Oct. 22, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:34:17
3106 Making Breeding Fun Again - Call In Show - October 21st, 2015
Question 1: [2:13] - My question - as it always has been - is why. Given the way the world is now - why is it my responsibility to show people the truth and to urge them to think? Should we not just escape their tyrannical house of cards and let people learn the insanity of their delusions through experience? Should these people, who have done so much wrong in the world with the 'best intentions' not be liable for their actions - or should we feel sympathy for them because they simply, like sheep, do not think and never have? Question 2: [59:25] - In overcoming maladaptive patterns of behavior, how can one distinguish between the absence of confidence arising from being unsuccessful in completely overcoming these patterns over the long-term (taking action and succeeding), versus low-confidence due to lack of insight in an unknown, but important area (you don’t know what you don’t know)?Question 3: [1:40:39] - I have a serious problem. Whenever I complete an amount of work for some project, I feel a brief high of achievement followed by a sense of purposelessness like my life has no meaning - even though I intellectually understand that it does - and this keeps me from starting anything new for a while. How do I overcome this feeling of purposelessness more quickly?
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Please, please, please, before we go any further, for God's sake, please go and watch The Truth About Immigration and Welfare.
And you should really, really check it out.
It's a very, very good presentation.
It's a fantastic data.
The Truth About Immigration and Welfare.
Blow your mind.
Please share it.
Absolutely essential information for people to get a hold of.
This was an interesting show.
Very interesting show.
The first caller basically...
I was asking why should we even bother being good?
You know what?
I didn't have a clue.
No, I'm just kidding.
So I sort of put together an argument and it was with reference to something in his personal life, a decision point in his personal life.
And we put together, I think, some good ways of looking at it that really had to motivate it to try and be good even though it comes at some, well, not insignificant personal cost at times.
Now the second guy, very interesting question.
How do you know if you lack confidence in something or you're just bad at it?
And that's an interesting question because, yeah, it could be that you are really good at something but lack confidence or it could be that you have an appropriate level of confidence because you suck at something.
I've certainly faced that mirror down a few times in my life.
So that thing was really interesting.
Third guy had something that happens a lot.
With all of us, I think.
It's kind of a human condition thing, kind of a male thing in some ways, which is, you know, I achieve something really great, and then I feel a sense of purposelessness and wholeness and emptiness, and I kind of have to then chase the next thing around the bend.
So we had a good long chat about that and went into his family's history under communism and so on, and the degree to which that may have an effect.
Hopefully it will help you to enjoy your successes and not constantly feel like you're in some revolving door of the next thing, the next thing, the next thing.
Because, you know, to circle back to the first guy, the last thing is death.
And that's going to happen no matter how busy you are.
So it's a really, really great show.
Please, of course, freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us continue to bring all this philosophy to the world.
We're doing a great, great amount of good.
But it's all dependent on you and your support.
So, let's get started.
Alright, up for us today is Cody.
Cody wrote in and said, My question, as it has always been, is why?
Given the way the world is now, why is it my responsibility to show people the truth and to urge them to think?
Should we not just escape their tyrannical house of cards and let people learn the insanity of their delusions through experience?
Should these people, who have done so much wrong in the world with the quote-unquote best intentions, not be liable for their actions?
Or should we feel sympathy for them because simply, like sheep, they do not think and never have?
If that's the case, are we then not dehumanizing them?
That's from Cody.
Hey Cody, how you doing?
Hi there, Steph.
Cody, you have any kids?
I do not, no.
I hate to be annoying, but that's the ask and answer of the question.
If you want to send a society into significant decay, reduce and dilute the incentive to have children.
Because when you don't have children, and of course, I say this as a guy who for many years didn't have children and never particularly planned on it.
I remember writing in my youthful journal, you know, I don't want to be part of the blind photocopier.
Make more, make more, make more.
And it wasn't until my 40s that I became a father.
And that's late and unusually late.
And it changes things.
If you don't have kids, then...
Your life is for your own pleasures and the long-term happiness of the planet.
It's not that important.
So, it's not the only reason, and there are lots of people who fought very hard to improve the planet who don't have children, and there are lots of people who do have children who don't, so it's not obviously a one-to-one ratio.
But you care about the world in a different way When you have kids.
Because you recognize that you're part of a great chain of being.
That you're a link in a chain, not an end unto yourself.
And I feel a significant responsibility to the kind of world that my daughter is going to end up living in.
And I know the degree of frustration That I had as a child when I saw lazy, selfish, stupid, ignorant, self-willed, ignorant adults.
And, you know, the adults who didn't lift a finger to fix the world or who bleated on about stupid things like, oh, it's just the environment that matters.
Of course it's the environment that matters.
But that was such an easy thing.
Being pro-environmental, it's like being anti-racist.
It's such a non-controversial thing that only cowards flock there as their primary moral flag.
Let me take a moral stand that absolutely nobody will disapprove of.
Scarcely takes a significant amount of moral courage.
I like trees, and discrimination is bad.
Okay, well, I agree with those two things, but these moral battles are fought and won Decades ago.
The real moral improvements are where the greatest offense currently resides because offense guards the truth.
You ring the truth with people offended by the truth and very few people want to approach it.
Now, the reality is you don't have to do a damn thing to try and fix the world.
It's not a moral obligation.
In the same way that if you're Walking past a lake and you see a five-year-old kid drowning, you don't have to get wet.
But how do you feel about yourself if you don't?
Yeah, I can see what you're saying there.
You sound like a young fellow.
Yeah, I am.
Pretty young.
Life is long.
It's a lot longer than you think it's going to be when you're young.
I've never quite understood the people who say, oh, you know, I blinked and ten years had gone by and your kids grew up.
So fast.
They don't, in fact.
They really don't.
I guess they grow up fast if you see them for an hour a day, but then, yeah, if you watch every 20th frame of a movie, that movie goes by pretty fast, and it's kind of jumbled and incomprehensible.
But I look back, like I'm pushing half a century.
Next year, I'll be 50.
And I'm pushing half a century.
I don't look back at my life.
It doesn't seem like a blur.
It doesn't seem fast.
It doesn't seem like, wow, where did all the time go?
I filled it pretty intensely with some pretty honorable stuff.
But life is long.
And I think that the gravest and ghastliest emotion to feel as you age is regret.
Because when you age, Your fears are revealed as meaningless, for the most part.
Oh, you know, I was so worried what people would think of me.
I was so worried that people might not like me.
And those, I understand those feelings.
I'm not trying to, you can't will them away.
We're a social animal.
You can't just wish them away.
We're a tribal species.
But as you get older, you do kind of look back at your fears and you say, wow, what a lot of wasted energy that was.
How many of the things I was afraid of came to pass?
I think I'm batting zero.
I'm a pretty smart guy and I'm not very good at guessing what can happen in life.
I think that you're young enough that the world could be a very different and much worse place when you get to my age.
In fact, sooner than that.
More than potentially.
The world will either be a much better place or it will be a much worse place when you get older.
But it's not going to be somewhere in between.
I don't think.
The social movements that are afoot, the economic processes and trends that are afoot, the multicultural challenges, to put it as mildly as possible, that are afoot, these are not going to be resolved in the neutral.
They are going to be resolved in the winning or in the losing.
And I can understand the desire to push off confrontation If you will outlive its necessity.
What?
You know, is there really much point quitting smoking if you've been a smoker and you're still 90 and smoking?
I don't know, maybe, but not much.
Is there much point starting to say for your old age when you're 85?
Probably not.
And so if the challenges...
Will not arrive before you depart?
I can understand, if you don't have kids, why that could be a sensible decision.
Not necessarily an honorable decision, but I can see the cost benefits.
But I don't think that will be the case for your generation.
I think the free ride of the historical momentum of capital and resources that has occurred since the 60s is not going to last for a huge amount of time longer.
So, I don't think that you're going to land in a neutral place.
You're going to land in bright sunlight or you're going to land in a bat-filled cave of horror.
And which way you land and where the future goes is up to you.
And I think it's terrible.
You know, I've got lots of videos railing against the boomers.
I think it's terrible that that choice is passed from the boomers through my generation and down to your generation.
I've certainly acquitted myself honorably in the field of battle when it comes to making a better world and fighting the evildoers of the world.
So nobody will curse my name in the future, no matter how it turns out.
Well, I guess if the evil guys win, maybe they will.
But that's good.
It's an honorable thing.
To be hated by evildoers is a prerequisite of virtue.
But I don't think that, I mean, just demographically, right?
I mean, that's just working on some information for Canadian politics.
And the average age in Canada is like almost 41 years old.
A lot of old people in Canada, not a lot of young people.
And I don't think it's...
I mean, demographically, it simply can't last.
And so a lot of work needs to be done to make breeding fun again, to make settling down and having families fun again.
And that's just one of the many things that could be done.
And I'm sorry that this is where it's ended up for your generation.
But you have to Because that time has come.
That torch has been passed to you and it's not going to last your generation if you don't take care to keep it lit.
And the last thing that I wanted to mention is that no one person can ever do it.
It's one of these things like if everybody thinks that everybody else is going to get water to put out the fire, the fire takes down the city.
Oh, I thought you were bringing the steaks and you just end up with a bunch of shish kebabs full of onions and green peppers at the cookyard.
Oh, I thought you were bringing...
Right?
So if you make the assumption that everyone else is doing it, you end up with nothing.
And if only one person is doing it, it doesn't work.
No matter what I do, I can't fix it.
Because I'm one person.
And one person can very easily be dismissed.
And in fact, the best way to discredit a movement is to provoke it and starve it, right?
So that only one or two or ten or fifty or a hundred people are into it, and that way you can dismiss it based upon the democracy of, well, if it was such a great idea, there'd be more adherents, right?
And so you marginalize a great idea by allowing it discourse and then Mocking adherence, right?
Because mockery goes a long way towards scaring off the spines of the young.
And so if there's a movement towards philosophy, peace, reason, freedom, free trade, individualism, in the long run statelessness, peaceful parenting, in the shorter run, if there's like 100,000 people the world over, it's probably not worth doing.
In fact, I would argue it's kind of definitely not worth doing.
Because the idea is discredited by the scarcity of its adherence.
You know, a snowflake is not a problem.
An avalanche is a problem.
And so...
If you decide not to join a movement towards promoting truth, reason, freedom, philosophy, property, well, you are part of the problem.
Because it means that it becomes a cost negative for other people to join it.
If you join it and you get other people to join it and get other people to join it, put your friendships on the line and put your relationships to the test, well, then you start to get a real movement.
And the movement gains credibility in the eyes of fools because there are such numbers.
If you're a religion of one, you're crazy.
You get lithium and you get self-hugging jackets in a well-padded room because you're a religion of one.
If you're a religion of a billion, well, you're a force in global politics.
So...
It is a collective movement.
No individual can solve this problem.
And the aggregation of individuals, well, you know, the first one is smart and brave, and the first hundred are smart and brave, and the first thousand are smart and brave, and the first ten thousand are pretty smart and brave, the first hundred thousand still smart and brave.
You know, the billionth and one, well, that extra one is just riding the herd, right?
So it is in the initial stages of a movement that adherence and passion is so delicate, right?
If you're too passionate, people can reject you for intensity.
If you're not passionate enough, people can reject you for indifference.
Striking the right balance is a real challenge.
Having calm in the face of radical ideas, which is these days just to say thinking, is a great challenge.
So it's worth doing.
Because what is the alternative?
There really isn't any, is there?
I mean, there are.
This is the alternative that most people choose, and most people just choose to let history happen to them.
That's true.
Most people, like a cork on a stormy sea, let history happen to them, and then bewail and complain that it did not deposit them in the right place.
And...
If you let history happen to you, well, then history will wipe you out.
Because history is made by the active people.
And the passive people get wiped out.
One way or another.
Doesn't have to be physically.
But they cease to matter.
It's like they never existed a lot of times.
Yeah, except, of course, they took up a lot of resources.
They took a lot of food, yeah.
Took a lot of food.
And they got in the way.
They got in the way.
Started all the witch shots and all that too, probably.
Do you know what the top regret is of old people?
Top regret?
That they didn't do what they wanted in life.
Yeah.
Number one, I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself and not the life others expected of me.
I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself Not the life others expected of me.
It's so terrifying to think how many people just do what others tell them to all the time.
And they should be scorned.
You know, when people express regret, a lot of people have this tendency to say, no, no, you did fine.
Oh, you know.
Oh, God, yeah, I know that.
I think I might not have been the best parent.
No, you were great.
You were fine.
You had it tough.
I think I may not have lived the most courageous life.
No, you did a good job.
You were steady.
You were reliable.
Oh, I really wanted to start that business when I was 25 with those three guys.
God, that would have been great.
I was just too scared.
I looked back and now I kicked myself.
I just feel like I lived my life in a slowly rotating hamster wheel.
Same day, over and over again.
World stayed the same.
I turned to dust.
No, don't be sad.
I'm not a big one for that.
Yeah, not at all.
That's terrifying.
Yeah, I mean, I'd like to put fuel under the fire of people's regrets so they can shoot up a giant spark of avoidance for those who come afterwards.
Because if you drug people with the opiate of it was fine, well, first of all, you're not listening to them.
It's your own discomfort that you're avoiding, not theirs.
If you have a fucked up life...
If you've made really bad mistakes, the only way to redeem them is to have other people see them and flee in horror from the disaster you've become.
And to squelch the fire of people's regret turns off the beacons that can guide people to a life not full of regret.
People say, I work too much and I didn't invest in my relationships.
times.
I should say that too.
Wish I hadn't let my friendships drift away.
I didn't get to know my neighbors.
I didn't invest in a community.
I didn't have kids.
That is a huge one for people.
You know, if you don't have kids, wow!
There's 20 years of your life where you could do 20 times as much.
We don't have kids.
But it's a long way.
It's a long way from 50 to 90.
It's almost as far from 50 to 90 as it is from diapers to 50.
It's a long way.
It's a long way to hope that video games can cover up the emptiness you continually feel inside as your name Selected over 4 billion years of evolution, your particular gene set after 4 billion years of evolution dies with you.
And when you get old, who is going to care about you except the people you made or the people you kept close?
Go down to the mall.
You can see these guys.
Go down to the mall.
Go down to the coffee shop.
These guys, 70 years old, 80 years old, they're just sitting there.
Do you want to go over and say, hey, let's be friends?
Hell no.
No way.
There was a New York Times article recently about a guy 74 years old.
George Bell, you can look it up.
74 years old.
The guy died in his hoarder-strewn apartment of isolated horror.
He just died.
And it took days before people noticed the smell.
He'd...
They tried to put this tragic spin on it.
Like, this was a great guy.
He just fell through the cracks.
But you could read between the lines.
Guy was going to get married.
But then the mother of his...
Fiance said, you know, we've got to work out what's going to happen legally should you guys ever split up, you know, just to make sure that things are sorted out ahead of time.
And he's like, nope!
Calls off the marriage, wanders off.
Later in his life, he's exchanging letters with this woman.
They still love each other, still care for each other.
Think of all the regret.
They could have had a life together.
They could have had a family together.
They could have laughed and loved and cried together.
But no.
Because he was found dead in his apartment.
With four tire pressure gauges nearby.
Because, you know, three just isn't enough.
What if they break?
So he didn't have a life with family.
He had a life of making sure he had a wide variety of calendars from all over the world.
And this is a guy who said, oh, it was such a shame that he ended up alone.
But he used to be a mover.
And he would move Office furniture.
Man, I did that for a weekend.
That is a tough work.
It's pretty wild to come out with the same number of fingers that you go in with.
But he used to write notes.
He used to write notes and put them in the desks of the people's offices he was moving.
So someone's got a desk.
They're moving up a floor.
They're moving to a different building.
They've got these movers.
And he puts a desk.
He puts notes in their desk.
And one says, I'm secretly in love with you.
Come and meet me by the water cooler.
Another one says, There's a bomb under your chair.
Move, and you'll die.
Well, that's a sadist, if you don't mind me saying so.
Oh, it's so weird that he ended up alone.
Such a tragedy.
Nobody came to claim the body.
Paranoid, loveless jerk.
Oh, it was such a tragic loss.
No, it wasn't.
Guy had half a million dollars, had barely left his apartment in 10 years.
He had friends who were begging him, come, come visit.
And they tailed off after a while because he just never had.
It was such a tragedy.
Really?
Is it a tragedy when a chain smoker gets cancer?
Well, I'm not sure that it is.
It's a tragedy if a healthy person gets sick, but...
So what happens is...
Sorry?
Yeah, it would be a tragedy for the people around them, for that chain smoker.
More than a tragedy.
More than a tragedy.
More than a tragedy, I mean, this guy was obese, had diabetes, and died of heart disease.
Is that a tragedy?
I don't know.
I assume he enjoyed his food.
You know, the problem with people who get lung cancer from smoking is everyone around them has probably been begging them to quit for decades.
Right?
Yeah, that's true.
Just wouldn't quit.
So when you're young, You're scared of disaster and then when you get old you realize that the fear was the disaster.
But then it's too late.
By then it's too late.
Some 60-year-old woman who goes, Oh man, not having kids was just the worst thing ever.
My life is empty.
My friends are moved or they're dead or they're not friends anymore.
I'm so lonely and I have another 25 years to go.
In this solitary confinement tiny apartment I call the hellhole last stop at the end of my life.
When you get more company in prison, Than people who don't invest in their relationships get in their old age.
And you go out and you want to get any kind of human contact.
I used to work in a hardware store when I was a teenager.
I'd see old people.
Who would hold the hand of the young lady at the cash register as they dropped their change into her palm.
I could see what it was.
Skin to skin.
Maybe that's why he bought four tire pressure gauges, this guy who died in New York all alone at the age of 74.
Maybe he just, there was a nice cashier, he could drop his Coins into her hand.
And he could feel her skin.
As a social animal, we need contact as much as we need air.
And that's the life that can't be fixed.
Thank you.
Say the number one killer, heart disease, cancer.
No.
Number one killer, solitude.
And how can you get companionship?
How can you have a life with contact that lasts?
Be a good person.
I don't mean a nice person.
Nice is the coward's compromise with convention that he pretends is good.
Be a good person.
Be a brave person.
Be admirable.
Be startling in your sagacity.
Be winsome in your wisdom.
And people will never leave you because you're irreplaceable.
But everybody wants you to be nice.
And everyone imagines that if they're nice, people will be there.
But they won't.
Because nice is cowardly and nice is bland.
The nice person at the end of the street dies alone.
The dogs eat their body and the smell brings the paramedics a week and a half later.
Nice is forgettable.
Nice is convenient for everyone.
And nice greases the slippery slope on the world's descent into perdition.
Don't be nice.
Be good.
And good is tough.
And good is honest.
And good does not spare the future Of the world for the feelings of losers.
Be memorable.
Be irreplaceable to those around you.
Be someone who startles everyone around you with the glory of who you are.
People say, Steph, how can you be sure you're going to stay married?
Well, you may like me, you may hate me, but there aren't many of me.
*laughs* And if you like me, you're not going anywhere.
For a lot of people, if they hate me, they don't seem to be going anywhere either, but I guess that's their choice too.
And so the guard against solitude is glory.
The god against isolation is moral excellence.
You will never be forgotten as long as you are inspirational.
People will return to you like a camel to water if you provide the most nutritious sustenance to the human soul, which is the energizing glimpse Of a higher place.
Of a more powerful state of mind.
Of a fearless and courageous tackling of all that is wrong and corrupt in the world.
So you do get to save the world.
Or at least give the world its greatest shot.
There is no saving the world.
The world exists whether we are free or under fascism.
The world will do what it's going to do, regardless of whether we are in a voluntary community or an involuntary communism.
But if you provide that light to people, that example to people, however erroneous and inconstant it may be, it certainly can happen with me, but you give People, they're best shot.
To change, you give the future the best shot to be a place where good people want to live and bad people want to move from.
But you also shield yourself.
Against the ultimate solitude that can surround you, which is indifference.
Be not predictable to people.
Be not predictable to people.
I remember reading a story many years ago about a woman who had an aunt who was old.
I mentioned this on the show before, and they'd go over to her house and say, Hi, how are you doing?
What's new?
And they'd get the little bit of ham, little bit of bread speech.
Oh yes, well for lunch I had a little bit of ham.
And I had a little bit of bread.
And that's really all they could get out of her.
She was forgettable.
She was un-there.
She was automatic.
She was no more a pianist than an mp3 as a pianist.
And then when she died, I'm sure, people struggled to say nice things.
I gave a eulogy at a funeral some years ago.
And people came up to talk about this woman who died on a toilet.
And they said, Well, she had lots of candy for the kids at Halloween, and I could borrow cups of sugar from her from time to time,
and Once she picked up some mail while I was away on holiday, and you could just see, like, what are we going to say?
Yeah, and I mean, I've talked about this before, that what's going to be written on your gravestone?
Are people going to have to dig through memories to talk about why you were on the planet and how the planet was a better place for you being there?
Our social circles are shadows cast by our commitment.
If you have very little commitment to anything, then you will have very shallow relationships.
If you have commitment to corruption and immorality, then your social circle will be characterized by corrupt and immoral people.
When we choose our commitments, we choose our companions.
And one of the great benefits of a virtuous life is that it will inevitably provide you with virtuous companions.
That's not great for the non-virtuous people who you may have had around you accidentally as a result of being born, but it is a great boon to those down the road who can enjoy the pleasure of your inspiring company in the future.
So I think there are a lot of good reasons to be a good person.
And I've never seen any look of skepticism or contempt in the eyes of those around me.
It doesn't mean they don't criticize me.
It doesn't mean that I can't improve.
Of course, absolutely.
I mean, that's essential.
But I have never...
I've seen that and I am to a large degree living my life with the knowledge that at some point my daughter is going to look at the world and say, well, I think this could be improved a little bit.
What have you been up to, old man, in the time that you've been alive to try and make the world a better place for me to live in?
What have you been up to?
And you've got to have an answer there somewhere, right?
So anyway, tell me what you think I gave a fairly long ramble there.
So that's pretty much what you're saying is, well, if I don't do anything, I can do that, but there's no, like when I die, there's like nothing I didn't help.
Oh, before you die.
Yeah, so tell me, what's the negative of doing something?
It doesn't mean you've got to go stand on a street corner with a megaphone, right?
But do something.
What is the downside?
I'm not, are there any?
I know there are.
But I mean, what are the downsides that you think, Cody?
I can think of one right off my head.
All my cousins, she's had her third kid now.
And I know they've been spanking a lot.
You can tell that it's not right at all.
I should probably say something about it.
I haven't yet.
But I really want to.
I can't believe they're doing that.
And I know they were as kids, so they think it's okay.
So that's just one thing I can think of off the top of my head.
And what happens?
What could happen there?
Well, if I never say anything, in the future, those kids could think, well, why didn't Uncle Cody ever do anything to help them or something?
And what would you say?
Let's say that they get to be 12 or 13 or 14.
Because at some point, they're going to be bigger.
And they're going to be bigger than their parents, right?
And then, ooh, magically, their parents are going to find some kind of self-restraint, right?
But let's say they come to you and say, so, Uncle Cody...
What's going on?
You knew this was going on, you never said anything?
When it happened and you were around, you pretended nothing happened.
What gives?
Did you know it was wrong?
What would you say?
Yeah.
100%.
Doesn't help anything.
Just makes everything worse.
And I would only probably make excuses like, you know, they would never listen to me or something, but I know that's just an excuse.
But the most likely thing is that they never would have that conversation with you because they had been spamed.
That's true.
They would probably get mad at me for even trying to insinuate that it's wrong.
No, no, because they would normalize it.
They would normalize it.
They would never think that there was anything wrong.
with all of the resulting dysfunction that that would bring about.
There's a downside, obviously, for not doing it.
There's a downside to doing it, right?
Which is, you know, they could go nuts on you, right?
They could, easily.
I'm not usually one to question my family because they get kind of mad at me then, to be honest.
Especially my not-immediate family, they tend to be like, well, why are you saying that?
You're just crazy.
Even though they think I'm smarter than them, so that's, I don't know.
Well, people like you to be smarter than them if it makes them feel proud, but not if it runs things they don't want to hear.
Yeah, that is a challenge.
That is a challenge.
If you see children being mistreated and you don't do anything, that stays with you.
Because then what happens is you then get to see those kids being mistreated and the effects of that playing out over time, right?
Yeah, I know I'm the same height as their dad.
They used to think of me as their dad, because I'm the same height as their dad.
So they used to be like, oh hey, you look just like my daddy.
So they liked me a lot.
But then I know they start spanking and now they avoid me all the time.
So it's like they equated me with their dad.
It's sad, really.
Well, no, not that sad.
I mean, it's quite predictable, right?
Yeah, it's what's going to happen.
If you get mauled by one tiger, you don't necessarily stay friends with all the other tigers in the jungle, right?
Yeah.
We are built that way.
We're built to see those patterns.
Yeah, I just don't know what to do.
Do I just, like, call them up one day and just tell them to stop?
Do I wait until, like, Easter or Thanksgiving to talk to them?
I don't know.
I don't know if I have to do something, because if I don't, it's...
I regret it.
Well, I don't know the answer to that specific situation, obviously.
What's the best way to talk about it?
But I will say this, that there are people, you know, therapists and so on, who can help you with that challenge.
Right?
There are books out there that can, you know, here's how to bring up difficult things with family members.
Because, you know, if you fail, that's going to be a big challenge for the kids, right?
Yeah, it might get it worse.
I don't know.
I think adding the dosages would help out more.
It's just sad.
Yeah, or what could happen is the parents get so mad at you that they cut you out of the kid's life, and then you don't even get to be there as a passive beneficial influence.
Well, they don't even...
They don't like to have me around anyway, so...
I don't know.
I don't know how much more they could cut me out.
But I get what you're saying.
It's not like they don't like me.
They just tend to avoid me.
Ever since I stopped believing in God, they've gotten really avoidant in that regard.
There's another challenge right there.
They bring them to church all the time.
It's about nonsense in their face.
Right.
And you may not be able to save these kids from this fate.
I don't know if I can.
You may not be able to but what you don't want is to end up in a situation where you're so compromised that it's going to affect the kind of woman who's going to want to go out with you and it's going to affect your relationship with your own kids in the future, right?
Yeah, that's true.
You know, it's the old, I don't know, if you're like me.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but I was very much into, hey, how can I be of help to people, right?
And how can I be of help to people?
How can I facilitate other people's happiness?
You know, you do that for a while.
After a while, you kind of get.
It's a one-way street.
It's a one-way street.
I see how this is benefiting you.
I fail to see how it's benefiting me.
And then, of course, the moment you start thinking that way, everyone calls you selfish.
Oh, that's the greatest one, isn't it?
Go back into the box of utility to me.
Because now that you're questioning the reciprocity of this relationship, you're suddenly a bad person who is selfish.
I know that.
I know that.
They always call me selfish when I try to bring things up like that.
So, I hate to say about this man, but Cody, you standing up for these kids, it's not even fundamentally about them, it's about you.
It's about you.
If you stand up for these kids, you will marry a different kind of woman.
I'm telling you, I know it sounds weird, may even sound a little mystical, but it's the truth.
I would not be married to who I'm married to if I hadn't done the right thing.
Okay.
Do you see what I mean?
I understand what you're saying.
Let's say...
I'll play it out.
You get it, but I'll play it out for the other listeners.
You stand up for these kids and either...
Your family's going to listen to you, and they're going to commit to change, and they'll fight you for a while, but you'll bring more facts, it'll be a lively discussion, and you'll turn the people around, they'll apologize to their kids, they'll do the right, decent thing.
In which case, yay you!
Great moral victory for the species.
And because, you know, they know parents too, and they may, right, you don't know what you might be setting in motion, but, you know, good stuff.
Good stuff being set in motion.
And then, when you cross paths with a great woman, you're going to be like, and this is my family.
And what's your family going to say?
Oh, Cody, he's...
What?
He's a what?
What would they say about you?
Well, he helped his cousins, you know, stop hitting their kids.
I guess it's one thing.
Yeah.
And if she's a halfway decent woman, she's going to get all kinds of tingly in her southern parts.
Right?
Whereas if this woman, who is a nice, good woman who comes around your family, and she sees your family hitting their kids, and you pretending nothing's happening, what's she going to do?
I'm screaming.
Yeah.
You know, there's an old saying, a man is known by the company he keeps.
It's very true.
It's very true.
It's not about the kids fundamentally.
It's about you.
If you make it about the kids, it's really hard to sustain.
Because they're not my kids.
And you have no control over that.
You cannot save these kids.
You cannot get their parents to stop hitting them.
You can't do it.
It's not possible.
Legally.
I do it, right?
Right.
So, when you put your moral might into a giant bucket called I can't control it, You're simply giving yourself an excuse to not be moral.
You can control how reasonably you bring up the conversation.
You can control how you act in that conversation.
You can't control their responses.
You may have some influence over their responses by saying X, Y, or Z, or bringing it up in a way, you know, like if you go and scream at them, only cowards hit their children.
Well...
It may divert their hitting for a while.
It won't work, right?
They just get mad at me.
Yeah, so...
But what you're doing when you create moral actions is you're creating a gravity will of virtue for good people to be drawn towards you.
You know, I mean...
If it goes the other way...
And they basically tell you to get lost.
We're going to keep hitting our kids.
There's nothing you can do about it.
And you're a pussy for even bringing it up.
Whatever might happen, right?
And let's say they cut you right out of their lives.
I mean, they'll probably wait and see if you bring it up again.
But if you do, right?
Then they cut you right out of their lives.
Well...
Then you meet...
A great woman.
And she says, hey, how's your family?
I'm like, well, I'm very much against hitting your children.
And I met with a therapist to figure out how to have the conversation.
I read all these books.
I practiced it.
And I made a great pitch with all the information, all the data, all the science as to why it was so bad.
They completely blew up.
And what it had nothing to do with me, So that's my family.
What's she gonna think?
I don't hang out with people who abuse their children.
I can't condone that.
Even passively.
Because the best thing that I can do for the kids of child abusers is to not pretend that they're not being abused.
To not participate in the hiding of the crime of spanking, the assault.
Can't do it.
Won't do it.
That's the best thing for the kids, that they saw someone who said no to how they were being treated.
And their parents banished that person.
It may take them a long time, but it's their best hope for seeing the light, right?
Whereas if you go there and swallow it and pretend nothing's happening and, you know, whatever, right?
Feel sick to your stomach and go get another beer, well, that's not going to work, right?
Not at all.
It's about your future and your family and your kids if you want them.
Because when some woman comes into your life, her entire being is scanning you It's scanning you for what kind of person you are.
This is how women have evolved.
This is the famous women's intuition, women's instincts that feminists think is sexist and rational people think is common sense.
Simply because a woman invests far more in sex with you than you do with her.
Because she could get pregnant and you could run away.
So, this is why when women say to me, well, I had no idea that he was an irresponsible guy who wouldn't stick around when I had kids.
Bullshit.
That's literally like a man saying, I had no idea whether I found her sexually attractive or not.
That's a hard one sometimes.
Did you have a boner?
Well, that's a clue, right?
Yeah.
You know, not a lot of trouser tents popping up when Margaret Thatcher drops a pencil and picks it up by herself.
So, women, their entire genetic apparatus is scanning you for worthiness.
And the women who say, I didn't know that he didn't have a good job or wouldn't keep it.
I didn't know that...
That he might have sex with other women.
I didn't know that he had a drinking problem.
I didn't know...
Okay, so what you're trying to tell me is there's no such fucking thing as evolution.
That even though women who regularly died in childbirth and had a 20-year commitment for a guy's seven and a half minutes of random thrusting followed by a quick nap and a scamper into the deep bushes...
There's no such thing as evolution.
There was no evolutionary advantage for women who could be killed or disabled by sex in choosing a good provider.
No evolution whatsoever.
To think that women don't know exactly who they're getting into bed with is to be a creationist.
That woman is going to come into your life, Cody, and she's going to scan you from top to toe, back to front.
And, yeah, I mean, not to beat a dead horse, but of course, women are going to scan and say, oh, that guy's hot.
And I think I'm just going to ride him like a cowboy.
And then, when it turns out he runs off, I'm going to pretend that I was the victim of something.
And then I'm going to get taxes and welfare.
And of course, single moms, they've been playing dumb so long, it's hard to tell the difference between playing dumb and being dumb.
But she's going to come in, she's going to scan you, and she's going to scan everyone around you.
Why?
Because she's going to be subjecting her ovaries and a quarter century of her life, and possibly her very life itself, to your entire gene set.
This is why when you date, meeting the family, meeting the parents is a big deal.
Because that's when the woman says, alright, is this a statistical anomaly?
Is this the only tall person in a family of pygmies?
The reason they need to meet the family is they're going to be highly involved in the family.
Family is going to be highly involved in their life.
And that's a wider view of the gene pool she's going to be breeding with.
Right?
So, what do you want this woman to see?
Who do you want this woman to see?
Best man she can find, I guess.
She wants to see a good family or a gone bad family.
Right?
Because there's genes and then there's memes, right?
There's genes and then there's epigenetics.
And even if she's willing to accept that your family's all tall, is she going to want to subject her children to the epigenetic triggers of a stressful family, a weird family, an abusive family, a dysfunctional family, an alienated family, an unloving family?
That's going to have an effect on her children.
It's not just the genes, it's the epigenetics, it's the memes, it's everything else that floats around that determines how the kids turn out.
And the reason that you want to have good people around you is that when the woman does her bone marrow deep tissue ovary scan that it doesn't come up with 4,000 red flags.
So you can make it about the kids.
I don't think that's going to work very well.
Make it about yourself and recognizing that your self-interest and that which is best for the kids is one and the same thing and pursue your self-interest.
Because I'm concerned about every time that we do something that is supposed to benefit other people, That we are weakening our commitment to our own happiness and becoming tools and utilities for others.
It renders us vulnerable, I think.
And it gives other people control over us.
I control what I say.
Can't control how people react to it.
I mean, pick any one of my videos.
Scroll down through the YouTube comments.
Same planet, different worlds.
People think the most astounding things.
Out of what I say.
The most astounding things out of what I say.
And can't control that.
Can't control what I say.
Can't control the quality of what I put out.
Can't control the quality of the research.
Can't control how people react to it.
So make it about you.
You are building...
You know, there are birds, I think they're in Central America, these male birds, they build these very elaborate nests.
It's pretty wild to watch.
It's just bird privilege.
Male bird privilege.
Plumage privilege.
You know, like having 14 pounds of feathers to drag around on your ass for a male peacock.
It's just part of the patriarchy.
You know, if I was in charge of all the birds, I'd have 8,000 feathers stuck up my ass and then have to walk around a bumpy savannah because that's just so fucking great.
But they have to go and they have to build these elaborate nests to try and lure these women, these girl birds, to mate with them.
Well, that's what Virtue is doing.
It's building you this elaborate love cave Where only good vaginas can pass.
You know, Virtue puts Gandalf on the bridge at Moria, in front of the Balrog.
No inferior pussies shall pass!
Only high-quality hoochie poos can enter!
So, do it for you.
Do it for you.
Do it for your future family and the quality of the person you're going to end up with for the rest of your life.
Okay.
Thank you.
Alright.
Alright.
See what you're saying.
Will you let us know how it goes?
Sure.
Alright.
Well, thank you very much, Cody, for a great question.
I hope it was helpful.
Thank you for letting me have my rant.
Who do we have next?
Alright, up next is Andrew.
Andrew wrote in and said, In overcoming maladaptive patterns of behavior, how can one distinguish between the absence of confidence arising from being unsuccessful in completely overcoming these patterns over the long term, taking action and succeeding, versus low confidence due to a lack of insight in an unknown but important area?
You don't know what you don't know.
That's from Andrew.
Do you consider maladaptive behavior to have very significantly run-on sentences in your question?
No kidding.
I've been told that before, yeah.
Do you inhale when voice dictating?
Just kidding, alright.
In overcoming maladaptive patterns of behavior, how can one distinguish between the absence of confidence arising from being unsuccessful and completely overcoming these patterns over the long term versus low confidence due to a lack of insight in an unknown?
Okay, so let's say you want to be a singer.
And you go out and practice at karaoke and every time you do your karaoke song, people leave.
Is that just a lack of confidence or is that objective feedback in terms of the quality of what you're producing?
Feedback, of course, yeah.
Right.
I guess my motivation for asking this is in the context of my own career.
So I'm looking to start a new career in web development and I haven't I haven't gone out and gotten a job in that yet.
So that's why I made motivation for asking these things.
I know it sounds abstract just by itself.
Well, I can just ask you a couple of practical questions to get the lay of the land, if that's alright?
Yeah, shoot.
Alright.
What's your training or experience?
In terms of education or work experience?
Both.
Training is education, and experience is work experience.
I have a background in chemistry, so I did a graduate degree in chemistry, a master's, and I did three years of medical school.
And I did a boot camp in web development, so Ruby and the JavaScript programming languages and a bit of other stuff like CSS, Cascading Style Sheets.
And now I'm Using online resources and books to train myself further in that right now.
And why are you neither a chemist nor a doctor?
Not a criticism, just curious.
No, no, I know.
So for chemistry, basically the PhDs took too long.
I didn't see any clear career coming out of that.
So a lot of people that were in graduate school with me A few years ago and continued on doing their doctorates are in postdoc limbo, so they're doing postdoctoral fellowships, and I don't see what they can do beyond that.
But wait a minute.
I mean, a lot of chemicals in the world.
I notice that every time I go grocery shopping.
So why can't you get a job in chemistry without a postdoctoral degree?
I think because there's been a lot of offshoring of research and development Asia as far as I can tell.
Looking online and looking at the job prospects for people with masters and doctorates in chemistry.
And there's just a lot of people being pumped out with graduate degrees now and just the jobs just don't seem to be in North America in the private sector and I mean, academia is crazy to try and get in.
Not that I'd want that, but it just doesn't seem like the odds are very good.
You don't sound too certain of this knowledge.
I'm not, I'm just, the way you're saying it, it's like, well, it seems to me that, you know, but it's like, this is pretty important, right?
I mean, you put a couple of years into this at least, right?
Five, six years, undergraduate and master's.
Yeah, I don't know.
I think it was okay.
I didn't feel particularly passionate about it.
And I thought medicine would be more satisfying in that way.
And then you did three years of med school, right?
Yes.
And then what were you like, ew, blood icky.
Like, what happened then?
No, I was dismissed from medical school.
I just came down with a bad depression in med school.
Really just stopped caring about it.
I was quite socially isolated at the time too.
I had no friends, no relationship, family was very distant and superficial interaction.
I really left my apartment during basically the last two years there.
My life was pretty miserable outside of the program itself.
I think that was a massive contributing factor of course.
I've taken steps since then to improve my personal life.
And I wholeheartedly agree with the last caller or the response you had at the last caller in terms of being honest and getting good people in your life and not being forgettable.
I was on track to be one of those people I think.
I mean that story of the old man dying in his apartment in New York City, that's terrifying and I saw that as my future a few years ago.
Right, and I want to terrify people about that possibility, right?
I mean, the whole New York Times article was, well, you know, it was incomprehensible that he ended up so alone.
It's like, no, it wasn't.
Don't return people's phone calls.
Don't leave your apartment.
And even hoarding, like, everyone gets the impulse, oh, I don't want to throw this stuff out, right?
Like, I'm going through a process, boring as hell to everyone else, but I'm going through a process of just like, hey...
All these boxes of books that I think I'm going to reread, I'm never going to reread them.
All these boxes of books that I read and marked up for use in the show, well, it's been five years.
If I haven't done a show on them now, either I'm not going to or the information is going to be out of date, you've got to throw it out.
And everybody hates doing that.
I mean, I hate doing that stuff because, you know, it's a kind of mark of mortality, right?
If I lived forever, I'd never throw anything out because I'd use it at some point.
But even people who hoard or people who have...
There's a decision at the beginning where you feel uncomfortable with something and then you either surrender...
To that discomfort and strengthen it, or you confront it and overcome it.
There's a choice at the beginning, right?
The habits start as cobwebs and end up as chains.
And so then were you dismissed from medical school for failure to complete stuff or low grades or something like that?
Yeah, it was a clinical exam that I had to pass.
It was actually the second time I did it.
And yeah, there was just one extra test that they gave me.
I don't know whether they gave me it because they knew I was struggling and wanted to put extra stuff.
It doesn't matter now, I guess.
But yeah, I didn't pass the clinical test and got told not to come back.
I remember just feeling such relief at the time, right?
And I think, you know, I would have been miserable if I was still in that system, but for a variety of reasons.
But yeah, that's the story of it.
And did you feel anything else other than relief?
Later on, I felt a lot of anger at my family for just, you know, Never saying anything.
I mean, there was a lot of stuff that went back to my childhood that this catalyzed, I guess, in terms of me examining it.
I actually called into you two years ago, shortly after I learned I was dismissed, and I took your advice.
You told me to be honest with people.
It was about really my personal life at that time, and it's helped.
So I really want to totally agree with what you were saying in the last call, just how It's not worth it to not speak up and to not confront people or to not speak the truth to people who are not good people or who just are boring.
Oh yeah, boring is a very underrated reason to ditch people from your life.
Because boring is a way of being...
Dead but not dead.
Like being bored is just a way of not existing while still breathing.
And the degree of people's dissociation and boredom is always precisely the degree to which zombies are popular in a culture because that's what they represent.
Yeah.
It's a living death of brainlessness.
And people who bore you, I find boredom, being bored by people is very much an act of aggression on their part.
It's a very much, oh, there's life.
Let me kill it.
There's happiness.
Let me kill it.
Let me confine it and close it and starve it of oxygen until it dies on the vine but never quite dies.
So I have a very visceral reaction to people who are boring.
It's a very aggressive and destructive thing.
And it's very cowardly, right?
It's like passive aggression.
It's very cowardly because...
If people are aggressive towards me, which I'll show in a sec, but if people are aggressive towards me, I want them to be aggressive towards me.
I don't want to do all this girl guy passive-aggressive crap.
Let's just get it out of the open.
Because then, you know, people who are passive-aggressive, they're boring, and then you're like, I'm sorry, I'm really bored here.
It's like, oh, you're just never satisfied.
I get, oh, I'm sorry I'm boring you.
It's like, now you're boring me and annoying me, and neither of those together makes into a happy frappe.
It's not a happe.
And so, yeah, it's just, it's really this manipulation.
Manipulation is so boring because when you're onto it, it's so predictable.
You know, being with manipulative people is like watching a Roomba for the 14th day in a row.
I think I know where you're going now.
It's really boring.
All right.
Anything else that occurred for you?
You had some relief.
You had some anger at your family.
Anything else?
Confusion, fear, just not knowing what I'm going to do next.
I just was so invested in, you know, this higher education, first graduate school and then medical school that I was just kind of, okay, what do I do now?
So I floundered around for a bit.
I went back to school for psychology for a semester thinking, okay, maybe, you know, maybe it's a psychiatry.
I was interested in psychiatry and for my reason for going into medicine.
So I thought, Okay, maybe it was the psychiatry and the medical school system, so maybe psychology would be better, but it wasn't.
Then I tried an internship in the U.S. Well, I applied and I was accepted to two companies, but I ran into visa issues with the U.S. government, so I'm in Canada, and it's ridiculously hard to legally immigrate to the U.S. if you don't have family there or you're not an executive or something.
Or if you're willing to, say, obey the laws.
It's very difficult.
Otherwise, you're fine.
Yes, yeah.
I was quite naive about that.
I found out about that.
So are you currently calling from the bottom of a bottomless debt of well?
Or what is the well of debt?
Is that what's going on?
Because I've got to imagine you took on some coins for this.
I was lucky enough in that I inherited some money from my grandparents.
Oh, I don't know if that's lucky.
I don't know if that's been a whole lot of luck for you, my friend.
I guess it's a double-edged sword, isn't it?
Yeah, we'll get to that in a sec.
Was there anything else that you were feeling with regards to bombing out of med school?
I guess disappointment that I had that opportunity and didn't make the most of it.
Right.
But really it was more about all those years of my life where I was alone.
That was the biggest thing.
And medical school, I think, forced me to confront that.
I guess you were saying how you couldn't sleep for a while when you were younger, right?
And that made you go into therapy.
That was the crisis that made you, that was the turning point in your life, right?
And I guess this was a similar thing for me.
I just couldn't ignore this anymore.
I think I would have eventually ended up dead if I hadn't confronted this.
I mean, that was no life.
I mean, it was, yeah.
You said you didn't leave your room for two years?
Barely, yeah.
Just to go to class and do clinical practice sessions at school.
I didn't want to talk to anybody.
I didn't want to I just didn't want to reveal how bad a state I was in.
I wanted to put on a good facade and everything's going, I'm fine, it's just going to pass if I just keep pushing through.
But it doesn't.
So it's a crisis that makes you confront these things.
For most people, I guess.
Right.
Right.
Do you mind if I make you feel bad for a moment?
Go ahead.
All right.
You know what's missing?
And I don't mean to be picking around at the scabs, but Andrew, there's something missing for me about your experience in medical school.
What's that?
Well, it's all about you and it's all about your family.
You get that society is down one doctor, right?
Yes.
I don't know that you do.
Because you took three years of resources, then somebody else who could have been a doctor didn't get into the class because they cap it at a certain number, and you don't pay the full cost of your education.
Society invested a lot into you becoming a doctor, and so society is like minus one doctor, and it's now minus one chemist.
And the reason I'm saying that is that you talk about isolation, and it seems to me that you have a moat Around you and society.
Andrew, that's what I'm kind of getting from what you're saying.
I could be wrong, as always.
I'm just telling you what my impressions are.
I don't think that you see the impact that your decisions are having, because the whole time you've been talking about this, what I've been seeing is massive amount of social resources going down the toilet, and all you've been talking about is your own negative things.
It's very costly for society as a whole when people take the place of someone who could have provided benefits and end up not providing that benefit.
The extreme example, not this category, right?
Some kid's drowning in a lake and everyone's taking their clothes off to go dive in and I say, I'm an Olympic swimmer!
I will go and get the child.
I am trained.
I know what I'm doing, right?
And then I swim out 150 yards to where the kid is and just tread water and watch him drown, right?
It's like, well, that's kind of displaced some social value called saving the kid, right?
Right.
And I don't think that you have that cord plugged in as yet, which says...
How your choices are affecting the society around you.
I think that's where the isolation comes from.
Right?
Because I was sort of expecting something like, oh, you know, I realized that I had taken someone's spot who didn't get in because I got in.
I didn't deal with my depression.
I didn't go and get the free mental health care professional Services that were available to me at university, I bombed out.
I feel bad about it for myself.
I also feel bad that society's down one doctor.
And that last bit, that connection between you and society, if you get that plugged in, I think that will give you immunity to future depression.
Right?
It was somebody's dream to be a doctor, and you took their spot.
Yes.
Yes.
It was somebody's dream to be a chemist, and you took their spot.
It was somebody's dream to be in those internship programs, and you took their spot.
You displaced people.
I'm not trying to say this to make you feel bad.
I'm just saying that you are in a society, and your decisions have an effect on other people.
That's called community.
That's called the tribe, right?
And some of these people you know, and some of these people you don't know.
And I've always felt, and just so you get my prejudice, where I'm coming from, is that It's always bothered me when people half do stuff that's limited.
And the reason for that is that it's expensive.
You know, even in a free society, it would be expensive.
You say, well, in a free society, I would pay for my own medical care, medical training, I would pay for my own medical training, and blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, yeah, but we'd still be down one doctor, which would make the rest of the doctors that much more expensive, right?
So what you do has a ripple effect in society as a whole, and there are other people who are both benefiting and paying for the choices that you're making.
And I think that level of solitude that you experienced in that room for two years, so you only go out for classes and other things, I think it comes from not getting that there's a world out there that you're part of and that your decisions affect.
No, it took me...
It took me a long time to realize how little I knew about interacting with people.
And I've learned quite a bit over the last year and a half, year and a bit about that.
By learning to be open with people and finding good people.
Something that I guess I hadn't been taught growing up, of course.
Right.
I mean, I'm aware for myself that by doing what I'm doing now rather than being, you know, I was in charge of like, I don't know, 20 or 30 people as a chief technology officer, as a director of technology.
You know, not Google, but not working in my pajamas.
And that was, I don't know, eight or nine years ago now.
So by now, if I'd continued on that trajectory, I would be in charge of a couple of hundred people.
I'd be making huge amounts of money probably with significant stock options.
Because I didn't just have tech experience.
I had management, sales, marketing, entrepreneurial, financial.
My knowledge of economics is very helpful in the business world.
So I was a good package as a worker.
So there are a couple of hundred people out there who don't get the benefits of my leadership, and I was a very good manager, because I always viewed myself as a manager whose value was, you know, I'd always say this to my employees, you're paying me.
You're surrendering a certain part of your salary so that I get my salary, which is more than yours.
So you're paying me, and if I'm not providing services that make it worthwhile for you to pay me, you should go to my boss and get me fired.
Right?
Because I always wanted to keep that free market.
It's like, I'm your boss.
You work for me.
It's like, no, I work for you.
Because if you weren't paying me these money, you'd be more money for you guys.
So, it has to be worth it for you.
You know, if you've got some shitty client, you want me to go in and deal with them, yeah.
I'll fly and I'll deal with the shitty client.
If you've got some unreasonable person in the department, I will sit down with that person and I will resolve it.
Like, I'm here to make your jobs easier and you're paying me to do it.
I am a service provider.
And, um...
I would now be doing that for probably a couple of hundred people and all that.
And I recognize that I'm not doing that.
And I believe that those people's lives are not as good as they would be if I were their manager.
A couple of hundred people who don't have an empathetic and sympathetic and strong and mature manager to make their lives better.
And so the decision that I make to do what I'm doing, I get it has significant impacts on other things, right?
The road less traveled or the road not traveled has a whole bunch of people in it there whose lives are different because you're not there.
And I think that boomerang, that circular what I do has an effect, I think is what I would suggest is the best way to stave off any Future depression.
Because for me, depression has a lot to do with it doesn't matter whether I'm here or not.
Right?
Right.
Nobody's going to miss me.
It doesn't matter.
It's funny because it's called depression because your mood is depressed.
But I think it arises from a feeling of, not the depression, the depression arises from a feeling of shallowness of impact in the world.
I agree with that.
That was my experience.
I mean, this guy who died in New York, the reporter went around and tried to find people who cared about him, who noticed he was gone, who cared that he was gone.
Couldn't really do it.
And so, but we do have deep impacts on the world.
I mean, obviously I do, but everybody does have deep impacts on the world around you.
You're as immaterial as you think you are.
And that's part of the sort of 360 feedback that I think is important for staving off depression.
I think people feel depressed when they feel that they don't matter, that there are impacts.
But everybody matters all the time.
It's just whether you choose to recognize it or not.
I mean, this guy who died in New York, his impact was largely negative, but it was still an impact.
I want to place you in the context of the society that you live in, which means that every decision you make has ripple effects and 360 effects and effects on other people.
There's someone else who didn't get to become a doctor.
Maybe they're a web developer.
Come full circle.
I don't know.
That's an important aspect of things, and I think that tells me a lot about the lack of impact you had on the people around you when you were growing up.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've confronted my family about this and asked them some of these questions along these lines about, you know, why did you do this?
And, you know, did you ever notice?
I had a pretty miserable childhood.
Just, you know, I was drugged with Ritalin and antidepressants for over a decade and had no friends.
And, you know, I asked my parents about this and, you know, it was just, there's just outrage, right?
And then they just go back to as if nothing happened.
So, yeah, I think that was happening.
I don't know.
Outrage is a pretty generic...
There was outrage.
It's like, oh, did it knock on the door?
Was it handing out Watchtower pamphlets?
What does it mean, there was outrage from your parents, from you?
Hysteria.
Just hysteria.
Oh, hysteria.
So they got really upset about you having legitimate questions about their competence as caregivers.
Yes.
Yeah, in denial, and we did the best we could, and then, you know, and then I talked to them a month later, and it's just, you know, oh, what kind of meals do you make for yourself?
Those kind of questions, right?
Are you getting enough sleep?
Are you exercising?
Yeah, yeah.
Because it's just a health issue for you.
It's got nothing to do with Ritalin or bad parenting or anything like that, right?
Yeah.
They're concerned trolls about the mess they made, right?
Yeah, I can see that being a formative impact.
So what effect did that have on your relationship?
Well, I mean, obviously, being around shitty people, you start to think the world is made up of people like that.
And I'm sure the drugs would definitely impact how you learn.
I asked you a direct question.
You're getting all theoretical.
Oh, sorry.
Can you repeat that?
Which way is it to Albuquerque?
Well, you know, time and space are very interesting concepts.
Sorry, I didn't mean that.
Can you repeat that?
What effect did it have on your relationship with your parents that they did not listen to you complaining that they did not listen?
Um...
Well, I mean, I've strongly considered...
I just almost never talk to them anymore as a result.
I mean, I've considered not talking to them at all again.
I'm not sure whether I'm ready to make that decision yet, but I'm at that point.
Yeah, I mean, that's something to talk about with a therapist, as I say.
But you've given them a good old college try in terms of being honest about issues that you had.
Why were you put on the Ritalin?
I was making stupid mistakes in math in grade 4.
Just, you know, the teacher talked to my mother and said, you know, Andrew seems like he's smarter than this.
He shouldn't be making these mistakes.
And I had already been on an antidepressant at that point since I was, I don't know, eight or so.
So, you know, taking psychotropic drugs wasn't a new thing at that point, right?
That would have been the second or third one.
Christ Almighty, I'm glad I was not at your school.
Christ Almighty.
So you just didn't do that well at math, or you made mistakes in math.
So, let's drug him.
That's what I've been able to get at my mother.
I mean, who knows, right, what was said there.
Yeah.
Teachers always said the same thing to me.
If effort matched ability, you'd be an A+. Yeah.
Yeah, it can't be anything to do with the school as to why I'm not doing well.
It can't be anything to do with my home life.
I just lack effort.
It's weird, you know, I mean...
Mom's been locked up, but you see, I just lack effort.
School is really boring and pointless.
I just lack effort.
Last place I want to learn is regurgitating facts about the British North American Act and Louis Riel for no reason whatsoever.
No problem with the environment at school or at home or anything like that.
You lack effort.
Wasn't beat.
Didn't have anything to do with the fact that I was fairly malnourished for significant portions of my early teenage life because there was no food in the house.
Hang around friends' houses around dinner time hoping that somebody would invite me to stay for a meal and to be fair, they often did.
They would say, well, why were you a waiter?
You were a smart guy.
You know why?
Because when you're a waiter, you get free food.
That's why.
That's why I became a waiter when I was young.
But, you know, it's what people say.
So if I'd have been in your school, they wouldn't have looked at my nutrition, they wouldn't have looked at my environment, they wouldn't have looked at the quality of the teachers.
They would have said, oh, he's making mistakes.
Let's drug him.
That's so Soviet.
You know, oh, is he not enjoying communism?
Let's shove horse tranquilizers up his ass until he spouts Lenin.
Wow, I'm so sorry, man.
Andrew, that is brutal.
And no sensitivity to you.
Did anyone ask you if there was anything wrong?
No.
Not that I remember.
I think you'd remember.
I think you'd remember.
I think my uncle, years later, when I was in my late teens, said, wow, you were pretty messed up.
I'm glad that, you know, you've gotten better.
Something to that effect.
You were pretty messed up.
Huh.
Huh.
That's a very ambivalent or ambiguous statement, right?
I can sort of see that both ways.
People really messed you up or you were personally just kind of messed up for whatever reason, right?
Yeah.
Wow.
And then you say you were on this stuff, was it 10 years you said?
Eight to 18?
Until I was 18, yeah.
Pretty consistently, I'd say.
I came off of it, I don't know, a month or two before I finished high school.
Ever any talk therapy?
I tried it a bit in graduate school, so at 23.
No, no, no, as a kid, I mean.
Oh, as a kid?
No.
No.
No talk therapy?
Yeah, because talk therapy can put you in conflict with bad parents.
I think there was a slight amount of play therapy with a psychiatrist, the same one who was giving me these drugs, but no talk therapy, no.
Right.
Right.
I'm sorry about that, man.
That is horrible, horrible stuff.
And so, of course, the idea that there's a 360 view, like when society just does stuff to you, it either ignores you or invades you, right?
It either pretends that your feelings don't exist or nukes them with mind-altering chemicals.
It's really hard to get that 360 feedback that I was talking about, right?
Yeah, I mean, I didn't even think that feedback existed for many years.
I guess I internalized the message until I was in my early 30s, really.
Basically until I got drummed out of med school.
But there is, you know, I mean, if you're going to, and the reason we're talking about this in particular is because if you're going to be a web designer, you are now in a full 360 mode, right?
Because you're going to have to work with, I mean, the hard thing with technology is not the technology, it's the customers, people.
This is why technology so often fails, right?
Or why there needs to be this giant overhead of touchy-feely people circling the typing robots, right?
You need this Saturn ring of empaths to translate feels into code, right?
Because I want you to succeed.
You don't want to keep stacking up these non-stellar successes, right?
Yeah.
If you want to succeed in this, you're going to need that 360 feedback.
You're going to have to welcome that feedback.
And you're going to have to be strong.
Because technology has this god-awful habit of saying yes to everything and then resentfully undercharging.
There's an old adage in tech which is it's at least 10 times cheaper and easier to fix a problem in design than it is in production.
And, you know, I won't get into all the boring details of my entrepreneurial history, but nailing down the spec was the key.
And I would just, I'd lecture and bore people about that.
You know, we'll mock up the screenshots.
We'll mock up the screenshots.
Because that's easy to do, visual development tools, right?
We'll mock up the screenshots.
We're going to say exactly what this button does.
We're going to do a flowchart.
This is the logic tree.
This is how it's going to work.
This is the output it's going to produce.
And you have to initial that and sign off on the whole thing.
Every page you have to initial, that is what we produce.
If you want anything different, it will be very expensive.
And this sort of will make it work.
And it's fine maybe when you're just starting out.
I don't know.
But it really made things very successful.
You know, we didn't go over budget.
We didn't go over time.
We didn't have to do all that crazy over time anymore.
And I made sure.
And I made sure whoever was in charge that his boss or her boss knew that this was the methodology.
And I'm saying this to you because this is the 360 thing.
You have to be assertive.
It's good for people.
If you give people all this loosey-goosey stuff, oh, we'll find a way to make it work and we'll just integrate with that package and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
Yikes, right?
No, that's good advice.
Thanks.
So...
That requires, though, that you get how your behavior is impacting others and how their behavior is going to impact you.
I had a project manager on the other side who I was responsible for delivering.
Some of these projects were like a million dollars or more.
And I had a project manager, and that project manager's boss would be aware that that project manager had signed off on something.
And everyone go around the table, we agree, we have agreed, this is the spec, this is the spec.
Nobody has written a single line of code before everybody agrees that this is the spec.
Everybody nod, nod, nod, nod, right?
And then I say, okay, this will change.
Because as we move forward, Something will change.
And probably more than one thing.
And we've got a 10% buffer in the budget for that, which we'll refund if it doesn't happen, but it will.
It will.
And if it changes, everybody needs to be aware that it's changing.
That it's a deviation and we've got a buffer for it.
We'll be charging more for it.
Right?
I mean, it's one thing to say...
I want a car with a sunroof before they make it.
It's quite another thing to say, I want a car with a sunroof after it's been delivered.
A little more pricey to fix it later.
And that made people really plan ahead of time rather than sign off because they're in a hurry, right?
Because everyone's in a hurry in business all the time.
And everyone thinks, well, I don't have time to review this spec now, but somehow we'll have time for 10 times the amount of time to fix it later on.
Or to change it later on.
And that requires that you care for people in the future rather than in the present.
And that requires a lot of empathy and time.
Like, you know, if you had been a doctor at some point, you'd have to say to some guy, hey man, you're fat, lose some weight.
However you'd say it, right?
Now, that's going to make the person uncomfortable in the moment, but hopefully happier in the long run.
Or at least you will have discharged your duty in the moment.
And business success is fundamentally predicated on making people uncomfortable in the present and more comfortable in the future.
I mean, everybody's uncomfortable buying something.
You just hope that you...
Like it after you bought it, right?
Now have buyer's remorse one day after the return period ends.
Day 15.
Oh, my enemy.
But that, I think, is a 360 thing.
Now, if you can get into some talk therapy to kind of understand that 360 thing, I think that'd be really useful for you.
Because you're trying to figure out in your own mind what is success, right?
Yeah, I have been seeing a psychotherapist for almost a year now.
Great.
Okay, so then I'm not going to speak for your psychotherapist, because I'm not a therapist, but what I will say is this, that if you think that success is in your mind or in your definition, you will not succeed in business.
Where does success live in business?
What is the definition of success in business?
The customer's mind.
Long-term customer satisfaction.
In the transaction itself, in both sides, but the customer is crucial.
Yes, and most importantly, it's the customer six months after you're done who's crucial.
Because when you're starting out in business, the most essential thing to build up is references.
Because you don't want to do business with people who don't check customer references.
That's why it's so hard to get started, right?
So, you know, first couple of customers are always the toughest.
You're going to work like crazy.
You're going to have to differentiate yourself from more experienced firms, which means you're going to work harder.
That's how you make it when you're starting out.
Because otherwise, they'll just go to IBM or whoever and get whatever they want from them.
But you'll be willing to do it cheaper and it means you'll work cheaper.
And they have to love what you did six months afterwards or a year afterwards because that's when they're going to get contacted about references.
That's what you're aiming for.
But that means that you really have to grow that empathy side and that 360 view side.
Because your temptation will probably be to reduce the customer's anxiety by giving them what they want in the moment.
But that may, of course, reduce the customer's anxiety in the moment.
Like, if we had a change request...
We call them ECNs, Engineering Change Notices.
If we had an ECN, which we always did, somebody said, oh, I forgot, I need you to include this capacity or whatever, right?
Now, if I just said to that person, okay, fine, we'll just throw it in, right?
Would they feel better in the moment?
Sure.
Right.
But they wouldn't feel better six months later because we'd have to cut the corner somewhere else.
Right?
Because there's only so much time in the day.
And so we would have had to, or they get suspicious because they say, well, wait a minute.
If they can do this thing for free, am I being overcharged?
Like what if I hadn't needed this change?
Right?
Like if you take your car in for an oil change and they say, well, you know, we've got to fix your brakes and that's going to be $1,500.
We've got to fix your front brakes and that's going to be like $800 or whatever, right?
And then you say, okay, can you fix my back brakes too?
And they're like, yeah, but it'll still only be $800, right?
You're going to be like, wait a minute.
If I hadn't asked for the back brakes to be fixed, am I being wildly overcharged for the front brakes?
I'm not comfortable with this, right?
And so you need that kind of pushback for the long term.
The project manager is going to be relieved, right?
And revealed, I guess, too, right?
But relieved, but the long-term relationship, it just makes you look suspicious.
Oh, yeah, we'll throw in all this extra stuff for free.
Oh, well, I guess I'll keep asking for free stuff until you charge me, and that way I know how much you overcharged me to begin with.
That would be my suggestion in terms of success.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
Thank you very much for the chat.
You're very welcome.
And listen, I mean, if you want to, I mean, there's a whole message board and all that.
If you get up and running and you want to throw some notices up there, I'm sure that would be fine.
Help you get the word out.
Because, you know, that's always the challenge at the beginning, right?
That's true.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks, Andrew.
Great chat.
And keep us posted.
So what do you mean by keep you posted?
Do you mean email or on the message board?
Look at that.
That's a nice 360 question right there.
Beautiful.
Yeah, just drop us a line.
Let us know how the business is going and how things are and all that.
I'm always curious to find out how things go after we chat.
Okay.
All right.
Thanks.
Thanks, man.
All right.
Who's next?
Okay, up next from Leon.
He wrote in and said, I have a serious problem.
Whenever I complete an amount of work for some project, academic or otherwise, I feel a brief high of achievement followed by a sense of purposelessness like my life has no meaning, even though I intellectually understand that it does.
And this keeps me from starting anything new for quite a while.
How do I overcome this feeling of purposelessness more quickly?
How long does your feeling of satisfaction last before it doesn't?
Probably up to an hour.
After how much labor?
Usually days.
So days of labor will give you an hour of satisfaction?
Yeah, thereabouts.
Now, how do you know that you're feeling purposelessness?
Compared to what?
I don't really know.
I guess...
Sorry, can you rephrase the question?
Well, so if you're feeling purposelessness, that's more of an intellectual judgment than an emotion.
If you're feeling purposelessness, I guess my question would be, what is the feeling that you have?
Is it emptiness, sadness, anger, frustration, despair?
Largely emptiness.
Okay, so it's an emotional kind of acuity and a sense of...
Not having value?
I'm trying to sort of make sure I understand what you mean by purposelessness.
How do I say this?
I thought I had written it more better than it actually was.
It's like...
Well, I guess I don't know exactly how I feel, but I... I know that there is more work, I guess, I could do, but I can't really get myself to do it for a while after I've been caught up with any one particular thing that I completed.
Sorry, this is all unclear.
No, good.
If it was perfectly clear, it wouldn't be my point in having a conversation, so that's fine.
Now, do you think that this is more of a male problem or more of a female problem?
What do you mean?
Do you think men suffer from this feeling of purposelessness?
Do you think men suffer from it more than women, less than women, or about the same?
I don't know.
I don't think I have any way to judge that.
Alright, let me ask you this.
You're home alone at the age of 12 or 13 or whatever.
And you're just sitting there reading a comic book or a book or something like that.
Or maybe you're just sitting there staring into space or something.
I don't know, right?
And your mom comes home And what's your feeling if you're not doing anything?
What would I feel if I was Reading a book or something?
Let's say that you were doing something that your mother did not consider a valuable use of your time, whatever that would be.
Maybe it's playing a video game.
Maybe it's playing thumb wars with yourself.
I don't know, right?
But you would come home with somebody's view of unproductive time for you and that person would come home and what would you feel?
I guess it would depend on if I had gotten done something that I could show them or not.
If I had, then I could just show them, oh, this is the work I have done and I completed this amount of math or whatever, writing something, and then we would have dinner probably because that's usually when they would get home and then I would go back to reading.
If I hadn't, then What usually would happen is because I usually know when my parents would get home so if I hadn't done what was assigned to me I would just feel really anxious and I would up to some probably 30 minutes before and then I would just do a mad dash of work and then they would be done and then they would be home and then I could show them I have done this work.
Right, so you could buy your leisure time By having done something productive that met with your parents' approval.
Yeah.
Right.
And that's called being a man.
Maybe there's some big personal issue, but this is how men are trained to be the worker bees of society.
What do you mean you're just sitting there?
I gave you a list of things to do, and you're just sitting there.
And this is how men, maybe it's true for women too, I don't see it as much, maybe it is, but I only speak for the male experience, is that it takes a lot of propaganda to turn men into the mindless worker bees of society.
Do something productive for other people and then maybe, like a prisoner who one hour out of every 24 gets to walk in a concrete yard, you can relax and enjoy yourself.
Most men that I've talked to about this feel uneasy when someone comes home and they're not doing something productive.
There is a huge amount of propaganda in society saying, men be busy.
Men get to work.
Men do stuff.
Men rake the yard.
Men take out the garbage.
Men go to work.
Men get something done.
Men do the dishes.
Men work, work, work.
Can I say something?
Yes, please.
I guess this might be something more related to my own family.
My sister is eight years older than me.
I suspect that she had a similar experience growing up and she might have faced that similar type of thing.
My parents are both, they work Tremendous amounts of time and they both are medical doctors.
There's always a measure of which I think probably both my sister and I felt like we couldn't measure up to what they did because They both set such an example of how far diligence, just working really hard, can bring someone.
And are they happy people?
I think so, yeah.
Oh, alright.
That's good.
Then the beacon, right?
The beacon towards working that hard should be, well, look how happy it makes us.
Don't you want to be happy kind of thing, right?
Not...
What do you mean you're sitting there in some sort of negative judgment?
Well, they...
Let me put it to you this way.
Like, I want my daughter to be into philosophy, right?
Yeah.
Now, do I basically come home and if she's not reading Kierkegaard, yell at her?
No.
Of course not, right?
I show, look how philosophy makes me happy, and look how enjoyable philosophy is, and look how much fun you can have with logic.
Right?
It's...
It's carrot, not stick, right?
Yeah.
And we generally don't feel feelings of worthlessness or purposelessness.
If I really feel like an ice cream and I'm walking down the road to get an ice cream, I don't feel purposelessness because I'm in pursuit of something good, right?
Something that I want.
Now, after I have had the ice cream, I don't fall into a sense of purposelessness, which sounds more existential.
What do you have or what value do you have when you're not being of utility to someone?
Now, doctors, of course, I mean, it's a pretty high-pressure, high-stakes environment.
I mean, every time you go for a latte, somebody dies because somebody needs health care in the world at all times, right?
And, you know, there are these stories of, at least before socialized medicine in Canada, there are these documentaries that you can still find of these doctors, particularly country doctors, like 80 hours a week, and they're just going from place to place.
Sometimes they're getting paid in chicken and eggs, and they're just working hard, you know, because that's what doctors used to do before the government made them friendly to us.
And so with medicine in particular, you know...
You scratch your ass, somebody falls up dead.
So there is quite a lot of, I've got to get some work done here because people are dropping like flies if I don't.
So I think there is that particular kind of pressure.
I feel that as well.
If I do a really compelling show that brings people to philosophy, then that's a very good thing for the world.
And if I take a day or two off and I don't produce a show, that could be another million people.
Who don't get exposure to philosophy.
If I could have done a show in that time that would have hit that kind of height or whatever, right?
And so, you know, given that the tsunami of doom sometimes seems to be approaching with not inconsiderable speed, and I'm sort of aware that if I, you know, if I put a show out, you know, the parenting shows don't do that well, but they do a lot of good, right?
They don't do well in terms of numbers, but they do some of the most good in terms of You put out a parenting video, it does like 30 or 40 or 50,000 views.
You know, 10% of those people, I assume are parents who have some interest in peaceful parenting or something.
Let's say, you know, 10% of the viewers of a 50,000 view video decide to look into peaceful parenting and end up not hitting their kids.
And they have two kids.
Well, I've just, in one day, I've helped 50,000 children not...
Sorry, I've helped 5,000 or 10,000 children not get hit, right?
Well, that's kind of important, right?
So, you know, the expansion pack on Skyrim might be looming, but there's those 5,000 or 10,000 children that I can help not get hit, right?
So...
Whereas if someone's like, well, I'm calling in sick to my waitering job, it's like, okay, well, some other biped's going to have to bring the food over.
Not that waitering's unimportant, but when your job is more valuable, then not working is more of an interruption, obviously, in that significant value, to put it as awkwardly as possible.
So...
I think there's the old human being versus human doing.
I don't believe that we can sit in a lotus position and be perfectly happy.
Because that's kind of...
Self-referential, solipsistic, and selfish, right?
Because I think it's important to do good in the world.
At the same time, if we become a slave doing good in the world, we have lost our liberty, and that does not seem to be a particularly good thing.
So, I'm concerned that if you do something that gives you great satisfaction, that you're restless and purposelessness within the hour.
That, I think, is something that must come from some outside message, which is to be of value, you must be of value to others.
And I think that is an unhealthy standard to have.
It does kind of turn you into a slave that's prodded by these ghost whips of, I'll strip you of happiness unless you're being of utility.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah.
And would you say that you had a happy childhood?
Like if you sort of rated on a scale from 1 to 10, what would you say?
Um...
I guess it's really hard to say.
Um...
I don't need two decimal places.
I don't know.
I guess I would have to compare in order to give a number.
I guess I could say five, but I don't know.
Ten, I don't know.
I'm not sure.
What would have had to have changed in your childhood?
Either something be present that wasn't or something be absent that was, that would have pushed that number closer to 10.
That's really hard to say as well.
Hey, nobody calls into the show for the easy convos, right?
I had very little social interaction for a lot of my childhood experiences.
but I also know that a big reason for that was I spent a lot of time studying and reading and what not and if I had more social interaction and that is I might have had a better time of it but I wouldn't know what I know today I wouldn't be At the college I'm at today.
How do you know?
Huh?
How do you know?
Well...
You said you'd need to compare your family with other families to come up with a number, but now you're comparing your path to an imaginary theoretical path called, I could have been happier by having more social interactions.
And you say, well, but if I'd have had that, I wouldn't be in this college that I'm at.
Like, you know that for certain.
How do you know that for certain?
Maybe with more social interaction you'd have had more fun studying.
You'd have had to bounce ideas off other people.
They could have helped quiz you.
You could have been at a better college for all you know.
I mean, I guess I saw all the people around me who had a lot of free time, who played a lot with their friends, and they did not study them.
They did not acquire the skills that I had.
I don't think I saw anyone At whatever school I was at, I was almost always the smartest kid for whatever that was meant.
In every subject that I was in a particular class.
And that everyone around me who had more social interaction also spent less time studying.
And I just...
I assumed that if I... If I spent those hours socializing, I wouldn't have spent those hours obtaining the skills and knowledge.
But if you're the smartest kid in the class, why do you need to study so much?
I felt that I would not have been the smartest kid if I did not study all that much.
No, that's different from smart, right?
Smart is something much more innate, right?
Hard is working and smart don't always go hand in hand, right?
I suppose, but I guess my perspective on that my entire life has always been that studying makes someone smart and that that's the culture I grew up with.
Well, no, it doesn't.
It may give particular skills, but there's no way that anybody knows to reliably raise and lower what's called G, or general intelligence.
Well, I guess they know how to lower it, right?
You lock a kid in a basement or don't feed them enough food or whatever.
But studying doesn't make you smarter.
I guess I was the highest achieving student in any particular class I was at.
And I felt if I spent less time studying, I would not be You would not be the highest achieving?
Yeah.
Yeah, and I don't know.
Do you watch movies at all?
Occasionally, yeah.
I don't know if you've ever seen a movie called Apocalypse Now?
No.
Have you ever seen any...
It's kind of old school, right?
But have you ever seen any movies with Marlon Brando in it?
No.
Okay.
He's considered to be the greatest actor who's ever lived.
And he...
He never worked.
I mean, basically.
He was sort of an unknown actor when Tennessee Williams was first looking for someone to play Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, which is one of the most famous plays in the modern, at least in the modern American playbook.
And he heard about this young Marlon Brando kid from Stella Adler, who was an acting teacher, a very famous acting teacher in New York, I guess in the 50s.
And...
Marlon Brando was sleeping on some friend of his's couch.
Tennessee Williams goes over with his play typed out laboriously.
And if I remember the story right, it's something like this.
Marlon Brando wakes up and says basically, who are you?
Oh, I'm a playwright.
I got a play.
He's like, all right.
And he basically wakes up from a nap, reads the play, and gets the part.
And this was the part that launched his career.
And you can actually watch this movie.
It's an incredible movie to watch.
Acting is spectacular.
One of his most famous roles...
I don't know if you've ever seen...
I've seen The Godfather.
Good heavens.
But one of his most famous roles was as Don Corleone in The Godfather.
And he did a video audition.
And he's like, oh yeah, I think I know what...
What kind of guys these are?
And he put some cotton wool into his mouth and he spoke, you know, he spoke like this.
He did that sort of breathy old Italian guy voice and it's considered to be one of the greatest Acting achievements on camera.
And he basically just stuffed some cotton in his mouth and spoke at a camera.
And his role is so famous.
Even though he's playing an evil mafia guy, he never had to pay for a meal at an Italian restaurant for the rest of his life, which may not have done him the greatest of good.
And the last sort of one thing I want to mention was...
He was signed up to play Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, which is, I guess, Francis Ford Coppola's updating of an old Joseph Conrad novel called Heart of Darkness, with a very young Harrison Ford, by the way.
But he showed up for the shoot.
He hadn't even read the book.
And he didn't bother learning any of his lines.
He just says, ah, I'll just ad-lib it.
Heaven's sakes, right?
And they just shot a bunch of takes of him ad-libbing, and it's magnificent stuff.
Another movie he made, Last Tango in Paris, which is pretty gross, but compelling from an acting standpoint.
They pointed the camera at him, and he told stories of his childhood.
And, well, in that movie, there's a scene, you can see it on YouTube, where it's a deathbed scene, Last Tango in Paris, where he basically, he had a troubled relationship with his mother, to say the least.
Good thing that never shows up in terms of creativity.
Talent later on than life for people.
But he had a deathbed scene, a mortuary scene, with his dead wife.
And in it, he basically said he was talking to his mother.
And it was an incredibly powerful scene.
I remember Leonard Moulton watching it just in tears afterwards.
Just like, God, that guy's incredible.
But he didn't really work very hard at his acting.
I just sort of wander in and He wouldn't even learn his lines sometimes.
He'd just have people have extras hold up the lines so he could glance at them and then just say them.
Now, he said that was to keep things fresh.
I don't know.
But he didn't work that hard.
And he's the greatest.
Freddie Mercury never took a singing lesson his whole life and smoked.
He got a beautiful instrument like that.
And you're smoking.
Penis and cigarettes.
Anyway, so the hard work, it may be a tad overrated in terms of some of the things that it can bring to your life.
And certainly, the relationship between hard work and happiness is not always linear, if I can put it that way.
And...
Studying, you know, obviously it's important.
I have some doubt about the value.
I mean, this is a big topic, so I'll just touch on it briefly, but ever since the internet gives everyone perfect memory, you know, there used to be these characters.
They still show up in, I think, Suits is one, right?
They show up in these shows, these characters who have these photographic memories.
Perfect memories.
Everything they see, they remember, and so on.
Well...
The internet and cell phones have given that to everyone.
If I wanted to do a speech from Streetcar Named Desire, I wouldn't need to memorize it like I have before.
I could just go look it up on my cell phone or whatever, and I've got perfect recall.
And so everybody now has a photographic memory called a cell phone.
Which is so amazing that they can, quote, remember things or access things they've never even seen before.
What's the last score of a Seattle Hawks game or something?
So, the degree to which studying is around memorization I don't know that that's necessarily the greatest value anymore, because with cell phones and all that, you can look things up.
Again, it doesn't mean that memorization has no value, but I think it's become less valuable.
Memorization was much more important when we didn't have access to all the world's information in the palm of our hand and could look up anything.
But basically, a photographic memory used to be Extremely rare and often associated with other dysfunctions in the brain.
But now, everyone's got that ability with a $20 a month cell phone plan.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention that intelligence and studying or ability and studying, I'm not sure that they're always united that way.
I didn't...
Just to clarify, I did not do a lot of memorization in any of my studying.
And what subject were you studying?
In high school?
Well, no, I mean, okay, let's say high school.
So what subject were you studying that required that amount of studying?
Basically all of them.
Oh, like math?
Math, biology, physics, chemistry, English.
There is knowing facts, but there's also the understanding of the concepts.
I remember especially in my AP Biology class that to achieve...
because that was the first class I took that actually required A significant amount of effort from me because I read and I noted and then I went to class and I had a very good teacher for that class.
There wasn't a lot of memorization, but there were very complicated concepts that required me to think about them repeatedly, to read about them, to hear about them, and then I would get it.
I guess.
Right.
No, I mean, I would...
The two top IQ or intelligence degrees are physics and philosophy, according to research.
These are where the top IQs live.
And I think, for me at least, philosophy comes very easily.
And...
To read and sort of understand a concept.
I do all these interviews with subject matter experts, and of course I don't come anywhere close to their level of expertise, but I can get to be a competent layperson fairly quickly and ask relatively intelligent and insightful questions and all that.
It's not like compare brains or anything like that, but I wonder if your willingness to work hard, my friend, Might not be obscuring what you may be more naturally talented at, if that makes any sense.
Like, when I first started reading philosophy, I'm like, wow, I get this concept, I get that concept, I understand it, and so on, right?
And I'm sure when Marlon Brando first started acting, it was like, wow, and, you know, when I was in theater school seeing the actors who were really good, it was like, wow, you know, I can really see that they're going to go far, and they did, right?
And so I wonder if some of this feeling of purposelessness might be coming from...
It's just a possibility.
It might be coming from you're willing to work so hard that you can achieve through sheer muscular willpower a lot, but because you're kind of driving yourself like somebody whipping a horse, that you're not necessarily...
Finding something that comes more easily and more naturally to your capacities.
Has there been a subject that you're drawn to that you don't feel It requires a massive amount of work.
Like, I mean, we all make these decisions, right?
I'm better at language than I am at mathematics.
And, you know, does that mean it's impossible for me to...
I could probably sit down and grind my way through it, but that's not my particular natural bent.
I mean, intelligent people are good at a wide variety of things.
But finding which comes easiest and which is the most enjoyable might take away some of this feeling of emptiness after you've achieved something.
Yeah, that has been...
That was probably computer science and coding for me.
I think I still require a lot of effort to understand lots of concepts, but that is what I'm pursuing right now.
And do you have any more or less feeling of purposelessness when you have completed a coding project or done something in that realm that's satisfying to you?
You're absolutely right.
There's less of that.
I feel less exhausted after that as well.
Right.
I think that's your instinct saying, do that which is easiest, most pleasurable, which has a reasonable degree of value to the world as a whole.
You've got to eat, right?
But that sort of sense of purposelessness or exhaustion might be just that...
To sort of put it in a way that most people, I'm sure you get that, and most people could understand is, you know, have you ever ridden like a 10-speed bike?
They have like even more like crazy numbers of speed bikes, but you know, they have those, they have the two different size chains on the front, and they have like five different size chains on the back, and you can, you've got a little lever on, I think it's the right-hand side, that changes the gears, right?
And the idea behind that, of course, is you want to go into a gear that's easier to pedal uphill when you're going uphill, and then when you're going downhill, you need a longer sweep of turning and all that.
And finding the right gear is, I think, really important in life.
And if you are trying to go up a hill, I think it's a lower gear.
I can never remember whether it's high or low.
I think a lower gear is the one that you do when you're going downhill, and a higher gear is the one you do when you're going uphill.
And if you try to go uphill in a lower gear, it's brutally difficult.
And if you try to go downhill in a higher gear, you're just spinning and getting nowhere.
And finding the right gear, I think, is really important in life.
And if that gear, which you're naturally the best at and gives you a good deal of pleasure, is computer science, then I think if you focus on that, you won't need to worry about that feeling of emptiness, which is I'm able to do it, but it's not coming as naturally to me as my abilities might more easily achieve.
Okay.
I have some other questions.
I think I'm getting what you're saying.
How much time do we have?
I could do one more if it's relatively short.
I'm happy to do another question if it helps.
I'm not sure.
I guess I wanted to circle back to something earlier.
I suppose I wasn't entirely honest when I said the talk about why I wasn't very social.
Throughout my middle school, basically, before I entered high school, I was kind of Purposefully antisocial, and I was, um...
I think...
How do I say this?
This isn't going to be well phrased.
I was, like, resentful to the people around me who didn't try as hard.
Um...
And that certainly didn't help.
And why were you resentful to the people who didn't try as hard?
I mean, it wasn't that they didn't have to try as hard.
I think you mentioned earlier that they socialized and they didn't do as well academically, but they socialized and I guess you felt that they were having more fun?
Yeah.
You were jealous of their fun?
I think so, yeah.
So in the bell curve of work and fun, you know, like a fair number of people in your community, you were kind of a little far over on the work side, right?
In the community of my peers that I was connected to, yeah.
And do you have a question about that?
But it was almost the opposite for the community of people I was culturally connected to, if that makes any sense.
No, I don't understand.
Sorry.
I guess I'll give a little bit of family background.
I don't want to take too much time though.
Is that okay?
Yeah, go ahead.
My parents are Chinese.
They moved from China.
They grew up under the communist regime.
My dad is extremely against the Chinese government because of what it did to his family and all that.
And they all worked really hard and then they got here and then everybody they're connected to, everybody who also got here, they also worked extremely hard and everybody that along my family And everybody I'm connected to,
to that whole community, it seems like while I might be working a lot harder than people around me, approximately the people that are my family, every single one of them seem to be working harder than me.
In some ways, I feel like if I don't work that hard, I don't measure up.
Thank you.
What does it mean to measure up?
I guess that because my parents did this incredibly difficult thing, that they became doctors even though they grew up under the worst possible conditions.
And they did that through sheer hard work.
My dad told me that he wanted to be an artist as a kid, but He knew that being a doctor would help him be successful and eventually bring his family across.
And it's an odd thing because he taught me drawing as a kid somewhat.
And he's quite good, but he chose to be a doctor in the end.
And then he still works Well, he recently quit one of his jobs, so now he works a regular 40-hour work week, but until very recently, he was working some 65, 80 hours, depending on the week.
As a doctor?
Yeah.
Well, he's got to make up for the last caller.
Just kidding.
All right.
And is there more you wanted to say about that?
Because I certainly have some perspectives that I think might be helpful on that.
What else I want to say?
I feel like I'm missing something.
You see, because this whole purposelessness thing isn't so much a problem for me right now because I have all these schedules, I have all these classes, I have all these projects, and as soon as I'm done with one, I don't have to think, oh, I don't have any purpose because there's always something else I can just immediately go to that has this structure that this is the assignment, I can just go to that, I don't have to think about that, I don't have to hesitate in that moment.
The reason I wanted to talk to you in the summer was because in the summer when I had no structure, I had basically nothing to do.
I was waiting for the school to start so I could have that structure again.
And there was very little for me to do.
And that's when there were just hours where I just thought...
I just felt sort of empty.
And...
When I first wrote that email, I was in some sort of state of despair that I can't even remember right now.
I can't even call up exactly how I felt then because I'm so busy now that I don't have time.
It doesn't feel like the despair builds up when I have time that I'm not doing anything.
Okay, you know, I get it.
I get it.
Let me tell you something.
I'm going to be really annoying here and just speak for your father.
And I'm going to do that because I am a father, and also because your father had a difficult childhood, and I had a difficult childhood, and also because you have a better childhood than your father had, right?
That's fair to say.
Alright.
Now, your father did not escape communism so that you could gain the skills or have the habits That he had to have growing up under communism.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Right?
He doesn't want you to be like him.
He doesn't want you to be like him.
Because if he wanted you to be like him, he'd have stayed in China.
Because he was forged and founded and shaped and brutalized by the Chinese system, right?
By the Chinese government, by the Chinese culture and society, and by Chinese communism.
That's what shaped him to a large degree into who he became, and that's what he rejects.
He worked incredibly hard, as did your mother, to pull you out of that system, right?
Yeah.
So if you end up being like your father, your father will have failed in his life's work, To have you grow up in a different environment that he did.
Look, there are specific skills and attributes and even qualities that I have because of my childhood.
Right?
I won't get into all of that now, but the reality is that if my daughter Has the skills that I developed as a result of a difficult childhood, it will be because I've given my daughter a difficult childhood.
Right?
If I was so low on food that I had to go and hunt rabbits in the woods, and then I say, well, that was terrible.
It was cold.
There were coyotes.
I don't want to do that.
I don't want my kids to do that.
Well, if they end up Growing up to be really good at hunting rabbits in the woods in the winter, I will have failed in my goal to not have my children have to hunt rabbits in the woods in the winter, right?
So the attributes that your father has, the skills and abilities and hard work ethic and whatever it is that your father had, which he had to some degree because he was desperate to get out of communist China, if you develop those same skills, it was pointless for him to do that.
He worked so hard to get you out of that horrible environment so that you wouldn't have to end up working so hard.
Do you see what I'm saying?
Yeah.
And he may not be aware of this.
He may not even agree with you.
But logically, it's inescapable.
I guess there was a lot of...
My parents...
They yelled sometimes, they hit once or twice, but the biggest thing they did sometimes was, when I failed at something, they would sit down and say, when I was a child and I failed, and then they would talk about what they had to face, and then say, oh you have it so much better, why have you failed?
Right.
And they may not have the insight to say, I'm glad that you're not terrified of failing the way that I was because I hated it.
And that's why I left China was because I did not want you to be in the environment that I grew up in.
I did not want you to be as terrified of failure.
Like, I was scared whenever my mom came home.
Without doubt, without fail, without exception.
I was scared.
Now, do I want my daughter to be scared when I come home?
No.
Of course not.
Now, if I were to go to my daughter and say, well, I was so scared every time my mom came home, how come you're not scared every time I come home?
What's wrong with you?
Would that make any sense?
No.
It would make no sense.
I mean, unless I was a bad guy, and your parents aren't, right?
No.
So that's...
When we get our children to a better place, the great temptation for parents is to say, our children are weaker than we are.
You see this all the time in my comments section on YouTube.
Ah, you know, the reason that the Europeans aren't standing up against the invading horde of homina hominis is because they weren't spanked and because they're not tough and because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Well, no, it's because the men have been verbally abused by social justice warriors for 50 years.
The problem is not that the kids weren't abused.
The problem is that the kids were abused, particularly the men, who largely have given up on society.
Well, anyway, we have to get into that whole thing right now, but...
It was not an absence of harshness that has made European men have no spine.
It was, okay, well, society hates us, so why on earth would we bother trying to protect society?
So, it is not rational, but it is very tempting for parents to say, I developed these characteristics because I had a terrible childhood.
My most fervent hope is to want you to have a better childhood than I had.
But then at the same time, they say, well, wait a minute, you're weak because you're not developing these same attributes and capacities that I did when I had a bad childhood, even though I want you to have a better childhood, right?
It's an emotional problem that arises out of a lack of insight, which is not to say a lack of intelligence.
And that's my view of the challenge that Parents who give their children better childhoods find it painful sometimes to look at their children's response to those better childhoods because it reminds them of everything that they lost or missed out on when they were children.
You know, the fact that my daughter is not afraid of me in the slightest is wonderful and a little bit heartbreaking.
Because it would be easy for me to reframe that as, well, she doesn't respect me, and she needs to respect me, and that would just be a way of avoiding the tiny little heartbreak that happens every time she's not scared of me.
It's not her fault.
And it's my pride that she's not scared of me.
So if your parents say, well, how come you're not reacting the way we did, When we were in Communist China, it's like, well, because you did the right thing, Mommy and Daddy, and you got me out of Communist China.
And if you expect me to be the same as you were in Communist China, there wouldn't have been any point moving me out.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
I guess...
If I could just make guesses from their perspective, I think they would think that if I had the same...
Same level of perseverance and diligence that they do.
I think that they think that if I had those characteristics and I was in this environment, I would go even further.
Yeah.
Okay.
So if you had exactly the same level of panic that they had, the exact same survival instinct and desperation that they had, you'd go even further.
But why the fuck would they want you to have that?
Why would they want you to have that?
That's not what they should want for you.
And, you know, I'm going to guess that deep down in their hearts they kind of know that.
It's just that because they grew up so battle-hardened, they look at you and you look maybe a little soft to them.
But that's the whole point.
A lack of trauma often looks like weakness to people who are traumatized because they like to reframe their trauma as something that made them tough.
That way they can get some benefit out of the horrors they went through.
Well, it made me very hardworking.
It made me very responsible.
It made me very diligent.
It made me very...
Right?
Bullshit.
I call bullshit.
I can't think...
Of any positive attribute that I have that I couldn't have gotten even more out of a happier childhood.
There is not one thing that I have that I couldn't have gotten much better, much deeper, much richer out of a happier childhood.
My miserable childhood gave me nothing but dysfunction and problems to be overcome.
Nietzsche was wrong.
That which does not kill you makes you stronger.
Bullshit.
Try Lyme disease.
He had syphilis.
Didn't kill him.
Made the last ten years of his life.
Turned into a drooling idiot.
Had to be taken care of by his sister after he necked with a horse.
PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder.
For veterans.
Didn't kill him.
But still veterans commit suicide at absolutely appalling rates.
War comes home.
Didn't make them stronger.
It broke them.
So there is a great temptation to try and make gold out of the shit of our histories.
And we eat it and smile.
But if we're sensitive and aware, we get the true taste, which is brutality and evil and destruction and failure and abuse.
If I thought that some virtues could only arise out of trauma, I would be abusing my child by not abusing I would be abusing my child by not abusing my child.
Thank you.
I don't go for that logical conundrum.
I don't go for that logical contradiction.
Here, these are all great, wonderful virtues that you can only get if I scream at you and hit you and terrify you.
Well, then we have a problem, which is that virtue is the product of a lack of virtue.
And that can't be the case.
Because child abuse is weakness.
And virtues are a strength.
And what we're saying is that strength can be produced by weakness.
Which is like saying, I'm going to become buff by lying on the couch.
It doesn't work.
People who abuse children do so out of weakness.
And all it produces is weakness.
Lying on the couch makes your muscles softer.
And harming children can produce no virtues because it comes out of weakness and immorality and therefore all it can produce is weakness and immorality.
And so your parents may be trying to feel that they gained some value out of their traumatized childhoods in communist China But they didn't.
I'm glad that they did the work to get you out.
I'm glad you're here, not there.
But it was a shitty situation.
And it had shitty outcomes in your parents' personalities.
And the considerable virtues that they were able to muster to work hard to get you out is great.
But it's hard to say that although some good can come out of desperation and danger, that desperation and danger are thus necessary for those good effects.
And it is very tempting to try and say, well, yes, I had a very tough childhood, but boy, did it ever make me strong and tough.
I was diminished by my history.
I was broken by my history.
And I've learned some useful things in putting myself back together in a productive way.
But so what?
You can learn a skill called repairing your cell phone by dropping it in a toilet or down the stairs.
Does that mean that because you gained the additional skill of repairing your cell phone, we should drop it down the stairs or into a toilet?
No.
Well, I broke my cell phone.
I didn't have enough money to repair it, so I learned how to do it myself.
That's still not better than not breaking your cell phone.
Don't break your cell phone.
And you don't have to learn how to repair it.
And isn't that much better?
So that would be my suggestion about how to approach that.
Does that make any sense?
Yes.
All right.
Well, yeah, thanks for calling in.
It was a real pleasure to chat.
And I hope it was helpful.
And yeah, please do pass along my congratulations to your parents for getting you out.
I mean, it's a good place to be here, I think.
Even though the taxes are higher as a whole, there is still less of that charge you for the bullet stuff.
So...
Thanks everyone for calling in.
I really appreciate it.
It's always a great pleasure to be able to chat with the world and its representatives in the show these twice-weekly nights.
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