You Are Stupid: Letting People Know that They're Wrong.

is there any point
in explaining to stupid people that they're stupid my girlfriend asked me this question we were out walking the other day and right away i jumped into it and right i think she knew what my answer was going to be she knew but it's still worth talking through it was worth talking through for her it's worth talking through for me it's going to be worth talking through for you guys in the audience right now because we all feel like we want to give up sometimes right you got friends you got relatives and you think this person is stupid and it's not worth explaining to them that they're stupid they're wrong and it's not worth me spending my time or my energy explaining them wrong but we're kind of falling into a strange sort of cultural double standard or inconsistency here right because we all know we all know that calling someone stupid can hurt their feelings we all know that insulting someone can even change their lives right if we recognize that negative side of the sword if you want then we have to recognize that the sword cuts both ways that telling someone that they're stupid that telling someone that they're wrong could have a tremendously positive effect in their lives that it could actually bring about positive change not just negative change that this is one of the ways all of us take on new directions and if you stop and reflect on your own life probably at some point or another somebody told you that you were stupid or you were wrong and it probably had a positive impact in your life it probably made a big difference to you and you probably wish someone had told you that five years earlier in some cases but well i wish i had gotten the message i wish i'd figured out what i was doing wrong earlier in the game um you know my father most of our conversations he was already over 50 years old i can remember him saying in the most podunk ignorant way that rock and roll music these days isn't real music whereas it was when he was a teenager my father had a bachelor's degree from a canadian university right in hamilton right he considered himself a highly educated refined cosmopolitan person and he's talking to me and he sounds like any idiot who just dropped out of high school all right it had a big impact on him for me to push back for me to really say to him you sound like a high school dropout right now you sound like you don't know what the [ __ ] you're talking about you sound like exactly the kind of people you despised when you were my age i said how did you feel how did you feel about the guys who were 55 years old who said that jazz music was just n-word music back when you were in your 20s because i know i know people were a little bit more overtly racist back then you know i think i think today people have other ways of saying it about rap music or about dance moves but you know when my father grew up it was right out on the surface the racial politics of music how how did you feel when you were in your 20s or even your 30s whatever and you heard people saying this about jazz music or rock music or the music you grew up with and i i know i mean i know he grew up at a time when there were people who literally burned the beatles records like there were there were people who felt that the beatles were too uh provocative to be uh to be tolerated the teenagers shouldn't be allowed to listen to the records of the bills he he grew up with all that right you know really asking him how stupid do you think you sound right now as has an impact in some ways my father had um unique disadvantages because of the pride he took in his own level of every addition his own level of education right but in some ways it's an advantage for someone in my position trying to challenge him trying to get him to recognize his own intellectual laziness and his own stupidity i remember he made some comments about women's fashion at that time so i know this is in the 1990s he was over 50 years old and i said to him you know people who have phd's in the history of costume design you've visited and worked on museums on the history of fashion you've walked through exhibition halls explaining this stuff to you if you were in the company of those people if you were at a cocktail party with those colleagues you have who do that kind of art history as applied to women's fashion would you feel ashamed will you feel embarrassed to say what you're saying to me right now because you want to know what you sound like you sound like a high school dropout you sound like somebody who doesn't know what the [ __ ] he's talking about you sound po dunk ignorant you sound like a redneck you sound like a bumpkin and and you know that's what you are now these are pretty easy examples from my decades-long experience confronting my father about his his ignorance there were times when my father would say something about the history of russia and say something about the history of china sometimes they said things about the history of ancient rome or the history of ancient greece and they were just as stupid as something a high school dropout would say but most high school dropouts probably wouldn't actually have the self-confidence to come out and say the incredibly stupid things my father would say and i'd i'd really have to talk to them some life you know tell me something barry do you think there are no specialists do you think there are no experts in that field do you think there's nobody who knows more than you do he's sitting there talking like he's next to this how many books have you read on that subject barry do you think there's nobody who's read more books on this than you unless i was a much younger man i'd often be able to like you know barry i've read one book on this stuff and nevertheless i've read infinitely more about it than you have you know you and i really had to tell him you sound stupid you sound like a high school dropout you sound ignorant you ought to be ashamed of yourself now my father didn't feel strange himself my father took great delight in acting like he was an expert on innumerable issues he knew absolutely nothing about uh my mother joked about this with melissa recently so my girlfriend melissa never met my dad never she said you know it's a big difference between isil and his father you know isil likes to lecture about history and politics but i know isil only talks about things he only knows about something he actually knows about whereas his father didn't have this problem he was quite famous for giving lectures on things he was perfectly ignorant of she gave some harmless examples she said she this is true this is when i was a young child this is before my father triphala she said you know isil used to ridicule his father endlessly this is when i was a small child because he would say things about different species of birds he would walk around he would see a bird he would make up the name of this bird and talk about like its habitat and what it would eat and so it would be complete fiction it would be completely wrong he was just like he was a fantasist this way he would make up stories about what kind of bird this was and you know and as a kid already like i got used to being able to tell when he was lying it was partly just i was a skeptic about him and i would ridicule him for a really cool oh yeah why don't you tell us another one i bought the the red crested warbler that just said yeah and it migrates here from florida huh was that what you're telling i was really saying you think you can get away with making up this [ __ ] in front of me because i'm a kid but you can't it's true it's my mother my mother reminds me of that yes you can say you can't really say like father like son both like to lecture isil seems to mostly like to lecture about things he's actually read books about or actually um look you know um we all go through it and what i said years ago on this channel is you know with criticism the question is you know do you have enough love in your heart do you respect someone enough to disrespect them do you care about someone enough to take the time and sit down with them and really let them know that they're wrong and really let them know they're screwing up and really let them know that they're stupid sometimes you don't sometimes you just don't care sometimes you're just gonna walk away um but yeah it can it can change people's lives it can change people's lives for the better it's not something that's destructive by nature and i gotta say this you know guys every single person who is intelligent knows what it's like to be stupid okay every single person who's well informed knows what it's like to be ignorant and every single person who seems incredibly conversant and competent and reliable and sharp in a particular domain they know what it's like to be an inept bumbler to be out of their depth in some other domain they know what it's like because they can remember their own youth from years and they know what it's like right now because they don't always and only speak or deal with problems within the limit of their expertise sometimes they play the part with a fool they know what it's like we know what it's like and it's asymmetrical right there are people on this planet who grew up playing pokemon and they have never hit the books on any topic they've never gotten any real life experience they don't know what it's like to develop their expertise their acumen their their ability they don't know what it's like to be an intellectual they don't know what it's like to be intelligent they don't know what it's like to be smart or good at anything and that can continue up to any age it's not just teenagers there are people in their 30s 40s and 50s and they've remained at that level so you know there's an asymmetry there i can say to you i know what it's like to be stupid i know what it's like to be ignorant i know what it's like to be an idiot i know it's like to be wrong i know what it's like to be misled and lied to by propaganda sources you didn't question to make political statements you later regret you later you know wise up and realize you know so there's a sense in which you know there's no other combination that's quite so dynamic i'm i'm straight i'm heterosexual i have no idea what it's like to be gay i can sympathize i can empathize i have no idea what it's like to be gay i've had gay friends and i can say them to some extent i know what you're going through and to some extent i don't you know what i mean it's not like i have that experience not to do that in the past and then i became straight and vice versa right if i'm going to talk to a gay friend about my sex life even if that's a gay friend who had a period of his or her life where they were trying to live as if they were straight there's a sense in which they don't really know what i'm going through not all problems in life you know i like this i had someone who i've known for years on the internet but we're not close we've never been close yeah we're like we're like friends on a shallow level talk once a year someone on the internet for years god touched me and sent me a ton of hate mail um telling me i'm a misogynist attacking my character you know and you know what here's the truth here's the truth she meant well she meant well from her perspective she thought she was helping me right it wasn't it wasn't dealing attention she wasn't just trying to hurt my feelings she wasn't trying to pray she thought she was helping me and you know one of the first things i said to her in response to this was if you took these audio recordings she was sending me you know voice messages his little short audio points if you took these audio recordings and you saved them to your hard drive and then you went back and listened to them again five years from now what do you think your opinion would be about what you're telling me today do you think you'd look back on this and think this is wise this is intelligent this is well informed or this is erudite because when i listen to this when i listen to what you're telling me i think you sound like a high school dropout i think you sound like somebody with no education at all right um it had a big impact on her i know i there are people i've criticized the internet who i had no communication with at all like we weren't friends we didn't have email going back and forth and they got in touch with me years later years later and told me that the criticism i made in a youtube video explaining why they were stupid and wrong that had a huge impact on them and changed their lives i have had people break down weeping telling me how much the criticism i've offered impact their lives here on youtube i told the anecdote not too long ago about a woman who was a phd student getting a phd and she did some research related to buddhism and i criticized her work on buddhism and she broke down weep over that you know repeatedly i know i know what a kind of powerful intervention this can be to to really confront someone this way and even just to ask the question like in your own eyes by your own standards what you're telling me right now what you're doing now does this sound intelligent to you and uh you know most people live their lives without any kind of reflection without any kind of mirror without any standard they they hold themselves to they just don't think of it that way they'll send me a bunch of audio messages a bunch of these stories and it will never occur to them to play that back to listen to it again and ask themselves do i sound like an idiot they'll write things they'll write comments on facebook they may write and publish books even and they'll never stop and read it and think do i sound smart do i sound stupid or five years from now if i go back and read this what am i going to think of the man i used to be the person i was you know when i wrote this they don't look at their own writing and think who's the best of the best in this field like before when i was challenging my father and say okay you've got this ignorant ass opinion about women's fashion in the 1990s and how it's like worse than the 1960s or whatever you know okay how does that compare to vogue magazine like are you telling me there's a dearth of people who are actually who have really well informed opinions about the history of women's fashion those people publish books too you know they don't just write articles for vogue magazine there's a whole category from these they are the best of the best in talking about the history of fashion and costume design aesthetics or whatever you know if i'm gonna publish my opinion this i'm gonna make it known whether it's history politics fashion music you name it am i gonna look in the mirror am i gonna hold myself to a standard of excellence not that you may be able to achieve that today and let's let's keep it over real there are people in this audience right now who have watched the youtube videos on my channel and who have challenged themselves to do the same thing but better so many people especially back when i was talking about vegan activism there were so many people middle-aged guys there were a lot of middle-aged men that watched i was doing camera and they thought that's easy because i make it look easy and they got out their camera and they got out the microphone and they figured out that it really wasn't easy at all now look you have to have a whole life cycle analysis for these things not just a single stage of analysis the fact that you can't sit down at a microphone and talk about history and politics the way that i talk about it today doesn't mean that you never will be able to the fact that you can't form your ideas and opinions about music or fashion if it's something more shallow like this today doesn't mean you know the fact that you are aware of those higher standards who is the best of the best who is the champion you know who's the equivalent of an olympic athlete in this area of research this area of intellectual endeavor of politics history the fact that you're aware of that higher standard and you can't meet it today you can't compete on that level today doesn't mean it's a limitation for you it doesn't mean you're going to give up now right if you want to speak chinese 10 years from now you've got to be willing to fail again and again and again today and tomorrow and for the next five years frankly right if you want to learn something if you want to become proficient in something if you want to become conversant in something some ecology i was raised with so much misinformation my generation we were told so much [ __ ] about solar panels and wind farm generation and you know basically the same the same ideas that are around today but of course i mean you know i i had to go through that i joined the green party i had to figure out what was propaganda was i had to figure out what was a real solution and what was a distraction i was surrounded by people who thought they were gonna save the world by switching from plastic bags to reusable contacts and i see young people going through it today they're walking in my footsteps they don't even know it yet right we were all born ignorant right the question is are you going to be satisfied with being ignorant until the day that you die are you going to go on being a fatuous windbag like my father like by an old man and passing down your judgment on rap music and rock music and women's fashion and joseph stalin and mao zedong and what's going on in palestine and all that stuff too are you gonna go on holding yourself to this low standard where you never grow you never develop you never strive to meet that standard of excellence even if you fail and fail and fail for the next 10 years right the one thing i can guarantee you is that you will have the intellectual development that comes from that process of striving