Quit Video Games: Learn More, Live More, Be More.

okay so let me ask you this do you not
have kind of throwaway activities you do in leisure time like would wouldn't this argument against video games wouldn't it be applicable to say somebody who likes to do and use adult coloring books you know i mean like some activity that they enjoy they sort of have blocked off an hour a day there's some sort of leisure activity that's kind of pointless but they get something out of it enriches their life it makes them feel good for an hour let's let's say you rent an apartment and you have a roommate somebody you don't know very well and then every so often you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and you see them sitting there at the kitchen counter at two o'clock in the morning filling in adult coloring books no no no but i mean just just think about it what would you what would your opinion be of your roommate like bro what is wrong with you you're staying up till 2am and then maybe you go to sleep and you wake up to have breakfast like you wake up early because that's your job you wake up at 6 00 a.m and like did you did you go to sleep last night you seem to still be sitting there working on that combo now i don't know of anyone in the universe i don't know if there's one person out of 300 million 400 million in the united states and canada who actually has this this problem with adult coloring books that would seem to me an incredibly rare thing we all know we all know what's common with video games like most people in this audience they know what it's like to stay up till 2 a.m playing a video game and they may know what it's like to stay up till 6 a.m or to find their their room like this is this is common this is widespread not everyone can research the cure for cancer not everyone can live a life as exciting as mine i went to cambodia and did humanitarian work i did research you know my life is interesting in different ways i get that but like my perspective is you still matter i still care about you i still care about what you could be doing productively with those three hours a day i don't accept the notion that you have zero creativity zero potential whether that's politically or otherwise to make the world a better place zero artistic potential whatever i really believe that you can do something better with those three hours a day and if you don't believe it what do you think of yourself i mean really people like to disrespect my crew but the fact is that you know my name and i don't know you i don't know i know if you're gonna have grandkids but if you do your grandkids will ask you what did you do in the year 2020. this is one of those years it's been such a crazy year it'll come up whether your children are great someday deal with oh what happened during the great riots of 2020 the great fire of 2020. and i'll say i was sitting in this room talking to people on the internet and your grandkids maybe can watch those those videos too it's good to have you back we're live folks and people in the chat are wondering yes this is live um and we're here we're gonna talk about a lot of stuff we had a conversation last week uh covered some things i had a bunch of other things i wanted to talk about so we set up round two yeah so we're gonna get into a bunch of stuff um so let's i wanna start on something that's kind of relevant to the platform that we're on here now as you probably know twitch is largely a gaming platform it's kind of changed more recently but the core twitch community is really connected to gaming and that's kind of how this whole thing started and you are a very vocal advocate for sort of i don't know what you call anti-gaming you quitting gaming in general so it's kind of an interesting place to have you here on this in this gaming zone as somebody who you have a whole playlist on your channel that's sort of i believe it's now 44 videos talking about quitting video games and the significance of video games in our lives yeah there we go 44 videos about video games a lot of them sort of urging the viewer to quit video games and i would say within the last say two or three years maybe the majority of the fan mail i get i mean it's hard to say i get fan mail i get fan mail many different kinds but a lot of the fan mail i know it's 30 or what um with people writing in to say that i changed their lives it has to do with video games people send me long messages i could read you two that i received in the last 48 hours of people saying hey your youtube channel changed my life and here's why you got me thinking about quitting video games and what is a meaningful life and i made these changes where people really do right into me let me know that that mattered to them in a big way yeah which is surprising because as you know my youtube channel is about a lot of things that's just that's just one that's come up over uh over five years most of these guys agree with me they just don't want it's like if you talk to someone who wants to quit smoking or they're aware put it this way someone who is aware they should quit smoking but they don't want to most of it's in that gray area where it's like well yeah i could and should be doing something better with my time just whether or not i'm going to do it so it's the addictive it's the addictive aspect of what i'm kind of hearing like so just just to keep going i'd be curious for you to or let's stop there is it the addictive aspect how does the addict like if you eliminated the addictiveness if somebody's playing video games that for whatever reason the selections they're making are these sort of inherently non-addictive games maybe they're really narrative driven and it's it's much more like an interactive film and they're appreciating it not as like an escape or just like this sort of physical like enjoyment of moving around but it's basically like an interactive story and they're experiencing it like a piece of art and they're taking they're not getting educational value but they're getting sort of cultural value out of it would you still have a same kind of problem with that since we're eliminating the addictiveness factor so uh i had an email about this this morning from someone i'm gonna summarize the email real quickly he wrote in and he thanked me for my videos he said my videos were like a positive inspiration for him blah blah and he said he partly agrees with and partly disagrees with what i have to say about about video games including video games as follows he is someone this guy writing to me this viewer he is someone who has struggled his whole life with video game addiction and he feels that with video games either you quit 100 percent or you're an addict because in his experience when he's tried to play only a moderate amount of games the addiction takes over his life and he's quit repeatedly and relapsed repeatedly this is his situation that's that's his experience and that's this also brings a certain kind of bias i think to the situation okay and he said something very similar he said that he feels there would be nothing wrong with video games if they were not addictive and he asked me do i feel this way so i wrote back and i said no i think that what you do with those three hours a day really matters you know i think it really matters this is a question of what difference you can make in the world what you can learn what kind of person you become who you really are and i think it matters even if video games are completely non-addictive and probably some video games are non-addictive or some people don't find them if we're talking about you know the original asteroids game for the atari 2600 talking about the original zork for ms-dos like you know some video games they're they're more primitive than a card game and i think less addictive than card games and let's keep in mind gambling and card games and dice people find these addictive even though the graphics aren't all that impressive um so without those those storytelling things you know um look my girlfriend who's sitting here right off camera she got like 10 of the value of her university education when she was a normal university age student because she was playing video games now not only she also watched a lot of sitcoms a lot of tv shows she had other distractions in her life but like okay you had this short period in life which for most people is the only chance they ever have to really learn something about history and politics and to gain a metier to become a you know somewhat refined person also to make decisions that are gonna affect your career your ability and money for the rest of your life you had this one brief period of four years of your life and you squandered it playing video games now my girlfriend is far from the worst example of this i don't think she would even qualify as an addict i think she just qualified as a video game player she was someone who regularly played there were you know if there were people whose lives are completely ruined by video game addiction when they move out of the hou their parents house and go to universities it's not just common i think it's at epidemic levels but not everyone's a university student everyone has some meaningful obligations in their life and something they can learn and something they can accomplish for most of us it's it's more and better than being a university student i mean i don't by the way i don't uh romanticize university if i buckle down and read the books on this shelf just it's not that big a shelf i can learn more than what's in a normal four-year university education if i if i have a full-time job but i take three hours a day to really study or really learn something to really apply myself and focus my mind instead of spending three hours a day playing video games that changes who i am it doesn't just change what i know it changes what kind of difference i can i can make in the world so obviously that's kind of easy to prove if you're talking about a high school student or university student who's squandering their only chances in education playing video games but each of us is squandering our chances right now and those chances those opportunities they may not be as self-evident as as being enrolled in a university program and for me that problem doesn't change whether or not it's addictive i've never known anyone who goes skiing for three hours a day you know something that's completely non-addictive could in theory have that role in somebody's life but for my generation the epidemic is specifically video games okay so let me ask you this do you not have kind of throwaway activities you do in leisure time like would wouldn't this argument against video games wouldn't it be applicable to say somebody who likes to do and use adult coloring books i mean like some activity that they enjoy they sort of have blocked off an hour a day of this some sort of leisure activity that's kind of pointless but they get something out of it enriches their life it makes them feel good for an hour let's let's say you rent an apartment and you have a roommate somebody you don't know very well and then every so often you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and you see them sitting there at the kitchen counter at two o'clock in the morning filling in adult coloring books no no no but i mean just just think about it what would you what would your opinion be of your roommate like bro what is wrong with you you're staying up till 2 am and then maybe you go to sleep and you wake up to have breakfast like you wake up early because that's your job you wake up at 6 00 a.m and like did you did you go to sleep last night you seem to still be sitting there working on that conqueror now i don't know if anyone in the unit like i don't know if there's one person out of 300 million 400 million in the united states and canada who actually has this this problem with adult coloring books that would seem to me an incredibly rare thing we all know we all know what's common with video games like most people in this audience they know what it's like to stay up till 2 a.m playing a video game and they may know what it's like to stay up till 6 a.m or to find their their room like this is this is common this is widespread i do think you know like eating soap you can have some small amount of this in your life but it's really still important to recognize that it's bad like the fact that you can tolerate a small amount of soap in your diet you can eat the soap that happens to be on your on your dishware doesn't mean eating soap is a good thing doesn't mean it's something you you want to be making excuses for and to recognize you know for my generation there's nothing else comparable to video games for my grandfather's generation it was a deck of cards it was dice it was going to the race track grown men used to neglect their children to go and watch horses run in a circle like can you you want to do that you want to go it's ridiculous you know today that's an incredibly rare hobby you know if people do this for our generation the challenge is video games so that's why it's the that's why it's the challenge that i'm that i'm addressing so the the argument that's kind of coming up in the chat and it's crossed my mind as well is basically that it's so again you're kind of referring to how addictive it is so it seems it seems as though it's these particularly addictive qualities that come with most video games if not arguably all of them i think you could argue either way with that it's just certain games and those other ones are a little more safe and then i think other people could argue that just video games in general are sort of addictive in any event um it's still kind of like it's like why again if if somebody is able to who find a way to engage with video games i mean for me personally i agree with you and for the most part i kind of eliminated video games in my life in my mid-20s because i saw it was just like training my time uh but there's certain video game creators that i love that i kind of look at as like an artist the way i would like it the director that i like puts on film so recently maybe a year ago this guy made this video game called death stranding that was it's like a real weird art piece of a video game and i broke my video game retirement played it for like a month beat it and it was like it was like experiencing a long movie over the course of this like month i'd play a couple hours a day and uh you know i've walked i didn't play i haven't played anything since and it was just like this one-off experience where i just like wanted to enjoy this piece of video game art and i don't think it impacted my life in a negative way so do you think that do you leave wiggle room for stuff like that where somebody kind of thinks it through and tries to protect themselves from the counterproductive qualities the addictive qualities and tries to engage with video games more as like art where's that people see problems in that approach right so i i pretty much reject the category of of leisure and the concept of of leisure i look at all the things in our life as educational even if they're just barely educational so with a mainstream video game of this i'm sorry i don't know the number for death stranding but for something like a zelda game you're normally talking about 200 hours so i'm sorry if death training is only 40 hours it was long it was it was something like 100 hours okay yeah so i mean most of the big mainstream triple-a totals 100 hours 200 hours people complain if a game is only is only 40 hours um how many hours would it take out of your life to go to egypt and see the pyramids not terribly meaningful like that's not the same as learning latin or learning chinese or studying the history of the french revolution like it's it's not going to change your life you could you could go to egypt and see the pyramids and you know what the amount of time we're talking about is so great you could even include the number of hours you spent working at starbucks earning 15 an hour to save the money to go to egypt and you could look at how many hours that was you know i bet egypt's far away it's expensive wherever you're watching this wherever you're living you know if you live in england there's some museum you could have gone to in england now you know going to a museum it's leisure it's educated it's not hard work it's not like sitting down and focusing your mind to study chinese or study history or study to study to get your degree as a registered accountant or something get some kind of uh some kind of credential you know but when you're really looking at what you do with your life as educational again whether you like it or not okay give an example let's raise the stakes a little sleeping with prostitutes i'm i'm not going to deny that sleeping with prostitutes could be enjoyable it could also be horrifying you know frankly i don't believe that aside but you know when i have known men who got accustomed to sleeping with prostitutes that was a habit they took online it changes who they are and it's not shallow like on a profound level over time over years of making these compromises and getting used to this and that becomes part of who they are it shapes and reshapes who they are in a manner that i find frankly kind of terrifying right and you could totally say hey it's just a hobby and it's way less than 200 hours nobody's wealthy enough to you know be spending 200 hours prostitutes but you know even if they have the money it's it's only a few hours here and there and you say wow this has really changed who he has this has changed of course how he sees women his relationship with women he's changed him his ethical character in a lot of ways i do really think there's an important argument to look at how you're spending your time if it's 200 hours uh playing zelda or 100 hours playing death stranding and to look at this is who i am this is how i'm training my mind this is who i'm training myself to be and you know no not everything can be compared to finding the cure for cancer not everything can be compared to studying chinese it's true but yeah you could have gotten up and walked around a museum you could have gone to egypt you could you know there are there are a lot of things you could do that most people would perceive as leisure or enjoyable um but i i think there's both the sense in which they would make you a better person in some subtle way and then again whether you're talking about prostitution or playing video games i think there's a really profound sort of corruption that creeps in there i think there's an important sense in which these particular habits are uh with time you know eroding your moral character so why i know from your videos you've watched game of thrones yes yep but why is you watching game of thrones different than somebody who's able to let's say holistically juggle their video game consumption in a way where it's really the same amount of time they find some game they spend an hour it de-stresses them they keep it to an hour every couple days why is that bit of cultural absorption that you experienced through game of thrones different than somebody else spending the exact same amount of time except on a similarly narrative artistic oriented video game so game of thrones i think that was let's say 10 hours per year i'm sorry i think some years they had 12 episodes and some hours they had some years they had eight episodes so 12 hours per year not per month per year if i met someone and i think it was what was it over spread over then eight years or something right seven or eight years the show okay 12 hours per year that's your video game happen i i agree that's not going to be a problem that's not going to impact your life and you know the other differences with some of these activities uh that i do that people may think waste time is of course whether or not you're doing something else with it simultaneously like i can listen to the news while lifting weights at the gym i don't think i have a news habit i don't think i have a gym habit either sure all these things can be evaluated this way but what are you evaluating question is what kind of person do you want to be and now what are you willing to do to make it happen there's certainly some people in the chat that don't seem uh we get mixed bag in the chat but anyway yeah no but and this is twitch i mean i know i'm coming into their space and that's and that's cool you know uh not everyone can be a medical doctor not everyone can research the cure for cancer not everyone can live a life as exciting as mine i went to cambodia and did humanitarian work i did research you know my life is interesting in different ways i get that but like my perspective is you still matter i still care about you i still care about what you could be doing productively with those three hours a day i don't accept the notion that you have zero creativity zero potential whether that's politically or otherwise to make the world a better place zero artistic potential whatever i really believe that you can do something better with those three hours a day and if you don't believe it what do you think of yourself like how low is your self-esteem how low is your opinion of yourself if you really don't believe you have something better to do some aspiration some ambition some potential something you could do with three hours a day or 20 hours a week or whatever it is it adds up to with video games because like i get it um i had a friend who got laid out in the hospital he was totally better at nil and they had him on these drugs painkillers they rewired his jaw so he couldn't even talk and you know he played video he he couldn't stand up he couldn't go to the bathroom he couldn't talk and you know like while he's doing that he's playing videos okay but then at some point after he's recovered right it's a relatively short time that he's that you know better okay look dude you know you gotta you've gotta get over this like you've gotten a little bit too comfortable with spending so many hours a day playing video games you gotta you know look dude you know you got to get off the drugs you got to get off the painkillers you got to stop making excuses you got to get some aspiration ambition to to do something with your life uh don't let this temporary injury and being bed real become an excuse for living your whole life as a mental and physical [ __ ] playing video games why do you think like what are the components we've obviously covered addiction video games clearly you know a lot of them by design are addictive are there other components like if working out was addictive which it is kind of is for some i don't think he would be railing against uh weightlifting addiction no i am oh sure i'm against all of it no i'm against skiing i'm against all kinds of things sure but it's not an epidemic for my generation and no it's it's possible i would have a friend who was addicted to working out i have one friend who is an ex-bodybuilder and he talked to me about that and he said look it was just so many hours per day and destroying his life and his strongest intellectual development and now uh anyway now he's a university student he is he does lead a very intellectual life but no it's it's theoretically possible and once in a long while you could meet someone with those with those other uh those other problems sure okay so what i'm getting at is that it is sort of like i wanna i'm curious to understand what what is it about video games outside of the fact that it's addictive um what is it what is it the actual act of playing video games that you think is sort of destructive to a person's psyche because i imagine i don't know that i've heard you speak about this but i it's sort of a lot of the arguments i've heard from you maybe i watch the wrong videos it's there's sort of this assumption that playing video games is going to be degenerative in some way or it's going to affect you negatively and i'm curious outside of it being addictive and arguably wasting your time is there more to it from your perspective is there something about the mechanics of engaging with like a virtual world that you think is unhealthy yes what what's going on in your mind as great question and probably i have answered in one of my 44 videos on the topic but there's i probably couldn't find the video where answer it anyway no uh you know one of the ways i've addressed this in the past is to ask well if you think this is something good for a human being to do let's narrow down what kind of person that would be um if you have a brother who is so severely mentally [ __ ] that he can't attend school he can't have any kind of career let's say he's learning disabled in a way where he really can't read i can imagine having a relative in my family who's just so disabled that you think well you know for timmy there's not much else he can enjoy in life so i guess i guess it's playing video games i guess this is about the best they can do right and on the other hand think about the kind of person for whom it would be a terrible waste of their talent of their creativity of what they could be learning or what they could be teaching or the difference they could make in the world through political activism or anything at all or through painting a picture right you think boy what a tragedy to this person instead of doing all these things acting on this potential they had that instead they became a video game addict they spent all their time playing video games ultimately the question is of what kind of person do you want to be and to recognize that what you do in your so-called leisure time which i would just call time what you do with your time that is making you into that person that's who you're going to become you are training yourself you are educating yourself all the time and just mention i had a guy writing to me the other day asking about becoming a lawyer i think he's pretty much made up his mind he's going to go can i go to law school if you think about the education you undergo the change of your character the way you're going to change and become a different person after so many years in law school right that also has to be thought about seriously i signed up to join the army at one point i had to really think about that if i go into the army now what kind of person am i going to be after five years right and all the kind of uh low-level trauma you deal with the day out of the army if it's just you know guys shouting at each other you know just kind of needless aggression and hostility you know through the men or whatever i'm going to live in that environment and deal with those things and go to iraq and then i'm going to come back even if you're assuming you don't actually kill anyone what if you become a police officer all of these things bring with them self-discipline habits of mind and also elements of your life that maybe become reckless maybe forms of self-indulgence and recklessness you get into to try to balance or compensate for the strain the stress the self-discipline sure everything can be evaluated the same way that i'm evaluating video games if you quit video games how is it possible that you were gonna replace those three hours of your time with something worse with something that's more detrimental to your character i've had people writing in to ask me i've had people writing in and claiming that if they quit video games they're going to do something way worse i'm like try me what what is what is this worst thing you're going to do like if if somebody says to me i've never had this happen if someone says to me they would love to get on a vegan diet but they were afraid that if they quit eating you know pork rinds and bacon and hot dogs that they're just gonna eat something even worse for their health it's like really what what is it it's possible it's possible you have a vegan diet you just buy a bag of sugar and you sit there with a spoon eating sugar straight out of the bag like it's possible that but like what is it you think like because from my perspective when you talk about playing video games and let's face it playing often combined with marijuana and other mind-altering drugs you know every time we're playing video games um what is it you would replace it with that's worse if you're just sitting on the couch thinking about how unhappy you are and how you want to change your life how dissatisfied you are with your job how you're not learning anything even that dissatisfaction even sitting and reflecting on how miserable your life is for three hours i think is way more productive than video games and it's gonna lead to more creative more positive stuff in your life because you're going to act on it and smoking marijuana and playing video games it's going to lead to inaction and justification for the stasis in the rest of your life that that's my perspective okay one of the things i said in the debate about this was um eating soap is bad however if you wash the dishes or you eat in a restaurant where the dishes are washed by someone not paying much attention you probably are eating tiny amounts of soap with every meal i am not going to claim that playing video games for five minutes or 15 minutes in a day has the same significance as three hours a day but if you know people who play video games three hours is actually quite quite a modest estimate most people a lot of people lie to themselves and lie to their friends for a lot of people it's much more than three hours it really is what their life rolls around so when you say something is bad you say something is a waste of time how bad how much time those quantitative considerations really do matter um i you know you so you talk about an elevator pitch some people play video games while they're standing in the elevator you know i get it okay so this is five minutes a day playing candy crush all right if that's really all it is honestly still there's something better you could be thinking about or doing while you're in the elevator but i have to concede the point when the quantity is that low the qualitative nature of the argument changes but for my generation for my generation this is like an epidemic level of people playing video games for three hours a day and more sometimes much much more so it really matters it's a decision we really have to make for ourselves there's people that are kind of wanting to get into the the micro of this and sort of how do you decide what's like and i don't know if you want to necessarily go on that road because i feel like we're kind of uh we've kind of reached an end on this on this point i suppose from my understanding so people are kind of taking this into a very black and white thing where it's kind of like sort of the assumption that you believe that everything needs to be productive but the fact that you did watch game of thrones i'm sure there's other examples you clearly saved some room for just culture and enjoyment and whatever you're not like hardcore 100 utilitarian or whatever you call it right but look you know so totally good question i'm not offended by any of these questions when people ask me this stuff i don't get defensive i'm i'm genuinely happy to answer those questions uh as a parallelism you know when i was living in england there were a lot of really negative attitudes about men's relationships with women like where men would really say things i saw this written in newspapers i mostly thought like in articles british men had this attitude of like oh no uh keep her keen treat her mean like don't don't do anything to help your wife that she wouldn't do to help you this really grudging transactional view of dating whether it's girlfriends or wives or or what have you and i remember reading several call wasn't was in a mainstream newspaper remember reason this and i said to my wife at the time does it ever occur to them to try doing the opposite does it ever occur to them have a relationship where you give all that you can possibly give where you do everything to help the other person you possibly can and then if they want more or they're dissatisfied or they complain you get to say to them i'm doing everything i possibly could to help you so if that's not good enough for you like we gotta break up or we gotta renegotiate we gotta talk about the meaning of life here right like okay so you say well you know it can't be a hundred percent you can't like you know in a relationship it can't be i can't be a hundred percent devoted to helping my girlfriend but i can do the most i possibly can i can i can give a hundred percent of what what's available right it's not going to be a hundred percent her that matters and zero percent of me that matters in the relationship right but i can be as giving as possible so if you ask me how much how much time and energy can you commit to flying to a third world country doing humanitarian work like on a volunteer basis uh doing historical research learning two languages like how much how much you can give it as much as you possibly can and then you can have the satisfaction of exhausting yourself we say look i gave and gave and gave i poured my energy into this i poured my heart into it and when there was nothing left to pour i ran out so i watched an episode of the simpsons like deadass exhausted you can have the satisfaction of doing the utmost you possibly can now ask yourself what if you've done that university what if instead of dragging your ass through introduction to plato's philosophy 401 what if you had given it 110 percent and then only watch the simpsons afterwards or play videos afterwards as opposed to doing the bare minimum you had to in your university courses so that you could play video games as much as possible as opposed to rushing through your meals like oh i want to spend as little time as possible cooking and eating this meal so i can go play video games the reality is that for most of us i remember this as a child we dream about video games you play them for enough hours what you see when you close your eyes and go to sleep you plan your day around videos even if you're not planning it becomes your highest priority right and you never develop a sensitivity to what is lost and you're losing all those things you're losing your relationship with your girlfriend it's not what it should be or could be because you're not giving that 110 you're losing what you could have learned in university what you could have done what you could have accomplished it never even occurred to you to do humanitarian work or learn another language or do research or go to cambodia or go to egypt and see ancient ruins none of these things and in terms of creativity it's maybe the saddest part of all you know to have creativity you need to have a blank canvas you've got to have enough empty space in your life to be creative too right and then to give that 100 all these things disappear because of video games could they disappear because you're addicted to gambling or you're addicted to watching movies or you're addicted to watching reruns of the simpsons it's possible but keeping it all the way real from my generation in 2020 this is the epidemic of our times this is ruining people's lives and it draws people into a shallow meaningless life of short-term thinking and childlike self-intelligence all right so a lot of people in the chat are kind of i guess um the the reaction from some not everybody for some people is is sort of like as if you you know it's kind of this sort of you take game of thrones for example they're kind of saying like well you watch game of thrones you could have been doing more productive things i think what i'm understanding from hearing you talk about this more is that you aren't taking it to those extremes you do have room you do reserve room for relaxation entertainment and all these things it's for you it's a question of managing that stuff look i've had times in my life where i worked so hard that i i broke down weeping from the stress i can remember waking up before 6 a.m to study cambodian as a language and cracking up i can remember waking up around 6am to study chinese for three hours before i took the bus to university to study chinese like i've had times in my life where i'm extremely hard-working and pushing myself to that ragged edge of exhaustion for whatever it is i want to accomplish in my life i know i know what it's like to give 110 to caring for a newborn infant like when my daughter the first one year of my daughter's life i was a stay-at-home parent for right and by the way with the little bits of time i had i read i read really meaningful books i read herodotus i read thucydides these are ancient greek authors i did actually get a little bit of reading done when my daughter was napping and she'd wake up you take care of her you know like there are all kinds of different things in my life i have the experience of giving 110 and by the way when i came up with and wrote and illustrated a storybook for my daughter you know this kind of thing there are creative things also where you give it 110 you see okay do you think for one minute i look back at those times in my life the most stressful times where i was pushing it to the extreme even though by the way today i can barely speak like in a complete sentence in cambodia like i've forgotten that i've studied like it was a total waste studying cambodia in many ways by the way you know a lot of those things like in the sense i do regret them okay do you think i look back at that and and and you know regret that i didn't own an xbox 360 at that time that i didn't own a playstation 3 that i missed out on those video games who's really missing out here a lot of these people you were a lot of people noticed you were alive during the same years i was alive but you were playing xbox 360. i don't remember i don't wish i'd spent one moment playing xbox or playstation instead of caring for my daughter instead of studying cambodia instead of pursuing those things and doing the most i could possibly do exhaustion is real and i hope everyone in this audience knows both the joy and the misery of exhausting themselves not because they have a boss or an overseer breathing down their neck right like not because they're like in the military and they're being bossed around but because they're really motivated you know and maybe motivated partly to accomplish something yes but you're also motivated to be a better person that you're motivated about what you're going to learn and who you're going to become by doing this thing by doing this hard work because the outcomes they aren't all external in the outside world right like i became the kind of person who went to cambodia did that have that experience the ultimate benefit is that i get to wake up in the morning and be me instead of waking up and being some loser who just stayed in toronto and played the whole generation of games that came out for playstation xbox 360.