Q&A: "What should I study in university?" #advicenobodywantstohear

as part of my unquestioned but equally unearned status as a guru on the internet the two most frequently asked questions i received are what book should i read next and what should i do with the rest of my life under the heading of what should i do with fresno life there are young people going to university for the first time there are middle age and older people going back to university after finding they're dissatisfied with their careers at midpoint or what have you there are women divorcing their husbands their husbands divorcing their wives their people in a midlife crisis and refreshingly once in a while i talk to more of a retired person someone 65 or something but who is nevertheless asking the tough questions of what they should do with the rest of their life and these two types of questions you deal with the same fundamental problem if you are in the position of the guru which is i don't know you like that i am very very careful in recommending a book to someone anyone at any given time and sometimes the people i recommend books to break down weeping and spit and curse and are very emotionally screwed up by the book i put in their hands but if so it's a book i'm recommending for you at this time at this moment because i think it's relevant to what what it is you're dealing with what is your you're going through right the question of what should be your major in university what should you study in college of my brothers was a very talented and very proficient guitarist and i have seen this guy with a pause switch between doing heavy metal guitar classical guitar and like spanish guitar spanish acoustic i've seen him do four or five different styles completely effortlessly like even the expression on his face didn't throw his brow this is someone who you know there's a question what is talent and what is proficiency whether it was through determination artwork repetition practice or through some innate uh combination of traits this guy had mastered the guitar do you know what he didn't have taste he didn't have good taste he wasn't sophisticated he was never even really aware of the most mainstream trends what was going on in new york city or los angeles and he didn't go to new york city or los angeles he remained an unsophisticated pumpkin and no matter how well you may be performing music if you are performing the wrong genre of music for the decade you're alive in you know how far can you possibly go now there are a lot of other characteristics it takes to be successful as a position especially if you are the one leading the band like if you're the guitarist and you're the guy making the decisions you're naming the band you're coming with the lyrics the song concepts the album concepts you're leading the tour or the personality on stage you could list off all the other traits you need to succeed he's an old man now this brother of mine some of my brothers are like 15 years older than me he's approximately 15 years old i really don't know exactly so he's an old old man now and if he throws a tantrum and sends me hate mail i'll deal with that bridge when i come to it it's possible he'll be upset by me talking about this but i think it is fair to say he was an example of someone who was lacking in all of the traits you would need to succeed aside from skill in playing the guitar like that he was great at right now i don't know how many people he got advice from like i don't know if he went you know like music school there was someone who was a tutor who trained people in planning and showed how well he played the guitar and someone in that position ever said to him wow you've really got what it takes but if that happened if that happened that person was wrong right they were making a judgment just based on how he auditioned how he played how he had that manual skill they weren't looking at the whole man and what i would call the whole cycle of life what it takes to be a creative artist in that field so you know would you lightly say to my brother sure you can be a musician and you know i mean to be fair to my brother he he put all his eggs in one basket very unvegan metaphor so he uh he committed himself to that totally for more than 30 years of his life for most of his adult life and teenage life you know that was all he cared about that was all he did that was the only way he tried to succeed and he didn't develop himself in in any other way so you know you might think if you were in the position of being the teacher or the tutor you might think that you do no harm in encouraging someone right you might think that you do no harm and encourage oh great you should be a musician you should go in that direction the reality is you have no skin in the game you are not making an investment in this kid you're giving the advice to you are not risking anything of yours right and we have a culture that celebrates encouragement right even if you are encouraging someone to take a long walk off a short bridge right like you're saying to someone oh yeah it's no problem just think positive just keep walking over that bridge and in reality they're walking over a cliff or they're walking over a bridge that's going to collapse under their feet that's just being real with you i think on the most elite institutional level that is what we see playing out again and again there was one example i saw in print that stays with me because it was it was in print so this was in something like a student newspaper at cambridge university cambridge england exactly what the newspaper were pamphlet was i don't know but it was an informal student-produced uh affair and the interview to one of the professors who was a guy i knew just from cocktail parties i i was married to a professor and whatever i laid eyes on this guy and he was an imbecile but he had a phd and he was a professor and so you know and so the the students interview said well you know what what do you think about this because all of these professors are encouraging us as students oh yeah yeah buckle down get your master's degree in anthropology get your phd in anthropology every year the university is cranking out more people with master's degrees and phds anthropology who are paying a lot of money to get this degree what what employment could any of them possibly have what can this lead to right well it's not just the case that he has no skin in the game like he takes no risk in saying to you like no no look let's also be clear the talent of playing the guitar it's something you can be observed empirically to some extent it's objectively real some of these judgments i mean you know do you have good taste in music that's hard to establish objectively right are you sophisticated you know in your view of of contemporary music your understanding of the market you understand the audience you know as a creative person do you come up with interesting ideas for songs it's not the same song everyone's heard before it's something really new and different these things may be hard to establish objectively but sure you know i remember i had a girlfriend very short-lived relationship i had a girlfriend who played a violin at this very high competitive level and she said that they had these tests for how accurately you were hitting the different notes in the scale like how quickly and accurately you could do certain things in the violin that appear like they stood there with something like a stopwatch i forget what it was but they measured how well you could hit all the marks you could you could do these things on violin so there were some measures we could say yeah you have what it takes to play the guitar you have what it takes to play the violin and this other person they don't have the dexterity in their hand or they don't have the ear for it they're they're tone deaf okay you know what there might be something verifiable empirically that way who can say to you that you have what it takes to be an anthropologist and if you guys don't know anthropology the concept of what an anthropologist is in england is totally different from france totally different from germany totally different from russia totally different from california new york like each of these little covens of anthropologists they have their own we know we know what the discipline of anthropology is we know what the science of anthropology is we know what makes a good anthropologist it's crazy you know so these professors these people who make money out of selling you you know they make money out of your enrollment out of your commitment out of convincing you to commit and spend your own money or spend your parents money right so on the one hand they take no risk they don't have any skin in the game if they give you a worthless degree if they sign you up for a life of unemployment or a completely hollow and meaningless education i'll talk more about that in a minute talking about employment now meaning of life is coming next don't worry we cover both of this new um they will actually profit by deceiving you they will actually profit by giving you bad advice it's not just that they will suffer from the lack of good advice this might be mediocre advice right so look you know if people ask you for advice about their sex life if someone says to you they just can't understand why it's so hard for them to get a boyfriend how why it's hard for them to get a girlfriend husband or wife do you really know them like that do you really know them well enough to say this is the problem this is the solution i was talking to a friend i've had for about eight years and i do know her though [Music] and it wasn't real entertaining she was complaining about some stuff in her personal i was like oh well here's your problem like you know not to boast i think i hit the nail right in the head but um and and she did reckon that she was like wow that's really good advice but it was good advice for her right this isn't this isn't good advice i can give to just anyone and everyone on the internet you know all right you know we seem to live in a culture increasingly because of internet guru dumb internet expertise the the monetization of advice expertise reflections on life on the internet we live in a world where we pretend anyone can give advice to anyone about their their love life without any knowledge of them so anyone can give you advice on your mental health on your weight your weight loss and exercise plan how to solve your problems you can just pay 49.99 and talk to someone by skype right now you know this kind of totally anonymous i mean it's really like um a one-way mirror right one person can see the other but the other person can't see back right like it's it's blind asymmetrically right oh yeah i can sit here and dish out advice joe guys all these guys my audience you feel you can trust me because you have been watching my life in detail for five years the internet i haven't been watching yours right this is uh what do you want to say a one-way mirror i think people say two-way mirror for that but it doesn't make that much sense whatever the appropriate idiom is on one side it's a window on the other side it's a it's a mirror all right so i'm going to read you guys this this uh this message yeah sorry if you can can't fill on the blank as much as we have that problem about people's romantic lives their love lives all right as much we have a problem with book reviews and recommended reading okay well the stakes are very high when a young person writes to you and says they're choosing what their major is going to be in university so i have a message from a member of the audience who writes in hi isil in your videos you mentioned how life is a lifelong learning journey and i truly sympathize with that i'm currently in my last year of high school and i'll begin university the year after my question is what should i pursue to learn what program and university should i take what career should i choose and finally how should i learn what method should i use and by the way university is free in the country where he lives all right so you can see i'm i'm anonymous in this so you know first of all let's just emphasize the things that are unknown to me sitting unknown in my throne as i sit here as a guru handing down this advice right i don't know you i don't know your talents i don't know your character this kid is in his last year of university he also may not know his talents and his character right he may not know himself that well it's hard to i don't know we're talking 18 years old something maybe 17 we don't know right something like that you may not know if you're even even something as obvious as guitar you maybe you could become good at guitar and you don't know yet i whatever it's the most obvious thing how would you know what you're good at at that age how would you know how would you know what your interests are and for most of us our youth is spent playing video games and uh watching movies and these other things that don't help you develop any kind of self knowledge of this kind any kind of analytical objectively verifiable awareness of what you're good at so wait so the first thing is i don't know you and especially i don't know you like that like i don't know you well enough to give you that kind of advice i don't know your city i don't know your country i don't know your culture and look i can sit here and launch into a critique of everything that's wrong with the study of anthropology at cambridge university england all right i can launch into a critique of everything that's wrong with the study of political science in canada right now this is not a complete list right okay but i'm aware just in the contrast between england and canada and france a lot of those critiques would not be equally true would not be valid in france france is a very different country in terms of what's wrong with the university system right so someone who so like let's say your specific interest isn't getting a phd in anthropology i don't know why and again earning money is one thing meaning of life is another whatever you want okay that's totally different in france and it's going to be very hard for you to talk to someone who has the in-depth knowledge of that field in france and who is willing to be honest with you about it right now it's a very brief parallel how easy is it to find someone who knows what they're talking about buddhism buddhist studies the you know university level study and teaching of buddhism someone who really knows what's wrong with that field and is willing to tell you the truth about it these are two different things because people have a religious fervor about this now look marxism communism a lot of these ideologies are not just buddhism and frankly there were people who were that [ __ ] up about anthropology like even though it's just their career or just their study there are people who have like sociology too you'd be amazed there are people from sociology is their buddhism it is their it is their marxism or whatever you know all those disciplines they have their own their own people in the field and a lot of those people whether this is wholesome or perverse they really get some kind of special thrill out of vindicating their own sense of importance by impressing it upon these teenagers who show up right so typical career academic whether it's the immediate professor or someone who's actually supposed to view career advice a special offer like a counselor right this person has been a loser their whole lives long nobody ever read their phd thesis nobody read the books they publish they go to conferences nobody in their field respects them within their own department they go to department meetings nobody in the department respects them everyone treats them like crap everything is denigrating for them every day their landlord doesn't respect them their parents don't respect them they're a loser their whole lives long and then once in a while they get to speak to a young person like you who is probably naive even if you think you're cynical their name and that young person says you know you're my hero what i want to do when i grow up is be just like you i want to have a phd in anthropology too or you know i want to have a phd in buddhism or i want to be an architect or i want to be a surgeon and save the lives of people with cancer but the point is sometimes it may be wholesome that they have this relationship to younger people who are just getting addressed in the field and they're they're chuffed they're proud they're pleased themselves a lot of the time it is not souls a lot of the time it is really perverse and there's a very strange ego trip on both sides of the equation so look uh i'm going to leave this person anonymous melissa and i both have a friend who's just gone through this in the last few months we have a friend who read my critique of the university system before he enrolled in university and who saw my past videos about what's wrong with university systems so what melissa can you call these out by memory but what we have a video just called the university is broken or something like this if you just oh so we have a playlist i'll have to add this to the playlist we have a playlist called university education comma critique of i'll put the link in the description now yeah the video i was really thinking of is titled the university is broken colon academically a drift book review so that's when i did very much with melissa she's on on camera with me for that one okay so there's there's quite a literature for you to see already on my my youtube channel talking about in depth and from different angles what is wrong with the university system melissa and i have a friend uh right now and he was aware of this he had both read what i'd written about universities and he'd seen these youtube videos i i think he'd seen every single one of them the youtube videos on this on this topic and he went to a good university in a country with a good university system so melissa's from detroit you understand i'm from toronto muslim detroit you know uh i have experienced universities all around the world right but he this is not detroit it's not oakland you know he's going somewhere on a shallow stereotypical level you'd think the university would be good and he has had to have the crushing realization like oh this is happening to me also like all the things isil has been saying are perverse and terrible and broken of the university system in general or globally or in the western world it's perverse and terrible and broken for me here also too that he also is going to endure this this terrible thing is happening also he also is in a position to have to fight against some of the same forces i've described myself fighting against my whole life including back when i was a teenager and i couldn't handle it so well as i do now right so look you know um i told melissa in anecdote a couple weeks ago it just came up we take a lot of long walks together that's why i have such a good tam we were taking a walk a couple weeks ago and the top of the conversation reminded me of this professor i had who was a very very elderly man he was past the age of mandatory retirement so you know universities they engage in some jiggery-pokery this way he was somehow teaching the course after his his retirement so this professor he looked like he was 70. and in class one day he was telling an anecdote about his own father who was closer to 100. so it's a funny story in many different ways but this is an old man telling an anecdote about an even older man and both of these guys were born in england and then came over to canada i think the son migrated first and later the father followed in his in his retirement and um so the the father the guy who's about a hundred his eyes are failing and he's now um too far gone to drive a car anymore he's losing the ability to drive safely and the sun says well you know dad and as the guy tells the story a lot of people are like that he he apparently speaks to his own father in a somewhat childish voice he lapses into a childish way you know dad you could take the street car it's perfectly normal here in toronto you you don't have to drive yourself around everyone else and the father really crosses his arms and pouts his lip out and froze about he doesn't like this idea he said well if you take me the first few times like if we go together i'll try it like he's really afraid to take the streetcar and the son doesn't know why so is it you know this guy's 100 years old is he afraid of crime is he afraid of being mugged or something like you know does he have some idea in his head about how dangerous it is to to get on the streetcar and um father and son get on the streetcar and you know how it is a lot of people when they get older they start going deaf and they speak more loudly to people to compensate for their own deafness and they don't say inappropriate things at a very high volume i've had this happen in the theater several times live theater and you know there's an elderly person doesn't realize how loudly they're talking you know someone next to them so in a in a very loud voice that everyone else on the street car can hear um when his father hobbles up to the driver and first comes onto the streetcar he says loudly i want a seat next to the stove this guy was so old and it had been so long since he'd been on a streetcar he imagined the streetcar had a coal burning stove that both powered the streetcar right and heated the passengers so like it was that a memory from the 1880s like what streetcar was he thinking of what um what was he imagining you know all right i'll come to the point of the story just a moment understandably i got a question from the audience will the new book no more manifesto must be published as an e-text as a kindle digital book no that's available on paper only so it's over 600 pages you have to have it as a book you can hold in your hands and the advantage will be you can make your own markings in the in the margins you can add your own uh index and table of cons all right why am i telling you this story that professor over seven years old he was the best professor i ever had and he reflected a whole set of cultural values and the idea of what it means to be a professor and what it means to be an educator that was left over from approximately world war one like this was really a different world um so that i had that class in the year 2001 um for various reasons i remember that so everybody in that story is deceased by now there's no chance any of them are alive um so you know again if you're counting back about a hundred years from 2001 all right maybe not 1880 i don't know maybe it was a streetcar made in the 1880s that was still in use in the 1920s i don't know i don't know what the story was there it wasn't but you know um the change in the culture of education the change in the culture of the educators themselves from one generation to the next the significance of that cannot be exaggerated now am i simply saying to you that they were the good old days and they're gone no you know in the old days universities were only inhabited by men no women universities were very tightly bound to a notion of the liberal arts the notion of preparing a gentleman to have a career in commerce um the idea of a being a gentleman there were a lot of um civic virtues public virtues qualities of character and so on that have now become laughable there ceased to be thought of it all in the plan of education i met one guy he'd now be a hundred he was younger when i talked to him he described to me his education going into a very conservative liberal arts college this wasn't that it was so many years ago it's probably the 1950s but the university itself had attitudes left over from the 1910s or something and you know um he was forced to learn to swim i thought that was bizarre so your university forestry and they said yes they had a list of abilities you're supposed to have as like a young as a young gentleman like you're supposed to be able to fight in a sword fight swim across a river like they had like this list of things you have to be able to ride a horse you know just skills you need before you can call yourself a graduate of this institution and and get on with your your career so you know a lot of those things were bound up in sexist and racist and religious rhetoric and ideals that you know marked them for destruction and i mean again if you if you just go back to those old days and you look at what was taught in a course on ethics and many universities had a required course on ethics that was a very common thing in people's days all young gentlemen should take the required course introduction to ethics that those days are gone right but as as positive as that may sound look at what they were actually teaching and you will be horrified look at the contents of those old courses on ethics and you know my field really is politics look at what was taught by in under the heading of politics they'll give you nightmares also so i'm not uh glorifying the the irretrievable past year you're saying before it was good and now it's bad however if you talk about a university professor born and raised in the 1920s a university professor raised in the 1940s university professor from the 1960s from the 1980s like the degree of cultural change among these elites it's impossible to exaggerate all right so the critique of university education on on this channel i've already provided a link in the description you can watch the videos did in the past i believe the critique of the university system is in no more manifestos my new new book there might be a little bit in future of an illusion there might be a little bit in there but really it's in no more manifestos that you get it in writing this very very passionate warning about how broken and corrupt and evil the university system is and so again talking about this friend melissa and i have i mean he got to read that stuff being discussed in theory and then he's shocked to find himself you know living through it in practice i think depending on how old you are when you read that that book no more manifestos new book i could imagine some people thinking oh well you know he's exaggerating for dramatic effect and no this is a a deadly serious critique of what's wrong with the university system the way it beggars and bankrupts families the way it shatters individual lives the way it really manipulates the hopes and education of the pardon me the hopes and expectations of young people who are seeking an education and of course the most painful part to see of all i was saying this to a friend of mine is a university professor right now um the saddest part of all is the people it hurts the most are the ones who are the least cynical you know saying this friend of mine said you know the saddest thing to behold is the people who turn up 100 cynical and they say okay i'm just here to get my degree in nursing i'm just here to get my degree as an x-ray technician just here to get my degree as a dentist so i can make money and get out people have these kinds of mercenary motives where they just regard the university as complete [ __ ] as they're there to get this degree to make money and they regard everything else as horseshit as a swindle you know those people are damaged by the experience of university of the least and the people who show up and who really care either they really care because they want to make the world a better place in that sense or they care because they actually want to learn the content of what's being taught just someone who really cares about poetry maybe it's someone who cares about philosophy maybe someone cares about politics but somebody cares about history maybe it's someone who passionately loves the japanese language i mean it's not necessarily something i sympathize with but whatever it is the students who show up with sincere good intentions who care about the content of the education they are the most deceived they are the most damaged of all and university for them becomes a life-altering uh tragedy so look with all the caveats have been stated i don't know you i don't know your circumstances i don't know your situation this is what i have to say about what you study in university do not go to university until you are such a machine that all you need is the piece of paper with the assignment on it and your library card and you can go to the university do the research write the essay bang it out and know it's publishable you know whether you can get it published it's another question that's all through nepotism and being friends with the editor of the journal when you are at the level of expertise that you can write that paper on your own terms and stuff it down your professor's throat say i don't give a [ __ ] if you disagree with it i don't give a [ __ ] if you're a marxist and i'm an anti-marxist i know how to do the research and prove my case and back it up whatever the field like and by the way there are marxists in all fields you have a marxist in economics you know marxist in religious studies english literature anything you know chinese is a language you might think you're taking a non-political subject and you can have crazy marxist professors if you go to a conservative christian school you can have crazy conservative christian professors i mean there's people for people pretend that it's only the left-wing universities that are crazy no mormon universities are crazy catholic universities are crazy there are conservative universities and they're almost all run by religious maniacs they deal different person so i think the real question you have to ask yourself again read the book you'd be surprised you will be surprised how many pages of no more manifestos are about the university system it is not dealt with briefly it's dealt with great passion and vigor in very in great depth with a very trench and uncompromising tone because i i care about it tremendously so one of the reasons i'm very glad i wrote the book now and not 10 years from now when maybe the memory of university would be more more distant and wishful for me okay um so the question becomes what are you going to do between now and when you enroll in university because i assume in your last year of high school you are not at that level of self-sufficiency or you're an auto diet act you can do everything yourself without relying on the professor to hold your hand and teach you because guess what when you get to university nobody's going to teach you how to do the research nobody's going to teach you how to uh write an essay if you go into something that relies on math if your older brother didn't teach you how to do the math no wait the university will teach you how to do the math like you know the fields that rely on knowledge of math or chemistry if you don't have an independent tutor or your father or uncle or brother or something if you don't have someone helping you you are just going to sit down in a theater with 300 students you know doing multiple choice exams and a lot of the students are cheating now huge number of them are cheating but things like that too if you haven't already gotten to a level where you can do the math yourself and now you're showing up just to enjoy the lecture and hear the professor's opinion on that don't go so then the question becomes what are you going to do for a few years before you go where you you will go to university but not now not yet um and i'm not going to get into the video because that's not the answer to the question you asked i think in my own life you can imagine how different it was for me to go university directly out of high school which i did at one time and have my heart broken and be crushed and be totally unprepared for the stupidity maliciousness and viciousness of my professors it's just mind-blowing for me nobody told me that nobody told me hey guess what you know this um your relationship with your professors is not even the relationship of a prisoner to a jail guard it's more like the relationship of a prisoner to a cellmate who is trying to rape you rob you stab you like it's it's this vicious it's terrible it was absolutely terrible and you know my experience in high school was so bad and everyone told me don't wait once you get to university it's it's better i got to university and it was it was worse totally unprepared um for the viciousness of what i encounter and i'm totally unfair of the extent to which everything i wanted to learn everything i wanted to know it was not in any way going to be touched on in the courses even something as obvious as plato oh you want to know the philosophy of plato you got to take your library card and go to the library and work alone because even a course that is titled philosophy of plato is not going to teach to you when you get into things more obscure you know that was really cold and chilling and shocking and you know my parents were not going to help me my parents were insane still are you know the extent to which i was alone i had to develop and become an auto dead act you know okay what if you're a kid who wants to learn cambodian i was what if you're a kid who wants to learn something a lot less commonly taught than than plato you know okay what then so that was that was a great horror at that age so here's the thing decades later right i went back to university when i had already published peer-reviewed papers when it already developed to a massive extent as an intellectual doing research doing writing and doing all the things you need to do as universities did when i was already advanced enough to teach courses i mean i never taught a whole course but i have given university level lectures i've given you university level lectures to university students i've also given them to gathered professors where everyone in the audience is a professor i've done university level teaching and you guys know in china i was teaching uh english at the university level that they they were final year university students it was what it was um so you know i have all these skills i have all this preparation and i'm totally mature and detached and understand the rules of the game and many of the professors are talking to me as an equal not as a student like they're commiserating with me as if i'm one of them rather so being treated in a very different way and guess what it was still tragic it was still heartbreaking still everyone in the system lied to me manipulated me ripped me off right and the other thing that changed in my life was that i had parents who up until very late i just don't want to make this into an autobiographical video but like so you back in 1997 to the year 2000 you know my parents were saying to me you have to earn money immediately or we're going to kick you out like you're going to be poor on the street we're not going to support you they would say this really nasty stuff pushing me around insulting me and intimidating me like you got to get out and work at starbucks it was really horrible and i've talked about that since before my father died i talked about it with him and um i've talked about it with my mother who's still alive now you know that was not a trivial thing in my life i mean it was really a major source of stress and that continued all the way up to during the life of this youtube channel when i suddenly had to quit my university degree here and move to what ended up being kunming china now it's a longer story how i ended up a good man it's a long story but at that time so that's over five years ago but not much more than five years five years ago creeping up on six years ago when that happened the reason why it happened was that my father said to me he had absolutely no money to pay for my tuition anymore intuition in canada is like five hundred dollars not a lot okay say five thousand dollars but it's not like the united states of america it's not hundreds of thousand dollars my father said he had no more money for my tuition and he was kicking me out and i had to go and get a job immediately um teaching english in japan you know this is this is what my father decided pulling the rug out from under me sabotaging my university education again these are two different times i went to university and my parents ruined it for me and you know um like you know whatever i took a philosophical attitude towards it you can go back and watch the youtube videos you can see how i cope with it i mean you can see in some ways i'm under emotional strain and you can also see the writing i did during the period many of the essays i researched and wrote for university that many different people said were works of genius and professors not all professors like me but some professors were tremendously impressed by the research it did in the essays wrote that time is what it is so you know you can go back um with that level of preparation and you will still fail because the system is broken it really is that bad um [Music] but the ultimate product of your education is you right so even if you presume failure on their path like even if you if you just acknowledge the university system is totally broken and there's no way to succeed and there's no way to win you still have a choice of whether you're going to lose on your terms or you're going to lose really being a victim of a system that you are just too young and defenseless to fully understand so that is my advice including this video you asked me what you should major in and my answer is read my book watch my other videos on this playlist dealing with just this subject and then recognizing that we're now going through a period of time in which the university system is utterly corrupt utterly broken utterly dishonest it's really working against your interest you will need a few years in between the conclusion of high school and the beginning of university to develop yourself even if it is just so that you have the skills that you need to succeed in a university context that is fundamentally hostile to you that is fundamentally inimical to you in which your professors are not helping you your professors are ripping you off sabotaging you exploiting you insulting you emotionally breaking you down and in terms of your career progress trying to hold you down now that's what you got to be prepared for um i would compare this talking to a young person entering the military you know be prepared for being robbed you know in your bunk bed by the other guys in your unit i've read a lot of stories about that literally being beaten up by other guys on your army base having a commander or a commanding officer who's a terrible person he may beat you up and rob you himself of counsel be prepared for the absolute worst be tough enough and resilient enough and selfish enough that you are not expecting any of those people to help you you're not expecting anything to be your friends you're expecting them all to be your enemies and you can still succeed at the training you can still get the skills down you can still be excellent in your capacity within the military assuming total hostility from all the other people in the institution whose job description says that they're to help you but actually they're you're they're they're your most intimate enemies put it that way they're the enemies on your side the enemies sleeping in the same barracks with you all right now you know if you say that to someone who's going to the army and then as it happens you know [Laughter] they're they're they're with some wonderful guys their commanding officer is a great guy the others great you know you went in prepared right if there's one person at your university who is kind and patient and helpful to you you know i'm i'm happy for you but i've got to tell you i've been lied to and ripped off and and mistreated even by the people whose description is counselor you know i mean even by the people you know who have a sign on their door saying we're here to help and they're not they're not there to help and i i began this with the kind of parable of my brother the guitarist and the sort of subtle way in which just out of a culture of encouragement someone who's a guitar tutor might say to him hey you're really skilled you should have occurred playing guitar and that could lead to someone's ruin that encouragement right well the way in which authority figures in a university ruin your life again sadly it is much more perverse than that so i think that's enough for this for this one video um [Music] if you were to ask me the question you know can university education make you stronger can university education make you smarter all this conflict and hostility i describe you know well couldn't it be like for the best like steel sharpened steel this this kind of challenge only if when you go in you're already smart enough you're already strong enough and like i mean i'd say that about the military too if you are the toughest guy in your unit right it's fine for other guys to try to stare you down right and you can you can laugh it off and you you get into fist fights other guys you may laugh it off together the next day you know like maybe that's your experience too right if you go in and you are tough enough to be a contender that's one thing but that kind of conflict that kind of hostility as easy as it is for a hollywood movie to only show you the aspect of it making strong people stronger it also takes the weak and makes them weaker and um [Music] the particular type of strength and resilience you need before you go into that university context although i don't know you and i don't know what you want to study i don't even know what country you're in or what city you're in or what your institutional options are i can say with total confidence there's no way your parents have equipped you with that and there's no way the experience of high school education uh would have given you those tools uh to succeed not because of the institution not thanks to the nurturing helpful nature of the institution but despite the institution where you know you are really going in with the understanding that sadly um the professors the administrators they really are a kind of aristocracy and you are in the position of either being a humble or a rebellious peasant um