what you don't know is that the villagers actually welcomed the Taliban in because the government was so corrupt. If you went to them for somebody raped your wife or your daughter, they wouldn't do anything. If you went to them with a property dispute, the regular government wouldn't do anything. You had to pay bribes. They were corrupt. The Taliban, although they were harsh, would come in and they would solve problems. And they were not unfair.
They were fair
[01:27:11] Unknown:
probably using Hammurabi's code. Well, you know, they're they're using, you know, Islamic codes. And that's what tends to happen when you have chaos, is that when you have chaos any source of order starts to look appealing. Even the sources of order that are tyrannical, such as, you know, actual fascism, or such as Islamic theocracy. Because in these kinds of very, very authoritarian civilizations, at least the rules are clear, and if you follow them you can expect to be okay. You know, the communist societies, you don't know what to do to be safe, because the orthodoxy of one moment is the heresy of the next moment that has to be purged.
So yes, people who people who have tasted chaos fear chaos. People who have tasted tyranny fear tyranny. And you know Afghanistan, what he's saying is we have tasted chaos and we prefer Islamic theocracy because that's the available alternative. So yeah, it's it's just another failure of this sort of idea of liberal hegemony, where very very arrogant both Republicans and Democrats thought that we could just export American democracy to the entire world in an unchanged format, and everybody would say, 'yay, thank you saviors!' And, you know, the rest of the world does not want liberal democracy.
It doesn't work for them. They're right not to want liberal democracy because in their society with, you know, their people and their land and their economic circumstances, it's not gonna work. They knew that.
[01:29:27] Unknown:
You know, it's I heard a guy talking not that long ago saying, you know, there's all this movement within The United States that we should expose ourselves to Eastern philosophy. Right? That we should know about Buddhism and that, you know, we should bring meditation. And he was saying, actually, I don't know that I agree with this. In fact, I don't think we should bring these, Eastern religions into our worldview because they don't map to our culture. And that actually there are some, I don't know who's using kind of, like, disease terms about this. Mhmm. How does that strike you?
[01:30:05] Unknown:
Well, it strikes me that, there are a lot of people who want to seek wisdom outside their culture. And, you know, the term Orientalism is sometimes applied to this. This idea that you have to go to another culture to find the secret wisdom that your culture doesn't have. Except we happen to be members of the culture that everybody wants to come here. Everybody wants to come here and get what we have. Sometimes destroying what we have in the process. But it's like they all want to come here. Nobody's clamoring to get let into the People's Republic Of China. Nobody's clamoring to be admitted to Pakistan.
You know, nobody is is trying to escape India and reach, you know, Uganda, or Nigeria, or Liberia. They want to come here. They want to come to England. They want to come to France. So, you know, you judge a tree by its fruit. And Western civilization, by even by the even according to its greatest critics, Western civilization is better. Now they wouldn't agree with that. They would say, oh no, Western civilization is horrible. And I'd say, you're here, aren't you? You're here, aren't you? You're dressed in a Western fashion, you know, you are participating in the Western lifestyle.
We are on a Western talk show talking about this stuff, You know, and you're saying, oh, Western civilization is bad? Well, your words say that you believe that, but your actions don't lie. They reveal your real beliefs. You know, you're not criticizing Western civilization because you actually think it's bad. You're criticizing it because that's your grift that you think will get you a bigger piece of it. You know, there is there are very few people who think that Western civilization is actually bad, and if they do, they're not creating problems for us because they're over there doing something else. You know, if you want to go be a part of, you know, a socialist society, there are socialist societies you can go to. If you want to be a hunter gatherer, go do that.
[01:33:04] Unknown:
Well, it seems like there are some like, Europe appears to be overrun by people that wanted the fruits of Europe. Mhmm. Are they too far gone? Are they is Europe going to be an African nation, an Islamic nation?
[01:33:19] Unknown:
I think it could go either way. The the the prediction, the the behavior of large populations is very difficult to predict. So, you know, if you're an actuary, you know, your job is to predict what happens to large populations like this many people are gonna get skin cancer. And treating that is gonna cost this much. And that's well I don't want to say it's easy to do, because it's a very hard job. You have to do a lot of math. But it's a tractable problem. Because if I get cancer, that doesn't make you get cancer. Those probabilities are independent, so they average out.
But if I become politically radicalized, and I talk to you, then you can become politically radicalized. So the odds of your behavior are dependent on what happens with my behavior and vice versa. So when you're looking at the social opinions and the political behavior of large groups of people, it becomes extremely unpredictable. And it can hinge on, you know, who comes up with that one shot killer meme? You know, where would we be if Donald Trump hadn't turned his head a little bit? You know, it's impossible to say, but we do know that things would be far different.
So, you know, I'm not going to play the game of this is what's going to happen.
[01:35:08] Unknown:
The only game you can play is this is these are some of the things that could happen. Alright. I wanna break in here for just a moment to talk about this class that I've developed that I think you might find valuable. If you enjoy the conversations that I have or you've heard about legacy interviews and you think, man, that would be a skill that I would love to have to be able to draw people out so that they would share their life stories, then you might wanna consider my interest based communications course. This is a course I developed for my business partner, Benjamin. When he left my company, he went out and raised millions of dollars in startup capital for a biotech firm. Then he hired these great scientists, and he said to me, Vance, I want these scientists to be able to talk persuasively, to introduce their ideas, to be able to deal with conflict in a much better way, and how to present their ideas so that other people wanna listen. Would you create the class that really was all of the information you taught me when we were working together? And so I did.
This class became something even bigger than I imagined. I have now delivered it for hedge funds and pharmaceutical companies, and it is truly becoming a versatile class. We've held it for salespeople. We've held it for communications teams, and we've even done it with people that are just saying, I wanna be better at speaking. I wanna feel more comfortable and confident knowing how to negotiate and how to get my ideas out. So if that sounds like you or you have an organization that you think you'd like to share this with, go to vancecrow.com and look up the IntraSpace communications course.
Then sign up on our contact form, and let's have a chat about what your goals are and how this class could help you reach those goals. Alright. Let's get back to the conversation with Devon Erickson. You mentioned a pairing of two ideas that I want to go back and explore. It was, feminism and industrialization. Of food. Yes. Of food. Yeah. Tell me about that. Okay. Well,
[01:37:10] Unknown:
so a lot of younger people, people your age and younger, they don't understand that we are living in an epidemic of metabolic syndrome and obesity. Everybody is sick. And they don't understand that because they look around them and they say fat people. And you know the problem isn't fat people, it's it's metabolic syndrome, but being fat is the visible symptom of that. And they say, well, okay, a certain number of people are just fat. You know, either they're genetically programmed to be fat or they are, you know, gluttonous and slothful, and they're fat, and this is normal.
Well, no. No. You talk to somebody who is 45, 50, and we have a different perspective. We remember a world where almost nobody was obese
[01:38:13] Unknown:
and relatively few people were fat. Yeah, we had one obese guy in my town. Everybody knew his name.
[01:38:19] Unknown:
Yeah, Yeah. And so it's not genetics, because the human genome didn't suddenly change. And it's not gluttony and sloth, because we didn't suddenly have a generation born for no reason at all that had weak character. This is something changed on a biological level, and that something is the food we ate. And this tracks pretty much perfectly with women leaving the home and joining the workforce. Now, I don't want to pontificate on whether that's a bad or a good thing. It has benefits and drawbacks and you could debate this all day.
That would be great fun. We don't have time. But one of the things it does is it moves you towards now you want your food ready to eat. Because you have families with a bunch of children and two working adults with full time jobs. And so now your food is not made from meat and vegetables that you bought up bought at the market, and you cut them up and you cook them on a stove. Now it's something wrapped in plastic, or that you ordered from DoorDash because, you know, you want to call a cab for your burrito, or whatever. And so the people who are making this food are large companies that can put all sorts of exotic things in it, which is, you know, it makes it easier to store.
It makes you buy more of it. It makes it easier to sell. And, you know, does it have long term health effects? Well yes, it does. You know what Crisco is? It's cottonseed oil. Why would you eat cottonseed oil? You don't eat cotton. That's not something that you're meant to eat. You know, seed oils, and there's there's a big debate over is this harmful. I don't care whether you whether I'm not interested in having a study that studies the effects of seed oils for ten years. That stuff is not food. That's what I'm talking about. That stuff is not food. We're eating things that are not food. What the hell is maltodextrin? And why are they putting it and stuff? Why are they putting high fructose corn syrup and everything?
You know, I don't know which pieces of this processed food make people fat and sick, but I know that in the 70s we stopped eating this stuff, and right on that same timeline,
[01:41:42] Unknown:
people started getting more and more fat and sick as time wore on. So I have I mean, I I certainly believe now that I'm raising three kids, both my wife and I have our own businesses, and inflation is running wild. So your time is being sucked away. Right? Yeah. It's very, very little time. Yeah. And so, definitely, the food choices that we make now versus the food choices we made when it was just me and my wife and we were working for somebody else are totally different. I track with the idea hyperpalatable food that is designed to make you wanna eat as much as possible, probably created with the low you know, in order to get the highest margins, you create the lowest quality. Well, but also not just hyperpalatable, but insulin resistance
[01:42:28] Unknown:
that spurs insulin resistance. And then you take out the fiber so that it is easy to freeze and store.
[01:42:38] Unknown:
But I would say that the, like, there are other things that I think we can tack on to this that are important part of it. So for example, you know, this was a brutal summer. Right? But you didn't know it was a brutal summer if you were working in an office that's 70 degrees, and your house is 70 degrees, and your car is 72 degrees. And I believe that humans eat really different when it's hot out. And now all of a sudden, we've created this climate control that is making it so it feels as though it is, you know, the middle of of of autumn all the time. Well, how old are you? I'm 45.
[01:43:16] Unknown:
Okay. Well, we had air conditioning in the eighties. I personally didn't have it because we were poor,
[01:43:23] Unknown:
but, you know, we had air conditioning in the eighties. Well, I mean, I'm the exact same boat. We it existed, but it didn't exist at my home. And, having lived in Africa, having lived on a ship and in Central America, like, the temperature that we experience has an impact on what we now, am I saying that's Do we have do we have fat people in Canada?
[01:43:47] Unknown:
Sure. Do we have fat people in Minnesota?
[01:43:49] Unknown:
Yeah. But those people have fat people in Washington? Yes. Of course. I mean, all these people use air conditioning. Right? He he most most houses in in some of the northern places don't have air conditioning because they don't need it. I I am not arguing on behalf of the industrial food system. Okay. No no one would do that. Right? They they would say, this is the system that we have, things need to change, And I know on a very deep level the things that need to change in farm policy to change that. Yeah. The but I'm saying, I believe it is more complicated than just the food. And that that there are huge components of the way that we are manipulating the world around us that are having, I would say, a
[01:44:34] Unknown:
comparable impact on this. That is one of the hazards of talking about these sort of society wide phenomenons, phenomena, is that when you try to focus on any one cause and say this is a problem, you always get a bunch of people saying but what about this over here? And it's like, okay, I can only talk about one thing at a time. You know, when you start to say, oh, let's let's look at, you know, 67 different elements of modern lifestyle. You know, maybe that's something you can do with a body of statistical research. But it creates a very convenient shelter for two attitudes.
First of all, it allows Coca Cola to point the finger at other people. You know, it allows them to say, oh look, we're going to invent a measurement called calories and we're going to pretend that all calories are the same. So, you know, if you consume 500 calories of Coca Cola, that's going to hit your body the same way as 500 calories of carrots, which of course is ridiculous. But it allows them to shift blame. You know, a calorie is only a calorie if you are a fire. Because, you know, that's how you measure calories. You burn it and you see how much heat it gives off. Well, your body is not a fire. Your body is a complex biological factory And it uses different raw materials and fuel sources differently.
So that allows the people who are responsible to dodge. And it also allows us to slip into this territory of being of saying, well, oh, it's the modern lifestyle as a whole.' To where we slip into this sort of weird Luddite territory, to where, you know, we propose a solution and nobody's going to accept it. You know, oh, you're fat? Well, you know, give up your air conditioning and go hunt antelope with a spear. Well, yes, that would fix the problem. Except it won't because nobody's gonna do it. If you have a solution and you don't have any idea how you get you how you're gonna get people to do it, you don't have a solution. You have half a solution.
So, you know, maybe people would be less fat if they gave up their air conditioning. But how about we just stop poisoning ourselves and see if that's enough?
[01:47:36] Unknown:
And when you when you are thinking about changes to the industrial system, are you thinking laws? Are you thinking education? What do you where would you go with this? Well, then the question becomes, okay, how do we implement this? Is what you're asking.
[01:47:51] Unknown:
Well, you know, the first thing is that, you know, I pointed the finger at feminism. You know, women wanting to work full time. And of course, that's sort of the third rail of politics, and nobody really wants to touch it. But what I'm focusing on here is not so much, oh this entire sociological thing, you know, inevitably leads to this, is that someone has to be cooking or we're going to be eating processed food. How we accomplish that is up in the air. But you can't become unhealthy eating the things that people ate for thousands of years and not being unhealthy.
You know, butter isn't bad for you Unless you're lactose intolerant because you come from a race of people who never ate dairy.
[01:48:58] Unknown:
Even then there's not that much lactose in getting butter. Yeah, people have been eating butter and cheese
[01:49:06] Unknown:
and red meat for thousands and thousands of years, and they were fine. So clearly that's not sufficient to be the problem. So if we if we ate, if we eat what we ate five hundred years ago,
[01:49:26] Unknown:
we would stop having this problem. So the the But I think the the do that? The the the like, I don't really think I was doing whataboutism. I think I was saying it's very easy to say, like, this is the thing, and then we go after it. I think if we compare how we ate five thousand years ago, what we did was we had, access to carbohydrates for about four months out of the year, and then those carbohydrates were gone. You know, maybe you could save some potatoes Mhmm. If if your country happened to have, you know, gotten them from Peru. And then you could eat, you know, certain parts of, meat for certain parts of the year, and then you would eat dried meat. I mean like, if we were rolling back to the We didn't start becoming obese
[01:50:13] Unknown:
when we had access to carbohydrates year round. We didn't start becoming obese when we had refrigeration. You know, the timeline doesn't line up. We started becoming obese in the late 70s and early 80s. And what this tracks with is not sugar availability, it's not refrigeration, it's not year round availability of carbohydrates, it's processed food. That's the one where the timeline lines up. So again, where I talk about the role of an intellectual is to start conversations, not finish them. So I'm saying, I'm not saying this is the culprit. I'm saying this is the most likely suspect.
Let's bring him in and interrogate him, and see if we can solve this crime. You know, if we stop eating the processed food and the problem is fixed, you know, that case closed.
[01:51:22] Unknown:
Yeah. I don't think we will get rid of processed food until we stop inflation. I think processed food is That is quite possible. And and women going into the workplace. So because of my legacy interviews, I have had a chance to talk with all these people that are right at the generation where either they were the last generation in their family to have the mom stay at home, or the first generation where mom started going into work. Yeah. And it's almost always as a supplemental income. It was all when they're starting out, it's like, I was there for the kids, and then once they were in grade school, I could go get insurance by working at the local bank or, you know, doing some other job.
But all of this being a function of, like, it tracks really closely with when we got off the gold standard Yeah. Is when we started getting overweight. It changed well, one of the things that created this change was a change in the economic landscape.
[01:52:15] Unknown:
You know, now it's how it's like now if you want to be a housewife and mother, you can't. Because that's a luxury. That is an economic luxury now that most people can't afford. Right. So yes, it's like you, you most people, when they're looking for the cause of something they're mad about, they ask why, and they ask why, and they ask why again, until they reach the thing they want to be mad about. Like you could ask why about the the food problems and the obesity epidemic until you get to feminism. And then if that's your bugbear, you stop there. You stop asking why and you say: oh that's the culprit.
But then you ask: okay, why did women want to join the workforce? What were the social and economic pressures, and where did those come from? And so, you know, then we look and it's pretty clear that something happened in the 1970s. And arguably, and I think this may have been where you were going, is we get off the gold standard, we start to be able to print money, and now we start inflating the currency. And now people need more income, so the wife starts to work, and then we're not making our own food, and we're not taking care of our own kids. And so they grow up screwed up, and everything's downstream from there. That's exactly right. And I would I would say,
[01:53:55] Unknown:
if if people calculated inflation the way we calculate taxes, then all of a sudden, we would realize that we are not in the, democratic state that we believe we are in, or we're we're in something else entirely for how we how we fund things. Yeah. And we would say, it's not that we got off the gold standards, that we changed our entire political system in the nineteen seventies. And fifty years later, we have people that are, you know, morbidly obese and have metabolic disorders and Yeah. These problems because we stole their time through our new our new government
[01:54:35] Unknown:
system. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, inflation, you know, there's a lot of libertarians running around saying taxation is theft. And it's like, okay, you have an argument for that. You're not entirely wrong, but you're focusing on one thing, and let's hear a little bit more about how inflation is theft. Because there's arguably, and this is something that Nayib Bukele has some very good speeches on, you know, you are not paying taxes in order to fund the government. You are paying taxes to hide the fact that the government is funded by the money printer. And that sucks the value out of everyone's savings.
And so we have more and more units of currency than ever before, But we get less and less for it, and we have to work harder and harder. And the federal budget gets more and more bloated, which all is going into somebody's pocket. So it goes back to this metaphor that I create of you create a walled garden and you create value and there's a big storehouse of grain and pretty soon the rats come along. Well, what you need when you have this society and you have these granaries and you have these storage of this storage of abstract value, is you need cats. You know, cats enabled the agricultural revolution.
Cats enabled civilization because they eat mice and rats. And the problem you know, one of the base problems we have in Western civilization right now is that the rats have banded together to convince everybody that the cats are fascists.
[01:56:56] Unknown:
Yeah.
[01:56:58] Unknown:
Yeah. That's right. So if you wonder why my Twitter profile picture is a cat.
[01:57:04] Unknown:
That's awesome. I love that. I, you know, I've talked a lot about agriculture. I've never thought about the empowerment of cats as far as particularly grain societies, anybody that was doing store housing. Yeah, we've got pesticides now and we keep cats around because we think they're cute and funny.
[01:57:20] Unknown:
But we needed cats for thousands of years.
[01:57:25] Unknown:
So a growing battle we talked about a lot of different groups that are that are kind of in conflict, and the one that, is definitely growing is the anti boomerism. Mhmm. It's, you know, it's this, like, hey, these boomers, they started off on third base, you know, bought a house for $80,000 and now wouldn't give it up for 1,500,000.0, and then they wonder why our wives have to work and we put our kids in daycare. Yeah. How does this play out?
[01:57:53] Unknown:
Well, I think I think a lot of people are just a little bit confused about why younger generations are mad at boomers. It's not and boomers themselves are confused about this. They're like, you're mad at me because I have more than you do. No. No. You know, they're mad at boomers because the boomers don't understand their situation. The boomers have a tendency to believe that the country is the same as it was forty years ago, fifty years ago. And to advocate solutions that were relevant fifty years ago, and to lack empathy and sympathy for the different situation that their grandchildren are in, and most of all to vote in ways that exacerbate the problem.
So I think, you know, we a lot of people will say, oh look at this vast portion of the wealth that boomers have, and they're not leaving any of it to their kids. Well, that's one way of describing it. But really, what they're angry about is this phrase, out of touch. It's like, you don't understand what life is like for your children and your children's children. And it's very hard to get you to understand that because you can't be told anything.
[01:59:43] Unknown:
You know, you ever had you ever had met someone who just can't be told something? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the most grating things. Right? Yeah. If if you're talking to somebody that will not change no matter what happens, it's the same as talking to a wall. There's no point in it.
[01:59:59] Unknown:
Yeah. So, you know, and generally boomers get very upset when you talk about this because they feel like they're all being tarred with the same brush. And you know, obviously nothing that's true of a generation is true of a 100% of that generation. But we have to speak in generalities because if you don't speak in generalities you can't say anything. Right. And you are speaking in generalities is sort of a rhetorical weapon that is used to silence things people don't want to hear. So it's not like every boomer is 100% out of touch and has no idea what has happened they they don't have an attitude of sort of emptying their cup and listening when someone younger than them says, this is what it's like for us.
[02:01:06] Unknown:
Yeah. I think you're, you know, I I get to meet a lot of boomers and so this is not a knock on them. Mhmm. But the experience that I've had is when you try and talk with a boomer about, like, okay, your stock is $1,500,000. Yeah. Who has the money to buy that from you Yeah. When you want to go to cash out? How is how is a couple?
[02:01:35] Unknown:
You know, you were raised, you know, you were three years old running around this house, right? Like, now this house costs $2,000,000 How is anybody who's, you know, they're 27 years old, the wife's pregnant, how are they going to buy that house? How is the next three year old going to run around in this house?
[02:02:05] Unknown:
The number of hours that it costs you to buy that house, number of hours of work versus the number of hours of work that this other people are, it's not that they're lazy. It's it's that they're the value of their hours has been stolen from them. Yeah. And that's
[02:02:20] Unknown:
that you've mentioned this idea of time several times, and this makes me think about a conversation that we were having, I think before we started recording. But you we were talking about looking at things through different metaphors.
[02:02:37] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[02:02:38] Unknown:
You know, I get on Twitter and I see something and I think, oh, do I have a different lens to look at this through?' So one of the things that I like to say is money is a value of fucks is a measure of fucks given. And that's one way to look at money. That's one way to look at value, you know? Somebody gives you money because they give a fuck about something you do. You give money to somebody else so that they will give a fuck about something you want. You created art and somebody gave enough fucks that they would give you that. Exactly. And that's one way to look at money. But what I hear you suggesting is, okay, here's another metaphor that we can also use to talk about money, and that is time.
Because we can envision everyone being born with a certain amount of time. We don't know how much, but at some point they're gonna die. So you you only have x amount of time, and there right now there isn't any way to spend money and get more. You know, maybe Brian Johnson's gonna come up with something cool. I certainly hope he is. But right now you can't buy more life. And since most people, not everybody, but most people have to trade their time for money, they only have so much time that they can trade for money. So if you were to calculate, okay, what is like every every moment in someone's life that they could conceivably work?
And you multiply this by what kind of wage they can realistically expect, that is the maximum amount of money that they can have in their lives. But this also means that you can convert the price of everything into hours. And when the price of certain things like housing becomes like, okay, this little maneuver is going to cost you twenty years of your life, well then a 20 year old can't have that thing. A 25 year old can't have something that it costs twenty years to earn because you would have had to start when you're five.
[02:05:05] Unknown:
One of my good good friends, Kate, was, we were in a group chat, and we had decided back in the spring, hey. This thing is gonna cost $500, and we're gonna pay it in Bitcoin. So she went out to the market and bought $500 worth of Bitcoin. And then when it was time to make the payment, we all said, alright. This is the strike date. And it was just a couple days ago. Right? And so she already had more Bitcoin than what $500 would be worth now. And so she started to calculate, well, if you made $50 an hour, which would be an excellent wage. Right? Mhmm. She just through holding that Bitcoin from spring until, this time, there was there was, I think it was a $100 difference. I mean, it wasn't a huge amount. Yeah. But it and and now she was like, that's two hours worth of time that I earned just by owning that asset. Yeah. And this to me Yeah. Is, like, wildly amazing that you, you know, that is what you hope with an asset is that it's it that by owning it and not utilizing its purchasing power now, not not taking Yeah. The, the high time preference idea and wanting the whatever it is that you want right now,
[02:06:18] Unknown:
that you can buy something and have it create more time. Yeah. Well, if you do something that people give a fuck about and you delay getting paid, It's sort of an IOU from society, except of course if you have inflation and people start draining the value out of those IOUs. But, you know, this is actually something that comes up in some of those conversations in Theft of Fire that you were talking about, is that there's a part where he's talking to Leila and he says, you know, people trade their time for money, but you can't get rich doing that because you can't buy more time to sell. So you have to own something that can scale and your time doesn't scale.
You have to own something that earns, except we have to realize that not everybody can play that game. Somebody has to sweep the floor, and somebody has to cook the food, and somebody has to build the houses, and those people are selling their time. So those of us who make it out of the selling your time game, whether it's by buying bitcoin, or you know starting a company that makes widgets, or starting a company that makes rockets, you know, whatever. We have to those people have to keep in mind that the game can't be too rigged against the people who sell their time.
That the time can't be too cheap. That we can't import a bunch of third world indentured servants to replace everybody and pay less wages, because the people who sell their time, we need them to make things. Right. And we need them to survive. And the third world hordes cannot replace them because if they could, the third world wouldn't be the third world. So you can only prosper for so long unless some of that prosperity makes it off Wall Street to Main Street.
[02:08:48] Unknown:
Yeah. This is I mean, you're we'll get back. I wanna return to theft of fire. Uh-huh. But for like, this is why with, people that do babysitting for me or other work for me, I will always sit down with them and be like, let me show you Bitcoin. Hey, would you mind if, like, if it's just extra hours, can I pay you in Bitcoin? Because it's it's a way for them to finally have time on their side.
[02:09:13] Unknown:
And, if you don't do this It is a way to to educate them because that is that is really a lot of what is missing. You know, I grew up very poor with parents who were not very, sort of, financially savvy. And my father was an engineer, he worked at JPL, but he didn't really know how to manage money. He came from poverty, so he was always about saving rather than about investing. And so it took me until very late in life that I realized if I had a lot of money in the bank, I was robbing myself. And I very much wish that there had been somebody who could sit me down when I was 13 years old and say: here's what you do with the money you have.
You know, it's it's not just, oh, go to college and go to get a good job. It's once you have one, here's what you do so you can actually retire later and enjoy yourself. You know,
[02:10:20] Unknown:
I've had a chance to interview a few of the people that are at, like, the point o o o 1% of Mhmm. Society. Like, they have that much money. And, the book that they all recommend, all of them, 100% of them. Yeah. Do you know what it is? I do not. Rich Dad Poor Dad. Uh-huh. All of them. Have you ever read that book? I've read some pieces of them. It's I mean, the guy, just really simplifies. He gives you a metaphor. Yeah. Poor dad says, hey, you gotta work in your job, but get a comfortable job, and put that money into a savings account. Yeah. Rich dad says, you make money, you work hard, but as soon as you can, you need to buy things that will produce money for you. Yeah. And that anytime you buy something that is not an income producing asset.
[02:11:02] Unknown:
And I I think one of the big pieces there is the most terrible thing you can do to a child is make them risk averse. Mhmm. Mhmm. Because the reason that investments make money is that they carry risk. They are payment to incentivize the risk. So a lot of parents raise their children thinking, oh, the most responsible thing I can do is teach them to be responsible and safe and not take risks. But if you don't take risks, you don't get rewards.
[02:11:45] Unknown:
Yeah. All you can do is keep things going linear at best Mhmm. And you'll never get that growth. So Yeah. This is a a perfect, jumping off point. I normally hate when fiction writers talk about economics. Mhmm. Normally, it makes me so angry that I'm like, I wish I didn't know that this is what you think. Uh-huh. I love Theft of Fire. Like, your economics so far, I'm 60% in. Right? Is that So you've heard most of the arguments between Marcus and Miranda about different financial perspectives. They got into the different
[02:12:20] Unknown:
situations there. And you're you're past the chapter entitled half. Yes. Okay. Okay. I don't wanna spoil anything for you. So it's it's,
[02:12:29] Unknown:
I think that that's a mark of, of this being such an excellent book because you're talking about things that cannot be known in the future, this science fiction. But the undergirding is not just the physics that you appear to know so well about, how many rotations you have to do to create this gravity, but also economic realities that are not going to change whether we are flying past Neptune or we're just here grounded on Earth. Yeah. Where's your economic background coming from?
[02:13:02] Unknown:
Lots of reading. Slowly learning how to invest and trying to make up for all the all the ignorance of my youth, obviously. I'm not very young anymore, but I do what I can. And again, it comes back to this idea of empathy. So both Marcus and Miranda, you know, they live in what could very much be described as a post governmental society. And, you know, obviously there are rules that come from various entities, like, okay, you own this station, you're gonna make some rules. But they, so there's elements in orbital society that fill the role of government, but not in the same way that modern governments do.
So you have an argument about economics between two anarcho capitalists, but they consider themselves to be on opposite ends of a political spectrum, of an economic spectrum, because their spectrum is different than ours. Now, if you suggested an income tax, Marcus would push you out the airlock. And if you suggested an income tax to Miranda, she would ask Marcus to push you out the airlock. So they're both very, very hard right from our modern perspective. But one of the sort of insights that I developed writing this was that they're not going to have that modern perspective. They're going to have their own political spectrum.
So Miranda is existing in this universe with the perspective of being raised by a family of venture capitalists. And Marcus is going to approach this sort of economic spectrum with the standpoint of someone who was a worker and just trying to start a business, and it didn't turn out too well.
[02:15:27] Unknown:
Well, it's to me, Marcus maps precisely to the American farmer. Mhmm. They get this business from their family Yeah. In order to be able to keep up with the the rate that everybody else is. They have to take on huge risk by taking out loans. And then if that doesn't pay off Yeah. They they don't go from, like, oh, well, we'll just pack it up or we'll try again. You're like, no. You've lost everything. Yeah. You don't have a you don't have something to invest to try again.
[02:15:58] Unknown:
Yeah. And and I hadn't thought about farmers specifically. Oh, man. It's so on land. I was actually thinking about crab fishermen.
[02:16:07] Unknown:
Okay.
[02:16:08] Unknown:
Where you own this boat that cost a million dollars, but it's financed to the hilt. And you're working very, very hard to make a middle class lifestyle, you know, despite having all these sort of tangible business assets. And the eco what they're arguing a lot of it is the specific economics of these Starlight Corporation fusion drives, to where the availability of them is so restricted and you have to lease them, you can't buy them, and what the effect this has on the people who have to use them for work. And, you know, I won't spoil anything, but I will tell you we're gonna find out more about how that technology works,
[02:17:01] Unknown:
and a lot more things are gonna make sense. Well, I'm I'm looking forward to it because the Starlight Drive is the modern American, combine in The United States. And, like, everything we were talking about before about boomers, where you have these boomers be like, well, we didn't need the air conditioning and the, you know, slow ride, the bench on there. And the meanwhile, their kid that's buying this giant combine is like, yeah. But I now have to farm 3,000 acres Yeah. In order to be able to make enough money. Yeah. And by the way, if I pop a tire, it's going to cost me a quarter of an acre of all of the work that I did that I just have to give away in order to get that fixed. Mhmm. Too many things go wrong. Yeah. And now I'm paying you to farm, not me getting paid to farm. Yeah. Yeah. So I think your Starlight drive is excellent. You guys just got, the audio version. You guys are about ready to release the there's gonna be an audio version of the We are,
[02:18:01] Unknown:
we well, this has taken us about a year because I had to fire two sound engineers. And we have had we sort of we we sort of had to we had to teach ourselves first how to be a publishing house, and then we had to teach ourselves how to be an audiobook studio. And you know most self published authors, when they go to have an audiobook, they're like, okay I'm gonna find a guy who does audiobooks, I'm gonna hand him my book, and he's gonna record the audiobook by reading it, And then, you know, I'm gonna pay him, you know, 3,000, $5,000 or whatever, and then I'm gonna release my audiobook and hope that I can make that back.
And I said, well, you know, I don't want to do that. I don't look at audiobooks that way. I think that audiobooks are becoming more popular, and we're almost looking at a return to the age of the 1930s radio play. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think what people really want is really good acting and different voices. I went I didn't include too many actual sound effects because I think they're distracting, but we did a lot of things with the voices to to show the environment. And so I decided, okay, I'm gonna do a Kickstarter for this, and I'm gonna see if I can do a really, really, really elaborate audiobook.
And I ended up being able to raise about $42,000 on my first Kickstarter, which I thought about that. And you were only looking for like $5,000 or something like that? Well, we only asked for $5,000 We were hoping for more. This is great! Yeah, yeah. It's almost a 10x. Yeah, so what I and that was due to not only a lot of people who pre ordered the audiobook, but due to some very generous, high dollar value donors who believed in what I was doing. Thank you guys, you know who you are, thank you. And I said, okay, I'm gonna get a full cast. I'm going to hire the best people and have have each of the three main characters played by a different person.
And I'm gonna we're gonna get online and I'm gonna direct it all myself. And so we went through and we did it like a movie without the visuals. We did directed scenes and I was making these poor actors do like ten, twelve, 15 takes on some of these lines. Just, you know, to get it exactly right. And I found some amazing actors. Like, the woman who plays Miranda is a consummate professional and she can do some incredible things with her voice. And then, you know, I was listening the guy who plays Marcus I was listening to all these auditions, because I got hundreds and hundreds of auditions, and I'm spending my entire weekend just listening over and over again to the same section of the words I wrote with different actors reading it. And I'm listening to these guys who are, you know, really, really professional voice actors. They're charging like $500 per finished hour hour and whatnot.
And I come to this one guy, and he just absolutely makes my jaw drop. Because his voice is good, but his diction is just so clear, and he has such an understanding of the material, and he puts that all into his voice. And I'm like, okay. This is our guy. I have to listen to all of them, but this is our guy. So I just gritted my teeth and I listened to all the rest of the editions and I go, okay, I'm gonna hire this guy. I contact him. Turns out he's a bus driver in North Dakota.
[02:22:27] Unknown:
Wow!
[02:22:29] Unknown:
And he's just this amazing talent. You know, I think this is the next Ray Porter. I don't know if you know who that is, but if you like audiobooks, you know, a lot of people who like audiobooks know who that is. But, you know, he is really amazingly talented. And I had these two actresses who are amazingly talented and we just we we just ground on this with the editing for months and months and months and we're finally we've we're just eliminating the final bugs now. And so I actually have the final version on my phone right now and I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet.
But it's out with beta listeners, so we're just going to go through, confirm that the bugs are finished, and then finally release these things to our backers who have been waiting for a year. And guys, I know that's a long time. I know that's a horrendously long time. We had to teach ourselves how to do this, But when you hear it, you're gonna understand why we were that perfectionist.
[02:23:39] Unknown:
Well, the just watching your face, like, and see how passionate you are about this, it's it's,
[02:23:44] Unknown:
it's definitely heartwarming. It was so frustrating to take this long and have so much, you know, to just have to learn so many new things, you know. You never realize how complicated something is until you try to do it. And just to finally be able to produce something you're proud of. And I think so much of the modern publishing industry, so much of the modern movie industry, so much of the modern entertainment industry, is just these big companies with lots of money hiring people who just kind of phone it in and they produce slop.
[02:24:30] Unknown:
We're in the fiat high time preference world, right? And you created a low time preference thing. Yeah, and that's
[02:24:37] Unknown:
what I'm gambling my career on this. Because the advice to most self published authors is you should be turning out a book every three months. And it's like, I'm sorry. If you write a book every three months, you're producing slop.
[02:24:54] Unknown:
Well, I absolutely hate to do this, but I I told you we would do only, so long and we've gone way over. But I wanna I wanna give a plug for this. Oh, dude. I just missed my bus. I I am, 60% into the book, and it is awesome. I had a choice last night. I could speed read it and try and get done, or I could just let it go. And I was like, I think this is a book that goes on my shelf for, you know, my top 100 books. You know, the books that I definitely wanna capture. And, so I am loving this book. To find out that you're coming out with the second one makes me delighted. Yeah. And, man, I I if if you were gonna give a quick overview of, like, what's your best pitch for the book, what what is it?
[02:25:40] Unknown:
Remember the feeling you got from reading the classic science fiction of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Do you wish that people still wrote like that? Yes. Well, let me put it this way. The only thing I updated is the technology.
[02:26:03] Unknown:
It's a great book. If people wanted to get the audiobook, where would they go? Devonerickson.com.
[02:26:10] Unknown:
We are taking preorders
[02:26:11] Unknown:
right now, and we will be delivering that in about a week. Great. Well, I will, this will this will be released as that is open, and I will put a link in the show notes.
[02:26:21] Unknown:
Okay. So if you're listening to this, it's probably already live.
[02:26:25] Unknown:
Devin, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming by. This was a truly great interview. Thank you for inviting me. It was it was a real pleasure. I was just enjoying myself getting on my soapbox and rattling on. It was great. Thank you, man. Okay. That's gonna do it for this week's episode. If you are still here, then you have been in for a wild ride. And I'm so glad we got to go on this together. You know, I should probably admit that after this recording was done, I asked my editing team to get it back to me as fast as they could so I could share it with some of my close friends. I can definitely tell that there was some heat in this conversation. We are talking about subjects that are sometimes walled off from us that we're not supposed to talk about or think about. And that's what was so wonderful about talking with Devon.
I know that they have just released their audiobook, and it is supposed to be something that is rich in character and depth and acting, and it really sounds like an amazing thing. So you can go to devonerickson.com and, or just look up Theft of Fire. I'm sure you'll find it. It is everywhere right now. If you're interested in having me sit down with your loved ones, go to legacy interviews dot com, and there, we can sign up to have them record their most important memories from their childhood to their career and all of the wisdom that they learned along the way. And if you're interested in developing your own communication skills or you have a team of people that you'd like to bring together to make them all have the sorts of skills that allow them to navigate conflict, negotiate when things are tight, and present their ideas, then go to vancecrowe.com and then look up interest based communicating.
Alright. We'll be back soon with another intense interview.
Opening: Sharing insights vs. repeating talking points
Host intro: Meeting Devon Erickson and The Theft of Fire
Metaphor as the engine of thought and memory
Empathy as a writer’s core skill—villains, readers, and realism
Modeling minds: conversational load, perspective taking, and audiences
Writing across gender and identity—finding Miranda’s voice
Speculative craft: writing what does not exist
Online discourse: empathy without sympathy and confronting hostility
Self‑defense mindset: lines, intent, and preparedness
Civility, uncivil actors, and the ‘soft off‑ramp’ in politics
Purpose of a military and cultural standards debate
Media narratives, ICE, and dealing with the uncivilized
Marxism, envy, and institutions—power vs. merit
Inflation’s danger and policy priorities ahead
Immigration, budget crises, and administration choices
Foreign influence and defining America’s interests
Money tech: inflation, Bitcoin, and future‑proofing exchange
Order vs. chaos: El Salvador, gangs, and state response
Feminism, industrialized food, and metabolic syndrome
What causes the obesity wave? Processed food vs. lifestyle
Inflation, two‑income households, and policy timelines
Cats, granaries, and guarding civilization’s value
Generations: anti‑boomer sentiment and being out of touch
Time as money: assets, risk, and financial education
Economics in sci‑fi: Marcus, Miranda, and post‑government markets
Building a cinematic audiobook: casting, direction, perfectionism
Closing: Why Theft of Fire and where to find it
