Giving Advice… to Strangers… On the Internet.

it's easy
to give advice on the internet because you as the broadcaster do not have to live with the consequences and there was a time when this same game was being played over the radio people phoning in and asking for help with their problems over the radio was a smaller number of people making a lot more money and it seems so easy for people in the audience to judge you as a broadcaster to be a good person or to judge what you say as good advice without ever giving the slightest thought to the person you're advising or the real world outcomes of the advice you're giving hypothetically let's just say i talk to a father who speaks spanish as his first language father wife kids they all speak spanish as their primary language most the time but they know for their kids for their future as a family what really matters is having the children grow up with the ability to speak english at a very high level to use the english language in a sophisticated way and let's just say this guy whatever his situation may be it doesn't really matter whether he's someone who has immigrated to the united states or canada or if he's living in a spanish-speaking country but nevertheless for his children's particular education and career path this is this is his concern let's say this guy comes to me for advice or he just complains he just talks to me and complains and say to him look here's what you have to do every day in the morning before you go to work you are going to download on your phone the youtube video for the morning news in english now i don't know when you're going to listen to it maybe it's while you're riding the bus to work like i don't know this guy's situation hypothetically maybe it's during your lunch break at work you are going to listen to the news in english you're going to have a pen and paper and you are going to note down the words and concepts and phrases and idioms that you don't know that are tricky for you and you're going to look them up and you're gonna learn what they really mean and once in a while not every day once in a while there will be some chapter of history that comes up in the news that you didn't know about and you read the wikipedia article do a little bit of reading outside of the news every night at the dinner table you sit with your wife and kids and you watch the news together you don't watch the nightly news you watch the news that you downloaded this morning and that you have already watched yourself maybe once maybe two times where you've already looked up the vocabulary tell them you've seen it before keep it a secret they're they're going to be surprised they're going to be oh wow it seems like you already know all the difficult words that came up in the news doesn't matter let them voice their opinions chit chat with them about what they say what they think in english right and do it seven nights a week never skip a night and for your kids maybe they speak to all their friends in spanish like maybe the only language used around the dinner table otherwise is spanish but whatever that is let's say it's one hour a night maybe some nights it's 45 minutes maybe sometimes it's half an hour sometimes the news is more interesting there's less those discussions you have with your kids over years it's going to result in you raising your level of sophistication in english language it's going to result in your kids raising their level of sophistication english language it's going to result in your kids getting to know you in a way they otherwise wouldn't it's going to result in you getting to know your kids in a way you otherwise wouldn't you're going to hear their reactions to political things in the news and sometimes your kids are going to ask questions like what what a crazy law how can that be illegal when this other thing is illegal and maybe you've already looked it up on wikipedia and you say oh yeah you know it's a funny law that was passed 150 years ago and still nobody has changed it and maybe you say well you know that's an interesting point kid i'm going to look that up on wikipedia tomorrow and tell you about it when i get home from work now think about the value of that language learning exercise of that educational device night after night after night after years think about how much you have to pay someone else to do it for you or what it would be worth if you could pay someone else to do it for you okay what you are doing with your kids and what you are learning yourself i can't say it's invaluable but like this would be tens of thousands of dollars worth of education this is so much better than what you're going to get in language courses the way they're taught at a university where it does indeed cost you tens of thousands of dollars and without digressing into my experience with language education and universities let's just say i am sadly in a position to know let's just say i know a family of russian immigrants who have the opposite problem this is this is less hypothetical really neither of these examples is entirely hypothetical these all relate to real people i've known it the real world let's say i know a family who have migrated from russia to canada and the father of the family is completely fluent in russian he speaks at a really high level but the wife and kids that either speak no russian at all or they can kind of say hello they can kind of say a few things they maybe have some experience hearing the language maybe spoken by their grandmother or something but they can't really respond in complete sentences now what if i give the exact same advice you know inside out and backwards i say hey look every day before you go to work you download the morning news in russia because your kids have grown up completely fluent in english they're going to school in english all their friends speak english inside the house they speak to their mom in english they speak to you in english that's not the problem the problem is they have no engagement with the russian language right and you download this you listen to it before you go home to eat dinner whether that's during your lunch break or some other time you are listening to the news you're noting down maybe what you think are difficult idioms or concepts vocabulary terms of phrase and then you're going to watch the news with them i presume while you eat dinner so that you're going to talk it through with them you're going to let them voice their opinions debate with you debate amongst themselves and this way you're going to have a have a bilingual family isn't it easy for all of you right now to sit here in the audience and say wow that's really good advice it might be really easy for you to even get some kind of sense of my moral character that i'm a really good guy because oh i have really good motivations wow what a great guy what great advice like there are all kinds of kind of positive generous things you might be thinking about what's the problem you don't know who i'm giving advice to and you don't know the outcomes you don't know the consequences and none of us none of us have to deal with a consequence how rare is it for anyone whether they're doing health advice like workout exercise diet language learning advice political advice how rare is it to really deal with the outcomes of the advice that you give and a lot of us a lot of us had a father who tried to sit and watch the news with us in whatever language in our first language or some other language and the result was that we regarded our own father as insane we regarded our own father as an overbearing bullying ignorant madman that instead of creating closer bonds of you know love and respect within the family this was deeply alienating it resulted in the children hating the father and the father hating the children everyone becoming aware of the generation gap in political values now some of you have no idea what i'm talking about some of you are sitting there thinking oh well my dad was a great guy it would have been really wonderful some of you are thinking that your dad spoke russian or spoke spanish and you wish you'd learned more from him and this this sounds really great okay was your father homophobic some of us had parents who were really homophobic and then we grew up going to a different school in a different time with different political sensitivities did your father believe in the moon landing so people had parents who were born conspiracy they think the moon landing never happened what did your father say to you about hiv aids what if your father was a communist what if your father was a neo-nazi like a lot of people have parents with beliefs that you know when you're a child it's an exaggeration to say your parents beliefs contrast with your own because if you're at such an early stage of development normally what you're seeing is that your parents beliefs clash with what your school teacher tells you your parents beliefs clash with what you you hear from the television news if you're a child who reads a newspaper you know and uh you know it's not enough to follow up with someone by email which is what most of us do social media influencers no matter how large or small our fame is and guys there's a lot of money in uh in giving advice this one girl i've been shouting out on my patreon i'm sorry to say girl she's a middle-aged woman who will give you uh diet advice on being a vegan for 399 dollars a month well if you've got 10 clients that's real money there's another one who charges even more that i discovered recently um i discovered it for this reason i was like well if i have if i have people mind if you want this kind of thing can i can i recommend this person the one who charges more though she has formal university credentials and this stuff just interestingly but you know you can charge people 500 a month and you can charge people 500 a session to talk to them to motivate to motivate them to give them advice okay if you ask them to follow up with you afterward like you know you want an email back saying that they lost 20 pounds or you want an email back from the parents saying oh yeah now my kid can speak this language so much better you want some kind of testimonial do you think you'll ever learn what you would learn by actually sitting in the room and watching them eat dinner together and watching them sit in front of the news right what you'd pick up on in that room the reality is the advice i have just given would work wonderfully if your child was like me i was a highly intellectually demanding child i don't say highly intellectual i say intellectually demanding i asked a lot of questions and i had very combative very active debates with my parents from an incredibly early age i was what you'd call an actively engaged learner a lot of kids aren't a lot of kids sit looking down at their shoes being ashamed of themselves and not participating they're let's not get into the full range of negative behaviors that are possible where you can't get your kid to participate you can't get your kid to respond as a described hypothetically this being possibly a wonderful exercise for the right kid the method i've just described would work wonderfully if your father were the kind of guy i am and there are a whole lot of different characteristics that go into that including having the detachment to set your own political views aside right like that you're you're not just gonna sit and rant at the news reader that what they're saying is propaganda and it's crazy but that you know you're actually you know i may have strongly held views for example on the war in afghanistan and my girlfriend melissa gets to hear me ranting at the news i do i indulge in these kinds of theatrics and say what an imbecile the person is okay if i'm sitting with my daughter or if in future i have another child hypothetically you know i've got to put all that aside and sit there and say oh so that's interesting this is what they said about afghanistan why do you think they said that you know when you have to you know if your kid is eight years old at an eight-year-old level break it down and hear their answer and you're not you know you're not imposing your character over the news you're not imposing what you're hearing onto what they're hearing you get to go through the wonder and the curiosity and and confusion with them okay it's not gonna work for every parent it's not gonna work for every child i don't want to admit to myself how few children are capable of benefiting from this i want to believe that i live in a world where like 90 percent of kids this would be great for and it's probably not even five percent i don't want to admit to myself how many parents are either intellectually incapable of doing this or emotionally incapable of doing this i don't want to admit to myself i would love to believe in the illusory world or every father and every grandfather is capable with real warmth and generosity of spirit of preparing this kind of exercise frankly even in their first language and their mother tongue let alone their their second language and really putting in the work and really caring and really helping the next generation learn how to listen to and talk about politics develop advanced ability in the idioms this way what percentage of parents are capable of that really and if i don't think about a hypothetical parent think about actual people and actual parents i've known face to face how many of them could possibly do it and the the answer is like zero so is it is it good advice or is it bad advice if your understanding of good advice is pandering to the crowd if if i'm trying to convince you guys to donate money to my patreon account or pay for my monthly course i could give a monthly course on parenting guys what's that worth 399 a month scott sky's the limit i consider the whole philosophy of education at least one chapter of my book is about philosophy education i think i think more than one chapter uh deals oh yeah oh sure i can present myself as a guru and i can present this kind of advice that makes me sound morally good and maybe in a sense for you listening to it you feel morally good and you recognize it in this this detached way as good advice because you're not thinking about the people implementing it and what it would be like for you to sit there at that dinner table now i don't think i need to digress in how this works for everything from quitting smoking quitting alcohol quitting video games to you know weight loss gaining muscle you know diet and exercise this this kind of advice um if the advice you're giving is not working out for people can you expect them to send you an email that really breaks down that really shares that really explains where they're going wrong how and why it is that this this just isn't going to work out for them um could an email from a former client someone who who paid you could it tell you what you need to know in the same way that just sitting with them i mean frankly sitting with them at the dinner table sitting with them when they when they go to the gym where you can see the advices is not going to help them now physical exercises is one of the easiest things to give advice on but what i see again and again is a certain kind of highly athletic person giving advice that could only possibly be useful for people who have a whole lot in common with themselves you know oh we'll just wake up in the morning and jog before you go to work why why do you think that doesn't work why do you think people don't do it maybe you can't relate maybe like maybe you can't do what i just did and admit to yourself a really large percentage of people cannot use that advice will not use that advice maybe you can't admit to yourself like hey in this world like like i wish i lived in a world where 90 of people could just take this advice and do it right but the real percentage is much less and of course those aren't the people who are going to pay you for your advice shout out to everybody in the audience we got 20 people here if we had 20 thumbs up some more people might join us from my perspective this can be a real short live stream i don't always have to go for two hours and three hours these things also if melissa wants to jump in and and make a comment so what up james what up frida what up william what up uh yeah chris i've seen you here before so these are the people commenting of course lydia lydia lydia has been watching the channel what seven years some of that shout out to lydia you know um right so frida's raising nutrition point i want to talk about a sec melissa anything you want to say you've just been laughing and smiling a lot yeah i think it's been very interesting it's different than where i thought it was going to go so yeah i want to hear free to ask you nacho in the crowd another longtime viewer a long time supporter here oh um humility and risk taking humility and recklessness humility and being willing to deal with the consequences of taking a risk i was listening to one of these guys while i was working out at the gym who gives a lot of advice on the internet and i was listening to a youtube video that was really criticizing him very harshly so i might as well show them out it was a youtube video harshly criticizing gary vee so his full name is gary vaynerchuk i believe but his youtube channel he goes by his garyvee and he is a mass phenomenon in giving advice he's appeared on the joe rogan show he's appeared on broadcast television he's become a mainstream icon in what could be frankly called the advice industry you know i commented to my girlfriend melissa while we were both at the gym exercising i said you know it's really easy to ridicule this advice that he's giving but i have known specific people there are some people there are specific types of people for whom this is good and necessary advice but it's just ridiculous it's just surreal to give this advice to anyone and everyone and this guy's method whether he's doing like a phone-in talk show which he does he has people just call him up you know he listens to them talk for about a sentence and a half and then jumps to giving the advice right or someone's this live q a with an audience once in a while i think somebody has written him an email or something but for the most part it's on the basis of no knowledge of this person no knowledge of their character or their behaviors or their traits like no knowledge for example if if they're lazy or hard-working some people are lazy some people have obsessive-compulsive disorder you know what i mean okay i've got to do this give a brief digression now one of my ex-girlfriends who will remain unspecified her mother joined a crazy cult in india that's my opinion she didn't refer to it as a crazy cult herself she referred to it as a dharma group or some some craft like this and she actually went to india and lived in the lived in the ashram as they like to say and by the way it's one of these groups in india where for some reason everything is conducted in english it's it's getting money out of white people that's the reality you know so it's an all english language spiritual retreat and ashram and you know what their whole spiritual practice was their whole spiritual practice had to do with focusing on undertaking an action while not caring about the outcomes that you're you're supposed to just learn to appreciate the process without having attachment to the to the product or the outcome so and this involved giving them tasks that were impossible and pointless uh like wrapping and unwrapping mangoes like you have a whole cart with hundreds and hundreds of members or thousands wrapping and unwrapping them with with saran wrap this is a spiritual practice and you know so i'm having this described to me by my girlfriend's mother would this actually be helpful for some incredibly rare personality type someone with a particular type of obsessive compulsive disorder and is it possible that the original guru spiritual guru who founded this ashram that he had this obsessive-compulsive disorder where like you get over it by wrapping and unwrapping mangoes doing a whole bunch of other pointless and impossible uh activities then learning to set aside your attachment to uh to the outcomes of your action but for how many people like is it 99 of people or 99.9 percent of people would this be a completely fruitless comple fruitless no pun intended a completely pointless activity right and then of course you think about the method of recruitment and how these cult groups operate um and what i'm saying in this video is i don't think in the 21st century this is the exception to the rule i think this is the rule like people commit to giving a certain kind of advice first and foremost that's their sense of mission that's their destiny like for the person doing the broadcasting and soon enough they have a whole you know codery of kind of employees and colleagues putting together these touring shows or they give advice and so on everyone gets committed to the message everyone gets committed to the gospel if you like to the advice that is being given with no thought whatsoever applied to the particular people receiving the vice the advice let alone evaluating the outcomes anyways just a couple hours ago i'm at the gym with melissa i say you know okay so listening to this criticism of gary vee garyvee is a business impresario and a self-declared millionaire i have no reason to think he's not a multi-millionaire by the way but anyway a very wealthy person who claims to give you the keys to success and so on you know and one of the things he tells people again and again and again advice he gives to people again and again again is you should never take a holiday you should never take a vacation you shouldn't take any time for yourself you should wake up every day and and hustle like dawn told us until you're completely exhausted you should work incredibly hard and he's given this advice to anybody and everybody so sometimes it's just like it's the same format i have here he just sits down in front of a camera and speaks to you an unknown person in the audience it's just telling you to work as hard as you possibly can from the moment you wake up to when you go with sleep and never stop and never take a vacation and just give it 110 all the time he doesn't even know what you're working on he doesn't know you know what are you doing like you know no nuance nothing no way relative uh to the particular person and sometimes he's giving this advice relative to a particular person who's phoned him like he does a phone show or someone who stood up in the audience and asked the question and i'm not saying that's the hate on the guy but most of the time the person doesn't get to finish their question like people stand at the eye and say hey you know i've been trying for a few years to be successful in real estate and you know i haven't really and he says let me tell you my you know he jumps right in like you know he's not really interested in hearing your story or what's holding you back or something he's just looking for the pretense for him to say something he said with minor variations a hundred times before to give you the same advice he'd give he'd give anyone else okay well you know i can't sit here and say to you that this kind of work works so hard that you pass out you know advice i can't say that's bad advice for everyone right i'll give you you know i can't say that i feel that growing up with my generation i grew up with the kurt cobain generation i grew up with the nirvana generation i grew up with a whole generation of people who really glamorized giving up and not trying hard i have known people who could really use the advice of someone sitting there and talking to them and saying look what if you gave it a hundred percent what if you worked so hard at this that you broke down weeping you know what i mean and i'm not saying this to insult you guys i don't know who's in the audience now again if you guys can hit the thumbs up some more people will join the conversation while it's happening just makes it more entertaining more people will discover the video later too but you know you might not know what it's like to really push yourself to that ragged edge where you're learning as much as you can possibly do you're working as much as you possibly can and where you're at the end of it you're trembling or you're even like weeping like you're not even sad you're weeping out of you know nervous exhaustion you're you're weeping just because you're so depleted and broken down having given it you know 110 percent uh you're cracking up you know in in plain english now i i have various memories of of doing that i remember one brief period where i had an airplane ticket to cambodia i was going to cambodia alone and i knew i was going to have to get off that plane with all my money and cash on me i was going to walk the streets and rent an apartment i was gonna go through a whole bunch of things i was gonna have to speak to landlords in cambodia so i'm working so hard to raise my level of spoken cambodian and i'm honestly it's not even setting an alarm i'm just waking up whether it's at 4am or 5am or 6am i'm waking up whenever i wake up a nervous wreck and i'm pouring it on as hard as i freaking can sitting there completely alone nobody talking to me nobody helping me alone working on the language and really giving up i can remember you know cracking up like emotionally getting cracked up with this because i was trying in some number of days to raise my level of ability in in the cambodian language which is not an easy language um and i have very bad materials to work with and so on too not worth not worth filling on those details you know there are different specific you know obviously short periods of time i can remember of really pushing the limit in terms of how many hours i can work for for intellectual work and nobody nobody can do that for 10 years or something you can do you can do it and some of you might not know what that's like i had a girlfriend many many years ago she was blonde you might have heard of her she's called my blonde ex-girlfriend she's mentioned in a few different youtube videos and you know um basically during the whole relationship or the main part of the relationship we were really living together like as if we were married you know we were sharing an apartment living together closely you know she wanted to become a painter a modern painter not a house painter you know she wanted to do modern art um as a creative artist and i can remember saying to her really as nicely as possible i wasn't being a kind of dramatic showman like gary vee i wasn't even being as dramatic as i'm being now on camera i remember saying to her look you know i come home every day i had a full-time job i come home every day i rented this apartment for you i got this studio i bought all these materials for you i did i literally bought like the easel and the canvas and the paint and stuff because you say this is what you want to do and i see that you're not working i see that you're not making progress or when you are it's like one hour here or there that you're putting in if you want to be a successful painter you are competing with people who have wanted this and have worked so hard at it since they were 11 years old all right so here you are i forget let's say she was 24 at the time something like that 24 25. you know you're coming in relatively late at the game and you have to work twice as hard as everyone else just to catch up with them over like the next 10 years if you think about how many hours you spend drawing how many hours do you spend painting practicing the art practicing the craft if you like if you only work twice as hard as they do you know they start at age 11 you're starting at h it's 24 right how hard are you gonna have to work in 10 years to catch up to be competitive now i gave i gave different examples then that i would give today so let's just be trying to you know i'm a much older man now i use different kinds of examples but i think you know one of the examples i gave was talking about being a pilot being like an airline pilot an army pilot or any other kind of pilot because i know that that's one job where they actually record how many hours you've flown even at the earliest stages of being you know practicing to become policy look today at the time i was the same age i was i was slightly younger than her so i was 24 and she was 25 or i was 23 and she was 24 or some of that we had this conversation you know i said look if i decide today to become a pilot i've got to compete with guys who joined the air force cadets when they were 14 years old 15 years old started flying at 16 years old right i can't just do the bare minimum maybe they can like maybe they're my age they don't really have to put in the time anymore they don't have to work that much anymore they're at a point where they can kind of coast along with the level of effort they're making not me i've got to work twice as hard i've got to work 10 times as hard i've got it i remember i used this term all the time with her i said you've got to do kind of proof of genius level effort you've got to put in a level of effort where you're like proving your genius you're you're knocking yourself out and i know i use this example in discussion time because i was really doing it i had a full-time job but like before i went to work after i came home from work i was working on this ancient dead language called pali it's like look you know i imagined there were all kinds of talented people in this field had been working really hard for many years and at a high level of ability in the language i later learned that was not true there's almost nobody with reading comprehension of pali all the people who claim to have ability and pali as a language they're basically frauds i don't know if i can think of a single exception i'd have to think for a while if there were any scholars who were not frauds about their level of comprehension of that language um but most of the people including people with phds including buddhist monks so on and so forth it's like look i'm coming into this field of study late after getting a university degree in political science i didn't come out i wasn't already committed to buddhist studies when i was 16. well there are other people who've been doing this since they were 16. i can't just do one hour here and there i can't just scrape by i have to work twice as hard as everyone else or i have to work 10 times as hard i have to put in a level of effort and and risk you know where there's really some some proof of genius involved okay here's the thing all right giving advice it involves humility it involves the advisor involves the broadcaster involves the person in my position really having the humility to listen to the other person letting them tell you who they are letting them tell you what their problem is letting them tell you what they deserve and also you have to have the humility to let them show you right they have to demonstrate you have to be able to just sit there quietly and watch right there's there's real humility involved you also have to have the arrogance to take risks right you have to be willing to take a risk to say to someone you know even just what i said look i come home from work i was literally working at the office come home from the office and i look in at your studio you know which has this separate room for painting and i can see ain't nothing moved you know what i mean like there's no new painting there's no new drawing you're not making progress you're not working you're not putting the time you know and when you really know somebody and you're dealing with them face to face what do you risk yeah will you risk them breaking down crying in front of you and you risk you have to hold them and hug them while they weep all over you and blow their nose on your sleeve or whatever else right like on a on a very basic level you're risking dealing with the emotional consequences of them recognizing that even if in some sense you are giving good advice you're giving advice that maybe a better person would follow or a better person wouldn't even need maybe a better person would already know this maybe a better person would just sit back right on you know that's that's what i've been saying all these years too you know what i'm on the same wavelength i'm on the same level as you someone else will come back this way and know this is the person who needs the advice but it is as the proverb goes it's the good advice that they just can't take you know did you want do you want to jump in stand up or just speak so i've been thinking about something as you've been talking about this there is a scene from the movie donnie darko yes that i think is relevant to this discussion in donnie darko there is a self-help guru who becomes very popular in their town and he gives a presentation to an audience of teenagers his main advice is that everything wrong with you all your problems are based in fear so his main goal is to solve your problems through solving what you're afraid of and getting to the root problems of your fear the scene is great because he invites these kids down and they talk about their problems and they're on stage and and talking about these difficulties in their life there's one kid who's chubby and he said he gets bullied by people and the self-help guru says you know you you know kind of like gary vee here like at the first moment he says no i know what your problem is you know you're afraid the reason why this scene is uh important is because uh donnie darko the character played by jake gyllenhaal he he gets up on the microphone and he just boldly says you know what this self-help guru i think he's the spawn of satan i think he's lying to you kid your problem is that you're chubby if you want to stand up to your bullies you have to lose weight you have to get fit you have to like you know he's really honest and like you say he's taking risks all right um and the kid might break down crying right right like that's that's really tough um but that's what it takes if you're trying to give advice to people and sometimes it is so obvious i mean just when you look at i i really appreciate what you said about observing people if you observe them in their environment right talking to family or something you get to see these things that they might not have the attachment or ability to cope with if somebody just points it out yeah and and including you know the ways in which they're stupid people are stupid and lazy now you know i've said this about my father before so if you've been watching my channel for a million years you already know this but for me it's a memory that really stands out that he took like 10 years to read one book it was james joyce's ulysses right now you know um my father had some intellectual advantages in life he was very good at memorizing factoids um something some little short piece of information so like the exact size of a parking space for a normal car versus a wheelchair disabled car like crap like that he really memorized like i don't even know it was an effort or not like i don't know if he just did that without trying very likely he did he did try but he'd always been gifted at memorizing factoids this way and just to give an example uh you know just assuming he wasn't lying to me he lied a lot but i'm gonna presume this particular story was the truth um he took a course on geology in universities this is a ba level uh course on geology and he only took it because he wanted to raise his grade point average raise his total like to get an a plus and a course and he had absolutely no interest in geology he didn't want like you know it was just to get high scores in the exams and he felt this was a course where he could do that he just had to memorize the names of different kinds of rocks and chemicals and there's a certain number of kind of factoids and he got the highest score on the exam that anyone had ever gotten since they opened the university and they've been using the same exam for 40 years or some some long period of time using the same standardized exam for geology and he said the professor approached him and asked if he would be willing to to switch his major and the professor said that he would personally support my father if you wanted to start a career as a geologist because he was so impressed by the exam and my father said then this part was not a lie my father said that he did not have any understanding of what he had memorized and i that was really true of him he was that kind of like he could memorize and recite things that he really didn't understand what he was saying so just mentioned this was kind of guy my father was but like dude like 10 years that's how long it took you to read this one book like like he did so little reading like so my point is in a lot of ways he was a very lazy very stupid guy um and again i've said this you know one of the things i said directly to my father was i know you the way nobody else knows you because my father was a character like gary v he was a character like gary vaynerchuk who stood on a stage and gave people advice he really was his career i said these other people they see you this way these other people they see you this way but i know you as the guy who would fall asleep on the couch watching baseball that's who he really was he was a guy who would lie on the couch and watch baseball and when he was overseas like when he was in europe the thing he was most excited to do and it was quite expensive he would buy a copy of an american newspaper like the new york times the new york times is expensive in america but it's actually much more expensive if you're in london or paris this is still true but it was true back then too like to buy a copy of the new york times in some other city in europe and he would buy it just to turn to the last page and there'd be a little section like this which would be the baseball scores and he'd sit there and stare at that excitedly and very often the rest of the newspaper didn't get read or was barely as you buy it just to sit there and he'd sit there and look at it and talk he was totally engrossed and this is him over 50 years old this is a fully grown maybe some of these memories are from his first words that's that's who my father was so like you know again when you say someone stupid was this one adjective to describe a complex person and a complex set of problems i mean i think you guys just from this description you guys have never met my father you know you already have a real insight into what this guy's problems are and why he isn't learning and why he doesn't develop and what is what is advantages and disadvantages okay now what advice you know are you are you going to give him now look you know for me this relates to the recurring theme of my not endorsing particular books on youtube i do book reviews i do read books you'll never see me out here just saying oh this is a good book that everyone should read you know i had a whole bunch of email from this uh this on youtube called um vegan foot soldier you know so some of this is on my blog if you guys don't know um it's not fascinating but he's a he's a rival youtuber i suppose of he's vegan but he doesn't he doesn't feel that he and i have too much in common and you know there are many things about what he wrote to me that are striking and absurd and risible and make me laugh but the final message i sent to the guy was very sincere i said look have you read karl popper's book the poverty of historicism now i'll type out the title because i know it's a really weird title poverty of historicism there is only one book with this crazy title and i'm certain i have a i have a video talking about it on my youtube channel i'll post that for you guys too you know and what i said to him was you know look um i didn't say what i really meant because i didn't want to be too insulting what i really meant to say was you fundamentally don't understand what philosophy is you keep kind of preaching philosophy he kept insulting me claiming that i don't know anything about philosophy he said that i'm at a high school level in philosophy that i'm not even at a first year university student's level he was using his supposedly advanced knowledge of philosophy to snub me and insult me and miraculously i seem to be immune to this kind of humiliation especially when it's coming from someone like him this did not upset me uh in any way but you know what i said to him because i was trying not to be overly insulting i said look you know philosophy is a problem problem-solving method it's about solving problems and i didn't say this but my point was like it's not about bullying and intimidating people with ostentatious use of formal logic like oh well you failed to substantiate proposition three it's not the way it's not the way people who really know philosophy talk you know it's not this is not really what philosophy is you know and i said to him look you know have you thought about reading this particular book karl popper's the poverty of historicism i said to him it could really change your life um how many years have i known that guy before i recommended this book you know more than five years he and i have known each other you know obviously there are some ways in which he's a stranger to me i don't know him at all but there are other ways in which having known him for five years having had so many years of harassment from him so many insults and so on both publicly and and privately from him against me and seeing now the way he's building up his own ego and what he thinks about philosophy and what he says about philosophy it's like well look i know a particular book that's going to challenge what you think philosophy is and what its meaning is in your life this could really change your life this is a book i recommend for for this person you know um you know i'm not out here saying we have 29 people in the united stand all 29 of you should read karl popper's philosophy of historicism i'm i'm not i'm not melissa here there are many books i've recommended she read in particular this is a book that meant a lot to me in my life and i can sit here in an analytical way and talk about why it was meaningful to me why it challenged or counteracted some false assumptions i had in life right i i can tell you why it was meaningful important to me i can tell you why i think it would be meaningful important to this other guy this other youtuber vegan foot soldier right but by the same token if melissa actually said to me after this live stream oh hey well do you think i should read this book i would say to her no look honestly i think would be a waste of your time i don't think it's interesting for you i don't think it's meaningful for you another another really brief example of that but we had this conversation in a bookstore uh lately there was a nice big copy of herodotus on the bookstore shelf in the last four and a half years or so melissa has told me pardon me melissa has heard me tell several anecdotes about herodotus things come up like oh yeah herodotus it says x y and z uh it's a book i have read i have a pretty good recollection of and there was a nice just the actual book was a good-looking book it was a good price it was cheap it was good deal and melissa was taking this out of the shelf and saying oh maybe now is the time for her to read herodotus huge book by the way and you know i said to her completely honestly look even though i can tell you why this was meaningful to me why this was important for me i can also tell you why i don't think it's important for you why i don't think it's it's useful for you now guys um i could i could turn to the audience and ask you if you guys have any stories of this in the old days when we broadcast on younow you guys were able to actually jump in and talk to me by voice chat those are the days we can't do that here with youtube you'll be able to actually split the screen and have two windows with two cameras it was great it was a great feature of you know unfortunately younow is a dead website it's a dead platform um there's a much darker side of this isn't there the the darker side is people tell you you can never make it as a musician just quit just give up now people tell you oh no you'll never be able to get a phd in chemistry just become a dental hygienist that's an easy living for somebody like people including authority figures whether it be your school teacher your guidance counselor your priest your parents your grandparents you know um people within the university system like a professor people are going to make a snap judgment of you very often like gary vee based on just a few sentences you said and they will give you advice that changes your life forever now taking it outside of an institutional setting you know i can remember when i was living in places like thailand laos and cambodia really relying uh for colleagues on advice i could name all these people there's no reason not to there was a very shifty character and i would guess he weighed about 400 pounds he was a very very fat white guy and [Music] he was a homosexual with effeminate behaviors and he had a much younger boyfriend slash husband who was not fat and was not out of shape they were very seeing them together they were a very strange pair and um his whole manner and way of speaking to you did not inspire trust he seemed like a very shifty very strange character and i spoke to a woman who was a white canadian the same age as myself who was his employee and i was asking as politely as possible look you know do you think i can trust this guy do you really think i should get involved with this with this company and so on and i remember at that time she gave this completely glowing completely positive account of her experience as an employee and what a good guy he was and everything else and i made a series of decisions that really changed my life for the next several years on the basis of that conversation like okay this is what you said to me you know okay well you know and that's someone who's worked with him for let's say she wore them for five years i'm remembering it's ten years she'd been there she'd been there for quite a while maybe it was ten years and i'm wrong i don't know anyway she'd been working with this guy for for quite a long time and so on now my actual you guys will have guessed my actual experience with this guy was incredibly negative um i had a really negative impact on my life made my life while i was in this communist country laos much harder in many ways and it would be an exaggeration to say he was ripping me off but it seemed to me he was really misleading and manipulating a great many people not just myself and having a negative impact on their lives and i ran into this same young woman again but you know again she was the same age i was white canadian i said well look you know this this is what's been happening lately with this guy the the head of the company the ceo of the company and she immediately just said to me yeah well you know i hear about that all the time he's done that to so many people it seems like a pattern his behavior he just does it again and again you know you could have told me that first before i rented an apartment and unpacked my bags and said like i before i was you know making a whole lot of assumptions including financial assumptions because it's like you know and that young woman she doesn't make any money out of lying to me or something she doesn't have any agenda and indeed the fact that she was so forthcoming when i said that to her the second time we we talked shows that she was in some ways a very honest person so my point is here you know advice um she doesn't assume any responsibility she doesn't assume any risk right now a few of you uh know this about me oh that's funny nacho says i remember gary vee yelling at someone not to become a dentist [Laughter] so something paralyzing uh for more than a year now i've been talking to people about going into film perhaps i should say going further into film given that youtube itself is a kind of filmmaking um but getting seriously interested in raising the level of my own effort and yeah raising the level amount of risk too and so many different people told me don't go to film school don't go back to college don't try to get a filter don't try to get any film training at all just start making films now the people who said this uh one i can name him one is ali tabrizi you guys remember him i like to breezy former vegan youtuber is one of the guys i talked to about this so ali tabrizi used to be on youtube and then under certain extraordinary circumstances he made the leap to uh documentary filmmaking for netflix and he has made one documentary film that took him about five years i'm not hating on him but that's the truth i think that was at least five years of that uh what was it called was called fish i was gonna say fish apocalypse that's a better name fishpocalypse if anyone uses that title you owe me 10 fishpocalypse no anyway i have made my own uh review of that film on my own youtube channel and mysteriously after i made this review of his film he never spoke to me again life is long maybe i'll hear from him five years now or 10 years you know he was so strident he was so insistent to me no no no get out just learn it yourself start doing just teach yourself don't go back to college and i'm going to come back to ali tabrizi it's the main anthony i want to tell her but you know one of the other people who told me this she is herself a professor in a university department that does exactly this they do cinema filmmaking uh photography you know several subjects of it but she's seeing the reality of every day and she said to me no joke she said you are better off just watching youtube videos like this one and she gave me a link to a channel it was a youtube channel talking you through cinematography filmmaking how to use the equipment like you know you can imagine there are these kinds of channels self-help educate yourself that's someone she her whole career she's earned her living at least for 20 years being a professor in one of those departments and even she is saying film school is a ripoff film school is a joke okay two things these people don't know me right this isn't advice for me it's for some other person they're thinking about it might be advice for someone who is like themselves right that might and it might not they might have some stereotype notion of who they're giving advice to who a typical student is who a typical person is receiving right this is this problem and the other problem is they accept no risk whatsoever so i don't have to go on about this it's just one example of my life and there are many i'll give maybe maybe one more on another topic you know um but you know one of the things i said to ali sorry he was saying with complete certainty and he was speaking as a successful filmmaker now he's got one film but it's a successful film i gave it a negative review in case you haven't guessed but it's on netflix it's had some number of views um i said to him yeah the stuff you're saying about you can just teach yourself you can learn without any teachers you can learn without going back to college ally do you know how to get up on a rooftop with two actors and one camera and film a fist fight a very simple fundamental scene do you know where to put the camera show up with the actors you know where to block it out do you know how to film one person punching another and in cinema it means they're pretending to punch the other you know the camera's at the right angle so you have the illusion that the fist is connecting again if you guys don't know i used to be in the theater so i do know a little bit about this i've done some of that stuff back when i was in the theater like 100 years ago when i was a young man i'm aware like put it this way i'm aware that there are tricks of the trade i am by no means a master but like i'm aware there are things you need to technically know about how to safely block out a fist fight so fist fight on a rooftop you know can you do it and if you can't how are you gonna learn it and how so i'm in my 40s how do you think i'm going to learn it do you think someone's going to take me aside and out of the goodness of their heart like you know train me in all that they know expecting nothing in return like again somebody maybe these people are also they're used to giving advice to someone who's 18 years old or something and they go you're young and good looking just go to hollywood and someone's going to take you aside and teach you what you know maybe someone who wants to sleep with you or something i don't know what the motivations are maybe because you're young and good looking there's some assumption that someone is going to share this kind of acknowledge you well guess what i'm a very self-confident slightly scary looking dude in my mid-40s nobody's going to help me nobody's going to work with me for free nobody's going to mentor me right how am i going to learn how to film a fist fight in rooftop and we can say this straight to ally to breezy the maker of that film cause i'm sorry the film was like on on a technical filmmaking level you can tell this guy doesn't know what to do with the camera you know there's no you know cinema in terms of cinematography the film is garbage it's not a well-filmed well edited well put together even the storyline or whatever you want to say the the narrative coherence is very poor in a lot of obvious ways it's it's a bad film i'm vegan on some level of course i sympathize with the messages trying to get a voice but i can't say it's a well-made film it's a poorly made film it looks like a film made by an amateur looks like exactly what it is a guy who went from youtube to professional filmmaking with no training and nobody to help him and none of those skills neither in terms of the storytelling the scripting the cinematography whatever it looks like a film made by a guy who could not put together a fist fight on a rooftop to save his life right um so you see you don't know me and you aren't really taking on any kind of risk right what if this is the wrong advice what if is this is the worst advice what if you are crippling me for the rest of my career because i didn't take two years to go to a community college and do a simple course in cinematography where they teach you the hands-on nuts and bolts of how to put the camera together and how to position it how to film that kind of scene how to set up the lighting how to set up the camera what angle the guy's face needs to be at relative to the camera when the fist goes by how to position the microphones when you're filming a dialogue like there are technical aspects to cinematography that come up again and again and again and you are telling me to just move on with my career without getting any of those those fundamentals like it's not hard for me to imagine that having incredibly negative long-term consequences where for the rest of my life i'm depending on other people to bail me out to help me with my own lack of confidence again and again and again and these i've talked this through with these people everybody i've talked like it's not just a one-way thing they don't just send me advice and that's it even though i'm engaging in some kind of socratic dialogue with them it seems very difficult to get other people to take seriously the stakes the risks that are involved in in giving this kind of advice you know i just say um i can talk about languages and talk about humanitarian work you know this way i give so many examples of people telling me like oh no you'll never be able to live in cambodia you'll never be able to study this language you'll never be able to go there and do that and where in some cases literally what i said to them was have you met me like do you know who you're talking to like my problem is not a lack of will and self-discipline like if anything my problem is that i'm so willing to give it 110 you know getting nothing out of it and ends in disaster you know like but no or i'm so committed i'm so willing to move to cambodia i'm still willing to move to cambodia and learn the cambodian language i'm willing to move to myanmar and learn some ethnic minority language you know the united me and my boy i'm willing to commit to all kinds of research broad projects and language study and humanitarian work and go out in the jungle i'm willing to do all these things i'm willing to give it 110 but then when other people disappoint me people or institutions let me down on the other side like my personal virtue alone can't carry this through to you know a successful conclusion that's the recurring light motif of my life that's the recurring tragedy of my life you know when i went to saskatchewan to study korean ojibwe and one of the reasons i keep saying korean ojibway is because if i just say cree you don't even know it's a language nahi away what these are indigenous languages there but yeah the courses i took they did deal with both korean and chile i have no problem hitting the books i have no problem memorizing like just the nouns and verbs that comprise language i have no problem with the grammar like i have no problem with this level of self-discipline i did that before i taught myself pali i can work in a jungle with a flashlight sleeping under a mosquito every night sleeping under a mosquito net every night and study a language i don't need a teacher and i don't need anyone to coddle me i don't want to help me right but okay so you have that level of of will and determination and self-discipline and talent and ability or whatever right okay but what happens when everyone else lets you down what happens when the problem is you can depend on yourself but you can't depend on anyone else nobody ever talked any of that through with me right they gave advice to me that might have been good advice for some other person in some other scenario people gave me advice that might be good for a really kind of lazy schlumpy stupid uh privileged student at oxford or cambridge someone born into tremendous wealth who's able to go to cambridge or oxford and study some obscure language and get a phd in some area of study they really have no talent or focus or dedication or work ethic themselves but they have all these wonderful people around to help you know paid for of course paid for it at a high price and why do people give that advice probably because that's who they're used to talking to that's who they presume they're giving advice to or maybe hey let's keep it all real that's who they used to be themselves that's who they were growing up that's how they came up and where most of their advice is going to revolve around you know your lack of work ethic your lack of will and determination and it's going to presume massive levels of kind of subsidy assistance and help coming from others you're surrounded by highly competent people assuring you through a phd program or ushering you through a language program or you know really even if you're talking about research in the field or humanitarian work that you have like a whole team of people like in some organization like uh med san san francie uh you know doctors at borders like that you're part of some united nations style organization overseas that does everything for you including your laundry and now all you have to do is show the hard work talent and determination to get results because everyone else has done all the all the thinking and worrying for you well that wasn't my situation right and again you know so you're giving advice or you don't know pardon me you don't know my situation you don't know me and you don't uh assume any sense of responsibility uh for the consequences what if your advice goes horribly wrong and you know the final outcome is that people's lives are ruined and you know not just for a short time i knew a girl of here i am saying girl again well was she 20 years old i don't know i knew when she was 19 20 or 21 years old at university in canada she was born and raised in a muslim family and she wanted to go to the university of toronto to study buddhism and put his philosophy that was her big interest in life and everyone at the university said good for you by the way yes she was extremely good-looking yes i had the option to sleep with her and ended up not doing it there's a reason why we had this at the series of bizarre conversations with her immaterial this story but yeah probably the fact that she was extremely good looking was part of her experience of this she gets to the university and everyone's happy to take her money and everyone's happy to tell her whatever she wants oh buddhism oh good we'll sign you up for the buddhism program just make sure you pay your money and select your courses and sit down in class and do the right thing and the whole time that she was at the university of toronto she was there for four years there was only one class on buddhism she was able to take she lost the one opportunity of her life they committed to her there was a program she was supposed to be signed up for in in buddhist studies or buddhism she instead got a general ba in religion and you know i knew exactly the situation the department that time who the professors were and what was what was going on she had to do a whole pile of courses on christianity judaism and islam as one of the professors said to me and uh i was interviewing this professor for an article he wanted to be quoted he said what the university of toronto has is a department of christianity masquerading as a department of world religions that they were pretending to teach courses in these in these other subjects when they really just didn't have the didn't have the staff didn't have the will didn't have the interest or what have you you know well look you know is that a small thing you know there is no responsibility for the outcomes the people who gave her this bad advice the people who said just sign up and pay this money which was i'm sure for her a lot of money i'm sure for her family a lot of money just devote four years of your life to this you can trust us and she did not get an education in buddhism she did not get an education in buddhist philosophy and she would have learned more not taking the courses at all and her personal situation exactly why i had a little bit of a friendship with her and again it was kind of like a doomed romance with her it was this question whether or not we're going to get get into bed with each other um you know the reality of her situation is she was rebelling against her muslim family she had been raised in the islamic faith and she wanted out she wanted something new something different and it's not that rare a lot of muslims are drawn to buddhism because they want something that still will give them some sense of moral purpose and self-discipline and sobriety there's certain kind of characteristics they want from a religion but they want something that will set them free from the oppressive irrationality of you know the the muslim faith well you know what's she going to do with the rest of her career what she could do with the rest of her her life personally like philosophically this was the philosophical education she wanted and she she didn't get right and you know she's supposed to go on and get some kind of job after getting this completely useless ba in religion is she going to become a chaplain for the canadian anglican church she couldn't become a christian missionary christian missionary or christian christian uh you know minister you know so you know i've been through similar situations in my own life you know again and again and again um at the deepest level i think the problem that we have is that we do not think of advice as a product stick with me here for one minute if i sell you a product right i am responsible forever for that product if someone sells me this and i turn it on and it lights on fire they're liable for the product right the damage done by the fact that the battery ignited on uh on fire and and so on and so forth i have even seen this with some miracle weight loss remedies when it is a product when it's something you can touch or it's something you can eat or something you can drink we have this idea of personal responsibility that if you made the product if you made if you endorsed the product if you made these claims about the product that you are responsible forever you know economically morally and otherwise as a matter of your personal integrity if you are going to endorse this product if you were going to sell this product you are responsible for the consequences forever and ever and for some reason in our culture and in our legal system and in our political system we do not think that way about advice what would it mean to live in a society where people are really responsible for the outcomes of their advice