Thank you to everyone who helped. My wife and I are immensely grateful. Sincerely. We’re now good as far as the budget emergency goes. So you can disregard this post now. But I always welcome hosts hiring me in for interviews and discussions on their channels, and having students in my online courses. So you are always welcome to ask or register.
***
Tax time and medical debt are crushing us this month. So I need to raise some additional cash to float us through March.
There are many ways to help my ongoing work or show your appreciation, including becoming a patron (you can always check my How to Help page for all the options). But this is more urgent. So what I’d like to persuade up is a flurry of interviews and consults. My rate is $150 per hour (proratable but minimum of $100). I can’t take any other projects this time because I’m still finishing pledged projects from last year. But I can spare some hours to talk.
Shows…
If you host a show and can hire me as a guest, text me now. I’m sure I can fit your show in somewhere in March. Or if you want me on but can’t afford my rate, see if your viewers or fans will gather the funds for you, and then get in touch!
Consults…
If you want to just pick my brain about anything, or get my advice or consultation on any subject, or just Q&A or AMA me (by yourself, or with several people joining in; the more the merrier, and the rate is the same), you can bug me privately for the same rate. It can be by almost any video or chat medium, or even discord. It only has to be something I know enough about to be useful. Just text me to schedule!
Classes…
Even if you book one of my online correspondence courses now (which you can then take any month you want, just let me know when; they are all available, beginning the 1st of any month), that would also help. Even better if you can get a bunch of people (friends, or an online or IRL club or group) to book courses, maybe even the same course for the same month that you can all then discuss together.
You can even pick a course for its subject but focus in the course on specific questions within that subject for challenges and discussions. For example, maybe you want to apply historical methods to a specific crank claim in archaeology, or a specific argument for or against free will (and not just the general subject of free will), or anything else you can think of or already have a bunch of people arguing about on Reddit or some other host’s comments or something.
Gifts…
Or you can just straight up tip me via PayPal, for nothing in return but gratitude. And this month, truly, it will be especially welcome.
❊
Debates?
My policy has not changed on debates though. My rate for virtual debates is still much more, at $500 per hour. But if in the off chance you want to fund one in March (even if the debate happens in a later month), then text me to discuss. As with interviews and consults, of course, a debate also has to be something I know enough about to be useful. And there are other conditions a debate has to meet that require discussion before I’d agree to do one. But if you’re serious, we can talk about it.
Hi Dr. Carrier, thank you for sharing your situation, been there back in the day too. So sorry. It makes me crazy that lying grifter megachurch pastors & people like performative “Christian” RW activist Erika Kirk rake in millions while brilliant, honest independent scholars like you & so many others struggle financially. The medical debt you mention particularly upsets me – in the richest country in the world this should not happen. Speaking of which have you tried to negotiate or just appeal for charity writeoffs? I helped a friend file for that after a catastrophic medical bill they faced due to a hospitalization when they were uninsured – and it worked. But I expect you’ve tried that. Never hurts to try if there is a way to do that.
I don’t have a podcast or group but would sponsor your appearance for an hour or two somewhere if you can line that up. In the meantime I’ll send a gift in thanks for the hours of reading, listening, learning I’ve gotten here & in other interviews & sign up for a course.
Alas, getting providers to write off bills is not realistically available to most folks. Especially when you are already insured, as we are.
American medical insurance is mostly bogus now, as deductibles and copays exceed most people’s paychecks; as the price of healthcare has skyrocketed, eliminating all the gains of having insurance in the first place. And that’s even after paying the insurance premium every month which is itself outrageously high, suppressing our available cash flow (~$700 a month which exceeds what I used to pay in rent, and sinks most families all by itself), thus ironically making it impossible to pay the copays and deductibles.
I’ve been through all this before. It’s generally a waste of time to try getting an exception. And many won’t provide non-emergency care after that (so you are burning a provider). But more the problem, when it’s ten different providers nickel-and-diming you for a single procedure, it’s simply not physically possible to work the exhausting list of procedures with all of them, especially knowing most of those attempts won’t succeed and it will all go to collections and kill your credit rating, increasing your interest rates, draining even more money from your accounts; or even end up in you getting sued for a piece of your house. That’s why 100 million Americans are where I am (and the half million or so every year literally bankrupted by medical debt), and not in the fantasy place you would hope for.
That’s all by design. They know they have to parcel the bills to avoid people running exactly the process you refer to, and they are not actually interested in giving anyone an exception, because they are for-profit corporations, not charities. Fact is, most Americans are actually de facto poor, because the cost of living keeps going up but not wages. And when everyone is an exception, no one is.
What we need is a moral society that pays for healthcare. Like literally every other developed nation on the planet.
But, that said, gifts are welcome.
Or if you want to cover my appearance fee on a show, you would have to choose a show you are already a fan of, for a topic you’d like to see me interviewed on (it has to be something I have expert knowledge in and the host would be interested in), and contact the host with your offer, letting them know that I will likely agree (I won’t do Nazi channels, for example, but I doubt that’s a concern here), and have them reach out to me, and the rest can be worked out at that point.
Dr Carrier, you need a YT channel. Full stop. We like what you write and what you say when you lecture, but there is NOT enough of it. You need to produce video content. End of story. And reguarly. And then you will create more income. I watched Alex O’Connor and Sam Harris drone on for an hour yesterday. It was somewhat unsufferable hearing Harris yammer about meditation, but I watched it all. People are VERY interested in philosophy, especially as it pertains to religion. You MUST create a YT channel and make weekly vlogs and have guests on, and you will get numerous brand deals, and new sponsorships and much , much more. IMO, this is the path you seek. I see you are on MythVision a few times. You need to make your own version. This is the advice you need to hear. Have a nice day. Respectfully….
Not my skillset. And too expensive in capitalization and time to monetization. And I can’t produce information-dense material that way so it would be more like edutainment. Which I am not especially good at. And which would take hours a week away from my more substantive work, and for very little return. And it would be heavily censored by YouTube, and subject to harassing takedown claims and other tactics always used on YouTubers who annoy anyone for any reason.
The alternative is to just draft on everyone else’s capitalization, time, and misery by having hosts pay me to be on their shows to grow audience-drawing content for them in a mutual synergy. Which is what I do. I am on some show every month or so on average. It costs me a lot less, in time, money, and grief. And I don’t have to be good at it. I just have to know stuff and then show up and answer questions intelligently.
Hi Dr. Carrier,
As a fan of your work and someone who has run a semi-successful youtube channel (20k subscribers and 400 dollars a month before my demonetization) I would be happy to help assist and advise if you changed your mind. There is a huge and hungry audience on youtube, and if a nobody like me could have gotten to where I did, I bet an actual academic could get much further with some support.
OMG. $400 a month? That’s not even three hours of my time. So you are describing a massive opportunity cost.
I know what goes into developing and producing YouTube shows of any audience-gaining quality. With prep, scripting, editing, and production (in addition to recording) it would be some twenty hours a week at minimum to hit a target like that. So you are describing a massive loss to me. Are you going to fund that? And that’s not counting the thousands of dollars of investment capital (sound and video and processing equipment). Are you going to give me $5000 in equipment capital too? And the years of losses waiting to build the channel to be monetized at all. Are you going to gift me a hundred grand to get me buy during that ramp?
And will you buy YouTube so you can stop it censoring and demonetizing my work? And stop trolls from constantly attacking my channel with bogus takedown and privacy claims? (YouTube is a shitty and unstable medium to make a living on.)
And all that for a lower quality, lower information medium, taking away all the time I devote to high quality, high information media, thus likely causing further losses in Patreon support and readers on my blog?
I really see no business value here.
Maybe if I win the lottery and retire I’ll fold some time into a YouTube show just for fun because I don’t need to make a living.
Unless you want to gift me some five million US dollars (that’s the endowment needed to retire on with capital to invest in projects). Hey. Then I’ll consider it.
I really think you’re being quite unreasonable and out of touch with reality here.
Hallo Dr. R. Carrier. Your book On the historicity of JC was the ultemate answer to many of my questions. I admire your work and would like to tip you (from The Hague, NL) but i will not use paypal (untrustworthy).
Totally understand. And thank you.
I don’t know any other international cash transfer method that’s any more trustworthy. Zelle doesn’t cross borders. Facebook Messenger Cash is just another corporate cash app like PayPal. Amazon Commissions come from, well, Amazon. Even mailed checks are no use because the international check cashing fee is $25 in the U.S.
Best I can recommend: become my Patreon patron for however many months you feel suited?
I just saw your post this morning on FB. You might find the following link of interest.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Thanks. That’s neat. But it just repeats the same metrics in different charts over and over then descends into increasingly dubious charts and equivocations and ends with a dumb crypto-currency-shilling quote of Hayek, a renowned idiot.
Which is especially funny as the composer of the page seems to want to winge about ending the gold standard (which actually happened in WWI, not under Nixon, who just made it official), and nothing is more toxically the opposite of a gold standard than crypto.
So that page seems designed to scam people into losing money in the stupid crypto market rather than voting for competent politicians who will ensure rational monetary policy and (as the top charts should have suggested) an honest labor policy.
That page is, in other words, pushing the very ignorance of the real problem that my media post was warning people not to fall for. And it is ironically doing it with the click bait of the very charts I used, and then leading viewers by hand away from what those charts say to ever more unhinged conspiracy theories and distractions from the original point, to in the end “sell crypto.”
That’s precisely how liars control and manipulate you.
So watch out for when that manipulation gets played on you.
Wow! That site doesn’t even mention “crypto” other than a link to a podcast on Bitcoin in small lettering at the very bottom of the page.
Wow. You’re pretty easily duped.
Everyone knows that website is a crypto shill (example, example, example).
And it pipelines you to a crypto shilling channel.
Indeed the Hayek quote is a stock pro-crypto propaganda meme, and they even hyperlink it to a Bitcoin shill in case you didn’t know.
All the weird handwaving about the gold standard having anything to do with the things they chart is also a common crypto meme.
You are being roped in by a crypto shill psyop. And you are still standing here denying it. Your failure here would be funny if it wasn’t disturbing.
You need to think more critically, and not let grifters and corpos control you with clever PR and social engineering.
Richard, I was hoping to engage in useful exchange with you about macroeconomics as viewed through a monetary lens. You posted some interesting points of view on FB. However, your resort to ad hominem attacks reveals more about your anger and resentments than me. You know nothing about me other than what I shared through those links. Of course you’re free to ignore me, but I don’t take insults and personal attacks lightly. I appreciate your historical work and have most of your books. On the other hand, you act as if your political beliefs and philosophy are facts. They’re not. They are simply opinions that are open to debate, just like everyone else’s. I also find it ironic that you accuse others of being shills when you are constantly promoting your own works and services. I am okay with that as we all have to earn our bread. But don’t pretend you’re morally superior because you think your work is worthwhile while that of others isn’t.
Getting caught being duped by crypto shill manipulation and then attacking the messenger rather than acting wisely on the message is exactly the worst possible thing you could be doing here.
I’ll give you a moment to realize that.
For everyone else:
Absolutely never do what Richard Martin is doing here. This behavior, society-wide, is the doom-loop that will destroy civilization. Don’t be that guy.
Richard, I commented here because you posted the productivity–compensation chart on your Facebook page and comments were closed there. The chart appears in the same collection of long-run economic series on the site I linked, and the underlying data come from the Economic Policy Institute. Since you raised the issue of wages, affordability, and the cost of living, the broader set of historical series is directly relevant to that discussion.
You were also the one who introduced “crypto” and Bitcoin into the thread, not me. Those two things are not the same. Much of the crypto token ecosystem deserves the criticism it receives. Bitcoin, however, is a monetary protocol and settlement network, which is a different phenomenon entirely.
As for the suggestion that I have been “duped,” that seems to be your standard way of dismissing interpretations you disagree with. Progressive interpretations of economic trends are contested, just as Austrian, Keynesian, monetarist, and MMT approaches are debated within economics. That is simply how intellectual inquiry works.
And dismissing Hayek as if he were some fringe crank is historically inaccurate. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on capital theory and the role of dispersed information in economic systems. One does not have to agree with his conclusions to recognize that his contributions are part of mainstream economic thought.
In any case, I was simply engaging the economic point you raised when you posted the chart. If you prefer not to engage the economic question, I am happy to leave it there.
You’re still doing it. Ignoring that you got conned (or were trying to con me) and complaining that you got caught.
If everyone else acted like you, civilization would be in ruins. And you would probably be dead, eaten by cannibal Nazi biker gangs.
And yet you continue to fail to learn. Time after time. Right here in real time.
What strikes me in your replies is the rhetorical pattern rather than the substance. When someone raises a point you disagree with, the response is not to identify the claim and explain why it is wrong, but to frame the other person as “duped,” irrational, or mentally deficient.
That move functions as pre-emptive delegitimization rather than argument. By declaring opponents incompetent or deceived, the claim itself never has to be examined while certainty is signalled to the audience. It’s a pattern visible across many of your discussions, particularly when the topic moves outside your primary field. The result is less analysis than intellectual status-defence.
More of you doing the same thing.
Lo and behold.
You are in a death-loop.
Hello Dr. Carrier. Glad to hear you met your bills. I have been pouring over all of your articles and have just finished your “Historicity of Jesus” book. I hope this isn’t deleted for relevancy-sake but I just had one question that was itching at me throughout the Acts and Gospels chapters of the book;
Some of the arguments for Acts and the Gospels being literary inventions rather than history is that they utilize biblical typology and prophesy for most, if not all of the narratives. As somebody raised in traditionalist Catholic circles, those facts were already known to me, Catholic scholars (at least the traditional ones) seem to be very proud of the typological elements, and tout the gospels as being “full of fulfilled prophesies.” I even recall more than a few of your comparisons between Jesus and Moses being taught in my Catechism class.
The best answer I could come up with is, the gospels are obviously dependent on them, not the other way around, and are being written precisely to fulfill these Old Testament prophesies. I assume on a similar note ancient readers would see Jesus’ typology of Moses, Elijah, etc as proof of some kind of divine orchestration.
This is an okay place to post questions because it’s like an AMA but it’s generally better to ask questions under an article pertaining, as that’s where other people are more likely to find the exchange (it will get lost here).
To the question: Of course both are true. The prophecies are used to construct the stories (not the other way around) because they are employing a method of composition that follows the technique of pesher (On the Historicity of Jesus, Ch. 4, Elements 5–8, 16–18; and Ch. 5, Element 42; cf. pp. 561, 576). And they used mimesis to make Jesus the “better” version of prior Greek and Jewish heroes (like Moses, Elijah, Romulus, Odysseus, and Dionysus), which is not a miracle, but standard composition practice for fiction of the time.
There is an open question over the purpose however. Mark clearly intends nothing to be understood literally; it’s all allegory and parable, but only insiders are supposed to understand that while outsiders (the damned) mistake it as a literal story (p. 119). Matthew might be following that practice and just doing a better job on the fake-out side (with making the structure look like an OT book like Deuteronomy and claiming “fulfilled” prophecies rather than allegorically intended prophecies). Likewise Luke. John is the first Gospel who, in our final redaction (probably not in its original edition), explicitly denounces that and insists it’s all literal and insiders are damned if they don’t agree (in alignment with the rising anti-mythicist attitudes also seen in 1 and 4 John, 2 Peter, and Ignatius).
I discuss aspects of this in: Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians and How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?.
Dr. Carrier I’m interested in your New Testament course. There seems to be a intro video missing in your description: “Please watch our video below by Dr. Richard Carrier to learn more details about this course!” Where is the video? It’s not showing on the course page… https://sales.mvp-courses.com/nt-studies/
Good catch. Thank you. The URL for the video (which is supposed to show up in the immediately following blank space) seems to be missing from the code.
I’ll let them know and have them email you when a fix is up.
I have a suggestion which you might take as an insult, but it is not meant as one. You write books about mythicism and you say some are easier than others, but in my opinion, nothing you write about mythicism is easy to understand. I don’t know if anyone has an easy book on the subject. Your books and articles are so complicated. They are like contracts with lots of subcategories, etc. If you want to make more money as an author, you might want to aim for a wider audience on mythicism, but you really need to write something that a 12 year old can understand. I am not exaggerating. If Bart Ehrman wrote like you, he would be financially struggling too as an author. I don’t agree with your anti-religious beliefs, but I think that the marketplace of ideas is important and different opinions make it more vibrant.
Have you read Jesus from Outer Space?
That’s literally the book you are describing.