Sit back with the Cesterilla and enjoy! I think I'm going to complete a Top 10 list for budding philosophers. Now, I realize that's pretty audacious of me. That presumes that I'm a philosopher.
And my response to that is, yes I am. But my response is also, we all are. Every person is a natural philosopher. We all wonder about the highest things of life.
If you're not thinking about them, you're probably anxious about them, even if it's subsurface. I think this is born out by psychoanalysis and all sorts of other studies. We're all thinking about the higher things in life. If the test of whether or not you're a philosopher is whether you have a degree in it, the answer is, well, Shuska doesn't have a degree there for Shuska's philosopher.
If it's a product of how many books you've read, it's like, well, I've read only a handful of actual primary philosophical texts. You'll need the complete books. I've read a lot of Plato, for instance. I've read Sinichi.
I've read a ton of Aquinas. I've read a lot of Augustine. So I could lay out quite a bit of read, but I could lay out ten times that when I haven't read. So if that's the test that you've actually absorbed the philosophical corpus, well, I flunk that as well.
Not in my credit. I'm a jimmy philosopher flunk. Because there's so much frickin' stuff out there. So philosopher is the someone who engages the ultimate questions of life, doesn't write them off as irrelevant, and thinks about them, tries to come up with answers.
And again, we all do it at some level. I take a quick tangent here. My favorite essay is Joseph Eftonos. I mentioned a parlor game at Professor's Play.
He's a professor of literature at Northwestern University. He's writing about professors who will be at some gathering, you know, some wine, cheese party, whatever, talking about different things, and some philosopher, literary, you know, PhD, you'll say something like, well, I've never read the works of whatever. And some obscure frickin' poet that very few people have ever heard of. And it's an also say, well, I've never read the works of this person.
And someone will one up him and say, well, I've never even read this person. It was a pretty soon. You have literary people admitted they've never read Shakespeare. Or philosophers who would never read Kant, never read Plato.
They have a couple drinks. They start trying to one up each other around their humility, and their ignorance. You start finding out that these people who are revered in academia as, you know, major players and first-rate brains, haven't read some real fundamental things. A lot of times, even, you know, freshman in college have to read.
It says you've seen that play out more than once. Anyway, back to the advice for the young girl who thinks you might be a philosopher. Again, just do it. Raw philosophers embrace it.
When you start thinking of the higher questions in life, keep thinking about them. That's always to it. Now, actual tips. I'm gonna start off with this first step.
The monk gardens. The monk gardens. So when you think of a monk, well, it's a Tibetan Buddhist monk, or Catholic monk, or some Eastern Orthodox monk on Mount Athos, you think of the monk praying. But that's not all a monk does.
Not by any stretch. Monks have quite a bit of physical work they have to do. The quintessential monk activity after prayer is gardening. So the monk spends much of a stay in the spiritual realm praying.
He may be an intellectual realm of studying the Bible, the church fathers, whatever it might be. But he spends a big chunk of a stay with his hands in the dirt. It grounds him. We are sacramental beings.
Part spirit, part body. All enmeshed together. And I separate, you know, Descartes, Descartes, the dualism Descartes, mind-body. That's wrong.
We're sacramental. So the body and soul are wrapped together. So things you do with the physical side have an impact on the spiritual side and vice versa. Mind you, this woman, she had a conversion experience with stories.
She was at some high Anglican church service, I guess, on a good Friday. And she went with a friend. Didn't even want to go, but human the friend that went to it. This part of the service, on a good Friday, they had to keep prostrating themselves.
You know, basically go to the ground and lay on your face. You know, flout, hands out, face down, over and over again. And she said, that's something she knew. She had tears streaming down her face.
And didn't know what I brought a lot. She went basically thinking, this is all stupid. You know, this is way over raw. This isn't my church type tradition.
She had to think she's more of the fundamentalist type Christian. Where she was kind of sitting in the pews, no kneel or nothing. And she said she was just blown away by how prostrating herself, even though she wasn't prostrating herself other than she wanted to fit in. That had a huge impact on her spirituality.
I've worshipped me on a good Friday. Anywho, the monk does garden. You are going to have to garden. You're not going to be able to sit around and read Plato in a manual Kant all day long.
You're going to spend part of your day reading those things. You're going to spend part of your day thinking about philosophical things. But you're going to have to garden. And that's a metaphor for you're going to have to sustain your body.
You're going to have to get a job. You're going to have to do things. You're going to have to find that balance. And I hate the phrase balance, even though I think it's valuable.
It's just been used by life coaches and pop magazines. But there is that balance you have to find. Fortunately, as a college freshman, you're in a great place to garden. You're gardening.
All your studies. Your gardening is to get good grades. Buy immersed in yourself and your studies. Become a generally interesting in your studies.
Immerse yourself in them. Get good grades. Am I getting the good grades? Then when you move on to the next stage of life, you're well positioned.
So you tend to garden. You've got good grades. That's all you have to get to do. What I don't suggest you do is prepare to garden.
Garden now. Get the good grades now. But don't prepare to garden by taking a major that you're not really interested in. If you're going to go to med school, that's fine.
Don't get a biology major. Take the basic science you have to take. Get a philosophy major. Get a history major.
Get a theology major. Get something in the humanities literature. I don't care. But engage in the traditional liberal arts.
I'm a strong urge to do that. And yes, it's a worthless degree. But that's the point. You're studying for the sake of knowledge, for the sake of wonder, for the sake of advanced philosophical course.
That's like the spiritual side. The guardian side is, yeah, ace that for an exam because you've done all the reading. You've done the extra reading. You've done the thinking about it.
You're not just trying to blow through your studies out of Friday afternoon and seeing go out and get drunk and stolen that night. You're actually really into this crap. And that will translate into good grades. And that's your guardian.
That's the guardian proper to your stage of life right now. Don't get a major that you think that law schools or med schools or whatever or employers are going to want to see. That's almost like jumping the garden. It's like you're not guarding then.
You're preparing a garden. And that I don't want you to do. Don't prepare a garden. You have to garden right now.
And that means getting good grades. You have to think of yourself. I don't get a useful major. I'm not going to employ me.
I'm not going to make a living. I'm not going to be able to stop it. Don't worry about it. As a freshman especially, you're still four years out.
At least in the first two years, immersion yourself and humanities type subjects. And I think you should do all four years like this. One, if you get good grades, grad program is going to want you. I was looking online.
I said medical schools all the time take flossing majors. In fact, if you have good grades and undergrad and do well in MCAT as a flossing major, you're much more likely getting a good med school because you're actually showing that like cross discipline type ability. So don't worry about it. Again, don't prepare to garden.
Just get the good grades by immersion yourself and humanities type subjects or liberal arts. I'm not saying don't take a smattering of science. I'm not saying that. Liberal arts is the full spectrum.
Secondly, I have a lot of rich clients. None of them. A single freaking rich client of mine made their money doing what they went to college for. In fact, most of them didn't go to college at all.
Some didn't go to any finish high school. If they went to college, they're not working in areas where their majors have no bearing whatsoever. I just think it's full hard. You spend these four years, especially if you've taken a floss week class and you just loved it.
I'm going to say it's almost like the seal has been broken on you. You're probably damaged goods. If you find yourself going down this route, you're really digging it. You get bit by this bug.
You're going to want you doing as much as possible. Right now is when you can. When you get out and you start having kids or you launch into a career or you have a career and kids, you're getting a lot of time to read. You're getting a lot of time to meditate or to contemplate.
Take advantage of it now because now is when thinking, contemplation, reading are proper to you. You're going to have more gardening responsibilities than you ever dream that you'll have now. You have a ton of gardening obligations ten years from now. Taking two, three, four, eight hours out of day to read your manual, can't be downright freaking irresponsible.
Take advantage of it now. Get good grades now. Just focus on that. I'm going to focus on the good grades.
Focus on the studies. The grades will follow, which is even better. Later on, when you have to garden, you're going to work in a office or working for the man, whatever it is. That's not going to translate into philosophy or advancement in your wisdom or knowledge.
Right now, you're in a position where many of your classes, your gardening, your good grades will translate to advanced knowledge and wisdom. Take advantage of it. Immerse yourself in your studies. That's a byproduct of that.
The good grades will come. That's the proper station to garden for you right now. Let's do some lightning segments. I had a couple notes in my trip to New England a couple weeks ago that didn't get a chance to cover.
I'm going to go through them right now. First off, I'm going to go back to Modern Drunkard magazine. It's something he said about drinking in a bar. He said, if you can't afford to tip the bartender, you can't afford to drink in a bar.
You'll get a suspect and go home. I'd say the same thing about hotels. If you can't afford to tip the chambermaid, then you can't afford to stay at a hotel or a motel. For whatever reason, my practice has had a large number of hotel and motel clients over the years.
And my clients told me, basically, the chambermaids, they're at the bottom of the economic food chain. And those women have to work hard. I went climbing them. I was telling me that.
I was like, well, you know, a good chairmaid, who's really efficient, can make as much as 15 bucks an hour. He's talking like, that's like the top of the line, the chairmaid. And she has to crank out three rooms an hour to make that. She has like five bucks a room.
They get paid piece rate. They have a minimum wage guarantee. That's under the Fair Labor Standards Act. They have to have that.
I think they get paid piece rate. And then get the room suspected by the manager or the owner of the hotel. So that's a good job. And they have to crank up basically a room every 20 minutes in order to make 15 bucks an hour.
And most of them can't do that. And then if you're the sum of a bitch, by the way, who leaves the place trash, that's really not for a person. All right, doing is punishing this woman who's probably an immigrant, trying to make his meat, trying to help support a family with some work on the side. And then you're trashing the room and leaving for it to clean up.
I can't imagine calling it a friend. It was like, open up that door. Every morning there's a chairmaid. It's like a negative dopamine where I can walk into.
So leave your hotel room a decent shape. Leave two, three, five, ten bucks on the table for her. If what's worth that leave five? If you want to measure yourself by someone, you might measure yourself by me.
You can say, okay, well, Jessica leaves five bucks a chambermaid. Hey, I want to plug, traveling in November. I'm really not kind of fell into taking our one trip a year together in November. It's just happening that way because the rest of the year is just jam with stuff.
And November is the only month we could travel together. It's in that period between false boards and wine sports. False boards wrap up and you have this glorious like three, four, maybe five weeks before things like musical practice and holiday celebration. All that kicks in at the top of New England, which actually got some bad weather.
We've been to London, Rome, I don't know, also to other places. And we've almost always had good weather. Maybe that's global warming. I don't know.
But even, you know, it's crisp, thirty, forty degrees. And the crowds are down to nothing. Must it's really windy or rainy? It doesn't matter.
It's thirty, forty degrees. I've kind of dawned me recently. I like all weather. As long as it's not windy or rainy.
I don't care if it's zero degrees out. Well, that's not true. I can't deal with ninety-two people. I do cute weather, but when it comes to cold, I really don't care how cold it is.
I like being outside as long as it's not real windy. And we've had great luck. It's again, the numbers are way down. Not rather be cold than be crowded any day of the week.
I remember years ago, we were going to read about various clergymen, monks or whatever, who live in bad neighborhoods, mostly thinking about Ben Necrochal, the fires of the renewal. They live in the South Bronx. I've never been there. I've been to the South Bronx.
I've never been to the where Ben Necrochal, where his monastery there is. I get the brushes in a pretty bad neighborhood. I was like, man, how do they do that? I was like, well, gosh, you're walking around in a monks' frock.
Look, you're walking around with it with a chaluron. Even the worst of the worst, I can argue to molestia. You're not going to kill your monkey whatever. I've come up with a layman's collar or a monks' frock.
If you want to walk around and not have much risk of having a confrontation with someone. Just smile. I call the smile of a layman's collar. I just find whether it's an airport or wherever you are if you're traveling.
You just keep a smile on your face, even when you're tired. Just keep a smile on your face. It'll keep people up, eh? Even nasty people.
Well, that's not true. The nastiest of the nasty, a-kass, not that there's horrible people. If I find it typically, even people weren't really warm, even if they don't reciprocate the smile, they back off a little bit, kind of like, well, this guy's constantly smiling. He must be a manga lawyer or something.
I don't bother this. This guy's obviously mentally disabled. I'm not going to bother him. We're at Portland, Maine, and Boston.
We saw what I think are the signs that death of civilization. Dog parks. Now, I don't hate dog parks. I don't want to tear dog parks down, because dog parks are really the symbol of the decay.
You don't attack the symbol of the decay. You got to attack the decay itself. Dog parks are people who don't have kids. They adopt these doggy walkies as their children, and they want to have a park to take them to.
And so the city or the community or the state, whatever it is, they build dog parks because that's what a large number of their taxpayers want to have. I don't blame them for building the dog parks, but it's because we're not having more children. So whenever you're in a city and you see dog parks, you can pretty much rush a shirt. You're dealing with a crisis of kids.
And if you're not reproducing yourselves, if you're not cranking out children, your civilization is at grave risk. That's why Europe has other Muslims coming in. That's why the United States will have more and more immigrants. We need them here to do the work that our children are doing because we're not having any.
So again, the dog park, that is, I think that you can put that up there as the number one symbol of the decay of civilization. You start seeing dog parks. You're going to assume that your culture is decaying. Hey, you got to get over and listen to the econ talk from November 18th with Keith Smith.
It's astounding. And actually the last like third of it isn't as good as the first two thirds. But this Keith Smith, he started up a cash only clinic. He'll take credit cards too.
But he's an anesthesiologist and he's set up his own medical clinic where you can say, well, I need this sist removed or whatever it is, whatever you need done, he'll settle up and he'll have it done. And then you pay cash. And his prices are just shockingly cheap. He'll also, for instance, there's one procedure he charged his $900 for.
And that's him, the surgeon, the nurse, all the parts, $900. The price charged by the hospital on the road, $19,000. And he said that happens over and over again. His prices are like a tenth of what the hospitals are charging.
And he has surgeons lined up wanting to work for him. They want to get this contract work to do these procedures because they get paid more from him than the hospital's pay him. And the health care system is seriously broken. And then he listens to Keith Smith and it's all government.
I mean, handful of things. I'm making insurance premiums tax deductible, few more money towards health insurance providers. Under Ronald Reagan, hospitals were told that if you take emergency patients, if you have an emergency room, you have to pay taxes. Apparently, any taxes, income taxes, property taxes, nothing.
So he said his hospitals complain about, well, we have people who have come in and the immigrants, they don't have health insurance, and they come into the emergency room to take up all our resources, cost us a lot. Like, wait a second, you got a huge break from the government back in 1980s. You have to pay in taxes if you do that. So come complain now about that.
But again, another distortion, you know, and a market distortion basically being forced to pay taxes. That's a free market distortion. That's the product of the government. The federal government cuts checks to hospitals for unreimbursed medical care.
And what that means is you charge this for a procedure, but the insurance company paid this. We're going to cut you a check for a portion of the difference. So for instance, it's not at all uncommon for a hospital charge, $100,000 for a procedure. But the health insurance company will only pay $13,000.
So then they have a quote unquote, $87,000 loss. Even though the hospital made money on that procedure, they go back to the federal government and say, hey, we had $87,000 loss. And then they get a check for a percentage of that loss, that quote unquote loss. And this is a gross fricking distortion.
And all this stuff is a product of the government. And why the frick, you know, the implication here in the whole podcast is why the frick would you want to turn over health insurance agencies to a one-payer system? You might have care for all. When you've completely just, you've got to go have created this problem.
We have health insurance industry. In my opinion, it's pretty easy fix. You get rid of the deduct million health insurance premiums. You get the government out altogether.
And 100% private systems like people want lawyer services. Prices are going to plummet. Prices are going to reflect reality. The good news is, I guess there are now like two dozen of these clinics across the country and they're popping up more and more.
And this keysmith is very optimistic that this is really going to gain a foothold. The question I want to ask is, is it going to gain enough a foothold before Warren gets elected? Every single day I might have cared for all. And it's going to be that there's a race going on here that we get enough of these clinics.
And you can prove that pure free market health care is 100% possible. And it'll make all our lives a lot easier because it'll make health care a lot cheaper. You can prove it through these clinics that are popping up. But we need to get it proven into public consciousness before the government takes it all together.
So as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, I had a pretty good Saturday. It wasn't as good as last Saturday when I did a lot of drinking Saturday evening, but it was a good Saturday. And basically it was extremely productive. I went to the office for about six hours.
I went to a ton of billable hours as lawyers live and die by, walked 18,000 steps, got mass out of the way. And I know we'll probably have to hear that. I can explain why you think like that. I think I have a previous podcast like Catholic's Head of Mine, that's about getting out of the way.
And it's simply because it's absolutely mandatory on pains of hell. So whenever you have to do something, you want to get out of the way. That's what people exercise first thing in the morning. I do my hour of prayer or study first thing in the morning.
You always want to try to get the heart stuff out of the way. So it's not hanging over your head. That's kind of how it masses when it becomes an obligation like that. Hopefully at the same time you embrace it.
At the same time you actually like doing it. Of course, that's obvious. But because it's mandatory, you want to get it done with. Anyway, so I'd also take care of large chunk of this podcast and get some of the things done around the house.
It's like eight thirty, nine o'clock and I'm just chilling out with Tess watching something on TV. I do my back exercise and pretty much splendid mood. It's been a very productive Saturday. And I thought of a friend of mine who went stuck with his in-laws all freaking day.
You know, from nine in the morning and he texted me, he still wasn't home yet. And he wasn't complaining. He was kind of keeping touch. He really liked his in-laws.
But he's kind of like, I am. He likes to be productive. He's a professionalized thing going on. Active life.
And I was like, oh gosh, I just, 12 hours just sitting around talking, socializing. What a freaking way he's about that for me. I was like, oh, you know, I'm not going to be on the occasion. He's had a great time.
And they got me thinking, you know, you can't tell this guy. You can't tell my friend. I know you were here to complete wait today. I build out a thousand bucks at the office.
I got almost 20,000 steps in. I worked on a podcast. I got some serious study done. I helped clean the house a little bit because my wife's gone for the weekend.
So I did some household stuff to help her out. I was real productive. And you just said it on all freaking day. Small talking.
Chatting. Probably doing some drinking. So that's cool. That's not that wouldn't be accurate.
I mean, he would love people he loves. He would love people he enjoys being around. I don't know how many I don't want to get home. But I think we all agree.
Spent time with other people. It's not a waste of time. In fact, I've heard some theologians say the fact that you won't waste time with other people is a sign that you love them. You know, so the wellness of waste time with people is a sign of affection, sign of love.
And the obviously is not a bad thing, but it can't be measured. Everything I did during the day could be measured. I have a thousand bucks in the middle of the hours. I cranked up 15 minutes in the podcast.
I walked 18,000 steps. I got the one mass obligation of the week out of the way. I cleaned the kitchen sink. Things like that.
You can quantify it. Measure it. You can't measure what he did. And this is crucial.
It may sound kind of kind of a humdrum or quotidian. Quotidian is a great word if you want to sound pretentious. It means it's everyday. So a quotidian occurrence is an everyday occurrence.
But it's not. It goes to the heart of a thing that philosophers to this day struggle with. And it's essence and existence. Essence is a thing that makes a thing what it is.
Essences of a lion make it a lion. Existence is that by which a thing is. So existence just is. Essence is what makes that thing that is what it is.
And it's a crucial distinction to keep in mind. I see it popping up in the works of Jacques Derrida. It popped up repeatedly in the works of Thomas Aquinas. I think it is the key to understanding the virtues of post-modernism and the anti-virtues of modernism.
We live in a modern world that is obsessed with essence. I, a child of modernity and psychologically, dispositionally, attitudeally, what you want to call it, inclined towards essence, obsessing on essence. Things you can measure are wrapped in essence. Things you can't measure are kind of simple existence.
So when you're inclined towards a stuff that are away from essence, that can't be measured, you're inclined towards the act of simple existence. That's why I promote this thing called the existential gap. You are leaving essence, the subject of the object world, and lapsing more into simple existence, the existential gap, just being with people, just enjoying yourself. Not quantifying and measuring it, trying to figure out what the concept is, trying to figure out whether it helps your essence, whether it helps your identification as a lawyer who builds out a lot of hours and helps his clients.
No. When you spend a day like my friend did, you're kind of like in the existential gap, maybe at a real shallow level, maybe not at the Tibetan monk level. But, in that existential gap when you spend a day like that, assuming my friend wasn't worrying about his lack of level hours or his steps or things like that, because I don't know my friend very well. I would be surprised to struggle with that.
It's like this is the whole freaking day I wasted. And I'd say no, he didn't waste it. Don't be like me. Don't be the child of modernity.
Don't get wrapped up in the essences, things you can measure, things that make you what you are. Get wrapped up more in the things that you can't measure, the existence. The thing that makes you be, period. Hey, one quick addendum before you wrap up here.
How much is that the most important part? If you, like me, agree that there is something valuable into simply wasting a day with other people you love, like my friend yesterday. But yet, you agree that that really has nothing to do with your essence. It doesn't really make you who you are, and it's just things for other people or from other species.
If you agree, no, there's something there that's just intangible. Valuable, but yet you can't explain it. I would say you have what's called intuition of being, BE, ING, the intuition of being. You intuit that even though you logically can't explain it, and that's crucial, because you operate logically in space and time.
And it's a logic that you can't really explain what it is about that activity that makes it valuable. I just know that it is valuable. Then you are kind of lapsing into, in a good way, the intuition of being, knowing that there is something more out there than what we can actually measure. That's one reason why when you get all these psychological studies or statistics or whatever, and they go through and say, well, you know, studies show that you live 4.5 years longer if you spend on average five hours a day just killing time with other people.
Whatever it is. I never really like them. They leave me cold. Not that they're not valuable.
I don't say that, but they kind of leave me cold and since that, it's like, no, you're trying to modernize. You're trying to essentialize. You're trying to measure. You're trying to use logic to get at something you really can't get at.
This might be one of the crucial distinguishing features between different types of people. Those who think, yeah, you can measure all these type of things. If you can't, they're not valuable and you kind of write them off with a harumpf screw it. Then there's those of us, like me, who say, no, there is something there.
Even though I'm a child of my journey and I incline towards the essences of what I can measure and what makes me be who I am, there is something other, a mode of existence or simple existence that can't be quantified. If you incline towards that, again, you have the intuition of being. You're seeing something that's very, very important. You're sensing something that's very, very important.
Quite frankly, it's probably been from the theme of this podcast in 2020. All right, that's it for this week. As always, thanks for listening.