April 4, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:06
4047 YOUTUBE SHOOTING EXPLAINED
On Tuesday, April 3rd, 2018, Iranian born Vegan Activist and bodybuilder Nasim Aghdam entered the YouTube offices in San Bruno, California, shooting four employees and killing herself. Stefan Molyneux breaks down the bizarre nature of this story including: the price of fame, when shootings don’t serve the media’s propaganda goals, how the police failed again, the reality of demonetization, when women lose their physical beauty and what we can all lean from this tragic story. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
The thirst for fame is a very, very dangerous predator, my friends, and it takes down many men and women in their prime.
So I'm going to tell you a couple of stories before we get to what happened at YouTube, so my conjecture about what might have gone down will make some sense.
So, after high school I did gold panning and prospecting for a little over a year and saved up money by living in the bush so I could go to college.
I went to college for two years for an English degree and in that time I got into acting and I acted in a wide variety of plays with comedy and tragedy.
And did well.
And then I ended up auditioning for the National Theatre School, and they take like 1% of the applicants.
And I got in, and I did a year of acting training, and then I did almost a year of playwriting and acting training.
And I was not happy.
And to be fair, they weren't happy either.
I did not like the leftist hotbed politics.
They did not like my writing and so on.
And I was trying to decide what to do.
I've always tried to sort of live my life so that I don't end up accumulating regrets.
I wrote in a novel once about a wife who was married for a long time who collected resentment the way that an elk collect burrs and at this point in the marriage she was more burr than elk and I've always tried to make sure I don't end up regretting things which means you know kind of going all in and go big or go home so that you get closure by not having looked back or not looking back and saying well I could have done more So, complete coincidence.
The kind of coincidence that tempts you to believe in fate.
A complete coincidence happened when I was trying to decide what to do with acting and playwriting and so on.
So I went out for dinner.
It was a random dinner with a fellow in business, and he was having a business dinner.
I won't even get into why I was invited along, but it was nice.
And for me, you know, as a student and an artist, free meals were always welcome.
So I went out, and whoever you are, thank you, because this was a pivotal turning point in my life, which led me to this camera today.
So there was a fellow there up for business and he turned to me.
I'll just call him Bob. Bob turned to me and said, what do you do?
And I said, I explained my situation.
He said, oh, an actor, writer.
My brother does that.
And part of you is like, okay, maybe he's someone who can help my career.
So he said, my brother did pretty well in acting when he was younger.
He, in his mid-twenties, he moved to New York to make it as an actor.
And I said, how's he been doing?
And he said, it's It's interesting.
It's a challenge. You know, he's back and forth about it.
And that was kind of new for me, because I'm always like, you win big or you lose big.
But this puttering along from oasis to oasis, living on scraps, and never quite getting enough food to hunt properly, it never really occurred to me as a possibility.
So, I said, well, what's been happening?
He said, well, you know, he gets some commercial work and that pays well.
And, you know, he's a good-looking guy, does some modeling, that pays well.
And, um... You know, he writes, he does some off-Broadway stuff, and he's making it.
Like, he's rooming with someone in New York, and he's kind of getting by.
And he said, but here's the problem.
You know, it's kind of like a young man's game, particularly if you're good-looking.
If you're not good-looking, then you become a character actor or whatever.
He says, kind of a young man's game in particular.
And if you, you know, how long do you wait to make it?
And he said, here's the problem. There's always, he calls me, there's always something.
Someone who knows someone, someone who's interested in investing in a place, someone who loves the work that you do, someone who wants to introduce you to someone else, someone who might cast you as a smaller role in a bigger movie where you might meet people and do a great job.
And so there's always something that keeps you in the game.
You haven't bombed out. It's not like you're getting no roles and you go home like a Chris de Bourgh song.
It is, in fact, just enough to get by, but not enough to really make it.
And he said it kind of drives him crazy.
Because now he's 35.
Now, of course, back then at the day, 35 seemed like, whoa, 35.
Did you speak into his good ear?
And... He said he's 35.
He wants to settle down. He wants to have a family.
He wants to get on with his life, but he's kind of stuck in this limbo, in this in-betweeny world, in the null zone.
Neither failed enough that it's decisive to get out, nor succeeded enough that it's decisive to stay in.
Just kind of puttering.
And I remember, ooh, the chill.
The chill ran through my bones at that time and for that story.
And... Because the chill ran down my spine, it was interesting to me.
Because I began to sort of ask myself, was I in it because I could bring beautiful art to people?
Because I could bring moving portrayals to people?
Or was I in it because I wanted fame?
I wanted to have the emptiness of my childhood filled up with adulation.
Which everyone knows is a terrible idea.
But people know that heroin is a terrible idea.
It doesn't mean that nobody takes heroin.
So that was my big flirtation and I walked away.
I went and completed an undergraduate degree in history where I did some more acting and then I did a graduate degree in history and then I went into the business world and was an entrepreneur for 15 years in the business world.
It was a good life. It was a good life.
And then now YouTubing.
And now, of course, having done over 4,000 podcasts.
The reason why I was limited as an actor is pretty clear to me because I'm way too full of my own words.
This meant my life as a hand puppet for other people's syllables, so.
Now, here's another story.
I knew a woman.
She wanted to be an actress.
Good looking woman. And she had some great mimicking talent, great sense of humor.
She wanted to be an actress. And she kind of had bumped along in another field for a while, but then she met a woman on a plane and said, I want to be an actress.
And the woman looked, and she said, like, in film?
And she said, yes. And the woman said to her, you know, your teeth need to, you know, if you're going to act in film, you know, if you're British, whatever, you act in film in America, you got to straighten up the old tombstones so that they don't look like a bunch of drunks leaning against each other on a windy day.
She may not have put it quite that floridly, but...
So this woman, she said, okay, well, she interpreted this as, get your teeth fixed and I'll cast you in a movie.
So she went and got braces and spent a year getting her teeth straightened and all that.
And the woman had given her a card, so then she calls up the woman and says, I want a meeting.
The woman says, yeah, sure, drop by.
And she goes and says, look, my teeth are straight.
Can you cast me in a movie now?
And the woman said, uh, have you ever really acted?
And she's like, well, you know, in high school or whatever.
It's like, yeah, that was a long time ago.
This woman was now... 39, I think?
Ooh, 39. Could be telling.
And she said, listen, I'm not casting your teeth.
You're not like the close-up of a vampire movie poster here.
And so, you know, go do some community theater, go get some experience, go get a resume, go get your headshots, and, you know, come on back.
And this was the woman that spent a year basically somewhat putting her life on hold with the idea that she was going to get her teeth fixed, she was going to go be a movie star.
And this was rough.
This was rough. And another friend of mine, this was not artistically, he was like the guy in high school for Marx.
I mean, he got more than 100% in his math tests, and he was fantastic in physics and so on, because you get bonus questions sometimes.
And he then was like Mr.
Universe Mental Musculature.
He was like, I'm going to go to a top-notch university, I'm going to take a math and physics double major, and I'm going to change the world with my science!
And he just, you know, it's one thing to be, you know, the old big fish in the little pond.
I'm the best looking person in this one horse town.
I'm the greatest singer at karaoke night.
And then you move to the other arena.
And then at some point, you may very well top out.
Very, very few people end up at the very top of the very top.
Most of life is about losing and just settling for where you are in the pecking order, which is healthy and helpful.
There's a bell curve of abilities, a bell curve of ambition, a bell curve of intelligence, and you've got to figure out where you stand.
Otherwise, you are going to be attempting to will yourself to become taller or, say, hairier for the rest of your life to very little effect.
Be ambitious, but be realistic is the key.
What is it, Casey Kasem?
Keep your feet on the ground, but keep reaching for the stars.
This guy couldn't keep up with the work.
He couldn't hack it with the wunderkind geniuses from all over the world who were doing this kind of work and he could not admit that he had overshot his mark, that he had reached too far and too high, that he'd gone Icarus-like to melt his back wings on the sun and plunging into a frigid ocean of despair and in fact got ill and ended up bombing out of university because he could not adjust his expectations.
The vanity! Vanity!
The vanity of massive ability in a limited dataset is...
You may be the best basketball player on your block, but that does not translate.
It might! But it may not translate to NBA. And certainly, the myth of talent, that it's just talent that gets you there.
Well, talent is certainly necessary, but far from sufficient to get you where you want to go.
Michael Jordan, he would spend hours practicing his shots every day.
Just because you get there, even if you get there, it doesn't mean you stay there and you certainly won't stay there forever.
So, my mom, my mom, her whole life wanted to write a book about her life, and she did have an interesting life.
And she wanted to write a whole book. She even had the title, One Woman's Century.
She had the title, she wanted to write the book, talked about it all the time.
Now, I did write books from an early age.
I have a whole bunch of manuscripts all over the place.
And again, you know, my language ability doesn't pop out of nowhere.
It's not magic. It's a lot of work in the background.
I'm like a 20-year overnight success.
And my mom wanted to write this book.
Never did. Never did.
She had time. And I said to her, I once said, look, I really want to write this book.
She said, I said, look, from what I understand in my experience, like if you just want to write a book, you'll never write a book.
If you absolutely feel compelled to write a book, like you feel compelled to write a book, like you got to pee.
Well, then you have a good chance of writing the book.
But if you just want to do it, it's too much work and it's too difficult and it's too humiliating because the idea in your mind of the perfect story versus what you can actually cough up on the page, they can be worlds apart.
And I've known a lot of people who have, you know, I grew up among a bunch of intelligent and ambitious people, and some of them have done fairly well, some of them have done very well, but most of them have bombed out along the way, and now seem to live lives of permanent regret.
Like somehow things conspired against them, somehow the system was flawed, the system was bad.
Yeah, well, the system is flawed, the system is bad, there's no question.
But people survived in the past when the system was far more flawed and far worse.
So that is a very sort of brief tour through just a few of the people that I've known.
You may know people like this who have this kind of ambition, and it can be very, very toxic and destructive.
So why am I talking about this?
Well, there was, of course, an active shooter situation at the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California.
This was Tuesday.
Recent shooter opened fire at the company.
Hundreds of employees fled.
The building were evacuated.
Several victims taken to hospitals in the area.
And even in the parking lot, they were dividing the YouTubers into people who saw something and people who didn't see something.
And the suspect died of a gunshot wound.
Now, it early came out that this was a woman, and we'll get to why that was important in a few minutes, but by the evening of the shooting, she was identified as 39-year-old Nassim Agdam.
And I've seen a few reports that she was 38, but the majority seem to say 39.
So she was born in Iran, and she had a pretty significant social media footprint.
She had, I think, 55,000 followers on Instagram, and And she claimed that she was the first Persian, which is what some people of course in the region call themselves, they're from Iran, she was the first Persian female vegan bodybuilder.
Now, the woman emigrated to the U.S. with her family in 1996 from Iran.
And she certainly seemed to be multilingual.
She posted videos in English and Farsi and Turkish.
And her English was a little, you know, concentrate and read the subtitles and it begins to hove into view.
She used the name Nassim Sabs on her Facebook and Telegram and Instagram accounts.
And she also ran a personal website.
She ranted about closed-minded YouTube employees, and she claimed that they were, quote, filtering my videos to reduce views and suppress and discourage me from making.
videos and so she had been building her platform and then demonetization and limits had been put onto her account and this was of course intensely upsetting to her and she claimed that a video that was viewed more than three hundred and sixty six thousand times netted her a grand total of ten cents and was very upset about that.
She was very much into animal rights and her videos, I mean scrolling, her website scrolling through them was just like, you know, just horrifying, torture after torture of images being vivisected and slaughtered and just the horrifying stuff, which we'll jump back to in a moment.
So yeah, she complained she was being discriminated against and filtered on YouTube and she had some I mean, Jeb Bush-style low-energy workout videos.
You know, if you want to encourage people to work out, you've got to be peppy, you've got to be up.
I mean, I'm not talking about Richard Simmons on cocaine, but it's not a bad place to aim for.
And she was, you know, very stone-faced and, you know, sort of barked out the counts and no particular enthusiasm.
Although, I mean, she certainly was, I mean...
For any age, she looked like half a gymnast.
And for a woman in her late 30s, she was lean.
And her workout video was, I think, age-restricted.
And she said, why?
I'm paraphrasing. She said, why?
You know, there's nothing sexual in it, nothing inappropriate for children.
And if you look at Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus and others, they're not age-restricted.
She posted a screenshot on one of her websites, which was a YouTube notice that said one of her channels was no longer eligible for monetization.
And so she was frustrated.
Obviously, she had worked, I think, in her own mind very hard, and she had worked hard to produce videos.
And they were demonetized and restricted, in some cases, according to what she said.
And this was... I guess the end of the plan that she'd had for herself.
Now, before we get to the fame aspect, I just wanted to mention Like most of you, I mean, certainly because I'm on YouTube and have a lot of subscribers and a lot of video views, I was following this, of course, and was hoping that as many people as humanly possible at YouTube were safe and were going to.
I hope everyone gets a speedy recovery.
This is horrifyingly evil, what happened.
And I was following it during the day, and when they said that she was a white woman, I was, okay, well...
The fact that the race is mentioned means, of course, you know which race it is.
But then witnesses said that she was wearing a headscarf.
Now, white women in general, not particularly partial to headscarves unless you're going through chemo and want to hide your baldness.
Or you're Kathy Griffin, of course, wearing, I think she shaved her head because her sister was going through chemo.
So when you start to see headscarf, you start to make questions, you start to have questions.
There was another aspect that was particularly appalling just because the incompetence and corruption and laziness in action on the part of American law enforcement, from local cops, Broward County cops to FBI and so on, is absolutely appalling these days.
So, according to reports, I'll put the links to this below, according to reports, the father of this woman who shot three people at YouTube Said that he actually had warned police that she hated the company and might be heading there.
So he said that the law enforcement authorities contacted him Tuesday, 2 o'clock in the morning, right?
The day of the shooting.
Because his daughter had gone missing, and he'd filed a missing person's report, so the cops, I guess, found the license plate or whatever, and said that they found his daughter in her car in Mountain View in Northern California.
And then the family, her family, put two and two together...
And realized that she was in a car near YouTube headquarters, of course, in San Bruno.
And so they told police about her recent complaints.
Her brother said that YouTube was ruining her life.
So they found this woman.
I think she was asleep in her car.
They questioned her.
They let her go. They contacted her.
I don't know if she was still around when they contacted the family.
The family says, oh man, she hates YouTube.
She might be heading to YouTube.
YouTube, she says, is ruining her life.
What other reason would she have to be there?
She's gone missing for a couple of days.
Now the family say the police said that they would keep an eye on her.
Did they?
Did they?
Well, remember, of course, California is a sanctuary state.
We got your basic catch and release.
Does that matter? Did they think she might have been an immigrant?
Who knows? Her brother told reporters outside the family home she was always complaining that YouTube ruined her life.
The race politics, of course, came into full force.
Mashable, right? So the one, you know, she's Middle Eastern, of course, is Persian or Iranian.
She's got, you know, black hair, really, really dark brown eyes.
And so Mashable published a picture of the shooter with lightened skin and green eyes.
Green eyes! Ah, it's appalling.
It's appalling. Guess what possible algorithm can catch fake news?
So this shooter, she was Iranian, she was female, she was an animal activist, she was a vegan, kind of crazy of course, didn't use any kind of AR-15, and she entered and shot up a building In a state with the strictest gun control laws in America.
So what that means is that this story is going to almost immediately vanish from the mainstream media.
It is going to be flushed down the memory hole.
It is going to be as if it never happened.
Because they cannot use it to further gun control agendas.
Because this story has gender.
It has ethnicity. It has immigration.
It has... It has demonetization, it has social media, it has, I mean, astonishing levels and layers.
Now, an astounding thing that happened, and you probably heard this too if you were following the story, as soon as they said, as soon as people found out that it was a woman who had shot up the YouTube headquarters, then CNN in particular turned to speculation that she was maybe shooting up a boyfriend, that there were love triangles.
How appallingly sexist.
Are you saying that women can't be insanely passionate and violent and evil about things other than sex and boyfriends?
My God. Well, it's a woman.
I don't know. Maybe she was also on her period.
I mean, the things that come out of CNN's mouth.
It's a woman. It must be a love triangle.
And of course, the left, in their absolutely appalling manner, were immediately like, I'm gonna politicize the living F out of this, and you should too!
The NRA are terrorists!
Gun control, the NRA is to blame!
NRA members are terrorists!
Well, no, she was an Iranian woman, she was a vegan, she was a bodybuilder, she was an animal rights activist.
Mueller! Investigation!
Trump! It's an idiot!
Oh, man. So this means, of course, that Persian vegan bodybuilding animal rights activists now have one shooter on their tally, and the National Rifle Association still has zero.
Zero. On their list.
So, here are some of the lessons that I suggest we take from this.
In scrolling through the website you could see, I hate to say obsession because the mistreatment and cruelty of animals is a horrifying thing to see, but people, people, people, manage and control your exposure to horrors.
Look, you can spend all day scrolling through the internet and finding the most appalling and horrifying behavior.
Against whatever you treasure, whatever you hold dear, everything will be insulted and violated and tortured in video after video if you want to pursue it.
You have to, have to, have to manage your exposure to horrors in this world.
As Nietzsche said, if you look too long into the abyss, remember, the abyss also looks into you.
Do not chase monsters to the point where you become a monster.
Do not overexpose yourself to horror.
It will mess up. In my opinion, it will mess your mind.
You have to manage it.
You have to control.
You manage your exposure. We want to oppose evil because virtue and goodness are so beautiful.
You understand? We want to fix ugliness because we love beauty, but if all you do is stare at ugliness, you lose sight of the beauty that's actually the motivating force behind what it is that you do.
We love virtue.
We love beauty. We love truth.
We love honesty. We love integrity.
We love courage. And all of the great things that can flow out of a dedication to bringing great, positive, wonderful lights to a darkening world.
We have light because there is darkness.
You understand? You're in a forest at night, you put out your flashlight, your cell phone flashlight, because there is darkness.
That's why we have light.
That's why we need light.
Do not cheese grate your soul into vengeful scraps by constantly rubbing it against the worst aspects of the world.
Recognize that they're there. Because there has to be something to oppose, but what we guide ourselves by is love of virtue, not hatred of evil.
The hatred of evil is the shadow cast by the love of virtue, but do not stare so long into the pit, into the abyss, into the true moral horrors of human behaviors, to the point where you lose your way.
Stay with your moral compass.
Love virtue, love truth, love goodness.
And use that against evil, but do not stare at evil to the point where you become it.
This may have been what happened.
Now, it's hard to avoid the fact that this woman was somewhat pretty and had a smoking body.
Now, that may sound sexist, but there's a reason why I'm bringing it up.
She... 39, so she was 17 when she came to America.
Okay, she has a little bit of dead, dull, fish-glossy-eyed stare.
She's got a tiny mouth that's pursed in, I guess, the withholding of her inner demons.
Let us out. No.
But she's attractive.
And she was really hitting the wall hard.
That is not unimportant, particularly, of course, in her culture.
If you're single past a certain age, that is embarrassing.
It is humiliating.
And a woman who is born with that kind of Beauty and again, it's hard for me to sort of judge by Iranian or Persian standards, but she was attractive and again The body was something that most women would definitely envy and the workout videos are Appallingly not unappealing.
Let's just put it that way.
So what did she want from her beauty, from her fame?
Again, to quote myself, this is a novel I wrote called Almost, about the tortures of being almost good.
And in it there was a beautiful woman who said she realized she was beautiful and she wanted to put her beauty to work for her like a glistening slave.
And this Focus on beauty this focus the thirst for fame is very very tempting for people now I know that sort of Middle Eastern standards are somewhat gaudy and somewhat overblown by Western standards, somewhat garish, somewhat overexposed, and so on.
But even by those standards, like she has on one of her bios, like a producer, singer, actor, whatever, whatever, whatever, right?
And she was, like, levels below William Hung, kind of terrible.
She was terrible.
The dancing was lackluster.
The singing was terrible.
I don't know, auto-tuned cat being fed ass backwards into a blender.
I can't really describe it other than to say, if you hear those voices in your head, get to a doctor quickly.
Now, the environment she shot her videos in was very, very wealthy.
So maybe she shot it in her family home.
It's hard to imagine she made any kind of living off YouTube.
But she has a wealthy family if she shot the videos in her home.
And she had, of course, I think, been infected by the thirst for fame.
And maybe she thought, well, I'll use my fame to be an animal activist, to...
But she had no talent.
And in particular, she had no charisma.
And charisma, a basic, like the Q factor, a basic measure of likability, that is kind of essential.
If you want people to pay attention to you, you have to be likable.
And in her videos, she's crazy, not just because she's so bad, but because she puts the video out, put the videos out as if they're good.
And, I mean, it's hard to say.
You know, I mean, the family around, who knows?
What happened to her in Iran as a child, who knows?
My experience of people who are very much into animal rights is that some pretty terrible stuff happened to them when...
They were children and her father, I think it was her father, who gave a story about this woman as a child that she hated to see ants harmed to the point where she would pick them up on paper and take them outside rather than squish them or anything like that and that is touching and it's a I guess a very high level of empathy but it also can be scar tissue from early trauma and My guess,
it's all just a guess, but, you know, we try, I try, actually, we, I try to gain as much wisdom and good advice out of these horrible, evil situations as possible, because philosophy is not a weapon.
Philosophy is like nutrition.
It doesn't cure, it can only prevent.
And the goal, of course, is to prevent people out there from going down this particular road.
You know, maybe it was organic.
Maybe she had a brain tumor. I don't know.
But still, I do believe that there are important lessons to get out of this.
It's... Beauty and physical attractiveness and so on, in particular for women, is with the goal of attracting a man.
Just as a man's accumulation of resources fundamentally is with the goal of attracting a quality woman.
To attempt to use things for their improper end is usually doomed to failure.
You know, if you try to hammer a nail with a wet fish or try to cut down the largest tree in the forest with a herring, then you are not going to have a very successful day.
The purpose of female beauty is to attract a mate, just as the purpose of male ambition is to attract a mate.
It doesn't mean that's all you can do with it, of course, but it's just that's its primary purpose.
It's not to feed your vanity.
It's not to feed your ego.
It's not to fill whatever holes were unfilled from your childhood.
It's not to give you happiness.
It's not to give you contentment.
It is there for physical attraction.
And women...
She worked hard, obviously, to maintain her figure and so on.
But you did not invent male hormones and you did not invent how men respond to a hip-to-waist ratio and a lack of body fat and symmetric features and so on.
You didn't invent that.
You didn't earn that. That's something you're exploiting.
Looks are there to get quality husbands and wives for your children.
Not there to feed your ego, to feed your vanity, to make you feel better about yourself, or to be used for some political purpose.
You didn't earn hormones.
You didn't earn sexual attraction.
That is something that happens automatically to men and to women.
Don't use it in a vainglorious manner.
So, she's 39 years old.
Now, my guess is she's been, like her friends and her family have been saying, perhaps nicely, perhaps not so nicely, this is not good.
Because, you know, we assume that she does these videos, she shows them to people, and of course, if people are honest, they say, this is not your thing.
It's not what you should be doing.
But she wants to do it.
Why? Why does she want to keep doing it?
Because she says it's going to work.
It's going to succeed. Now, does she get a job?
I'm going to go with no.
She says, I'm going to make my money on social media.
So she doesn't get a job. Does she get married?
Does she have kids? Does she do charity work?
No! Does she help people?
Does she bring light and goodness and love and virtue and happiness to the world?
Well, certainly not now.
Because she says, this is going to work.
And people say, it's not going to work.
And she's like, yes, it is.
She commits fully to it, which is good when you're starting, it's just not good when you're in your late 30s.
And not only has it not happened, but...
Anyway, so she goes full tilt boogie into this goal.
And then she gets demonetized.
Her channels get demonetized.
She feels she's being restricted in some manner, and her views go down.
And it turns out that everyone around her was right, and she was wrong.
And if she's wrong, it means that she wasted her beauty, she wasted her youth, because I don't care how many sit-ups you do, the eggs age anyway.
You can put on your makeup, you can get your Botox, but there's no plastic surgery for the quality of a woman's eggs.
And by the time you're 30, 90% of your eggs are already dead.
There are some indications she was fascinated by plastic surgery.
I gotta say fake boobs, but I'm no expert.
So she doesn't have the fame.
She doesn't have the future. Everyone else around her was right.
She was wrong. And she's too old, probably, to get married and have kids.
Now, these circumstances happen to a lot of people who make these kinds of terrible mistakes.
They don't go shooting up people.
So, I gotta say, she was crazy and evil in a way that goes beyond the norm, of course.
But these are lessons that can be learned even from an extremity.
You know, you don't have to smoke four packs of cigarettes a day to say, I should stop smoking.
You can look at the extremes and you can find lessons that can improve your life.
Don't aim for fame.
Don't aim for fame.
Use your talents to make the world a better place.
Subjugate your ego, your vanity, your thirst for reinforcement.
Your thirst for approval.
Your thirst for popularity.
Subjugate that to what does good in the world.
What makes the world a better place?
What inspires people? I'm frothing in the mouth here.
What inspires people to do better?
It's not about you.
It's about the world. It's about virtue.
And you can say, well, why should I do that?
And I'll tell you why. A, it'll make you happy in the long run.
The pursuit of excellence Particularly virtuous excellence is as far back as Aristotle defined Eudomania.
That is the best way to achieve and maintain happiness.
And it allows you to survive the slings and arrows of outrageous lunatics who cast dispersions against you, not because you're bad, but because you're good!
Use what has been given you to make the world a better place.
The reason I also say that is that it is profoundly ungrateful to live in a world of relative freedom, particularly in the United States, which has survived and existed and flourished to a large degree, if not only exclusively, because people sacrificed their own immediate selfish interests for the sake of the pursuit of the good.
You know, people fought, people died, people took massive social conflicts, people had their reputations destroyed.
In order to bring you the truth, in order to defend the truth.
So you live protected by the shadow wings of courageous virtue pursuers and virtue spreaders who came before you.
The treasures that you have in terms of free speech and political liberty and economic liberty exist because other people sacrifice their immediate happiness in order to bring you the kind of freedoms that you thrive on today.
And to simply consume those freedoms without doing anything to spread and add to them is profoundly selfish and will result in those who come after you having far less, far fewer of those freedoms, or maybe in fact none of those freedoms.
Use your talents for virtue.
Do not be consumed by the thirst for notoriety.
There are famous people in the world who have done that and they are not making the world a better place.
If you have had a hollowed out childhood, fill it with virtue.
Do not fill it with the applause of fools.
Do not fill it with the thirsty eyeballs of others.
Do not feed on adulation.
Do not feed on fame.
Do not use your talents and your appeal.
To serve your vanity, to serve your emptiness.
Fill yourself full of light and awaken the eyes in those around you.
