WHY I AM BETTER THAN YOU. (Cheese Speedrunning)

all right look this professional video
game player cheese speedrunning basically put up a challenge to me he basically said to me if I'm so confident in making these proclamations about the meaning of life about what it means to lead a meaningful life why don't I just come out and say it and you know I sympathize with the situation he's in but there is obviously an undercurrent in much of what he has to say to me where he feels who am I to judge what he's doing with his life as meaningless now look I've made videos in the past directly answering the question of what is the meaning of life and what does it mean to lead a meaningful life but in these kinds of man to man face to face situations most of the judgments we have to make are subjective and relative to the situation that we're in in such a way that we never really need to take it that far we all know on some level what matters here is not my idea of what it is to lead a meaningful life it's his idea it's what I can get him to agree to do you know what I think cheese already fundamentally agrees with me right I think she's knows that playing the same video game again and again and again for 80 hours a week he he protested against my saying 40 hours a week he said get on my level that he plays the game for 80 hours a week playing Super Mario 64 playing something that was designed as children's entertainment for 80 hours a week what what do we have to compare that to to come to practical real-world conclusions about the meaning of life or leading a meaningful life let me ask you something geez what if you decided that in the next couple of years you were going to go to medical school and study to become a medical doctor let's just say you weren't entirely confident that you would be able to get into university that you'd be able to do that but you're gonna start studying now you're gonna start taking 40 hours a week to sit down with the textbooks and memorize them memorize what you need to know to become a medical doctor now let's not glorify our glamorizes what are you gonna memorize the name of every bone in the human hand the Latin names for a lot of the different muscles that comprise the body right you're gonna have to learn a lot of organic chemistry you're gonna have to memorize a lot of really boring facts to go to medical school but what I'm saying to you here is maybe you're not in medical school maybe you're just thinking about it for the future and you decide to start studying to that level to that extent and maybe you're partly studied because you want to decide if you're really committed to this you want to decide if going to medical school will make you happy or make you miserable you want to decide if this is meaningful enough that you care about this enough to really put in the effort to really memorize you know these these boring facts okay let's not let's not glamorize what it means to be a doctor being a medical doctor it's a lot of manual labor it's a lot of incredibly boring and repetitious tasks day in and day out when I was doing humanitarian work myself in Cambodia and Laos I met medical doctors who had volunteered to go out to these countries also Myanmar Burma next door I met medical doctors who volunteered to go there and if you got them in an honest moment a lot of them would say to you yeah they volunteered to do humanitarian work in a third-world country because it was so boring it was so boring and so meaningless to be a medical doctor in Europe in Western Europe was it yeah they did all this hard work they learned all this medicine and then they sit in an office and every day they just have elderly people coming in complaining about diarrhea and that's it's like predominantly medical care for elderly people with the same simple illnesses the same simple ailments again and again and again of course if you're a specialized doctor you know if you do heart attacks you just deal with art attacks if you help women who are pregnant giving birth you just deal with that one problem people with that who are coming to the hospital for that one reason or coming to your offset with one reason day after day after day again and again it's very repetitious it is in many obvious ways quite meaningless and quite depressing to be a medical doctor or even to go through med school to become a doctor but you cheese you know you know it's way more meaningful than what you're doing right now you wouldn't even debate this with me and you know what cheese I think you know at one point is video he said that a lot of the things I was saying his own father had said to him in the past you know what cheese I think your father would say to you today he would say to you today look kid you're smart why don't you go back to university and become a medical doctor if you show this video to your father you talk about this with your with your father if you say you know dad this guy on the internet he was saying today that what I should really do is stop playing video games for 80 hours a week I let's just cut it now let's just say cheese let's say you should take 40 hours a week and study the textbooks for medical school you should start preparing to go to medical school to become a doctor this guy in the internet said I should do that because that would be more meaningful I think your father would agree cheese and I think you would agree that's why you're weak in this argument that's why you're defensive that's why you have to get hostile and talk about how much money you make playing video games we both know money doesn't matter if you if you could make more money playing video games than being a medical doctor that doesn't mean playing video games is a meaningful life not compared to be who medical doctor right how is being a medical doctor meaningful its meaningful in two ways because you make yourself into a better person right and you make the world a better place really simple criteria for what it is to lead a meaningful life you can make a lot of money working in a slaughterhouse you can make a lot of money standing there with a kind of fancy chainsaw carving up cow carcasses everyday gruesome work do you think that makes you into a better person do you think that makes the world a better place no don't come to me and say oh but I make a ton of money working in a slaughterhouse maybe so maybe so we were talking about the meaning of life here we weren't talking about how to make the mutton the most money you can make a lot of money out of drug-dealing you can make a lot of money at a real estate you can make a lot of money working at a slaughterhouse no doubt okay you want to come to me talk about the meaning of life you've got to compare video games to something else and right now for you at age 24 we're making the comparison between you buckling down and doing speedruns in mario 64 and you buckling down and hitting the textbooks to study medical science prepare to become a medical doctor and you know what studied medical science studying those text books is so meaningful it's so meaningful that even if you quit or even if you fail you would look back on that as a meaningful time in your life is something really great you did alright if you did this preparation if you started memorizing this stuff and learning this stuff and then let's let's say you gave up or the university rejects you for some reason you decide you can't go through with me you know you're afraid of blood or something there's some reason why you stopped doing it you would still look back and say wow remember that one year where I spent the whole year 40 hours a week really studying those medical doctors learning about chemistry and history of medical science and human anatomy and the progress of diseases wow that's something meaningful I'm going to carry with me for the rest of my life and if you really did memorize that stuff you would have that knowledge you would have that wisdom with you you would wear it you would inhabit it for the rest of your life there would be something positive and meaningful but meaningful for you forever even if the project was a failure even if you failed right we all know that's not true about video games cheese speedrunning you are the one person in a who makes money makes a little bit of money out of playing video games okay the percentage of athletes at the gym who make money out of exercise is much much higher than the percentage of gamers who make money out of video gaming okay and you know cheese spending 80 hours a week playing video games it's hard to justify that as meaningful even if you make money even if you win and if you don't make money and if you fail you've already conceded the point cheese it would be it would be horrendously meetings to be a terrible source of regret in your life right these are the kinds of practical questions we've got but the meaning of life when I was a kid I played video games all right you know what this is this is a high school level history textbook in Chinese okay right now for me at age 41 this this textbook still has things to teach me high school level textbook it's not that sophisticated I think you saw there's a Napoleon on the cover right so this is gonna tell the history of Napoleon at a level appropriate for Chinese high school students who maybe have never even heard of the point it's not gonna talk about Napoleon and his attempt to conquer Egypt it's not gonna talk about Napoleon and the war he fought in Haiti in the Caribbean it's not gonna question profoundly Napoleon's position on slavery it's not gonna reflect on the various attempts to assassinate Napoleon it's not going to explore philosophically the extent to which Napoleon was an enemy of democracy someone who destroyed democracy someone who subvert 'add the hopes of the French Revolution and of the Directorate the Revolution pretty as opposed to the extent to which he sincerely was someone who wanted democracy but failed along the way and getting there in achieving understanding it's not gonna ask those profound questions about democracy slavery or any the rest of it okay but this book even at this shallow simple high school level a lot to teach me all right I would still benefit I'd still become a better person now if I memorized the facts in this textbook instead of memorizing the layout of the levels in Mario 64 instead of memorizing the videogame zillion for the Sega Master System and when I was a child that was a video game I played enough that I had all the levels memorized that video game had secret lasers lasers you couldn't see at the start of the game you could learn where they were because if you step through the laser it would set off an alarm kind of like a really simple stealth game from the 8-bit video game era I memorized where all the lasers were in that game so I could move around the game I could I could probably speed run that game still to this day all right but the point is not just in some abstract sense that it would be more meaningful to memorize a textbook like this even given that it's propaganda you know if I read this book I'm gonna learn the Chinese perspective on history I'm gonna learn how shiny z' people think about you know Napoleon and slavery in the United States of America and all these issues it's not going to be the same kind of propaganda in an American textbook or a Spanish textbook or a French textbook okay the point is not just that this is more meaningful or this is part of a meaningful life in an abstract sense okay I would be a better person today if I had taken 40 hours a week to memorize my high school history textbook instead of spending however many hours playing video games and still today I mean this would be a huge language challenge but I would learn the way people discuss these things in Chinese I would learn the Chinese vocabulary for slavery and democracy that'd be very intellectually stimulating okay but still today for youichi's I think you know I think you feel it if you sat down and spent 40 hours a week memorizing a high school history textbook that would here and now even at your current age at age 20 four would make you a better person and then you would live your whole life with that knowledge memorized you would inhabit that knowledge you would be able to muster and make use of that knowledge day in and day out at a moment's notice you would memorize the exact dates in history when different events happen you would have memorized certain political and historical facts from this general even if it was at such a basic level and you know you know with just a few weeks if you're really doing 40 hours a week 80 hours a week you know what levels of learning what levels of erudition you're capable of whether it's an English Spanish or Chinese you know that if you put the work in you could do it okay it would be a more meaningful life for you it would be part of you becoming a better person and it would enable you to make a positive difference in the world in a way that you never can sitting at a couch holding a Nintendo 64 controller acting out a fantasy from your childhood playing a game made for children's entertainment as a grown adult again and again and again get uncomfortable get ambitious yearn to be a better person yearn to make the world a better place even if you don't have to do it get hungry for a meaningful life even if you don't know what the meaning of life is I can totally accept that being a medical doctor is meaningless but not compared to playing Nintendo 64 games I think my own high school history textbooks were propaganda and they were bullshitting this textbook - it probably pissed me off the more I'd read of it I'd hate it I would hate it and say this is just propaganda this is just this isn't really being honest this isn't really examining the issues of who Napoleon was and why he matters in history I'd probably think it's terribly hypocritical and dishonest I still have a lot to learn from it I still have the humility to recognize there's a lot for me to learn and there would be a lot here that'd be valuable for me to memorize and carry with me for the rest of my life right get uncomfortable get ambitious yearn to be more do more no more even if you don't know what the destination you're working towards is yet