Sneako: Tolerance is a Lie.

i wasn't so lucky if i had some crazy
hospital bill there's a good chance i'd be in rehab or dead once drugs loses the taboo which is going to be soon because it's getting more legal we got to collectively change the way we scare kids into staying sober because all that fear-mongering just makes it seem more fun you shouldn't be afraid of drugs frying your brain sober isn't smarter sober's playing the game honestly you should stay sober because the alternative is cheating you're like that kid who jail broke his ipod touch to hack flappy bird you know yeah you got the high score but you ain't earn it and you know it definitely not a fun way to play this but for you guys out there that want to just get a high score and then share it with your friends and and just trick your friends into thinking that you're good at flappy bird then you can go ahead and use this trick i want to warn the kids rotation thinking about taking a puff because nobody explained this to me the worst part about drugs are the benefits you got nothing to do with the health defects what makes drugs dangerous is knowing the cheat codes to the game doing as many drugs as i do i probably don't recommend them i don't recommend them to anyone if you're sober i don't recommend starting to do drugs because it just changes your perspective on how you approach life but i know the cheat codes i can't unlearn them no amount of yoga and meditation will make you forget how [ __ ] awesome being high is that feeling is attainable without drugs but it's just so much easier best feeling i've ever experienced in life was sex on mali i bet those white guys that spend months climbing mount everest and then make it to the top and take that pick with ice in their beard they felt at the top of the mountain what i felt in that hotel at 3am but those white guys earned it they prepared for weeks and suffered through freezing temperatures i was just bored on a thursday why climb an ice mountain when you can snort one now every day is a constant battle with my brain because i'm a dopamine fiend dopamine is a cool way of saying idiot i'm just inherently not like the successful people i know the people i know on track to be multi-millionaires if they're not already are all stone cold sober you believe that you think i'm exaggerating but i'm not at all the guys i mentioned are all early 20s and won't even sip a beer doing as many drugs as i do i probably don't recommend them i don't recommend them to anyone [Music] a lot of people will tell you that we live in a society that is more tolerant than ever towards drug addicts i'm here to tell you the exact opposite i think we live in a society that's based on a kind of apartheid apartheid is not tolerance all right when you have black people living in one part of society white people living in another part of society this is not that one group is tolerated the existence of the other right they're living separately and unequally right can say that you tolerate drug addicts meaning what meaning you're not actively trying to capture them arrest them put them in prison be a bit like saying you know in south africa white people tolerated black people just because they're not trying to commit genocide against them if you tell me you tolerate drug addicts when you hire a babysitter what's the first thing you need to know about that babysitter that they're not a drug user that they're not a drug addict and if if you hire a babysitter when they are 16 years old which is common in our culture for whatever reason to hire people as teenagers to babysitters rather than in their 40s 50s or 60s i think on some level you know they might not be a drug addict at 16 but you keep employing them for a couple years when they're 17 or 18 they might become a drug addict they might become an alcoholic and you're still watching for it because when you hire someone to be a babysitter you are hiring them to sleep on your couch to eat in your kitchen to take care of your children you are trusting them with all the most delicate things in your life and the one thing above all else that makes them untrustworthy is drug addiction consciously or unconsciously as we live in a society that tolerates more and more drug use and more and more drug addicts i think in reality we become a society that is more apprehensive of and more judgmental of the most subtle indications that someone is a drug user or a drug addict because the moment we perceive that about them it's like their name is scratched off a list right they're removed from the social cast of people who can be police officers who can be pilots or who can even be babysitters and they are relegated to the social cast of people who can never be trusted sneako is a guy who's using a lot of drugs and in the past five years has used a lot of drugs and the most pathetic thing of all is he thinks he's getting away with it he thinks other people can't see it in him right but i think it's something we've all become very cynical about it's something we've all become very well informed of the subtle signs when you look in someone's eyes or you hear their voice that they are a drug user or that they are a drug addict and sometimes you may be wrong you may know someone who lost a lot of weight because they got on a vegan diet you may know someone who lost a lot of weight because they got malaria they got some illness that resolved them losing weight you may know someone who got skinny for some totally unrelated reason right but you may respond to those things apprehensively with the false and negative assumption that they're on drugs flipping it around you know there's the whole question of what you're not doing with your life what you're not cultivating because you are on drugs because those are the people you spend your time around that's what you spend your time doing those are the excuses you carry with you and you live with right i had an older brother and he talked to my dad about his struggle to be taken seriously his struggle to be respected at the university uh by a professor who was basically his supervisor in getting a master's degree so i heard about this through broken telephone my brother complains to my dad and then my dad tells the story to me so you know there's some level of reinvention and remixing that goes on along the way but i said to my father look you're telling this story in a way that just fundamentally doesn't make any sense because my brother the brother you're talking about the minute he walks into a room the minute he opens his mouth the minute he starts talking the first impression absolutely everyone has about him is that he's a burnout the first impression he makes on everyone his professors included is that he is a long term drug addict and in this case the first impression is dead right because that's what he is and he can get a master's degree and he can get a phd but nobody is ever going to hire him to be their babysitter nobody would ever feel comfortable walking onto an airplane talking to my brother feeling happy and safe and secure that they're going to be a passenger with this guy flying the plane you think oh my god this guy's the pilot if this guy's the pilot i don't want to get on this plane if my brother somehow ended up putting on a police uniform and interrogating you the minute you heard his voice or started interacting with them whoa this this guy's a cop you can tell we talk about tolerance but i think all of us are becoming more and more sensitive to and more judgmental about and more apprehensive of the smallest signs of lifelong drug addiction and then there's the question of all the books you're not reading all the stuff you're not learning because this is what you do with your time this is what you do with your life all right sneako speaks fairly eloquently about the way in which the drug high becomes the only thing he thinks is worth living for and it's pathetic he says he's he's straining to be profound he says that he thinks he could get the same kind of high the same kind of ebullient joy by climbing a mountain and getting to the top of the mountain and taking a selfie with icicles in his beard now he's wrong he's never done it he's never tried i doubt he's ever talked to anyone who's done that kind of work it's just wrong but he imagines that he could get the same kind of high out of that that he gets out of having sex while on mind altering drugs okay and he admits that he is motivated to and he lives his whole life just for that kind of high the problem he sees with drugs is that they make it too easy for him to achieve it so my my brother who went into the master's degree program and was so disrespected by his professor what kind of person instead would walk into the room and talk to that professor and and push respect and earn that professor's respect and demand that professorship put that professor in a position where he can't help but respect you right it's not just sobriety it's not just not being a drug addict right it would be the accumulation of many years of reading and research and questioning right that adds some kind of weight some kind of ballast to the things you say and the questions you ask now i've had the experience many times and it often amuses me where i walk into a room there's nothing extraordinary about my appearance in the particular room and i ask a very simple question that doesn't give away really anything about my depth of knowledge of how much research i've done i may have done more research than the professor i'm asking the question to but the professor himself or herself and everyone in the room picks up on whoa this guy knows what he's talking about one of the most dramatic i was in thailand this was the first time i ever met professor gonbridge so gombrich is a famous and infamous figure in buddhist studies very powerful academic very famous published books phd and so on um you know a situation where it's a big crowd and you have to walk up to the microphone and which turn to speak at a microphone to ask that's a question and and i don't know i don't know if gomberg thinks he has a poker face or keeps he he thinks he keeps his uh cards close to his chest but there had been one question after another that he was totally exasperated with he was openly showing that he thought these people were idiots and he said like and in one case he actually reproached the person asking the question he basically said he would have never gotten a question this stupid at a muslim conference with muslim scholars he was only getting this question with buddhist scholars interesting moment so he's he's openly exasperated anyway i stand up and ask a question it's not it's not directed at garbage directed someone else and he got out of his seat he was so excited and he pointed at me and he asked people who is that who's that guy that guy he was right he was right and uh you know we met after the after the proceedings were over we had dinner that night and we became we became friends for what was it one year two years before he decided he hated me which is in character for gambridge he's that he's that kind of guy if he'll write his autobiography would be a long series of uh short intense friendships followed by years of hatred anyway i don't i don't hate gobridge back but yeah quite a quite a carrot and i once i once uh got a story from my dad from my father where he was giving a lecture at a university that i attended there were 30 or 40 people in the crowd and he said to me when i was over he said you have no idea how terrifying it is to give a lecture when you are in the audience because he said even if you're not saying anything even when you're just silent i can tell from the look in your eyes i can tell that you're following the argument of what i'm saying and i can tell that you're scrutinizing it and that you know what's what's wrong with it you're finding fault even if you're silent and he said in the other students in the audience with that particular lecture this was true he said the other students the audience they're sitting there like cows they you know the look in their eyes like cows uh chewing cut i have given a few university lectures myself so i i have some experience i have some experience with this uh with the child the cows chewing cut inside of it i definitely have uh some experience with that you know and i just i want to be fair at all sides here the drug addict thing the background with drugs and alcohol it's not the only reason why a professor why a bureaucrat why a policeman why an authority figure will dismiss and denigrate your opinion i have a lot of experience with good-looking women and back when they were good-looking or cute teenagers they got real used to just walking into a room and throwing a tantrum and complaining making no effort at all to make their own perspective respectable or respected they just go in and pour out their feelings and complain and kick their feet and you know act like a kid promise it didn't stop when they were kid right they kept doing that at 14 15 16 17 18 28 right and nobody ever sat them down and talked and said look if you want to walk into the room and push respect if you want to walk in the room and earn other people's respect you know this is how you have to do it this is this is the level of effort you have to make right but the thing is for guys like sneako for guys like my brother okay even if my brother gets a master's degree anybody gets a phd okay i think they can never overcome the cognitive deficit they have brought in their lives through drug addiction i don't think they can ever overcome comment all right there is no way you can act there's no mannerism you can consciously cultivate or dissimulate that will cover up the fact that you're a crackhead okay being a burnout talking in that strange monotone whether it is from lsd or psychiatric medicines or marijuana or mdma or all of the above and with most of these guys it's a combination of all the above it's not something you can dissimulate your way out of it's not something you can just make an effort to overcome and all the years you spent partying all the hours you spent making excuses for your drugged up friends right there's no way now you can turn that around and fill up that time with the kind of reading questioning self-cultivation self-development that would make you the kind of person who walks into a room and earns that respect there's no way now you can make yourself into somebody i would hire to be my babysitter [Music] maybe we can we can practice yes