High All the Time. @Tana Mongeau, @Ally Hardesty, @Amazing Atheist

it's not necessarily that like back then
i was the realest that i'd ever been i had a lot of flaws then you know what i mean like my parents never like instilled anything that parents instill in you like structure responsibility or schedule i dropped out of high school at 15 because i couldn't even like go to school on time like so many of the mistakes i'd like i made in the beginning of my career were from lack of so many things like i needed you know yeah what's your opinion on marijuana do you smoke i personally don't smoke weed she's like how do i unlock it on a complete side note please no one put this in anything i'm so high that i can't feel the car movies i take adderall all the time you guys know so like i'll take like a fourth of a 20 milligram pill like five milligrams of batter in my bag everywhere i go i always have a pill bottle filled with adderall why does the bottle say that this is oxycodone and there's just there's not even oxycodone in there like the pain pills in there we're like hydrocodone like an adderall dealer in l.a and you happen to run across this hit my business email like i'm not offend like i'll just buy something to be real my family's like definitely very dead to me like we're still like i'll never i'll probably never talk to them again i'm already like too high to speak i don't even know how to say it but like my childhood was just the worst thing on earth and i'm very lucky to have gotten out of that but obviously i spent like 15 years of my life being so incredibly emotionally abused and physically abused and mentally abused and just like tormented and like i was raising myself all of those years and like i built up so much hatred for my parents and like so much anger for like the entire life that they've given me and it was like instantly i got thrown into this way out and obviously when you have a way out of a life like that you're going to take it this is one of the busiest intersections in this small city if you look at the grass carefully here you see there's a square that's darker green than the light green grass that's because there were tents set up here there were tents with drug addicts living all along this median all along this park for months and now instead there's a sign that doesn't say doesn't say pitching a tent is illegal it tells you which public parks the police will tolerate and encourage you to set up attention this is one of the busiest buildings in the whole city see the sliding front doors there in front of this uh grocery store i have seen a man in broad daylight get down on his knees right in front of that sliding door oblivious to the people moving around him take out a piece of tin foil a lighter and a glass pipe on his knees right there on the sidewalk with no hesitation with no shame this is not a bustling busy city some of you may be laughing saying this is the most busy intersection this is one of the busiest doors yeah it is this is basically a small town okay the streets are empty and yet everywhere you go they're filled with drug addicts yeah as never before you can see why most of the recording i do is indoors with indoor lighting but what you can't see is that in the few minutes between those takes where we walked from one park to another in downtown victoria we passed at least four drug addicts in various states of distress and it's not just my theory that these people were drug addicts some of them had the paraphernalia out in front of them they had the glass pipe out and one guy had passed out while standing upright some of you listen to this will have no idea what i'm talking about how can someone be blacked out and standing upright and some of you are living in cities that are so full of drug addicts like oh yeah i see that once a week okay we see the glass pipes we see the needles in people's arms and just in walking a few blocks really any blocks between any two points on the map here downtown of the city yeah that's a huge part of why so few of my videos are filmed outdoors what does tana mongeau have to do with homeless drug addicts living in tents on the street oh yeah we think about these things as if they're too completely separate categories as if the fact that you sleep in a mansion you sleep on a four-post bed makes the problem of drug addiction or the challenge of sobriety any different as if your ability to manage the consequences of your drug habit right your your ability to basically keep money in your bank account keep a roof over your head as if that makes it any less of a problem or as if in a really kind of perverse way we just think of people as being intellectually unequal ethically unequal right as if there are some people who are just born to live out their lives on the street hopelessly and then there are others who are in this category of i don't know highly effective people have the potential to to change the world well i don't believe that all right i think all of us have the positive potential to change the world and that's why it's so tragic that we have a whole generation of people now who are squandering it it's really easy to look at tana mongeau as if she had always been destined to turn out this way as if there were something wrong with her inherent in her character that guaranteed that she could not have accomplished something better for herself intellectually or ethically and we think this way because it's reassuring for us if we pass a homeless drug addict on the street and it happens to be someone you recognize it was someone you knew in college maybe it was someone you knew in high school maybe it's someone you knew as a little kid back in grade four back in kindergarten oh i remember that guy isn't it reassuring to think there must be something wrong with him there must be something wrong deep down inside that made it inevitable that he'd turn out like this and not me that somehow i'm morally different intellectually different special better and it's not true there aren't two classes of humanity one of which has the potential to make the world a better place and the other of which is just doomed and determined to be fixated on their own self-destruction on the dissipation of their potential through drugs and alcohol with someone like tana moncho you can go back and listen to her videos from five years ago you can hear how different she was you can see the potential she had yeah intellectually with someone like the amazing atheist you can go back five years you can go back 10 years and you can chart his intellectual decline or to flatter him his intellectual stagnation it's so tempting it's so easy to look at who he is today and then to see that as some kind of inevitable result of something that was wrong with him deep down inside there was nothing inevitable about tana mongeau dropping out of high school there was nothing inevitable about the amazing atheist dropping out of high school there was nothing inevitable about ali hardesty dropping out of college all of these people were intelligent enough to complete a university degree all of them if they get sober they still are now intelligent enough they still can develop they still can grow and a further reason why we tend to essentialize these problems treat them as a fundamental part of a person's character is that so many of the drug users themselves will present a narrative in this way whereby they are a victim of their circumstance tana mongeau explains to you in a moving way that she had terrible parents she had a terrible childhood she had a terrible upbringing and that that makes her who she is today but it's just not true that there are two classes of humanity the drunks and the drug addicts who had terrible parents and those of us who are sober and self-disciplined because we had good parents okay there are millions of us untold millions who had terrible parents and with traumatic experiences whether as children or as adults who live a sober self-disciplined life all right the difference between the sober and the drunk is not a binary matter of whether or not we have emotional problems the difference is in how we cope with those emotional problems the difference frankly is in the progress we make we're all born stupid we're all born ignorant we're all born selfish but we're also born curious we're also born ambitious and the drugs and alcohol snuff that curiosity and ambition out tana i sympathize with your story about how terrible your childhood was i sympathized your story about what terrible parents you had i sympathize more than you could possibly know but there's another question here which is why aren't you over it yet why didn't you deal with this in the last five years and my answer is for you it's because of the drugs and alcohol some of you will say that i'm wrong you'll look at someone like tana mongeau and say she has a wonderful life she's a great success story you look at someone like the amazing atheist or ali hardesty and say what an amazing life what a success story when you look back at just the last five years leading up to this point what you have to recognize is there is a better person that they could be today if they have been sober during the last five years and that better person now will never exist there's a kind of potential there that's been snuffed out and that is the sense in which the drug addicts who live in fancy mansions and sleep on four poster beds are exactly the same as the drug addicts who are sleeping on the street tonight every single one of them had a mother and a father some of them went to school with you some of them had at some stage the same intellectual potential that you've got now everything that a family like instills there was never like that reliability again everything i feel like i am is because i was making up for what they like weren't you know what i mean like they were so shitty and they were abusive and they were you know they treated me bad and i was like i don't want to be that i want to treat people well i want to like because i'm a very productive person i like to get up i like to start my days i like to be productive and for the most part just not really me not really my thing like i said i like to be productive that's why i smoke crack no i'm just kidding but really yeah i was gonna say this is one of the only times i ever did acid but that's just not true so i won't mind you i'll save you that time but this was my first time taking like real acid on my tongue like full tab like let's go baby i hate drugs and i believe this country would do better if everyone would stop smoking marijuana and doing all these drugs i am very sorry for what i did and i have to live with it every day and that if i were to get a second chance i would do everything my power to try to help others the way they raised me wasn't it they just neglected me in like a lot of ways i definitely didn't get like proper health care proper food proper schooling proper love proper nurturing proper schedule but it's cool to see you like like to rise from that yeah push through that well i wanted to help like kids who like you know what i mean but i try to push through because i know that's what you guys would want me to do and i hope you give me a chance to try to help others i wanted to help like kids who like you know what i mean like maybe they didn't have the best home yeah if i believe it's your decision to decide where i go whether i live or die because that's like that's the reality of it all you know we're not always all raised by like perfect families and sometimes we just have to you know pick [ __ ] up and raise ourselves the role that drugs and alcohol play in our life is complex but in a sense the significance of sobriety in our life is far more complex far more profound living with a kind of curiosity and ambition to learn more be more all the time and never turning it off all right that leads to emotional intellectual and ethical progress in all kinds of ways that again you can't reduce to a simple mathematical formula on the chalkboard it's hard to look at the amazing atheist or ali hardesty and feel like this person wasn't always doomed to turn out to be a brainless scumbag they had the same kind of intellectual potential i do and it's even harder when you're looking at a homeless drug addict on the street okay i have so many older brothers guys who have a fair bit of dna in common with me and i think those guys were born with the same intellectual potential i had or to turn it around they were born just as stupid as i was you know i wasn't born any less stupid than they were either okay but they made the wrong choices they got drugs and alcohol involved in their lives and so like tana mongeau there's a sense in which they never made progress and guess what my brothers and i were all dealing with the same bad parents we're dealing with the same bad culture the same bad school system the same bad political context the same bad upbringing in so many ways you can guess i'm not close with any of my brothers these are guys i talk to once every five years or once every 10 years but you know what i can see with every single one of them five years go by and they haven't learned a goddamn thing they haven't made any progress no not intellectually not in terms of like research but also not emotionally they've got baggage they've been carrying around with themselves since childhood they've never learned to take a more philosophical attitude towards they've never questioned it they've never analyzed it they've never investigated they never learned to put it down one of my brothers you know he hated me from the day i was born and i've been in situations where he walks into the room and there are a bunch of other people and everyone can feel it everyone picks up on the tension once just once i sat down to talk to him about why does he feel this way what does he think and the stuff he told me it falls apart after five seconds of analysis or introspection he tells me oh well you went to a better university than i did really i went to the university of toronto you went to the university of ottawa i could see you that you went to a better university than i did in in my area of study and in his area of study in terms of what our actual majors were and i thought what do you mean i applied to go to your university i'm visiting i know it's a good universe what are you saying to me these universities are equal or actually your university is slightly better in our fields right he had he had a better education than me he ended up with a master's degree i only have an honors pa you know immediately he shifts onto claiming that i went to a better primary school that i went to a better high school team we sit down and talk about it for five minutes it's a fantasy he constructed in his mind he probably constructed his mind when he was still a little boy or a teenager he had constructed this fantasy that had this amazing life of privilege he never once asked anyone he never once asked me what kind of school i went to and as soon as we start talking about it guess what it turns out that you know he went to better schools than i did at every stage of his education this kind of jealousy this kind of envy this kind of sibling rivalry it's not extraordinary it's not rare it's dismally common what's uncommon is my brother's failure to cope with it his failure to question it his failure to ever think these things through and ultimately over the passage of years his inability to ever get over it and yes what i'm telling you is drugs and alcohol played a crucial role in this way in perpetuating his emotional problems what youtube shows us again and again is young brilliant people bristling with potential and then their total lack of intellectual development as soon as they have just a little bit of money and fame coming in through this platform and yeah in most of these cases the crucial undisclosed factor is drug addiction whether or not it's perceived as an addiction it's the role that drugs and alcohol play in snuffing out their curiosity in smothering their ambition and making them incapable of the kind of emotional progress the kind of overcoming of our emotional problems that sober people are doing all the time even when we don't particularly try my sling is editorial explicit material briefcase show lava stereo flow fill me