The cost of reading books, the price of playing video games.

i'm not used to paying money for books
at all i'm used to paying money for video games looking at video games for sale on a store shelf when i was a child asking my parents to buy me video games for pretty much every single birthday and christmas the economy of video games is something i'm much more familiar with than owning books once we're looking at thousands of dollars and with current generation systems we are talking about thousands of dollars then we're also talking about really meaningful really significant opportunity costs 39.74 canadian dollars this book cost me almost forty dollars and i resent the hell out of it i feel like i'm gonna present buying this book until the day that i die and it's you know it's only forty dollars it's only forty dollars but it's strange how different types of cost weigh on us differently right i you know forty dollars spent on groceries i wouldn't feel the same way about you know the thing is we had a translation of this book that we downloaded for free printed it out as a pdf i mean it's not really free because you had to pay for the ink and the printer there's some there's some cost there's a translation for about 100 years ago and it's better it's better than this book i read articles by the author before i decided to buy this book and i even emailed the author and had a bunch of messages back and forth with the guy so you feel you have a connection to the author of the book and you feel you can trust him and you think buying this book is gonna be a happy memory [Music] and you know for me personally part of the reason why i resent this book is i'm not used to paying money for books at all i'm used to paying money for video games looking at video games for sale on a store shelf when i was a child asking my parents to buy me video games for pretty much every single birthday and christmas celebration i mean there was a pretty short period of my life when i was really buying video games my own money because for me video games were primarily if not exclusively a childhood phenomenon but nevertheless the economy of video games is something i'm much more familiar with than owning books now that's partly because if you don't know me it's the first time the channel i used to live in cambodia i used to live in thailand i used to live in laos and even when i was in more comfortable places like moving between hong kong and taiwan the fact that you're always moving means that you're never going to be building up a bookshelf full of heavy objects i didn't i didn't uh build up a collection of video games either but video games are a lot more portable than the books are there was no way i could own and carry with me books you know from one place to another and you know i think one of the main reasons on this channel i've only criticized video games in terms of the waste of time and not the waste of money is that it's still it still seems to me in my mind's eye like books way more of a waste of money than video games even though obviously books bring so much positive in my life but man forty dollars for a book even even some books that cost you cost you twenty dollars can you can you justify that i mean unless you have some sense of pride in collecting these things and having them sit on a shelf for you to look at them later and for me in my life i never had that i never had the stability in my life to really own books the first year of me really buying and owning books was 2020 in the conditions of the pandemic and let's not forget 2020 all the libraries were closed before that i had access to university library and even as a kid public libraries i had the option i had the luxury of getting books for free this is stunning to me i made this chart myself the numbers were available from ign this chart shows that if you had bought a brand new nintendo entertainment system in 1985 you were paying almost 500 us dollars in today's money so adjusting for inflation the nintendo entertainment system cost you five hundred dollars wow it really is a lot of money and a lot of us may be insensitive to how much money it was because it might have been our parents who paid for these things and we never thought our parents spent five hundred dollars to provide us with a nintendo console like if you're my generation i had sega master system um or a playstation 2 or a playstation depending on what generation of video games you grew up with now let's really be honest what is the minimum cost of owning and using one of these consoles because it's not the sticker price on the front of that box i would say conservatively you could take any of these numbers and double them for a minimum price why you got to own a tv set you have to own more than one controller if you're fussy you might end up with four or five controllers i don't know i don't know anyone who owns a console with just one controller even if you play alone you have different types of controllers different types of games you want an arcade stick you want whatever you know people get fussy but if you got brothers and sisters or friends or boyfriends or girlfriends but you can spend a lot just on the interface on controllers people paid upgrade and expand the hard drive to expand the capacity of the console itself right and if you think it's unreasonable to include the cost of the screen what are you going to include in the cost of your reading habit i just i just bought one of these this is uh this is a wooden wooden book rack uh book stand help you read a little bit more efficiently i can include that in the cost of my reading you can include the bookshelf and then above all else you have to have some kind of estimate for the cost of the games nobody is going to buy a console and then only play the built-in games now video games are still part of my life i think they will always be a part of my life partly because i have a daughter it's possible i will have another kid or more kids in the future this is never going to go away when i see this price tag when i see that super mario 3d world is 79 canadian dollars all right i'm shocked i'm horrified and i'll tell you my own biasness i don't feel video games have made progress i don't feel that super mario 3d world today is a better game than what came out 10 years ago or that it provides more wholesome or more educational entertainment for kids that there's more value than in a mario game that came out 10 years ago now i admit if you're going to talk about 20 years ago we get into a more difficult nuanced discussion for me personally video games made before 1997 are more valuable than video games made today because i don't want to spend three hours playing a video game i would only be interested in a game that you can play for five minutes or 15 minutes but that's that's my personal bias but to be on the leading edge of technology to spend 500 on a console and then maybe 80 dollars per game plus the controllers plus the screen this is already a lot of money and look guys can we be honest with ourselves about how many games in total you are gonna buy over say a five year period this fine specimen of the human species youtuber known as metal jesus rocks owns 233 nintendo switch games complete in box so this does not mean that he doesn't own other games that are cheaper and available as digital download only so on current generation consoles there are some games where just like buying something for your apple macintosh or your windows computer you just pay a relatively small price to download onto your hard drive that could be 9.99 could be 20 could be 5 he owns those cheaper games also but he has a collection of 233 games complete inbox if we were to estimate that he spent 50 us dollars per game that gives us a total of eleven thousand six hundred and fifty dollars i am not suggesting to you that anyone in my audience today is considering getting a 20 000 a year video game habit i don't think that's a warning i need to sound but we really are talking about enough money that there were serious opportunity costs in life opportunity cost means the cost of the things you decided not to do right so there's the cost of the thing you bought and then there's the cost of the lost opportunity for what you didn't buy what you didn't do with that time with that money and so on and that's why books are so hard to evaluate right i mean what is what is it worth to me the number of hours i'm going to spend reading this book and the number of dollars i'm going to spend reading this book i don't want to be the person in a parallel universe who didn't read any books any of these books right you can't say any books at all i don't want to be the person who didn't have the frankly soul-crushing disappointing experience of finding this book and then regretting it you know even though that's bad i want to be that guy i want to be the guy that takes that chance and makes that effort and tries to read the book and tries to improve himself and even if i fail or end up frustrated that's what i want to be right this part of a self-development process there of training yourself to be the kind of person you want to come even if even if all these books end up in the garbage because i've had to move house before suddenly i got to move across the country across the continent to the other side of the world it's possible again i'm going to lose most of these books all these books it's really possible i'm not going to have one bookshelf in one place where i get to accumulate these things right but it's hard for me to speak in terms of opportunity costs because if i didn't buy that book and if i didn't spend the time reading that book right who would i be once we're looking at thousands of dollars and with current generation systems we are talking about thousands of dollars then we're also talking about really meaningful really significant opportunity costs you can take a vacation to france and learn nothing i'm not endorsing taking a vacation just for the sake of that vacation i'll tell you something in the south of france there is a museum to the history of the french revolution you could learn a lot and you could make a kind of meaningful connection to that political history that guides you in the books you read and the other things you learn and what you do politically what you do in your own life politically for the next 10 years for the rest of your life you could take away something really meaningful and political history and tourism they don't just intersect in the ancient past you could go to france today because you're interested in the chilejone protest movement the pro-democracy protest movement that's ongoing in france right now you could say you know what i feel this isn't really being covered by the english language press i don't really feel i can learn about this on youtube or tv or by reading books in english which is true you could go and you could meet those people you could attend some of the products you could interview those people you could bring your cell phone camera and you could record the interviews you could write a book of your own you could make a youtube video of your you could make a documentary film of your own right but even if you did none of that you could just go there to learn something meaningful have something have some kind of contact with political history as it unfolds in your own generation and then decades later be able to look back and say yeah i was there i was there when that happened you know you know in this sense a one thousand dollar vacation there could be a lot of value there there could be something you carry with you for the rest of your life in a really meaningful way my sling is editorial explicit material briefcase show lava stereo flow fill me