On the writing of "No More Manifestos". A casual conversation, recorded live.

we are here today to discuss two books that from my perspective i have already published this one already exists on paper future of an illusion quite some time ago when i hit when i clicked the button that publishes a book in the 21st century i put out an invitation to my audience to send in questions to send in arguments to send in objections to send in corrections quite a few typos were correct [Laughter] and today we are going to do the q a we're going to answer those questions about this book i'm also going to open the video with a reading the next book to come out after this you will notice this is quite a slim volume it costs about four us dollars it costs about 350 in europe it is a very very cheap book a lot of entertainment value and about 120 pages the other book yeah i think 124. the other book we're here to talk about today which i have already made the final click of the mouse button to publish but that it is impossible for you to have in your hands as of this moment is called no more manifestos and that is over 630 pages so that's a much heavier tome to sink your teeth into uh so i'm going to read you a selection an excerpt i suppose from no more manifestos and then i'm going to answer your questions in theory about either book or about any of the ideas this raises for you i'll just mention that the process of writing these two books took up over two years of my life writing this shorter volume probably delayed the completion of no more manifestos by six months although it was a delightful process to go through as a writer i had from my perspective finished no more manifestos and simply needed to go through and do a final rereading and revision to make minor changes and corrections and i got one message from one supporter on patreon who said reasonably enough look given that no more manifestos is really a book about political philosophy that barely mentions veganism why don't you write a separate book dealing with the the vegan angle the vegan issue uh dealing with vegan politic great idea so i stopped everything i was doing and i effectively took a vacation from writing one book to write another and the relationship between the two books is thus for me very interesting going back and rereading them and enough time has passed you know that you yes i'm always going to be reading it as the author but you forget your own book a little bit and then get to encounter it new just as the months go by frankly hasn't been years yet i would say that the central philosophy of no more manifestos it is expressed in this book in a much more abbreviated [Laughter] but much easier to understand form so i can really imagine reading this book first preparing you very well to deal with the profounder aspects of no more manifestos and also i can imagine reading no more manifestos first maybe you have no interest in veganism or vegan politics and then even if you've read no more manifestos first reading this afterward then this will bring it into a much sharper focus it's a much more succinct statement of what now i do not write these books so that they will exist like a museum exhibit on a shelf you know i'm not producing a diorama to exist behind a a glass wall you know the sense of urgency in all my youtube videos and also in my writing comes to the fact that i'm aware of my own mortality and yours and then within that span of perhaps a century that you've got on this earth if you're lucky how much more limited your potential is to change the world change your life change yourself yes but ultimately the difference we're going to make on this planet and to bring it into uh even clearer relief what do you what are you going to do in the next five years you know when you put down this book what now what next so here you know in this very short book of only 120 pages that yes it is partly about vegan politics it's partly about the meaning of life and it's really the sense of urgency the sense of passion is that you have to live your life what are you going to do with this philosophy moving forward what are you going to do [Music] given that you have admitted to yourself or accepted all the things that are very hard to admit and accept about politics that are uh discussed in this book in a very trenchant very passionate very convincing way okay okay given that there were certain illusions about politics we might have had from childhood that we're letting go of maybe certain illusions about religion maybe certain relations maybe certain illusions about philosophy too you know okay what now what next so that same message is to be found in no more manifestos but as has already been mentioned no more manifestos is not a book about veganism uh what is no more manifestos a book about it was created in the ashes literal and figurative of the armed rebellions that were taking place in the street in the year 2020 the armed uprisings that were more or less loosely inspired by police brutality especially in the death of george floyd right so that moment in history that we all lived through i i wanted to write a book in a response to it but of course i cannot say that it's a book about that or about that alone several chapters of the book are specifically and narrowly about police brutality several chapters are specifically and narrowly about the brutality of american police against black people within the united states of america there's a whole the whole world is our canvas here guys that's not the only thing the book's about it's not the only thing i'm i'm concerned about and you do get some case studies discussed in quite a bit of detail about what happens when the police get caught how do the police try to cover up these crimes what happens when they're dragged into court the state level court system the federal level court system and um what human rights means in practice in this case that is that is one element of the book i stood at a very strange crossroads at the time george floyd died i did actually have one friend who was living within earshot of the explosions and gunshots going off so the thought certainly crossed my mind just to go as a youtuber as a journalist if you like buy an airplane ticket and go and be there as the story unfolded as significant part of that city was was burned down now you know obviously for you guys in the audience now it's kind of easy to say well no great loss i mean certainly there were a lot of other youtubers there who um you know smelled the ashes so to speak and uh saw those things unfold you know of course though it gnaws at you a bit in retrospect and it haunted me at the time that i could have been there i could have been holding the camera in the microphone i could have asked some questions i could have brought my own perspective to it yeah the border was closed so you couldn't oh yes yes from from page one of the book though that's also true so melissa mentioned something i i laughed because that shows you know how how these kinds of things seems like a minor detail now in retrospect but it was it was all important at the time melissa reminds me that at that time we could not cross the border between the united states and canada so year 2019 2020 2021 that's right so what yeah so actually that's right there were there were barriers to travel so well so babe i'd forgotten that i forgot that it was a purely hypothetical question of whether or not i went to the states to witness the the well it would be unlikely to get there while the riots were going on but at least i could have gotten there in the immediate aftermath of rides um anyway yeah so you know a lot of us have memories that way also connected to september 11th 2001 where exactly you were and where you could have gone it could have been i've already made a youtube video talking without my autobiography but there are those moments in life where you think so anyway given that context yeah so just figuring that out so it really was just wistful thinking on my part that i could have gone there because international travel was temporarily completely impossible [Laughter] um you know are you going to write a short book that just talks about one issue in a shallow way or are you going to write a really profound book that brings together basically everything you have to say about political philosophy past present and future so first the first choice i made was option two there you know i really this is this was the first book i had written for an adult audience i've written children's story books many of you know about that in the past um [Music] and you know of course you could have a plan of saying okay i'm just going to write a short book on one topic now and then another book and another book but i really felt like well i've left this off until my 40s to write a book i could have written a book in my 20s i could have written a book on political philosophy when i was 23 would have been different would have been memorable and i believe i have files on my hard drive in that period i i could tell you quite accurately what my political philosophy was like in my my twenties because i still have it on my hard drive some of my ex-girlfriends i don't know if they're in the audience right now some of my ex-girlfriends remember what my what i had to say about politics in my 20s obviously if i published a book at 23 or at 33 very different from what i'm now able to bring together so much research experience uh so many different walks of life at age 43 so that's the first sort of cross sort of fork in the road sorry the first sort of decision you have to make is um [Music] am i going to write something short and brief and publish immediately on just one topic narrowly defined or am i going to write something broad and deep and profound um and you know if you guys if in case of the first video you've ever seen on my channel i have a background in buddhist philosophy i in this book uh within the first couple pages it shows actually buddhist philosophy so it's a nice symmetry if you read this one first this opens talking about what is philosophy the other book no more manifestos closes talking about his philosophy there's some discussion about his philosophy and just the last few pages there um but you know i have a background in the history of china history of india history of thailand laos cambodia the political histories i can draw on well japan i can make a long list but obviously europe they go far beyond the american experience they go far beyond the canadian experience and so on so it was bringing this together uh in an analytical way the many different kind of areas of research i effectively devoted my life to and then the second fork in the road was um the manuscript was substantively finished it was mostly finished in january of 2021 so i wrote with tremendous passion and tremendous energy a lot of the chapters the first draft was written in one day and they're long profound chapters but um that's energetic passionate quality you know because initially i thought was i wanted to publish during calendar year 2020. that's why i met so it's january uh of a certain everything everything was substantially finished so there's this very rambunctious passionate kind of kind of energy throughout the whole book my opinion but uh when you write that rapidly also that first draft was sloppy i said melissa did a proofreading two people read the whole book beginning to end melissa and ods oliver shields if you guys subscribe to me on patreon you know who oliver is don't i don't think anyone else has read the whole thing and neither of you have read the finished text actually as it turned out probably because i i didn't want to impose too much on their time i did not turn around to oliver and say hey can you read more than 600 pages of text you know um but yeah you know i said to melissa when i was doing the final revisions especially to the earliest chapters in the book was like wow you know you must really be in love with me to be able to follow the argument of this early draft because the first draft was written so quickly and to some extent so sloppily sometimes it left between ideas it left between points and i do think melissa understood it melissa is in love with me melissa talks to me a lot about politics she she would know me well enough to know where i was going with the thought and then understand why i'm making the next point but in the revision those chapters became longer and they became more clearly explained something something lost there too because it's true it's less poetic but it's certainly more comprehensible than the final draft so yeah um sam walsh asks were you working non-stop over the past few days doing final tweaks i feel i've been working non-stop for two years on this but i'm you know it's it's been a lot of work the only the only time i stopped was to write a separate book oh well right the reading and research that i include that as part of the the work in two years the amount i did a huge amount of reading for this book and it's part of the revisions process um so yeah the the next fourth of the number came to the next strategic decision i had to come to was given that the book was largely complete as of december 2020 or january 2021 so like okay i can take this with all its errors and defects in lacuna and just scrape together and get on the internet now but get it published as a book now or and the the choice the decision was or am i going to go much further and be much more robust in my research and reflections on the history of the american revolution the creation of the american constitution so in the first draft of the book and uh sorry keep in mind history of american revolution history of american constitution i was already studying that when i was 19 years old 18 19 20 i already had a research interest it frankly if you care about politics it is hard to be ignorant of the american constitution it's so massive [Music] well melissa you will remember this when i was writing the book i said to you several times early on i'm now writing about things i haven't really thought about or had a verbal conversation with someone about since i was like 21 years old like some of them because i could remember specific conversations with friends maybe as late as 23 or something but you know a lot of it 18 19 20. you know it was that was when i did that research and you guys can guess this about me if you didn't know part of the decision to do so much research on the political history of india political history of china and then cambodia laos thailand these other countries in asia um was my sense of dissatisfaction with the american constitutional tradition my sense of dissatisfaction with the whole western you know european and colonial democratic tradition and indeed that's also why i didn't learn latin i didn't learn greek i started working on languages like pali pali is related to sanskrit if you've never heard it before but you know paulie and then cambodian lotion burmese cinelies and this group of languages that very few men ever ever learn and then eventually after that korean ojibwe so all this work all this research in different areas but yeah um my feeling as a young man my feeling around age 21 or 23 was that i knew everything that was worth knowing about the american uh revolution and it's certainly very easy to feel that the french revolution is where the important and profound questions got asked rather than the american revolution and then and when you know the french revolution which i did i'm starting as a teenager i knew a lot about the french revolution i still know a lot of different children and then you know the ancient greek and ancient roman material right it's easy to trivialize the american revolution the american constitution because you feel like okay i'm dealing with what's really profound over here with aristotle thucydides xenophon we can list off all these names whether ancient greek origin or both and then on the other hand you have the put it this way these starkly modern political questions that are raised by the french revolution with the french revolution you're you're looking at the same questions raised by mao zedong you're looking at the same questions raised by the rise and fall of communism and you're very much looking at the french revolution you're so much looking at questions that are still being raised by protesters in the streets in the year 2020 so at first and for me as an immature young man teenager in my 20s it's certainly easy to kind of sneer at just how eccentric and bizarre the the founding fathers were as people um you know thomas jefferson is a really weird guy it's just crazy i'm sorry what most of you know about thomas jefferson it does show what a weird and crazy guy was thomas jefferson and what he says about black people and slaves and at the same time his own children are partly black he's having sex with his slaves he's this really weird guy sorry i'm not going to get into a long discourse on thomas jefferson here you know uh but you know if you think robespierre is eccentric if you think napoleon is eccentric or something you look at this history written by these strange guys and there's this very very strange sense in which the philosophical debates at the founding of the american constitution they seem to have nothing to do with the rest of the history of the world yeah i was just gonna say the fact that your whole political philosophy has been condensed into this 600 page book um condensed condensed into only 600 patients yeah it just comes as a surprise to me um because when we first got together i wouldn't have imagined that a book that you would publish would be about the american revolution or about the american revolution but that you'd uh research so much about yeah because but look yeah the book is about the immigrants a huge a huge part of the book you know but so as i'm describing here just the audience you know i think you can see that what i'm trying to say to you is it began with these questions about police brutality about the justice system in america however you want to put it so you know not not just policing the prisons the courts law itself the constitution itself and then that naturally expands into dealing with the origins of the problem in the american revolution and writing the constitution deal with it in a really profound way and also to deal with the knock-on consequence of this because the the american constitution has influenced every written constitution in every other country on planet earth yes there's just the point you know four years ago five years ago i really wouldn't have anticipated that this would be a research interest you know and if you were to have gotten a master's degree i would i really thought it would be like you would specialize in you know asian history and sure somewhere in southeast asia you'd write a book about but uh political philosophy in china or japan or thailand or laos or cambodia or something right but personally you know i'm an american citizen so it it it's very uh it's been very educational for me as i've been researching these different um the founding fathers and and just how the process happened it's it's yeah i think it i see how it's influenced the whole rest of the world the the american constitution that's right and it's just so funny to understand more about like the origins of it well okay you want to switch up i'll just say you know um obviously i also i grew up in a family that was forever assailing and complaining about american imperialism now my point here is not to say and now i'm 100 110 in favor of american burialism but let's get real you know again i used to live in cambodia i have real experience with this in the absence of american imperialism would japan be a democracy today in the absence of american imperialism would south korea be a democracy today in the absence of american imperialism would taiwan be a democracy today and now conversely if we had just a little bit more american imperialism you know all of china could be a democracy today probably democracy very similar to south korea and taiwan probably maybe a little bit different maybe not you know probably not that different from what we have in taiwan everyone in communist china would be enjoying the day and it gets worse guys it gets more challenging where i'm going here because you know we everyone wants to be morally opposed to imperialism it certainly seems very very easy to wrap yourself in the morally superior flag of anti-imperialism india if india had not been conquered by the united kingdom by the british do you think india would be focusing today now look as you know there are reasons why why american imperialism is remembered and regarded so negatively afghanistan and you know very much the the memory of afghanistan it's a huge part of both books talk about kind of the emotional context for both these books what what shake them but you know the um and with the grinding sense of inevitable defeat in afghanistan you know as it unfolds very much part of this book the first page or two i think i think it might be on page one of no more manifestos it says yeah this was written in a period of time that's now very hard for any of us to remember a period of time when we thought coronavirus was going to be over within a few months and when we thought the war in afghanistan was going to go on forever was going to go on for another 10 years you know we were wrong on both counts you know coronavirus was going to instead go on and on and the afghan war was kind of coming to a sudden climactic conclusion if you want whether it's climactic or any climactic it's a it's a matter of uh matter of perspective um yeah so look i just say afghanistan vietnam you know even look at the reality of mexico today the caribbean south america haiti history of american imperialism in haiti um the philippines there are a lot of places where we can take american imperialism and really examine what's wrong with it and what's right with it so on and so forth but you know without american imperialism do you believe germany would be a democracy today how about france you know so we're going to talk about democracy and american imperialism yes there is there is no document more important than the american constitution there is no revolution more important the american revolution for the whole world it's unbelievably important for japan for cambodia for canada for france for the whole world the american revolution american constitution had influenced everyone but as i've already said for me as a young man in my 20s it's remarkable because the american revolution is the most alien of all it is the hardest to understand even though american culture is the most familiar just real briefly um the french revolution when you describe the status quo part b when you describe the status quo ante when you describe you know the pieces on the chess board before the civil war begins it's very easy to understand you understand what the two sides are that are facing off you understand what they're trying to win and what they're trying to lose like it's it's real clear and it's very easy to sympathize with people on on each and every side in the french revolution i'm just saying this honestly you know of course on the one hand you can sympathize with the poor oppressed farmer who wants to have a revolution so we can have democracy and equality you can you can certainly sympathize with the atheist who really wants to fight against the power of the catholic church it's a huge part of the french revolution right again the american revolution is not like this just for it's it's totally different well you have to understand right but you know the more you read about the french revolution you may also start to sympathize with people who supported the royal family on point of honor where just the sheer corruption of the jacobins of the french word this was a really corrupt and violent and in some ways evil regime they created and where you can start to sympathize with some of the loyalists royalists anti-revolutionary counter-revolutionaries who said no they wanted to stand to have a society built on an honor honor and dignity they that they represented a higher standard of morality that they were willing to fight for um so you know as you say once you get in kind of the biographies of particular men who put their life on the line and fought and died if you start to study the french revolution you might be surprised how often you sympathize with people on the counter revolutionary and frankly pro-aristic pro-aristocrat side of the war because that's what it was yes here's a very simple way to summarize the french revolution it was the war for the future of aristocracy france had been ruled by aristocrats the whole society was was an aristocratic side it was defined and controlled by aristocracy an aristocracy that had evolved from the dark ages into the renaissance i mean it had it it had evolved and adapted a little bit it wasn't the same as it was 500 years earlier this this kind of thing um but this was a war for aristocracy which side are you on and either you're fighting for the aristocrats or you're fighting against them so the french revolution is very easy to understand and it's very easy to conceptualize in parallel to the russian revolution that creates the communist dictatorship of lenin the communist revolution in china they create the dictatorship of mao zedong and they're kind of you can look at your own society here i am sitting here in canada and it's very easy to take the kind of logic of the french revolution and apply it to the situation i'm in now you know um and again even my youtube channel ultimately is an illusion of this do you guys know what the meaning of about this yell is um [Music] so yeah there's this kind of clarity to the analytical and moral significance of the french revolution and the american revolution by contrast when you're just setting up the pieces on the chess board when you're just describing the status quo ante where you're just trying to get your head around and or trying to sincerely communicate to someone else what are we fighting for what is there to win what is there to lose here it's it's very hard to understand and now that is partly because of propaganda it is partly because of lies and misrepresentation partly there's also it's propaganda about the history of france history all these countries have propagand but you know in the american case you're starting with something that's very very hard to understand propaganda makes it harder um i'm surprised these questions you people don't actually watch my videos someone asked are you moving back to thailand i i'm going back to thailand i'm not going to live there permanently it's just about i get fan mail like that too i got family they're saying oh hey now that you're in thailand i know you're busy but you didn't actually watch the video you haven't seen a lot of the videos leading up to this but anyway um um [Music] i've effectively derailed my own discussion here so um just in understanding why the american revolution happened this is the thing once you get past this sort of distorting intentionally and unintentionally distorting layer of propaganda and start dealing with the primary sources itself it's still utterly baffling i mean i can really say in the last five years i learned to fully understand what happened in the american revolution writing the constitution and it began melissa was there with me it began with my studying the history of the english civil war so coming out of my teens and twenties i kind of had a list of things to read in the back of my mind things that yeah i believe so yeah yeah yeah that's right um anyway i had a list of things to read about and i was aware i'd never found the time to really read the history of what happened with the english civil war so this is the english civil war that temporarily tears down the monarchy and ends up establishing the dictatorship of a guy named oliver cromwell so as with a lot of revolutions they thought they were getting democracy and they ended up with something that was democratic in name only yeah i tell them melissa counts as a member of the audience here too something i said correct anyway um this book the 600 page book no more manifestos it it says again and again because it's really true that most of the ideological debates that were you know setting the stage for they were defining the sides opposing each other in the american revolution those debates began the definition of those ideologies that that it really was this continuous tradition um in uh the thirteen colonies there's a continuous tradition of of political debate from the english civil war through to the writing of the american constitution so yeah about starting with five years ago i really started to understand the history of the united states in a very different way because i filled in this gap in my historical knowledge the chapter coming 130 years before it but still very much its direct prequel the history of what happened in the english civil war so anyway look i wasn't planning to make this general lecture about uh american revolution the meaning of the word republic and i remind you when you're looking at the american revolution and the french revolution which one comes first the american revolution comes first i have to remember in terms of cause and effect but you know well what is a republic remarkably because of the legacy of english civil war america was full of people willing to fight and die for the republic and none of them agreed on the meaning of that word nobody really knew what a republic was but they knew they were going to fight and die for it right now the book again it's a long book it's 600 pages so we get to delve into all of this yes in part simply the brief period in the history of england when they tore down the monarchy and declared themselves to be a republic a parliamentary republic what a concept you know what what does that really mean a parliamentary republic um sure this this starts the ball rolling but there are several other really interesting antecedents including the revolution in corsica this is an island where people have a revolution kick out the political leaders who are there and declare themselves a republic and write a new constitution starting from a blank sheet of paper so this very directly and powerfully prefigures and forms and influences uh what's going to happen in american revolution but i've made several um live streams recently that discuss issues in the history of the revolution history of writing the constitution at great length and that of course made it much easier to write the book i don't think many authors have the luxury that i've had of being able to sit down and discuss their ideas with an audience sometimes for three hours or something let's sit down and really talk this through but um the book i know it sounds ridiculous to say this but both of the books including even this short book the material that's in here is not on the youtube channel it's really not um what you will find in the pages of this book uh it is not repeating things you've already heard on the youtube channel and on the other hand no more manifestos even though someone's had a three-hour discussion about those issues and sometimes i read hundreds of pages about those issues i think at most you get kind of one very concise paragraph corresponding to a lot of those in-depth discussions so there is a tremendous power of concision that way despite the fact the book ends up being 600 pages because it covers so much history and there is simply a lot of political philosophizing to do so another good good question guys oh so one of the other problems is just i think the the most controversial chapter in this book we already did a live stream discussing so probably the most questions would have been about the chapter on the philosophy of compassion what is compassion and we already did record a discussion it was pretty much that day it was kind of the same day i'd shared that chapter um just as a one chapter text file with supporters on on patreon i i went into a q a and answered not so much the questions as the incredulity and hostility of my audience but what i have to say about the foster compassion so that that's one issue that branched off from the book into a youtube video before the book was published or the only show before frida asks who drew the cover so frida you ordered your copy of the book quite recently so one of the differences between the editions of the book i i have the first edition this does not name the artist who drew the cover because she didn't want to be named we talked about this a long time ago and then when she saw the book she changed her mind she was like hey i want my name in the book it's great of course so depending on the date when you offer ordered this if you bought it the moment it was published when it first came out you get a copy of the book that doesn't name the the artist i think it's such a long time ago but i forget what her concern was it was just internet trolls or stalkers you know i'm not sure i want my name on this because you know um it'll somehow bring unwanted internet harassment into her life or something but then when the book was done she didn't want her name on it so i forget what it was there was maybe a two week window of opportunity or something but you get the book without the artist's name on it but now when you get it it says cover illustration by you get the uh you get the citation great question big smoke asks any chance of tracking down joe best and challenging him to a cage match so i i've put up the question my other video if anyone knows anybody in thailand for me to meet up with and nobody does um thailand for the past two years has had about one percent as much tourism as they usually have so it's about a 99 reduction in tourism and when i'm there will not have recovered yet so i do not know i think the number of the number of non-thai people in the streets the number of white people in the streets and so on will be very close to zero unlike any other time i've been in town i assume won't quite be a ghost town but i assume you know uh yeah but sure if you guys want to set me up with the cage match by all means okay so i'm going to read you guys an excerpt from um no more manifestos a book that from my perspective i have clicked to publish on amazon but is not uh available yet um perhaps within the next 12 hours perhaps the next six hours last time it only took a couple of hours they just do a quick uh censorship uh check make sure there's no nudity in the book or something i suppose i don't even know maybe they do allow nudity whatever is they don't allow but they do like youtube they do a quick censorship and that's it anyway so we're gonna do a quick reading from the the uh the book that i have published but that you cannot have read yet and then guys if you have something intelligent to say if you have an intelligent question to ask rub your uh rub your pieces of firewood together rub your kindling together and try to come up with a spark because you're gonna have the opportunity to say something or ask something intelligent i do have a list of questions that i've received by via email in writing previously and i will go through that list of questions about this book not the other book here we go with the passage of time our excuses for things become more important than the real reasons for them no one are unknown our motivations in misrepresenting a historical event are a problem that needs to be dealt with here and now whereas the events themselves and the motivations that first set them in motion diminish in size as they come closer to the horizon escaping step by step from the immediacy of real politics to the safer distance of real of pure philosophy slavery is over excuses for slavery are with us still overcoming the excuses is a political struggle but understanding slavery itself now is increasingly just a matter of philosophy the real history of the american constitution matters very little whereas its mythology is of tremendous importance the first only matters in as much as it could help to dispel the second and even so tremendous creativity is needed to make it matter as everyone beholds the bare facts with indifference the vast majority of us will not have our minds changed by the facts we will have our minds changed by fiction one fable of the constitution will be challenged by another so that we may make progress without ever progressing from lies to truth of the millions of people still making excuses for slavery a terrifyingly tiny minority will change their minds by taking an interest in the historical facts of those who do the majority will seek out biased sources and read them in a biased manner in a biased manner they will use what we call critical thinking to selectively support one delusion or another with the presumption that whatever interpretation is most flattering to their ideology is also the most factual this is a greeting familiar pattern in the formation of personal political identity although this is stereotypically associated with extremists making excuses for communism fascism etc the mentality is not much different from the mainstream where it is less visible less confrontational and therefore is even less susceptible to change for the vast majority of us and for the vast majority of our political convictions that kind of change is not a process of giving up our excuses to embrace the truth found in facts instead what changes our minds is seeing the consequences of the excuses we've made and then comparing one set of excuses to another considering other myths and imagining how our identity would change if we were to behave as if they were true when the communist becomes contemptible in his own eyes and starts to feel that his excuses that he has practiced and put on display a hundred times before are things he should be ashamed to say it is not his knowledge of any particular fact that has changed it is him he changed and so he starts to seek out new facts and new interpretations to suit himself which was the root of the problem in the first place but before he was a different sort of man living with a different set of excuses so this is obviously an excerpt from a chapter late in the book this is not page one of chapter one and the emphasis i'm placing here is not on a contrast between truth and fiction i'm not saying to you everyone else lies to you about the history of the american revolution everyone else lies to you about the american constitution and i'm going to give you the truth however i do think the book taken as a whole apart from being a statement of my own political philosophy i do think it gives you a really nuanced really robust understanding of what happened and why i've i know even more that's not in the book i mean the book is not meant to be because i have some really long books here on this desk that went on for hundreds and hundreds of pages um it's not sort of a laundry list of factoids and details about the american english but what i am telling you uh somewhat poetically in this uh this part of this excerpt from the book is that what i'm interested in doing is challenging the mythology you know challenging the sort of strange set of excuses and half truths that we live with about the american revolution and for a very clear purpose um the vast majority of people reading this book are are powerless individuals but exactly what i want to get at is how we're going to change the world which in an utterly non-corny sense does begin with changing yourself probably you guys have i mean any of you in the audience you have probably had some friend or relative some brother or sister or cousin who really wanted to change the world many many examples from people i've known in my own life uh come to mind sorry i'll give you a particular example i knew a woman who had been a marketing executive she worked in the advertising industry and she wanted to start a foundation and change the world veganism veganism and ecology these issues were her or her issues and you know what's what's the most polite way to possibly say to someone it ain't you you are the wrong person for this job and then take a step beyond that what if what you really have to say to this person is you aren't the right person to do this yet you aren't the right person do this now like you've chosen a role for yourself and you don't realize how many years of preparation you'll need before you can before you can play it your background in marketing and advertising has not in any way prepared you to play the role of political leadership you're you're putting yourself into so that particular woman right at the start of her project she had a lot of money she burned through her whole budget budget she bought huge advertisements by the side of the highway and i imagine i don't know this but i imagine because of her background in advertising she got a good price i mean she knew people in advertising she probably i'm not saying she got it for free or something she probably knew how to get a good deal on getting advertisements on the side of the highway and it was completely surreal and completely stupid and completely self-defeating and i attempted to talk through with her okay well strategically like what's your message here and how many people are there like you know if you have a message on the side of the highway that is interesting to fewer than one of one in a million people even if a million people drive their cars down that highway this is not an effective way to build your movement this is crazy and her message was less than one in a million it was an incredibly niche message and you know i was trying to talk that through with her and i think it's very telling i've already told you she's a background in marketing she has a background in advertising she should be so well prepared from her professional background this is this is a middle-aged woman she's not a young one she should be so prepared to have exactly that conversation right think about what her job is all the time she's got to sit down with an executive from a toothpaste company say okay so what's the message what's the market you're trying to reach what's the audience you're trying to like let's let's think about this strategically and you know she just became furious and frankly violent you know any attempt to reason through with her you know like what are you doing and how is this going to work of course it's no surprise her whole movement failed and i would i would love to know how much money she wasted i saw her doing quite a number of things that cost quite a lot of money and she was not a poor person herself and it's totally possible like 90 of the money was her own money that's possible fifty percent of the money was her own money you know i i would assume she did put some of her own money in the hat to start this this political movement uh rolling so look i know it sounds like a corny self-help book to say you know the political change has to start with you these are real life situations these are real life scenarios um you know maybe you don't have what it takes yet you know maybe you never will maybe you've got to make some tough choices that way you know in terms of how you work with other people how you get things done um you know if you're not good at math you've got to learn to work with someone who's good at math i sorry i write children's stories books i don't illustrate them i tried to take courses an illustration here doing um you