Friendship: Your Mind is Playing Tricks on You.

one of the oldest playlists on this channel is the playlist on friendship discussing the nature of friendship in our culture we have so many songs that are sung so many movies that are made about love about romantic relationships and it's rare for people to put the same level of energy the same level of effort into friendships but friendships very simply define what you can and cannot do in your life you could say especially when you're young but you think it doesn't influence middle-aged people you think it doesn't influence old people what you can and cannot do can you play tennis if you have three friends who play tennis yeah you can can you learn how to play tennis can you get good at it can you get into it yeah okay can you can you learn chinese can you get involved with politics at city hall if you have three friends who already are involved with politics at sea hall if you have three friends who already are learning chinese you know even the types of television people watch i mean things with a very low level of effort you know well yeah if you have friends who already understand these things you know these things hey do you guys think any of you could uh buy an airplane ticket and go to cambodia and start doing humanitarian work if you have a friend who already has lived in cambodia that's not so intimidating anymore right you have a friend who can already talk you through the paperwork you need to do or whatever you know yeah and as you've heard me say many times in this channel what you can do as an intellectual what you can do as a sort of political activist political lobbyist as a person who cares about politics and wants to change future of the world you know friendship matters it matters far more than the attention we pay to it right and perhaps some of us suffer from obsessing over sexual relationships but maybe we also suffer from paying too little attention to friendships now i think nobody in this audience will doubt that our sexual relationships are primarily rooted in instinct you know not reason [Laughter] whether or not you're attracted to someone is instinctual what you do about that attraction is a very different question how you cope with it or what kind of relationship you create out of it and all kinds of questions that you may answer intellectually and philosophically but how you actually live your life how you conduct yourself sexually romantically who you fall in love with marry how you live but there is a very deep level on which i as a heterosexual can never be attracted to a member of the same sex and i have certainly known gay people who could never be attracted to the opposite sex and of course there are bisexual people who can do it all you know and i have known people who could only be attracted to fat people and there are people who can only be attracted to skinny people you know there are more peculiar elements to those instinctual relations and i met a guy who had spent his whole life chasing after chinese women and i was talking about my philosophical attitude towards this because i said look i grew up in a city i grew up in toronto where there were plenty of chinese women plenty of korean women around a couple japanese women too like i grew up with you know in high school and what have you and just surrounding me in the city and i said i've never had any fascination towards never in any attraction or never my type and the interesting thing about this guy's reply to me was he had grown up in a small town where there were absolutely zero asian people this is somewhere in the united states where it's like 90 percent white five percent hispanic five percent black or so there are in america in the united states but there are a lot of towns like that like you know it's just not a cosmopolitan place at all anyway but he said that when he reflected on his life nevertheless growing up in an almost entirely white community in school and so on the women he was attracted to in high school looked like they could have been asian like they looked like they could have been chinese or japanese they were white women with certain kind of facial features and their their body type and so on and so forth and he knew what it was he found attractive about them and that was years before he'd ever meet uh asian women or start to develop an interest in asian culture and so on and so forth so we all admit when we talk about romantic relationships that we're talking about instinct not exclusively but very fundamentally and i think people don't want to pay the same kind of attention to the instincts that are involved with friendship okay why why why do human beings need friends should be clear why do human beings feel that they need friends i don't mean rationally i don't mean when you think about it when you reflect on it i mean why are we a species for whom the most serious kind of punishment is to be locked in a prison cell in isolation solitary confinement which i've seen some people argue seriously they feel solitary confinement is a form of torture i heard an interview once with a man um and he was being interrogated that way he was being turned to confess to a crime he hadn't committed and he really said in his own experience he felt that solitary confinement was a kind of torture anyway he described the exact scenario of what he was locked into he was in a completely dark room where he couldn't see or hear anybody or something you know well you know i am not the kind of person who uh liberally appeals to uh evolutionary psychology i think we have to be tremendously self-aware and self-disciplined when we make claims alluding to a revolutionary past i think we have to be aware of our tendency to indulge in self-justification rationalization and excuse making by pointing to a kind of fictional construct of what we imagine our evolutionary past was and what it how we ought to live our lives now given that evolutionary past so without digressing into at any length you guys probably know there are men who uh you know men who try to sleep with a hundred different women a year and who justify this through their notion of of evolution they say oh well this is how we were evolved to behave and you can talk to another man who believes that one man should marry and commit to just one woman and raise children with her and he can justify that he can justify monogamy by appealing to evolutionary psychology and so on all kinds of different extremes i've known people in anthropology who very seriously believe that everyone was secretly homosexual i you know there were people who believed everyone is secretly a closeted homosexual and thus heterosexuality is some kind of repressed uh dysfunction and there were of course people of the opposite stripe people who tried to make heterosexuality a definitive aspect of sanity or normalcy and that somehow homosexuality uh you know was delegitimized as being the result of repression or trauma that but that we really these people weren't really homosexual and then i think the although in some ways it's the craziest position of all um it's at least empirically uh harder to debunk there's also the popular popular enough notion that everyone is secretly bisexual but that so thus thus surrendering both homosexuals and heterosexuals uh repressed dysfunctional people on the premise that everyone secretly and inwardly is is bisexual in their inclinations i in case you guessed i subscribe to none of these schools of thought i don't i don't support any of these but my point being evolutionary psychology it's a very pliant excuse making mechanism and you have to be really keenly aware of what your own agenda is what your own desires are what you might be making excuses for consciously or or unconsciously in uh in asking these questions and then proposing your own your own answers to them so i do notice guys i do notice uh 16 people in the audience and only eight thumbs up i think we had about 20 thumbs up before so if you change your mind you can give it a thumbs up now and then you don't like the direction this conversation is going you might not know that you can click on the thumbs up again and undo the thumbs up but clicking on thumbs up helps more people uh join the crowd while the discussion is uh is ongoing and uh i it also people discover the video later on so i do like having a live audience i do like performing with the pressure uh provided to me by having a live audience this way exe.exe says off-topic comment but i thought you took that two-week break because you were watching the kenosha trial so guys um if you support me on patreon you'll know you'll know more about what's going on in my life but no i stopped uploading videos for two weeks just because um i felt that one video i'd uploaded was especially important i really wanted more people to see my video about uh philosophy and politics of socrates i still think it's a tremendously important video if you haven't seen it uh go back and watch it but even during those two weeks i actually continued uploading videos recording and uploading videos i just didn't publish them and actually i have a backlog now i have several videos that haven't been published yet but that i created during that period of time so anyway thanks larry uh shows up the socrates video and says that it was very good so every so often i do that i know um you know guys i'm happy to have you all in the audience but i know i have viewers who really do value my channel but they can only they only have enough time to come and watch a video once every two weeks there are people who've loved my channel for years but they watch every tenth video or something and i'm uploading so much that something will get buried something will get missed so uh every so often i have to slow myself down although yeah i create in terms of my creative process basically yeah i want to be making videos all the time including this one so i think thanks for joining me but i think you can imagine like if this video now we're limited just to the people who are not at work today who are able to come and watch this video today you know uh that would be a tremendous constraint but if you're uploading and publishing new videos every day some of your videos are gonna get are gonna get buried um anyway so the most the most basic premise here uh that i'm borrowing from evolutionary psychology is just that there is a good reason why human beings are uncomfortable being alone there is a good reason why even they perceive solitary confinement as a kind of torment or torture or or punishment and i would say that is because we are not evolved to be solitary predators there are innumerable species both on land and in the ocean that have no social instincts whatsoever they don't live in a troop they don't live in a pack they don't help one another they don't assist one another whatsoever and the only time they have positive contact with their own species is for sexual reproduction so normally when they're in heat or something they send a chemical signal and they meet and they mate and then that's it you know there are innumerable species on this earth that follow that that kind of pattern well human beings are not quite pack animals um we don't naturally form into flocks you know we don't naturally form into schools in the sense of schools of fish however it is impossible for just one person to survive in the wild for long if you are one person alone if you do not have a troop if you do not have a clan if you do not have some kind of extended family like organization of people who help you and work with you and take care of you um [Music] the common cold could be the end of your life you know if you are truly living alone in a cave in prehistoric conditions or in a hut in the middle of the jungle a very minor injury a very minor illness could be the end of your life because you have nobody to take care of you during that that short span of time so you guys know i am i have experience living in the tropics and i i was living in one of the last parts there were people still some of the indigenous people were still living in tribal conditions that was disappearing year by year the last people with traditional lifestyles were moving to the city and so and so on you know um so if you go there and hell i don't know how many people still still live that way but there were still people hunting with crossbows when i was there and i think one of the things um we forget is just how different life is before refrigeration as as a vegan i was very interested in traditional methods of growing things like soybeans i was very interested in the vegan aspects of the diet i guess i still am well guess what you can grow soybeans in that climate you can grow them quite effortlessly and they go bad in like two days they become poisonous elected there's no refrigeration there's no preservative there's no food processing like okay you can take the beans out of the field you've got to eat them now and you know you start to realize why there's so much emphasis on certain types of food that can be kept even if it's only for like two weeks um in the tropics potatoes do not last very long you know there were kind of bacteria and things that there are tiny somehow find their way into your potatoes you know potatoes do not last that long so on and so forth so yeah and and by the way again i am vegan but you start to see why meat was so important for survival because it was possible to take me i've seen this my ex-wife also was an anthropologist it was with groups emerging from tribal conditions they would just kill something and hang it over the fireplace and with no other preservatives just the smoke rising they would they would cure meat and it could lie it could last for six months anyway my point here again is not to glorify the conditions of our ancient ancestors and it's also not to present you with a kind of [Music] rationalization of my own choices my own values i don't think that um you know evolutionary psychology vindicates the choices i've made in my life i don't think it vindicates my schedule values i think if anything evolutionary psychology helps to explain why people like myself are so alone you know and i embrace that and i accept that and i understand that there is strange kind of strength necessary a strange kind of psychological and emotional resilience necessary to really live your life alone to really live in defiance of social conventions and to accept the consequence of that fact now you know to give give a very simple example if you live in a predominantly catholic society and you reject the catholic church you're likely to find yourself alone now maybe maybe you can find the company of other dissident intellectuals who also reject the catholic church maybe that's the most wonderful thing for you but start adding up all the conventions all the social demands on you that you're rejecting and you start explaining more and more why it is you're alone and when you look at the fear of being alone the terror people have of loneliness that i'm here suggesting to you is rooted in our instincts as rooted in evolutionary psychology in a way totally unrelated to the romantic erotic reproductive instincts that we spend so much time examining and analyzing that we spend so much time singing songs about and dancing dances about and talking to our psychiatrists and therapists about we all obsess over human sexuality this way right but there's much less attention paid to loneliness the instinct to avoid loneliness the instinct to conform with the most unreasonable social and political demands you know like that if you live in a society of communists to be a communist then if you live in a society of fascists to be a fascist if you live in a society of catholics or muslims to conform that if you live in a society where everyone watches a certain sport everyone watches football soccer or baseball to conform and go along with the crowd even if you personally do not find it entertaining or interesting i've known people like that um those instincts the instincts around the fear of loneliness and the way people approach and cling to friendship right maybe that's something we're not we're not examining nearly enough and um i'm just taking a moment to let you just take a moment to let your comments guys okay so just interesting atlanta richard says that he doesn't like the direction this discussion is going in but he's still committed to knowing my opinion about it okay well look richard um i doubt what you have to say is criticism why don't you just tell me what's on your mind because i mean if there's something i'm guessing there's something you want me to address or there's some particular question within this topic you want me to talk about and if you mention it it might not be the first thing i i talk about maybe it's gonna be the last thing i talk about i can but i can pay attention to whatever your uh you know whatever your interest is that you think i'm i'm moving i'm moving away from in the direction that i'm that i'm taking in this this video so look uh a comeback something i said earlier in the video i'm not i'm not glorifying loneliness here i'm not glorifying being alone i'm not glorifying being a defiant individualist i think i said very briefly that the friends you have determine what you can do in life now i don't have to digress into a whole lot of examples here but if you've been watching my channel for years at one point somebody wrote into me asking for particular examples of vegan activism that wouldn't be destructive and wouldn't destroy their life whatever and one of the examples i remember discussing at length was setting up a pancake stand and actually getting the the proper legal permission from the city government or whichever part of government handles it we are where you actually get a pancake stand or a waffle stand and set that up and with maybe five of your colleagues you know you can give away you can sell them if you want you can sell them for one dollar each you can sell them at a loss i guess that's better the giveaway so sell them for one dollar so for much less than they really would cost and with each you know pancake the way you put it you can give the person a leaflet and say look this pancake doesn't contain any eggs or dairy it's possible to make pancakes or waffles with eggs dairy and here's why because we're vegan and we think this is really important here's why i just gave that as an example i'm not saying this is the world's most prominent example okay do you have five friends who will do that with you do you have people in your life who trust you and can work with you that way um i can give examples from totally different times in my life i gave a proposal to professor richard gombrich many years ago if you don't know who richard gombridge is he was at that time the most powerful scholar in buddhist studies of research related to buddhism and uh for a period of like 50 years he was the most i don't know if he still is today but whatever he had a long career of being a very powerful and influential person and i put together this proposal for a kind of magazine and i just mentioned so the magazine was going to do a few different things but one of the things i said to him because even in my own conversation i keep i kept mentioning to him books that had been published he'd never heard of and he's just he's a great and famous scholar in the field he doesn't know about the new books that are coming out related to buddhism and what have you that's partly because many of the books are published in india some of them are published in hong kong it's it's hard to stay on top of that stuff but i was and i worked in the publishing industry so i really knew oh but do you know there's a new book published about that here and then so one of the driving forces for this magazine was to give you an update whether it was every month for every three months however often this magazine was here are all the new books that came out and i said you know including the books published in russia you know what it means you know there are places like this which is just not that easy to find out unless you take the time what are the new books being published in this field they have brief not even book reviews but brief notices about all the new books uh coming out in this this area of scholarship and he got tremendously excited i mean he he was mostly spending his life around very boring people very pouring people with phds and a certain kind of pot-smoking lackadaisical hippie who decides to get a degree in buddhist studies i mean he was he was around people who were not ambitious and not hard-working and not motivated so he was very excited about this idea of me setting up a magazine but you know it was just funny because in his mind he thought i'd be doing this all alone with no encouragement and no help from it's like no like if i were i wouldn't tell you like [Laughter] why do you think i'm talking to you why do you think i made this presentation i made like slides like a powerpoint presentation you know gave him this [ __ ] it's like and and by the way with that one you don't need money i mean 100 bucks or something it's it's going to be almost compared to eating out in a restaurant every month it's not going to be very much money a little bit more than zero money but no no i need a couple people to work with me like you know three people five people 10 people would be great no no i need colleagues i need friends who will do this you know what you can do and what you cannot do it's crucially shaped by friendship let me just say briefly kevin smith what's the difference between me and kevin smith okay kevin smith had enough friends to make the movie clerks basically everyone in that film it's notorious he engages in nepotism and hiring his friends whatever he had enough and i'm i am not saying they were close personal friends i don't believe they were i've heard him talk about it i they were people he kind of sort of knew from the neighborhood he grew up in he made phone calls around said oh hey you know a couple a couple of people in that film were his close friends and a couple of people became his close friends later because they made the movie with him but you know he was calling up you know distant acquaintances to appear in this weird movie okay how many people do you think i could get to collaborate with me to participate in making a movie now in this city in canada the city i've been living in on and off for like eight years right i came and went but still i've got i've got significant roots in the city now right i lived here and then i went to taiwan i lived here you know i made trips back and forth but still [Laughter] so the friends you have shape what you can do and the friends you don't have are an insuperable obstacle right they really define what you cannot do now i just say going beyond this i'm not going to go on and on with examples but um do you guys think i have what it takes to be a drug dealer i don't i'm lacking one crucial variable i don't have the friends if you already have friends who are drug dealers and people you trust people you trust with money people who trust i'm going to give you this thousand dollars and you're not going to just take it and run away people you trust not to backstab you literally you know not to rob you not to double cross you not to turn you into the police not to snitch like there's a pretty significant level of you know trust required by that that's the crucial variable for whether or not you can you know become a drug dealer okay now think back to the person you were when you were 14 years old at age 14 could you have become a medical doctor obviously i mean in that year but could you have started the process of studying to become a medical doctor all of you know for so many of those professions the most crucial variable is do you already have a parent or an aunt or an uncle who became a medical doctor do you have an older brother or sister if you have a friend if you have someone who helps you so far more important than money you know there are rich people who become drug dealers there are poor people who come to our children's right there are rich people who become medical doctors there are poor people who become medical doctors i just read the autobiography of a guy who was born into dire poverty and he became a medical doctor i could tell his whole story and his his family connections were a crucial part of that um long story you know the friends you have define what you can do and what you can't do even i didn't i didn't have any concept of studying latin or greek when i was a kid if i'd had a friend who was interested i feel like again you can just imagine if i had a friend to even take an intro intro to latin you know if i'd had an older brother or a friend or something just even imagining something being a possible career right that's gonna come from friends and your own sense of comfort and taking that risk and making that investment and going to that place so i i just mentioned that some of your comments seem to me to uh seem to me to reflect the assumption that i was gonna glorify being a defiant isolated individualist someone who throws off social conventions and says no i'm not going to watch soccer i'm not going to watch baseball you know no i'm not going to compromise with the catholic church i'm not going to be part of these things that's not what i'm saying at all i'm starting by talking about evolutionary psychology and the demands that we maybe don't even articulate to ourselves in private the demands we have of friends and that we that we make friends and that we struggle against isolation with something that i think is rooted ultimately in an instinctual fear of death the fearing that if the fear the the fear that if we are alone if we are truly isolated if we don't have a pack if we don't have a a clan or a tribe that we will die um that we can be alone for a couple of days but that's about it that then we start to get antsy and to be looking around for who were our friends did you want you want to jump in i just wanted to say something that spoke to me that you said was a comment made that as children what friends we have will determine what we can do and you use this example of learning to play tennis if you have a friend that plays tennis with you then you can play tennis but playing alone yeah right not having any friends who play tennis with you then that will preclude you from playing tents um so as children we we are able to remember times when you know we wanted to play and nobody was available i know this is a very basic thing but it doesn't stop after your childhood a lot of people think like well once you're an adult you get involved with raising children and you get involved with your job but it still really matters uh to anything else that you want to do outside of truth and even including those endeavors if you want so yeah i just i just say like that to me was um yes thinking about the difference between like how you do friendship as a child more kind of evolutionary psychology but so melissa and i both regard playing tennis as meaningless by the way we're not using it as some wonderful positive example but if you want to play tennis and if you want to become good at playing you want to become proficient you want to be an excellent tennis player having friends who play tennis of course to motivate you you know as opposed to doing it once a month or once a year that you're really getting out and training and improving your your skills and so on it's even more important if you join when someone is 40 years old like you you have someone who's four years old and maybe they're trying to lose weight and improve their muscle mass so they start playing tennis well if you don't already have friends who play tennis that's going to be incredibly hard to do it's going to be incredibly hard to put in the effort and so on uh to do it in that sense alone now obviously you can go and pay someone to be your coach but it's not the same it's really not now you know okay so that's tennis hey guys have any of you published poetry do you think poetry is motivated by money in the year 2021 nobody makes money out of poetry nobody nobody makes money under poetry you have to know people who publish poetry you have to have a circle and by the way you can start your own journal you can start your own publishing house it's it's pretty cheap if you have five friends who share your aesthetic taste in poetry you have the same idea about just five so it'd be six of you uh the six of you have the same sense of why you should be writing and publishing poetry like maybe it's a political you have some political motivation maybe it's just a sense of the beauty of the language or something okay now now you guys can start publishing a journal you can start collaborating and publishing each other's books but if not you know what i mean in this sense right now in the 21st century there's no such thing as one poet you need to have a troop of poets you need to have a tribe of poets to make anything happen and again what would motivate you to keep writing poetry and producing it to a to a higher and higher standard so again obviously i'm not saying this is not true of of all forms of writing and publishing but i think poetry is an especially an especially good example hey guys you want to put on a performance of julius caesar william shakespeare's julius do you have enough friends to think about it and you know you you can talk about money but there are a lot of things you can't you can't buy you can't pay for the type of camaraderie and cooperation you get by doing a project like that with friends so friendship is productive you know and the lack of friendship the possibility for you having too few friends snuffs out your creativity snuffs out you know the the potential you have uh for production in your life or any kind again whether that's studying think about how [ __ ] boring it is to study chemistry you know when chemistry is a prerequisite to going into medicine to become a medical doctor in our terrible education system okay if you have friends who are willing to study for the chemistry exam with you now it's more like tennis you know really you know so what you can and can't do even intellectually it's it's shaped by friendship in this in this profound way and you're you're enabled and you receive positive reinforcement through friendship so and so forth and i'm just telling you honestly you can't pay a tutor to do that if you pay a tutor and they happen to fall in love with you that's if you pay a tutor and they become your best friend that's different but with many many of these things it's this profoundly important constraint that people i think people don't want to examine it for exactly the reasons we're going to get into in this video because it reveals certain kinds of weaknesses you have it reveals the extent of your alienation from the culture you're a part of you know what i'm saying like you know you know i just say there are a lot of really tough things to reflect on when you think about friendship the friends you've had the friends you've lost you know so forth so you know i want to rehearse something that i discussed with melissa last night and i'm gonna ask you i can't remember anyone ever talking about this honestly so i don't know if there's a taboo about this or it's just i have never heard it but i've never heard about this in fiction in non-fiction in someone else's youtube video i've never had a conversation with us but you know melissa mentioned me last night that she still has dreams about people she was friends with in high school and i think occasionally university people you people you had some close connection with at that age in that stage of your life and she has vivid dreams about them and not every night but once in a while even when intellectually she is aware these are people she would not want to be friends with today like you know there are various things wrong with them it's it's not a coincidence they haven't been in touch and i immediately respond to this with several vivid examples of my own of people where i had some kind of close cooperative bond with them we were friends at a certain age and then they appeared in my dreams for years and years afterward even after i mean in some cases i had really formed the judgment that this person was despicable they were untrustworthy immoral there's someone i'd never want to talk to again i'd never want to be friends with again um you know just just briefly many of the people i went to high school with got involved in drugs and alcohol to a great extent some of them went to jail you know um there was this woman who was in love with me and she became a stripper i don't know she was a stripper for a year or two i don't think it was for her career in life or something you know people took on different very strange directions with their lives after they knew after they were they were part of my life and one of the examples i gave melissa was this girl i never had sex with her i'm saying girl because we were both young we were both teenagers whatever she was a girl i was a boy but a young woman whatever i say but you know i had this friendship with a girl where we never had sex but we did sleep together literally and um we had a lot we had this close friendship for a time with this kind of intense friendship and at one point she actually washed my hair i was back when i had hair she washed and combed my hair like you know we touched each other and spent time together and talked about our lives and stuff and for something like five years after i stopped talking to her she did appear in my dreams you know and sometimes very vividly you know um by the way sorry these were not erotic dreams i was not fantasizing about having sex with her i could describe some of these dreams you know now that girl she became the most despicable person imaginable to me and i did talk to her several times after the friendship stopped we bumped into each other and talked she's someone i consider totally immoral really really disgusting uh to me she's someone i don't just morally disapprove of her in the abstract i can say to you honestly she makes my skin crawl and i'm gonna choose to leave it anonymous um but there are some youtube videos of her she's not like a conventional youtuber but there were several youtube videos of her talking and before i made this video i went and listened to a couple of them for just a couple of minutes and you know it's i get the feeling like she is she is really though and you know i already knew that you know a million years ago okay you know my my hypothesis is here i think we do have really deep-seated instincts to form cooperative connections to other people and to work with them and live with them and support them and i think that so what age was maybe 16 17 when i had that relationship with that girl and again i didn't have sex um i think there's an instinct to form a kind of tribe to form a clan to form a bond that's going to last the rest of your life where this is a person you can literally sleep with this is a person who can wash you and clothe you and feed you i think i probably did cook with her a couple times nothing nothing elaborate but we ate together it's someone you trust this you know this is someone who can guard you while you're sleeping you you trust that they're not going to attack you in your sleep or rob you in your sleep you know and again in terms of evolutionary time i do not think we're evolved to form such deep intellectual and ethical relationships such as we demand of one another such such as i demand of all the women in my life and so i i have very high standards for my male friends also you know ethically and intellectually and so on you know i have these very very high very very many standards i don't think we're demand to have pardon me i do not think we are evolved to be so demanding as that i think we are just evolved to be seeking out and then trying to maintain for the rest of our lives relationships with people who can work on a farm with us who can gather food and gather firewood where you have that level of trust and cooperation uh but not and again this is my own agenda i mean i have my own agenda and interest that i'm not trying to valorize with evolutionary psychology uh you know most people in the 21st century they want to spend time with others who you know who understand who people who understand who i really am you know people who appreciate intellectually the same things i appreciate ethically appreciate the same things that you know um emotionally people who have a really profound level of emotional compatibility with you well you know i i that's that's way beyond the point of of mere survival that's way beyond the point of merely counteracting loneliness or what i think is an evolved instinct to to avoid just dying of starvation or her or abandonment you know i i think you know at some point we have to write this okay this is this is way beyond the remit of what we're talking about with evolutionary psychology but why should i have dreams about someone years after i've stopped talking to them and years after i consciously and intellectually decided i don't want to talk with them i don't want to be your friend there's one song it's a really short song by the ramones called i don't want to walk around with you i remember talking with us a friend of mine and it's a very short song it's very repetitious song the entire lyrics of the songs are as follows i don't want to walk around a part of me i don't want to walk around with you so why do you want to walk around with me and i remember i just thought that for me that's like primary school you know in the school like well you know you're trying to be my friend i don't want to be your friend um why are we haunted by dreams of these people that we may really think are despicable but if even if it doesn't go that far we're consciously intellectually aware there's someone we can never be friends with there's just no compatibility there you know intellectually ethically emotionally you're not compatible as friends um i think there is a reason for this but it's not a very good reason and it's a reason we have to learn to overcome that's why we're why we're doing this video today why i'm leading you in this discussion or in this we're in the set of reflections so okay i i'm not going to speak for myself i'm not going to speak for melissa now but i'm going to speak for hypothetical members of the audience you guys can tell me not too many comments just the last couple minutes i'm sure this is a slightly horrifying conversation for many of you it is i mean it's disturbing to think about but you know do any of you ever find do any of you ever find that you have wistful moments of reflection in which you yearn for the friendship of people you knew in primary school or people you knew in high school people you knew in university that you you you maybe look back at your life and regret and think oh things could be better now if i had maintained this friendship if i'd maintain this switch will you you look back and feel that something is missing feel that something is lost because these people aren't in your life today or that they haven't been your life continuously for all these years and you know maybe in that moment you just think you lost touch that you know you didn't put the effort in do you ever feel that way and i so i would suggest you maybe first thing in the morning maybe when you've just woken up and you're still a little bit half asleep or something you know you're not at your brightest you don't have your rational mindset on to tackle the problems that you have a wistful moment of you know not just thinking whatever happened to that person not just curiosity but feeling that there's something missing and something lost in your in your life because you're not still friends with those people and then you go on facebook and you look at their profile and now you're looking at the cold clinical reality of who this person is and the life they're living and you know they very likely they're not going to show photographs they consider embarrassing they're going to show photographs that they uh you know they feel proud of they feel show them that they're at their best photographs of themselves on vacation photographs of themselves holding up a bottle of champagne to celebrate something photographs themselves with face paint on and a colored jersey standing next to a truck celebrating that a certain team won the football game or the baseball game you know uh you you see you like my point being they're they're showing you what they're proud of they're showing you what they enjoy whether that's a skiing vacation or organized sports or getting drunk or getting high i've seen so many profiles on the internet whether we're talking about facebook or instagram or tinder or what have you where the person is depicting themselves it's a self-portrait they're holding marijuana in one hand they have some kind of video game in the other hand they have plastic figurines in the background for the different types of movies and tv shows they they watch maybe posters for the some of the movies they're into and like it's like hey here's here's the stuff i own that represents what my life is all about this one you know very often you're looking at you know consciously articulated autobiographical statements in the form of a photograph whether that's facebook instagram dating website like like tin near you whoa this is who this person is this is who they become and this is this is who they want me to know them as like you know maybe in reality i mean looks they're not putting up a picture themselves vomiting in the toilet maybe they're actually an alcoholic and they they vomit in the toilet on a regular basis that reason they're not showing themselves at their worst this is them showing themselves and then you look at that and you're struck with the contrast between this half dream half instinct yearning that they should still be a part of your life you should still be friends and you know the subtly horrifying reality that you guys are alienated from one another for reasons for good reasons now you may look back on any one of these particular friendships some someone you know in high school somebody new university would say you may look back on a particular friendship and think you wanted to be friends you wanted to continue the friendship but they rejected you and there would be another case we look at it you think oh well really we should have been friends but i rejected them regardless i think there's a kind of objectively real sense in which you can look at all of these failed friendships all of these people who disappeared from your life all these people who could have been part of your tribe and who are not you know maybe they briefly were a part of your tribe whether it was when you were 16 or when you were 21 you had some here to and now and then you're not now you're strange one another you know whether you feel that you've rejected them or that they rejected you or that you just drifted apart that nobody made the effort to maintain the friendship but there was no particular rejection nevertheless even just looking at their facebook profile you will feel the chill of recognition that this is someone you never could have been friends with this is someone you never could have got along with that actually your natural enemies not natural allies right but you have this innate instinct still some of you guys may not feel that way there's some biological diversity amongst us you know some people some people have much stronger social instincts some people have very strong anti-social instincts and some people are autistic i have some autistic members in my audience some of them write to me appreciatively like i've had autistic people write to me saying they agree with my analysis of autism i'm not autistic but i have made some videos talking about i can't say this is a universal pattern of thinking or feeling i think it's even more important because i've never heard anyone talk about it nobody not my parents like not my other girlfriends or whatever like you know girlfriends prior to the girl i'm currently with you know i i can't remember any tv show any youtube camera anyone really talking about that and i will go further to state this is not quite the same as loneliness because i think you can wake up with these feelings i think you can have these feelings unguarded moments you can sense this instinct even when your life is full of other people even when you are busily socializing with and are integrated with other people you can still feel it you can still feel the sense that you should reach out to and should still be in touch with uh that you should still be a tribe with these people even though right now you have enough friends you have a wonderful boyfriend or girlfriend or you have two or three boyfriends or girlfriends uh what have you so i'm going to take a moment now to read uh read comments in the audience so lazolapoli says sorry lazal lappy yes to read the name correctly uh says quote i had a dream of my teenage best friend just last night and i do dream of her often but i follow her on instagram and i know our friendship is better off dead to which he adds ahaha yeah and look raw intelligence is a factor i am of the opinion that most people are stupid because they choose to lead a stupid life like their potential to build themselves up intellectually whether that's in their teenage years their 20s their 30s their 40s in any given decade of their life that they're dissipating and wasting their potential to make themselves into a more substantive person intellectually so like i see stupidity as a process and as a product of a pro of an ongoing process more than i see it as an innate trait however you know some people are born severely mentally disabled sometimes you're looking at an innate trait a characteristic that prevents you from from developing intellectually but you know um if you just think about the mass of people you knew in high school like who you knew at all you had a single conversation with you think about the mass of people you knew in university the vast majority of them are just too stupid for you to be interested in having a friendship with them today and many of them many of them are too crazy for you to be interested in having a friendship with them today now beyond that if you think so you know this huge survey of people you remember and half remember if you think about the few exceptions really intelligent people who happen to be in your high school or happen to be in your university um i think if you just try to separate those couples you never had friendships with them or you didn't maintain a friendship with them and then you think about who they are and their values like i knew a couple of very smart guys who went into computer programming i don't miss them you know i i don't look back on that with any regret i can't look back now and say like you know they were like in some sense they were some of the smartest people i ever met in high school university but i don't respect what they've done with their lives i'm not interested in this and you know they they don't know about history and politics and the things i care about they're not going to have a conversation with me about the things i care about and you know probably vice versa is drew probably they would not want to sit down and have a conversation with me about buddhism or you know politics or the history of the american constitution or whatever it is i'm researching or or care about at the time and you know looks i mean that's that's one type of person you know i knew people who went to the theater oh but you know again where i just do not have anything anything in common that way but sure you know i know intelligence it makes it so uncomfortable to kind of quantify intelligence but even if you're just looking at a dating app even if you're looking at tinder or one of these dating apps of course you're quantifying intelligence all the time and you may be doing it very imperfectly and you would be doing it inaccurately someone who has a photograph of themselves holding a jug of beer and laughing and screaming they might actually be a very intelligent person but you're looking at that image you're judging them you're looking at their tattoos and judging them you know so yeah um and again i don't think this side of the game can be referred to um evolutionary psychology i don't think we can rationalize these choices we make because probably all were evolved to do is to try to create a tribe of people that we can trust enough to gather firewood together and even you know you leave one person to tend the fire okay you keep the fire going it's very hard to light a fire in terms of evolutionary time in terms of prehistory over the last several thousand years okay you have to keep the fire going well we go and do this other chore do this other task or we bring the food or something just people you can work with on that level is what i think we uh what i think we instinctually desire and what we're terrified of of lacking you know um you guys may know um so anyway so look great it's a great question eamon flame here asks do people have to be intelligent to be your friend a question mark what if someone is just nice why can't they be your friend go back on my channel and look up the debate i did with uh modvegan so obviously that's her youtube name not her not her government name or what have you i don't know if i can even remember her real first name at this point anyway um you know when i returned to canada um it was completely reasonable for me to expect that mod vegan was going to be one of my few friends here in canada you can list off all the things we have in common uh oh yes so melora remembers margaret was her first name i i had forgotten actually genuinely i forgot her first day it's been a long time as a doctor it's been like maybe four years three and a half years anyway um that's a link to just a video i did with her so anyway you can make a list of things i have in common with her like veganism you know uh she's also a parent i think she and i are about the same age also she's in an age gap relationship the same as i think her husband is 14 years older than her my girlfriend and presumed second wife is 14 years younger than me and so we have a whole lot of things in in common you know she's not my friend she's never gonna be my friend um and you know sure she's you know think about intelligence think about ethics think about emotional character it's kind of those three categories the intellectual the ethical the emotional uh we're not compatible but you know if we were actually on a desert island a great idiom especially as vegans of course she's someone i could trust to chop lumber you know i mean she's someone i could live with and cooperate with on that on that level but what we're into uh you know obviously she also thought what i had to say about drug addiction was morally despicable so i have a i have a more recent video that also talks about that i mean she she considered me morally despicable basically because i want cocaine and heroin to be illegal yeah that's i have a very mainstream view of that in many ways you could say i have a conservative view but i don't have the extreme left-wing view so you know that that illustrates the gap between us but you know so if you're at the question you ask is does someone have to be intelligent to be your friend the answer is yes you know and you know i think if someone were my friend for more than just a few days you know no it wouldn't work if they aren't at a very high level in all three of those categories uh intellectual character ethical character and emotional character yeah i was just gonna say even in the realm of evolutionary psychology stupidity is dangerous and if you have injury and you need somebody to gather food you know so that you don't starve to death while you're injured it does matter to have sheer intelligence on that mobilizing so i know you you've made this contrast between like what is evolutionarily a factor in in who we um who we want to be around who will be a member of our plan um but i think there's also something today we really care about the ethical intellectual qualities of people i think it does kind of relate because if somebody is really stupid it's dangerous to be around them yes sure um you know if somebody's watching the fire you want them to not catch other things on fire not catch the blinds i just think you have to admit that's a much lower bar than we actually impose on our on our friends you know that we and and look guys if we're being all the way honest women have much higher demands of their friends than of the men they fall in love with i mean women are so demanding of their other female friends she has to agree with you on everything you know politically ethically like but she can like a woman can be a teetotaler teetotaler is a fancy word for she drinks no alcohol at all no alcohol no drugs and she can fall in love with a guy who drinks beer every friday and saturday she's like oh well i love him he'll be okay he's coming around i can help him like she'll make every [ __ ] excuse in the world for the guy who's dick she's sucking but like her best friend since high school it's like that [ __ ] is trying to destroy me you know like you know like some woman who's been your best friend since high school she's drinking beer on the weekend and you judge her and you hate her and you can't trust her like as a as a pattern a lot of people the exacting standards and requirements they apply to their friends are much higher than their lovers precisely because love itself romantic love the erotic impulse motivates you to make excuses for those people now i i look i do think i mean the stereotype that men are better at making friends in maintaining friendships i think there is some truth to that uh some go on what you can say about drug dealer example yeah right right [Music] look there are look as you said use of some very stereotypical male roles there are men who have friends they knew from the army and they go bowling together and they know they're dumb and they know they have ptsd and stuff like oh yeah you know brad i was you know somebody they were on assignment with in afghanistan so no i think i think people do accept stupid like i'm not saying you should you know but but i think i think you're going you're taking the evolutionary psychology german in precisely the way i warned you not to no because you see how easy it is though i think it's a good example she has totally good intentions but it's easy to slip into a kind of self-justifying mentality where like oh well like you personally you have a bias you have an agenda you want to justify selecting more intelligent people to be your friends and then you're trying to attribute this to devolution but anyway i think it's v it's very easy people want to justify their own sex lives there are men who sleep with prostitutes who will give you a cold calculating justification that paying for sex with prostitutes is justified by evolutionary psychology and again there are people who live in celibacy and just marry one person and have no sex out of marriage and they justify that in terms of evolution i've had hate mail from those people i think they're incredibly stupid so guys by the way if you have a moment hit the thumbs up button it'll help more people discover the video and if you actually know someone who'd benefit from joining this conversation if you have a friend you hate and never want to talk to again can send the link to this uh this discussion about about the nature of friendships and the the implications of these things someone can send this link to margaret hey isil just said you're a piece of [ __ ] margaret you guys can never be friends but it's true you know look i i i obviously on some level i regret losing margaret as a friend on another level i just know it's it's not possible for us to friend so it's ridiculous regretting it you know like i know it's going to sound weird but it's just as absurd as regretting that i am not friends with a statue made of stone you know it's really the alienation is that deep and it's that profound there's no way i can be friends with that person and if i i don't do this i'm just being honest with you i do not go to facebook and look through the profiles of people i knew in high school university i'm just honestly i'm not a member of any groups where i could do that like for some of you that's easy because you're like you may be members of a facebook group which is specifically for people who went to high school and graduated in the same year as you or people who went to your college for some of you it's one most like a way to that i've i've never done that um but you know yeah however there are specific people where i've looked up youtube videos they've made and this kind of thing where i've found their web presence they're intentionally created public uh web presence and you have that sense of coldness but i i think that is the same thing as recognizing i could no more be friends with this person than with the statue made of still see i to me the degree of mutual alienation is is that real and the impossibility of moving past it or or moving uh beyond it okay so atlanta richard asks andy i did encourage this guy to to specify what was you want me to talk about earlier he says quote what about the way many of us compartmentalize friends what is a real or true friends when it's appropriate to say sheer he used to be my friend so i'm just going to be 100 honest to you richard and sadly some of these problems do come down to semantics because other people may not use the word friend in the same way i do implicitly in everything i've said up to this point in the video i've treated friendship as something totally separate from work from employment i think that work gives people a kind of false friendship um you can be a taxi driver uh you can work in an office and it's like okay there's this person they're my co-worker they're also employed by this company and i am gonna trust them just to do this task with me just to accomplish this task and then it's we're done we're done here i don't talk to you i don't like you i don't trust you i don't know your political opinions and i don't care and those relationships can go on for decades i mean you can know someone for 10 years at work in what you call like a compartmentalized way and then some people blend business with pleasure like this is someone you know from work but you invited them to your wedding you know whatever it is you know i get it this is someone from work but sometimes you go and drink alcohol together uh i i don't think that's evil but i think that a lot of people have a kind of false friendship in their life that is produced by the workplace and if they even just stop and think about it for a minute they'll be able to recognize well a work a work colleague is not a friend um now of course of course by the way someone you met at work could become your friend i'm not i'm not saying that's that's impossible nor there's even any barrier to that but when you talk about a compartmentalized friendship that's what i think of as a totally false friendship in that sense because it's someone who you can work with on a particular task someone you can trust and appreciate only in relation to accomplishing that that task so by the way i um copied and pasted a comment from look it's one of my long-term um supporters so if you scroll up slightly you should see this le kiss wrote in and said quote in his opinion in europe most cultural activities like poetry and theater are heavily state financed i.e you have to know which bureaucrat gives out grant money and how the process works i grew up in toronto and look the best word we have for this in english is nepotism uh in literally nepotism means that you rely on blood relations aunts and uncles and grandparents but we also use it more broadly to mean personal connections the arts in canada and toronto they were nepotistic to an unbelievable stand people using friends and connections so you say bureaucrats it's not always bureaucrats but it is people who know people and yes that does include filling out application forms to get grant money from the oh god and but even renting the space just renting the theater where the performance is going to happen yeah it's horrifying and that explains why so so many of the things put on stage are terrible and have no audience uh there's there's all this awful awful live theater and you can't believe anyone ever made the effort to put it on um [Music] growing up in the context i grew up in i i i'm not aware of a single example where something positive came out of that kind of nepotism but yeah no this is a massive massive factor you're talking about so in anthropology it's a much misused concept but there's also the concept of the gift economy it's it's very boring a marcel mouse and the gift economy um now i've read the original hypothesis the original essay or book chapter this comes from actually it was a short book it was an essay published as a book it's just a very very short book um you know so the gift economy is a flattering term for uh bribery what can i tell you but you know there are whole parts of the economy and yes in europe in toronto in montreal um your ability to accomplish things in theater it can rely totally on a gift economy and it's sickening so the fact that you like you maybe didn't pay a bribe but the fact that you invited someone to stay at your cottage during the summer to go on vacation with you and you you know that there's a kind of exchange of gifts that very often cements favors that are done for other people and also to a massive extent uh drugs and prostitution are involved and i'm sorry but if we're being all the way real people do cocaine together and people sleep with prostitutes together and people make arrangements to provide one another with prostitutes actually i just read the autobiography of a guy and he described using that in hollywood he got ahead very much like to give an example um i'm not someone who's into hollywood actors but anyway there was a famous hollywood actor an oscar award-winning hollywood actor and one of the ways he got this guy on his side and got him to do favors for him which led to him being able to do different film projects was simply that he he hired he described her as an incredibly gorgeous chinese prostitute a frosty who had been working as a las vegas dancing girl this is a high-end prostitute from las vegas who also did dancing and he just had her sit in his car as he pulled up to this guy's office window and tried to arrange him and then the the actor went for it i mean he the uh this woman actually moved into the actor's apartment for a couple of weeks or something and this was really this is really bribery of this kind so again whether it's drugs or sex i mean very often it's something much uglier or i shouldn't even say i shouldn't say uglier i mean let's let's not be so judgmental here but it's um it's something that has more serious consequences than the mere exchange of gifts yeah so anyway but look so we've dealt with false friendship and now we're getting into the false economy and how there is a kind of false economy connected to cultural production those are all those are all real issues however this is this is basically extending out far beyond um the central the central topic of this of this video but i think also these are kind of the shadows in between which real friendship exists so it's worth talking about this is very much the cultural and psychological context in the midst of which we've got to talk about friendship if it is something real at all and look guys i want to say this too the fact that you yearn for something doesn't make it real the fact that you desire something uh doesn't make it real i read an anthropological paper once and i only read this because my ex-wife printed it out handed to me and she even told me the amusing parts you know i mean she was like oh yeah i've afraid of she circled it or just told me what pages i told my ruth uh i read an anthropological paper that was dealing with polyamory uh polyamory open relationships this kind of thing and it also dealt with bisexuality within polyamorous anthropology of these these issues and these questions and one of the men interviewed for this he said i think i think passionately but irrationally he said you know have you ever seen a group of kittens rolling around on a carpet he said that's what he wants human nature to be like you have a group of kittens that are all rolling around on the carpet and joining us he said why can't human sexuality be like that why can't we have a group of people instead of just two people who love each other why can't we have a whole group of people who love each other and all roll around together ah the kittens you're talking about those would be brothers and sisters who are newborns who are still literally surviving by drinking breast milk from their mother right you know like it's such a deeply by the way the article didn't say any of that the article didn't criticize it it just reported what he said so you know but still as as misguided and insane as that may be i understand what it is he yearns for he yearns for he wants a sense of community togetherness he wants to be able to roll around with a whole bunch of people who trust and love and appreciate each other not to have isolated jealous monogamous relationships so you know i get it like in some ways you could say it's a beautiful dream right but the fact that you want it doesn't make it real and wanting it more won't make it more real maybe you want something that's totally impossible and like the fact that we have this fear of being alone built into us um which by the way i haven't been talking about myself i think if anything i'm i'm a very unusual person i i have complete mastery over that feeling or i feel it much less than other people perhaps and i could talk about that but it's not my own personal weakness you know many many years of my life i've been totally alone i've been totally alone in countries and places where nobody speaks the same language as me or i can't even communicate you know the communication you can have is just buying groceries like really you know how well did i speak lotion when i was living alone in laos you know these these kinds of scenarios um where i've been able to embrace and thrive on uh isolation for significant parts of my life um you know uh so so this isn't really talking about my own psychology uh very much but the fact that people are afraid of being alone the fact that they want to have friends and friendship that doesn't mean they can and it doesn't mean it's something real um and even if it is something ideal doesn't mean it's something something attainable something viable for uh for any of us as individuals or for the great bulk of humanity because in the same way that i described before looking at those facebook profiles and thinking whoa i don't want to have anything to do with this person you know okay well don't you think the other people who went to high school they feel that way about me like when they look at my youtube channel or they look at my instagram do you think any of the people i went to high school with look at that and think oh wow great he's reading thucydides he's reading aristotle he's reading what we put most recently uh plutarch's lives i put up on my instagram now some some do uh the girl i lost my virginity with she got in touch with me and she she got a phd and i i won't specify too much in an area of classics she still had some things in common with me she's gone on and gotten married and has kids of our own and stuff once in a while there are people who knew me in high school who get touched me and still they respond positively to what my public image is and what i'm doing with my with my dealership but the vast majority of people right that rejection is going to be mutual and if you think sorry it's a brief digression but it may be an important one for some of you if you think that being involved with mainstream cultural crap means you won't be alone you're wrong most of the people who watch anime are alone they're lonely and they hate their lives they don't have the friends they want neither quantitatively nor qualitatively the p the vast majority of people who drink beer and watch football are alone are lonely are unhappy and just this way they don't have the quantity or or quality of friends they want so there are people who are total conformists from the day they're they're born to the day they they die and they don't have the kind of friendships that i have in my life even if i can say my friends my are too few and that my friendships are too shallow that i wish i had more more friends quantitatively and also that there was more friendship in each relationship you know qualitatively sorry i'm just going to be comments melissa if you if you want to comment too you also count as part of this melissa never comments in text form but she gets to she gets to speak whenever she wants to be so yeah ronald sims says quote ron is a long-time viewer of the channel by the way i feel i know him fairly well at this point ron says quote i'm choosy when it comes to friends watching this is making it making me feel even more steadfast in my stance close quote yeah and you know it's easy to forget just how awful it is to sit and listen to someone or sit and console someone sit and comfort someone when you really don't like them and really don't respect them and really don't want to be their friend you know um if some of you have been in that situation this week you know what i mean but you know have you ever held someone's hand when they're telling you about how they cheated on their boyfriend or you know whatever it is so something something you personally don't sympathize with and don't like this person you're like why am i sitting here um you know someone who you're expected to be friends with but actually you despise them for some of you maybe you've been in that situation more often with relatives because you're expected to be friendly with your cousin or your brother or sister or something and you're like look you you have all these assumptions about me and how much you haven't come but really you know you don't want to be with them so that's one thing but of course also when you're friends with someone as we've been discussing mostly indirectly you are making yourself vulnerable and they can rob you and you know they can they can backstab you and hurt you but you know they can all just literally steal things from you um you know you're you're opening yourself up to a lot of really negative experiences um which again some of you will have had where you tried to be friends with someone and they stole your bike um it can be as simple as that so but again for many of us if it's been many years if it's if you haven't had that kind of experience for years and years you may have forgotten that but yes there are there are elements of risk uh in friendship friendships have friendships with negative people have uh have negative consequences and you know if you have friends who are drug addicts yes in an indirect sense you can talk about the fear that you end up becoming a drug addict yourself or you end up becoming implicated in their crimes like the police are questioning you because your friends have been committing crimes that's one kind of fear but also do you actually want to sit there and hold their hand and comfort them when they're dealing with drug addict [ __ ] like do you really love them or appreciate them or you know respect them enough to do that or are you sitting there thinking look to me you're just a despicable person um you guys might not remember 50 cent made an autobiographical movie about his life and it's a very brief scene but he has his girlfriend at the time just revile him he's on painkillers he's on prescription painkillers some kind of opiate and she says to him look are you gonna stop using these drugs because when i look at you now i just see a weak person you know and he breaks down crying you know but he does he quits the drugs he quits using the painkillers you know so you know um you know it's it's a momentous turning point in his life in various ways you know this is harsh because he actually was reverent from injuries when he was on these these painkillers but they made him mindless whatever they you know he was snowballed out of his brain on these on these painkillers so you know um just how awful it is to pretend to be friends with someone you're not friends with you may have forgotten and that's reciprocal it could be it could be awful for someone else to hold your hand it could be awful for someone else to uh to comfort you in that way you know so again look his comments quote maybe this subject also somewhat ties into the religion discussion i've done some long videos recently talking about religion and atheism um quote having someone of the same faith provides a community without actually being close to these other people not really being friends the other people who are part of your faith group i would refer that back to my concept of work again there is a lot of work in religious communities where it's just okay we're gonna put up this tent you know okay we're gonna organize these hot dogs and this uh you know barbecue grill people do those things together and again i think it gives them a type of false friendship that is just the product of work um and again i'm not saying it's evil but it can certainly be misleading so i would say the work of religion in that sense gives people a semblance of friendship um without actually giving them friends and look again something implicit in this this whole video i'm very much opposed to um attitudes of entitlement you know i do not feel entitled to have friends i do not feel that um my high school owes me friends or people even potentially could be my friends you know think about what the high school principal what the high school bureaucrats are trying to accomplish think about the university uh like i i know it may sound like an easy thing to say nobody owes you any friends but we're not raised that way by television by movies and also by our own parents most of us are taught that we are entitled to friends that there's some obligation of other people to be friends with us and that we're obliged to be friends with other people too many people will tell you that the primary purpose of high school and university is to make these friends who will last the rest of your lives but again if i look at sort of mentally i i think of the facebook profiles of all the people i went to high school with people went to university with again i've never actually done that but kind of in your mind's eye you imagine this list of of these things why would there even be a single person who is of an intellectual character that would merit my friendship what are the odds that there would even be one person who went to the same high school university who intellectually would be could be should be my friend and then ethically because someone could be quite brilliant but they're evil i've known people okay and then emotionally right what if someone it's not intellectually they're good enough for you um ethically they're good enough for you but emotionally they're an [ __ ] they're a terrible person they're a terrible friend to you they can't share your life emotionally it is incredibly unlikely you'll you'll have even a single friend that lasts the rest of your life who happened to go to the same high school university now when you talk about the workplace you're normally talking about a relatively tiny number of people you meet you might work with 10 other people why would any of them be friends and i've known i've known a few people but well you struggle with that i kind of don't want to give away home talking here but i mean i knew people who made sacrifices to work in a very specialized field of research like a very specialized area of studies or of kind of social work of political outreach work or something and they were expecting to meet wonderful people that have a lot of a lot in common with because these other people chose to study in that area or who chose to try to help people and change the world in that area like more politically or in terms of charity work and they get there and nobody's your friend nobody you know you then deal with the great coldness of middle age and that no you know have fewer friends than you had before in high school you have fewer friends of the people in your field of study or in your profession who you were expecting have so much in common with you'd say oh wow these these people my colleagues i have less in common with them than the random selection of people i happen to go to high school with have to go to university with um that's that can be a horrifying thing and that many of us have to then live with for decades the rest of our lives you know so we have quite a number of intelligent comments here quote relationships in the modern age are far more important for personal connections of this kind so what makes someone a real friend comma i would say it is all about how they make you feel close quote well i disagree because you know the title of this video is friendship your mind is playing tricks on you how you feel your mind can really play tricks on you for all the reasons i talked about in the first hour of this video and the fact that you feel that you need a friend or you feel loved or cared for you feel that you can trust this person feelings are usually wrong you know and they can prove to be wrong with time with devastating effects for you uh and and look most people are not intellectuals tana mongeau lives her life on the basis of feelings she's someone who cares a lot about friendship and doesn't matter she talks about it a lot um she's someone who has defined her life in terms of the friends she gathers around herself she's probably much closer to being an ordinary person than i am with the exception that she's fabulously wealthy so she doesn't have to worry about earning money uh so on and so forth but you know no i i don't think you can uh judge friendship on how you feel and i think on the contrary your mind will play tricks on you you know and sorry no offense but it's quite possible in your own life your mind is playing tricks on you much more than you know and again you you might anyway you don't you don't necessarily know how you how those people you call friends feel about you um and you don't know to what extent your feelings are the shadow cast by your own needs your own fears your own insecurities and as i say your own your own instincts you know um [Music] okay so the same person comments quote you can disagree in certain you can disagree about certain moral and intellectual issues yes but if they truly make you feel comfortable and you feel that you can be open with no problem that's enough necessary when i lived in vien chen the capital city of laos there were a lot of older men with years of work experience who were interesting guys who had things they could teach me and he wanted to be my friends you know they wanted to sit around and talk they wanted to drink beer and talk to me but i don't drink alcohol you know um [Music] i was not willing to be friends with them because they slept with prostitutes these were older white men some of them british some of them australian some of them other ethnicities but these were white europeans and they're sleeping with teenage asian prostitutes from thailand laos cambodia this this guy this kind of maybe some from vietnam ethical differences matter you know um now conversely who were the people living in celibacy who were the people living the kind of resolute sober self-discipline lifestyle i lived myself they were christian missionaries i couldn't be friends with them i did not feel i could be friends with someone who was a protestant missionary or a catholic missionary who had come to this country to destroy its indigenous cultures to convert people to this religion that i consider despicable however in terms of how they actually live their lives those were the only people who were refusing to sleep with prostitutes and also generally drinking very little alcohol or completely refusing to drink alcohol right so most of the people i could have been friends with or could have been colleagues with i reject it you know now again i mentioned this more than an hour ago it's difficult to be honest with yourself about just how high your demands are of your friends there is this example this particular situation i was in when i was still a very young man i just finished my last year of university so there's a couple a couple months after i completed my last university courses and i was invited to give a lecture in front of a live audience i forget there were 30 people in the audience but it was not a big audience and it wasn't that big a room in the university we ran after the event i was supposed to give a lecture about history uh history and politics to introduce a special speaker who had been invited who was the author of a book who's going to talk about the book so i got up and i gave an unscripted you know i had thought about what i was going to say but given unscripted and spontaneous uh lecture and the audience was completely silent while speaking and they applauded at the end you can imagine i'm kind of good at talking but during it at one moment the silence was broken when my girlfriend of that time a girlfriend i was in a very high commitment loving relationship with where i assumed we were going to go on to get married and so on and so forth it was a super high commitment long-term relationship she laughed she laughed at me in a mocking way during the lecture you know um now what actually happened i was in the lecture partly i'm speaking to introduce the author and i used the term i referred to the book she had written as a seminal work in the field which is standard academic parlance and my girlfriend was sitting next to this someone who was basically an acquaintance of hers but who had been a friend of mine and between the two of them you know whispering but you know you can kind of hear that in a halt like that it's not that big of a haul they whispered they made a dick joke about the word seminal you know seminal has more than one meaning it's a seminal work some of her and then she laughed at me in a mocking way and you can hear that and again i'm i'm still i'm a very experienced self-confident public speaker now i was a much younger man at that time but to have someone you love and you trust laugh at you in a mocking way during the lecture you know um i didn't get mad at her and you know i didn't stop giving i didn't interrupt my lecture i didn't get stage fright or stop working at that time uh but when it was over uh when it was after the whole event was over not at that moment when i finished everything but you know this heard the lecture from the woman i'd introduced and so on you know when we were outside on the sidewalk after i said look i'm breaking up with you this relationship is over like i'm i never want to speak to you again and i said to her very simply look you know the joke the laugh you had at that moment in the silence was given pleasure if i had done that to you how would you feel because i knew her she was not a self-confident person like me she wasn't a gifted public speaker i say you would have broken down crying and you would have been furious with me you would be throwing a lamp at me or something you'd be throwing dishes at me you would be you know she had a violent temper that girlfriend did she had a lot of bad characters i know what kind of fury you would have toward me if i had laughed at you that way you know the same tone and everything and you know no if you love me and you support me and you're there you're hearing me give this lecture to support me it's not really that she's interested in hearing the lecture if you're there as my woman as my girl you know this is totally unacceptable now she did beg and plead and negotiate her way back into having another chance at the relationship but i've got to tell you looking back now i was completely right to want to dump her i wish i dumped her that day and never spoke to her just being 100 honest looking back at what the rest of their relations was like this is a momentary lapse it's a moment you know it shows bad judgment on her character whatever but it tells you a lot about her it tells you a lot about what her attitude was toward me and that she really had a kind of punitive and mean attitude towards me i've dealt with this with several several women who really loved me and well she loved me that girl and um she loved me and she had a like erotic obsession with me she was very turned on by me and so in terms of chemistry but she also really wanted to hurt me and really wanted to take me down a peg and it came out all the time in different ways this sense of her wanting to have revenge against me and her resenting that i was more intelligent than her and her wanting to somehow hurt me this major major thing in the relationship and that moment really showed that now look um so this tells you a lot about my intellectual character too i'm incredibly demanding of my friends i'm incredibly demanding of my lovers you know i don't lower my standards for anyone and by the way if you think i lower my standards for my brothers or my sisters for my cousins or my singles no no like i judge everyone equally and it's like either you live up to my standards or you don't and i'm i'm at peace with that if you're not at peace with that we shouldn't be friends you know but my point here is this i am never going to attempt to vindicate my values and what i'm just here admitting to you explain to you i am never going to try to vindicate that in terms of evolutionary psychology uh if the survival of our species depended on having such a high level of intellectual compatibility such a high level of emotional compatibility such a high level of ethical compatibility as as i demand from everyone in my life right the species couldn't possibly exist no we're evolved to try to form deep lasting cooperative bonds with people that we trust enough to go and gather firewood you know okay you're on my side you're on my team you're part of my tribe we're gonna get firewood together we're gonna store rice together you're not gonna you're not gonna wait till i'm asleep and then steal all the rice out of the storage room and then run away and start your own tribe you know and you know obviously relationships of authority then creep into this how do we form unequal societies together how do we raise children together do i do i trust you enough to let you babysit my kid think about that level of trust you know so you know now look so i'm now bringing myself into the equation more we're an hour and 30 minutes then but i haven't been talking that much about me talking about humanity in general and you know uh been generalizing about a kind of average person to a large extent i'm not averse to being alone i think most people are ruled by a very powerful fear of being alone i remember one of my brothers talking to me about the fact that he couldn't stand just to be alone in his own apartment for two days and he had a really terrible uh throat infection he was really sick but he still had to go out and get drunk at a bar and hang around with people because he he felt like he was being honest with me he felt he could not go for like 48 hours without spending time with people now again maybe he's an extreme example maybe not maybe he's just more honest than other people that for him to be alone in his apartment when you're sick and he was alone he didn't have a girlfriend or any other time just not in general he wasn't gonna have trouble with that but at that time he didn't have a girlfriend living with him he didn't have anyone else's apartment to be alone in your apartment for 48 hours or 72 hours you can't do that well i am someone who is totally happy to go on a long bicycle trip alone from city to city across thailand laos and cambodia and where am i going when i get off my bicycle i'm going to a library doing it was going to archives and manuscriptoria you know collection and go and sit alone and i go to museums and i see stone inscriptions and to study history and study politics and study these things and again even if i say hi to someone on my way into the library which is often the case i knew the person by the desk oh hi but then that's it then you're alone with the book i'm alone with like i've lived a life for many many years many of you guys i'm alone with the bicycle i'm alone with the books when i'm at the gym i'm alone at the gym even if there's other people there they don't talk to me i've been very comfortable living a life totally alone including living a life where i don't speak the same language as anyone else like you know i can't really communicate with people in whatever the language spoken is in in the country i've been i've been totally totally comfortable with that and the truth is like the most alone i've ever been in my life was probably here in canada both in toronto and when i was attending class at university of victoria i would go for months where the only verbal interaction i had with somebody i remember i made fun of them as i said i started keeping track of it was when they asked me uh did i want to pay to have a bag with that do i want a plastic bag with it at the end or is depending on the grocery store do you have a discount card for the grocery that was it nobody talked to me you know there was no interaction and i was happy and i was thriving those were positive times in my life you know i'm someone who's really strong enough to be alone and maybe that's why i'm so comfortable rejecting other people and telling them they don't live up to my standards maybe other people their fear of being alone motivates them to maintain a friendship with someone even though they drink alcohol and use drugs and sleep with prostitutes again these are just kind of compromises i was not willing to make and being honest with you like this isn't hypothetical you can put up together a hypothetical thing like oh well okay here's this wonderful guy uh he's knowledgeable about these subjects he can help you in different ways someone with a lot of positive redeeming traits however he smokes marijuana drinks alcohol and he sleeps with prostitutes two days a week like two days a week he goes and saves the prostitute you can think about that in your mind's eye hypothetically and think that's a friendship that can work how do you feel when you're actually sitting there face to face with that guy and talking to him you know and i can do the opposite you can talk about someone who's a brilliant scholar who's very knowledgeable and experiencing those wonderful things but they are a missionary working for the vatican working for the catholic church and this is who they are and this is what they do you can construe a hypothetical scenario we're like i could be friends with that person how do you feel when you're actually sitting there talking to them you know so yeah and again you might feel differently at a different age maybe when you're 50 years old you could make some of those compromises maybe when you're 25 years old you can't you know there's different different dimensions to that but yeah probably my own lack of fear of being alone or just my own very high level of positive motivation so at the beginning this video we talked about you can't learn tennis alone kind of thing who what friends you have well i'm someone who did a lot of things totally alone with no teacher and no friends to help me so on and so forth including studying languages including going out you know really changing my life in in dramatic ways so if anything i i i would not say i am an exception to the rule i'm not saying what we're talking about here in this conversation doesn't affect me in any way but i'm maybe an unusually detached observer of this because it's been less of an obstruction and less of a limitation in my life than it was than what than it is for for others is reading through your comments here okay so we uh we have a comment from himr edits so i'm glad to see i'm building up people from the himr [Laughter] fan slash critic community i don't know if anyone can be said to be a fan of himr but this is probably someone who is a critic of hmr us in the audience but yeah i'd like to think i'm the number one himr commentary channel at the moment you know um okay so natasha says quote extreme extroverts are odd i am the opposite tend to panic if i can't get uh time alone throughout the day well um [Music] natasha how would you live your life if you thought the world was gonna end if you can't organize a group of political activists to carry out this set of reforms this set of new policy initiatives you believe in what if you in this sense believed in global warming you know now i'll give you a less uh maudlin example a less emotionally extreme example i don't even know how much money melissa spent on tuition in her whole life like you know first like how much money in total did your parents have to spend for you to go to university but it is many tens of thousands of dollars okay if you live anywhere in the united states of america you know all these people who went into debt or their parents saved up money their whole lives it's this huge issue to spend tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a university education and that education may have been very poor it may have been worth much less than they they paid for it it's a massive social problem um and it may be something that impacts your own life directly and indirectly okay it's not the end of the world okay that can go on forever that problem can get worse and worse the university can be overpriced and if you can do more overpriced unless or until somebody gets organized somebody stands up to do something about it somebody stands up to in a profound and sweeping way reform and change education forever okay how antisocial are you now you know what if you want to have friends so that you can change the world like education policy like tuition i mean who depending on who you are and what problems you have contact with how about prison reform you're living in a country where you know the prisons are corrupt and terrible places how about taking care of orphans there are pressing issues where you know in your country or in your city orphans are in a terrible situation and every year matters every month matters for these orphans or these prisoners or these people going into debt for their university education okay i think you can get introverted quick if you care and again coming back to the major late motif for this video it's hard to care if you don't already have friends who care if you don't know five other people who say to you yeah that's a big deal somebody's gotta stand up and change it and if not you then who like i guess somebody is gonna be you and me and us right if you don't have people who share your intellectual character your emotional character your ethical character who say yes somebody has got to stand up and do something for these orphans for these people in prison for these university students um you are very unlikely to do it alone right but of course conversely it could start with you you could be the first person to stand up and then you could find your friends because you get motivated so you guys already know i've made videos attacking the concept of of being an introvert um so i don't need to just search for the word introvert on my channel i think there's even a playlist for that topic and and you'll see what i have to say on that but you know when i was a scholar of buddhism was i an extrovert when i was appalled to humanitarian work was i an extrovert when i was studying korean ojibwe at a special university called first nations university was i being an extrovert i was trying to get things done i was trying to change the world and you can't do it alone you can't i mean what is the difference between me and kevin smith as a filmmaker why haven't i made my first film yet it's because of you natasha it's because you are not friends with me you know five people from this audience natasha joel uh hmir edits you know like the five people in this audience who just commented most recently you guys probably have enough talent and enough of a skill set to work with me and make a film that is better than kevin smith's first film clerks the fact that it's better doesn't mean it'll be successful we can make a film that's better and you know it only reaches a few thousand people on on youtube or whatever you know but i just say you know like including and working with other people and the level of extraversion that's involved there you guys don't have to talk to me about your sex lives you know you don't you can make a film together without that kind of trust or what have you um but most people do like most i'm just i'm not joking but most people in the theater most people who work on films they sit around and talk about their sex lives they do i think you know i think it's the same in the army i think people are even more intimate and trusting when they have that you know so-called esprit de corps they talk about who they are and what they care about and their own heartbreak in the past or what's going on with them i think people get to know each other intimately and form exactly that kind of uh friendship on a film set you hear about it directly and indirectly and in all these in all these ways so yeah and and look um again sorry just you know to be to be fair to everyone involved um you know when i look at other people's tinder profile or i look at other people's facebook profile or i look at other people's instagram all the time i think i don't want to know this person i don't want to be friends with this person all the time of course and of course and i completely other people will look at my instagram profile or my and they'll feel that way about me and that's great this video is really talking about the social instincts we're not so much talking about the antisocial instincts but obviously they're reciprocal and you know the fact that you're attracted to one person or the fact that you i sorry i don't actually mean sexual attraction here but the fact that you want to be friends with one person necessarily entails that you'll be repulsed by that you'll be that you'll be rejecting others so someone else says here uh this is lekis again quote i wouldn't have made it through university without colleagues explaining things to me and calling my [ __ ] when i thought i understood something but really different yeah close quote yeah okay so anyway sorry so you guys say it's totally fine two two people in the audience agreeing with each other someone says isil you are an extroverted thinker for sure and natasha says uh quote i think he is as well um i'm extroverted because i am a dissident intellectual it's because i want to change the world um [Music] you know i'm i'm i really don't need friends and that's i really don't emotionally and i don't need people to respect me if i don't respect them and so on it's a huge thing in my life and you know i know it's going to sound weird but again you guys don't know that side of my life but i i for years my life consisted of going and looking at manuscripts and stone inscriptions and studying books you know just long hours with books and what kind of then writing where before youtube i thought of myself as a writer i was writing and reading and editing other people's writing i had a life of paper and uh you know i would go to the national archives every [ __ ] city i went to i remember laughing about this with a friend of mine the first place i went in bangkok thailand the first day i was in bangkok thailand i went to the national archives which is a giant library that's what it's the first place i went you know that was the kind of man i was that was how i lived so these things most people would stereotype them as being introverted you know as being you know whatever a nerd-like character now you guys can guess i never was a nerd i was a very self-confident very masculine very imposing figure everywhere i went um but you know so why why am i out meeting people and talking to people and being social people and learning from people it's because i'm trying to work with people it's because i'm trying to change the world you know i'm not reading those books in the library you know it's not for the good of the book that i'm reading it you know uh you know i i'm profoundly unhappy with the status quo in all the societies i'm living in i i want the future to be different from the past and better than the past in a number of of profound ways you know i'm sorry when i was involved with first nations language research politics you know i do not want the cree and ojibwe to go back to living the way they were living 500 years ago right i'm someone who wants something new and different and better in the future for them better than what they have now but also better than their own ancient past you know shall we say i'm not a backward looking researcher or what have you but the things the the type of work that denominated in my life even at the beginning of this youtube channel think about how many hours i spent practicing the chinese language just sitting i was also researching and writing essays for several years of channel those essays many of them are on the internet you can read them so you know i just say like it's the fact that you see me doing a live stream maybe gives you an impression of me as being extremely extroverted i'm not i'm not offended by that but no i mean um this isn't just some trait i have this is a tool i hold in my hands this is something i'm doing intentionally this is a means to an end um yeah so javier is commenting that being alone with a two-year-old and a seven-year-old is a very different experience yes and this is actually one of the reasons why i don't want to have two children of of different ages you know giving a two-year-old all of your attention is very different from trying to communicate with a seven-year-old at a seven-year-old's level and a two-year-old at a two-year-old's level simultaneously but you guys know i have experience taking care of children and raising children and of trying to make things meaningful and engaging for for a child and i very much enjoy putting my putting marriage to that but yeah there's definitely a sense in which you are never alone uh if you're raising children and virtually all of the time and energy you have uh goes into that that kind of relationship yeah but parenting is not the topic of this video okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna wrap it up guys um i think most people are not comfortable admitting the extent to which we live our lives in the shadow of these instincts we are haunted by these instincts we are much more comfortable talking about erotic instincts talking about sexual desire talking about marriage or even talking about cheating on your wife cheating on your husband people are very comfortable talking about that if you look around youtube to talk about loneliness to talk about feeling alone when you're not alone feeling the need for friends feeling that you need to be friends with people where on an intellectual level you're aware you really can't be friends with them or that you shouldn't be friends with them but you still yearn for desire that having the friendships you made in youth in childhood in your teenage years having those friendships still haunt you in your dreams um having a sense that the person you could be or should be relies on the friends you have you know that you could have lived a better life you could have accomplished something more if only you'd held on to those those connections and you know some we haven't talked about feeling a sense that your your self-worth is rooted in the friend group you have that it's that's perhaps limited by the friends you have but it's also perhaps elevated by the friends you have there's a lot of that in human nature a lot you know there are people who grow up involved in organized crime because they all their friends are involved with organized crime and they feel that's who they are that's all they're ever going to be and there are people who are relentless social climbers they're born poor but they only want to have friends who are wealthy i mean plays out these are very coarse and crude examples but there are people who put together their their friend group precisely because they feel that this does in some sense elevate them or enable them or it changes how they feel about themselves when they look in the mirror who they think they are how they think of themselves changes with their with their friend group and maybe it's not even a group maybe it changes with one friend you know maybe that's that's how you you value friendship so yeah i think this is an area that people are very reluctant to analyze in part just because it reveals the weakness of your own ego and maybe also because it's an inquiry that can never come to a conclusion when you're inquiring into and reflecting on your own sexuality there normally is some kind of conclusive end to the story you know so you had years of questioning your sexuality and sleeping around and maybe polyamory and open relationships or maybe cheating on your boyfriend and then you came to a conclusion you settled down you got married you found the person who's the right person for you or you dogmatically assert this is the right person for you and you're happily ever after someone else they go through some confusion some inquiry some questioning and then they conclude they want to be alone forever i know one person like that someone who said no marriage and friendship sorry marriage and any kind of commitment religion that's just not for her she's gonna be alone for the rest of her life or you go through whatever whatever you were confused about your sexuality and then you finally figure out you're gay and you have a gay marriage or whatever it is you settle there and find the person you know but where there is there's kind of a beginning a middle and an end to the story about your sexuality whether that ending is a comedy or a tragedy you know however bad it is that it comes to an end and this question of friendship um [Music] you know it never ends again i think this is probably reciprocal with the other thing i mentioned when people settle down they normally settle for less you know i was joking about this earlier where women and men also they come to the okay this guy has some things wrong with him but he's my man so i'm committed to justifying her rationalize that i accept him as he is the good and the bad together and we we are settling down you know and and that is that um [Music] and you know i think people live with a kind of open-ended restlessness about their friends that reflects their own open ended recklessness pardon me it reflects the open-ended restlessness they feel when they look in the mirror and they think about who they are themselves maybe your friends can never live up to your standards maybe your friends will always be letting you down maybe you'll always be disappointed with who they are and whether that's something as simple and palpable as you rely on your friends to show up and practice tennis with you and they're not as enthusiastic or motivated about about tennis as you are or it's something much more intellectually sophisticated uh something much more ambitious you're trying to accomplish working with your friends and they're they're they're letting you down again and again you have some awareness if only i had better friends i could accomplish something better again whether it's whether it's tennis whether it's a political movement whether it's publishing a literary magazine uh some kind of collaborative uh effort you're trying to make it's not anyway there are complex and simple ways in which falling in love and being in a commitment relationship is enough for us is sufficient has a finality it's it's a total answer to the question of your sexuality even if it's an unhappy relationship even if it's a flawed relationship even if you cheat on each other or some kind of polyamorous situation there is a sense in which okay you had a question and you found an answer and the very nature of commitment and settling down that relationship it may indeed mean that you accept things about that partner that were not what you're looking for that are contrary to your own values that are contrary to your own ideals but now you love them and love itself leads you to overlook or accept their their flaws and i think friendship [Laughter] it is never reliable in this way i think friends instead are constantly scrutinizing and evaluating one another and i think that reflects the extent to which we're constantly scrutinizing and evaluating ourselves um [Music] you know as much as our culture is fascinated with the erotic instincts as much as it dominates film theater song dance you know so much of our culture is about sexuality nevertheless we all have a sense of what is enough you can have a sufficient marriage a sufficient boyfriend or girlfriend if you need to have two or three boyfriends or girlfriends or you need to have them of multiple genders or whatever still you know there is a sense of a sufficient sexual relationship and i don't think we ever really can have enough friendship you know whether that's quantitative or qualitative um [Music] and i do think that's ultimately rooted in a community building instinct of yes wanting to have a troop wanting to have a tribe wanting to have a whole group of people who will work together with you um having people in your life that you trust to watch over you when you're asleep to gather firewood with you to store up food with you people you would trust enough to help you raise children that you can leave your child with them that they can babysit your your child and and vice versa and you know the scope of that is infinite it's infinite both in wanting to have a larger and larger community of those trusting loving cooperative people who are your friends and i think it's also infinite in terms of the depth of insight into that person's character it's kind of an infinite in terms of the escalating levels of scrutiny of are you really good enough for me are you someone i can really trust and of course we have progressed from merely gathering firewood to trying to publish poetry together trying to make films together you know do you really get me man do you really understand my vision in making this film you know do you and i really feel the same way about vegan activism or ecology or the reform of of parliament think for a moment it's actually a really good it's a really good example think about the intense friendships that emerged betwixt in between people who were trying to abolish slavery together that's the side of it that's very rarely told groups of friends changed the history of the world i read recently it's not worth telling the whole context for why i read this chapter of history but i read about the legal struggle to abolish slavery in scotland so at that time there was some legal independence of scotland as opposed to england there still is some you know to some extent of the same country but to some extent they operate as separate countries in separate legal systems and you can imagine right away there were these really passionate friendships amongst these men as i read i don't think there was a single woman involved these were you know predominantly wealthy white men who really felt black people should have equality in scotland i mean i know scotland wasn't the home of that kind of racism but there were there were some black slaves in scotland and of course there were boats leaving and arriving at their harbors that had black slaves from africa on them and so on and so forth and there were these men who form very passionate friendships and you can probably imagine also some of them came out of a christian background and some of them were really free thinking atheist modern scientific thinkers and they came together and they worked very hard to mount this legal case what i read about was just one importantly okay that went on for years of you know trying to kind of prove the humanity of slaves and to argue that they ought to have equal rights regardless of the color of their skin and to in this sense undermine the legal basis of of slavery in scotland um now you know my point here is not that anyone did that for the sake of friendship maybe some did maybe some people got involved and contributed for years just because they had a friend who already wasn't fall well you know you know maybe some people did you know but but my point is that whole struggle i mean it's way beyond the level of trust and mutual admiration and mutual appreciation it's way beyond the the level of cooperation needed to play tennis with people but still it is demanding look i need you to wake up at 6 a.m so we can be there for 7 30 to play tennis i said are you going to be there for me are you going to keep up your are you going to keep up your commitments in this in this friendship you know it's asking it's asking a lot of people and with the struggle like the struggle to abolish slavery over many years um you know yeah but my point here is ultimately negative if those people hadn't become friends none of them were doing it for money right when you talk about my my usual list of motivations money fame power respect sex they weren't doing it for money they weren't doing it to get laid they're pretending to get famous talk about people really working together you know when to write oh and typeset and publish you know articles and so on and to press this you know in the in the newspapers in the court of public opinion and also in a court of law to do that for years together i think that's a it's actually a really kind of moving example of the importance of friendship and it's an example of the kind of social progress that would not have happened without those friendships without a particular number of friendships that we probably could research and itemize probably comes down to 20 guys who were friends you know i might be even fewer than that was it 15 was it 12 you know that there were there were a few friends who made this happen um and now you turn it around and you look at our lives of invidious mutual isolation and now think of all the things we could have accomplished if we had at that level of profundity at that level of mutual trust just 10 or 20 good friends