Talent is Scarce: the Personal is Political.

whether you are talking about your
personal life your political life or your professional life i cannot emphasize enough to you this slogan talent is scarce i think that all of grow up in a school system that conditions us to expect another 40 people to be crowded into our lives every september every year you gotta gonna have a whole new circle of friends and a whole new circle of enemies and a number of new strangers trying to eat lunch with you you know we're conditioned to regard our colleagues fellow human beings really as disposable really as as easily replaced and i think we're we're very reluctant to learn this lesson as to just how scarce talent can be we will blame everything else every conceivable factor will be playing before blaming this one and then taking responsibility for our disregard the importance of it you know so we talk about people's personal lives people are very ready to believe oh the problem is i'm too fat the problem is if only i could get some more exercise in the gym if only i could be more muscular or you know more attractive in this sense you know you might think it takes a lot of humility you know to to see yourself that way it really doesn't i'm sorry but incredibly shallow incredibly stupid people with very little thought are able to be self-critical in that way i think it's much more difficult for us to be critical of the society we live in as a whole and then see our place in it and then think strategically and think about our own kind of responsibility in it also you know um just every day my girlfriend and i go for long walks together we have long conversations and they sometimes remind me of people i knew in the past um that i've forgotten or haven't haven't thought about for years and you know we had a conversation about the way in which basically uh the world has gotten worse and worse i get email from fans and viewers the channel who seem to feel that the world is in some kind of terrible decline politically culturally and otherwise and you know melissa had also heard from from a friend this way and one of the things i said back was no you know young people today have no idea what it was like for my generation how utterly alone we were when we went through high school when we went through university you know i didn't know a single other intellectual period i didn't know a single other like-minded intellectual i mean even on really mainstream issues in 21st century politics i never met and knew a single other person who cared about first nations baltics american indian politics native american these kinds of things and i was i was out there looking i never knew a single other person who cared about ecology and ecological politics and i joined the green party i gave lectures at the green party conference meeting i was very charismatic and memorable you know uh person there i went and i lobbied city hall on ecological issues i didn't just stay in my room playing video games or something i didn't stay cut off from society i was out mixing in society i remember the one that really got to me i never met a single other person who cared about the philosophy of plato aristotle any of the big names from ancient greece let's just say generally and i was i was taking those courses i took one course um at a 400 level you know the advanced final year course they actually the university actually made an exception to the rules for me to take that course because i wasn't in the right way i didn't meet a single other person you know interested in and you know my interest in life required and involved um cooperation with other people just learning a language involves participating with other people the types of creative art i wanted to pursue including filmmaking including youtube videos you know involve collaboration with cooperation with with other people i didn't choose to do something solitary in my life like like being a painter my aspirations whether humanitarian political linguistic educational otherwise they all involved and required you know working together with other people and i've grown up with this crushing awareness that talent is scarce that you have to make the best use possible of the few people who have something in common with you have some common ground with you or who have some capacity to sympathize with you and your ambitions in life so branching off from just mentioning you know i understand why certain friends in my life and certain friends in melissa's life happen to be writing into us lately saying oh well the world is getting worse and worse and i've been hearing a lot of complaints about social media like tinder and uh twitter and tick tock and the way in which this is destroying the intellectual capacity of uh the american mind and the the western european mind and so on and of course you know i i understand what it is there what it is they're complaining about the people who who say those things but they can't imagine and i would even say if you're my age if you're now 40 years old 50 years old six years old it may be very hard for you now to imagine even reflecting on your own life for you to really think back to when you were a teenager and think about how alone you were how utterly lacking in the kinds of alternative intellectual perspectives and personal experiences you were that today we can take for granted that today we can access through through youtube through numerous other media as well uh the the the people who talk to me the people who've met me and contacted me through this youtube channel you know through patreon through whatever messaging service you know they are for that reason less alone when i packed up my bags and moved to cambodia i didn't know anyone who'd gone to cambodia i didn't know what he wanted done i didn't know anyone who does humanitarian work of any kind anywhere you know not cambodia specifically not lost i had not met and spoken to anyone who had any relevant experience i did meet and speak to the couple of professors i had in asian studies and buddhism but they were they were guys who'd spent their whole careers standing around in front of a chalkboard not going anywhere or not doing anything and not having any aspirations in life beyond having a comfortable income you know frankly ripping off one classroom full of students after another year after year as those students go thousands and thousands of dollars in the debt and learn absolutely nothing that will ever earn them an income and so on and so forth it's really sorry it's quite a morally charged situation even if it's not so intellectually stimulating being in the classroom being around to professor that but i remember i did i did talk to those guys now you know today obviously i would have my fingertips even if there were no interaction i'd be able to watch and hear the reflections for people who've been through that you know so on and so forth and you know you guys may have noticed here that i'm using the hashtag and the subtitle you know that the personal is political and you know the the political is his person there was a guy i met um on facebook many many years ago and you know the way i met him is telling i was sent a facebook message from a complete stranger saying stay away from this guy he's dangerous he's right-wing he's romantically or sexually involved with teenage women who are much younger than him he's some kind of terrible sexual predator i received this message and the person obviously had copied it and pasted it and said i the person sent the message i'd never heard from before never spoken before and at this point i was not a famous youtuber i wasn't even famous within veganism i didn't have fame i didn't have microfame the total number of views in my youtube channel was you know practically zero um but i had a blog that was quite well known there were a lot of a lot of vegan activists who knew my work as as texts i was well known within buddhism but as tara vadabotta studies and some other things i've done in the past this is a real turning point in my life where i was i was just getting started on youtube and you know this was not the first time i'd seen this happen even though i hadn't yet been through what in the years to follow i would go through again and again and again of people making up stories about my sex life people denouncing me publicly on the internet you know i i hadn't i hadn't been through that yet um but i i'd seen it already just on what is it tumblr you know the vegan activist of tumblr and there were people who went after me and tried to blacken my name on tumblr who would later do it again on on youtube so i i had actually already seen this i've ever been aware this couple times so i received this anonymous message saying don't talk to this guy he's a terrible person like he pretends to be a vegan activist but really these are his sexual political models and i'd never heard of that guy before either there'd never been any contact between us whatsoever so i get this vegeta thing oh i'll bet he's doing something right i'm going to look him up you know he and i became friends for a couple of years um and i think you're about to hear why we became friends and how he became friends i never heard of this guy before i get this one message saying he's this terrible despicable human being and making all these damning allegations about his sex life and you know rather than me being prejudiced against them or being you know i was like oh oh i'll look this guy up i found his back in those days people talk to you on facebook i think today they really don't it's very hard to talk to a complete stranger on facebook by the way that includes me if any of you guys in the audience try to talk to me on facebook i'm not gonna talk to you so i'm part of the problem here too but i mean social media has become less social in the passage of 20 years but just even in the last five years i would say everybody's more defensive and distant and not without reason anyway so i touched this guy and you know he i saw what he was doing on facebook he was making different kind of edgy political statements about veganism and you know he was saying that you don't have to be left-wing to be vegan and he wasn't left-wing you know and there was some kind of culture clash between him as a relatively conservative vegan and the far left-wing vegans who who surrounded him so this guy he had a face that looked like an italian american movie star and he was a bodybuilder and he probably made himself look more italian i'm not saying this is intentional but like a lot of bodybuilders he was doing the kind of fake tan thing so yeah i never asked you know he had this kind of you know he was rubbing himself with some kind of tanning fluid or something you know a lot of bodies bodybuilders do that to show off uh show off the curvature of their their body more impressively so that gave him this kind of artificial bronzed or dark brown look it's very handsome face and he was a male bodybuilder who did stripping heterosexual stripping not for a living not as a career but kind of like every other weekend he'd go and he he danced four women at a at a strip club and i think he sometimes also did uh what are they called sorry we say stag parties what's that what's the opposite of doe party you know where women like women are celebrating it's normally that a woman is getting engaged to be married and they have a bunch of a bachelorette party thank you so he would do these kinds of things that someone says so the guy is very good looking not just his body but his face he's vegan i knew all kinds of details about his life and so on and you know i mean one of the main things he talked to me about again and again was just how hopeless and depressing his personal life was his sex life was that he was all alone and he felt he was never going to be with anyone and so on and so forth he talked about the isolation and misery he felt he was politically isolated he was morally isolated like he regarded people who ate meat as immoral you know he was also isolated in terms of drugs and alcohol i mean he didn't want to be part of that kind of party culture um [Music] one of the things that's a little bit unusual about him and i remember joking about this with him i said dude you are the most fastidiously clean heterosexual i've ever seen in my life like he was one of these guys where his house reminded me of my grandmother's house the interior decor and the way in which everything was spotless and strangely colored it was this really weird hokey interior decor style and like a lot of vegans he was taking care of animals there were like rescued animals oh this animal got hit by a truck and then he nursed it back it was part of his kind of moral crusade so again for a lot of women this is the ultimate guy he is the macho man with a marshmallow middle you know he's soft on the inside but tough and masculine on the outside he's you know nursing these animals and there's not a single hair there's not a single dog hair or cat hair or i forget if he was taking care of chinchillas or whatever there's no hair on any couch or any surface something like he was like oh yeah i vacuum every day he vacuumed seven days a week you know oh yeah i vacuum all the furniture of carpenter you know and he's like no i don't know why people are i don't know why people are lazy about this just you know keep it up just do the work obviously the guy had a work ethic also for being a bodybuilder but you know the the life he described to me was so painfully pathetically alone and he said you know there were women who would have sex with him but the women who had sex with him you know treated him like a male prostitute he had completely shallow exploitative ultimately kind of hurtful and abusive relationships with women he did sometimes meet women you know when he was a stripper or women who met him on stage so to speak he did sometimes meet women in a kind of party scenario where everyone was a lot younger than he was and so on he met women in different scenarios and he came i'm anonymizing this to some step but he came from one of those rust built cities in the united states of america he came from a city that is not considered well it's certainly not politically progressive and it's not economically upwardly mobile and so on and so forth and you know in every meaningful way he just felt terribly alone so this is a guy who and by the way also he was economically successful he wasn't poor he'd had to he'd have he didn't need the money from stripping he did strip as a kind of hobby and probably also reward him for all this work he does at the gym staying in shape but you know um you know so he he he i think he owned his own house city on his own truck and all those things that american men tend to desire and you know he described for me a life in which you know he met someone he could even have a conversation with like once every 10 years you know he said looking back at his life there were so few people he had and then partly why he was talking to me why he cared about you know the the connection with me and so you know there were so few people he could talk to there were so few people he could he could get along with and even though there were women who would sleep with him you know there were really no women who could even have a conversation with him over breakfast the next day you know let alone have a have a long-term relationship you know so um i see other youtubers and you know i admit one that stands out in my mind before making this video is this remarkably awful but remarkably honest guy hiding in my room so his name is daniel his youtube channel and his internet identity is the phrase hiding in my room and you know i think hiding in my room really demonstrates this principle or this problem that i'm trying to talk about in this video i'm trying to talk about the opposite it turns out what the alternative is but this principle this problem of regarding people as disposable of regarding people as as easily replaceable and you know so he's lately told some anecdotes he is now bemoaning his fate and complaining that he's all alone and nobody wants him he had a certain amount of fame on youtube which has been shrinking or contracting dramatically so he has fewer and fewer viewers and less and less public interest and he felt that he went through a period of time when he had a lot of public interest in his youtube channel where a lot of attractive women were talking to him or messaging him and he did he did meet up with and have sex with several of them you know and he treated them all as disposable he presumed recklessly that you know there would be ten more women for every woman he slept with and discarded this way and you know there's one who sticks out in my mind because he met up with her twice he met up with her and had sex with her i think under a kind of no strings attached scenario met up in a hotel room but then this woman stayed in touch with him and approximately one year later she started writing to him again and asking if he'd consider being in a serious relationship with her she had a boyfriend at that time her boyfriend became furious and she broke up with her boyfriend dramatically and went over to meet up again with this guy daniel you know and again i mean he's an awful person it's an awful youtube channel but he is honest about precisely the things that most people are dishonest about and yes indeed most men are dishonest about and he had the honesty to say that he kind of met up with this girl and had sex with her but all he was thinking about was how he could get back to his couch get back to his computer and resume playing i think call of duty one of one of the current generation video games i'm sorry i'm getting the video game wrong but one of these ridiculous you know high definition graphic 3d video games that takes up hours and hours and hours of your life repetitively now i am not here to imagine or suppose anything positive about this young woman what i know about her is daniel she likes you she's interested in you she's willing to give you a chance and she's willing to give you a chance again like you know she thought about it for a year and she still likes you and she's still interested in you you know you still have something in common or some capacity there right and that's scarce you know talent is scarce but like to really recognize you know what it's not the case that coming up next september you're going to be forced to sit at the lunch table with 40 new people that you're going to sit down in english class with 40 new people and the school system conditions us to imagine that there's a whole new generation of friends and enemies for you arriving year after year like like clockwork there's no reunion coming up when you find people you have some common ground with even if it's just that you know you have some sympathy with them and they have some interest in you some curiosity about you the word interest in english unfortunately has too many meanings i mean i guess i should say curiosity you find someone who cares about you someone who's curious about what you're doing next your life you know that's scarce talent is scarce and you should cherish it you should try to keep that person in your life you know forever in whatever capacity you can i mean you know obviously i'm not saying you have to have a sexual relationship and i'm not saying you have to get married i'm not saying you have to raise kids with someone just because you have this but like if you can keep that connection and and build on you know despite the fact that there may be things terribly wrong with this person you know they may have terrible failings they may have terrible flaws and you may be the friend who helps them you know address some of those flaws you know you may help them you know develop into being a better person if you stay in their life if and if they if they uh if they stay in yours you know um know we're having elections here now in canada and some people asked me as they always do if i would stand in the elections myself that would run in the elections obviously with no hope of winning the elections but you know you'd at least be able to stand on a podium and make your speech make your pitch you'd be able to give a voice to the voiceless or give a perspective for some political cause now i believe in order to do that i would need to have 100 friends living in the same district of the city as i do so they can't even be friends of mine who are out in the suburbs they can't be friends of mine who are frankly walking distance from here you know if you guys know this but electoral districts when you draw the lines on a map with an urban area it's not a very big plot of land i would have to know 100 people who are renting or owning a home within very short walking distance of of where i live okay now here's what i would say to you it's not just that this is impossible for me now it was impossible for me five years ago it was impossible for me 10 years ago looking ahead to the future it's going to continue to be impossible for me five years from now 10 years from now 15 years from now 20 years from now it's going to be impossible for me for the rest of my life i'm never going to have 100 friends living in one place at one time i'm never gonna have 100 colleagues living in one place at one time never not if i live in montreal not if i live in vancouver not if i live in seattle right and guys i'm not saying this to uh i'm not saying this to insult you but i'd like you to reflect about your own lives this way a little bit have you ever had 100 friends who would you know it's not asking that much who would sign a piece of paper so you could participate in the elections you know you have to provide your id card you have to do a few things who would sign the petition to let you stand in election again knowing knowing you wouldn't win knowing you're not going to spend a lot of money but you're going to say hey look there are some issues i really think are important to talk about and this is an opportunity for me to try to shift public opinion try to inform people try to have my voice count in our pseudo-democracy you know just a little bit to do my do my public my public service um you know and again so i mean looking forward to the future everyone thinks about the sex issue this way i mean if everyone thinks about whether or not they're going to have a girlfriend or they're going to have a wife if it's women whether they're going to have a husband if they're gay whether they're going to have some kind of partner you know and and a lot of us a lot of us think about whether we're going to have just one wife or we're going to have two or three yeah sure there's that too and there are gay couples are they going to have a you know quadrilateral relationship you know okay on that scale people do a lot of thinking about their about their social connections right they do a lot of thinking about being alone and then what's the opposite of being alone what's being counter opposed to being alone okay but how would you live your life differently if you were trying to get to that level of social organization where you have 100 friends who all live in the same district geographically who all live in the same town or the same neighborhood with you think about what a monumental task that would be ask yourself how you would even go about doing it and what you'd have to sacrifice what you have to do made a live stream recently oh sorry so thanks brendan brennan says pseudo democracy i like that if you read my book no more manifest those write the title of what it's worth it's not available yet it's going to be on amazon but i have a book i'm writing doing the final edits and revisions now which could go on for some time um ods found new typos today i got i got a bunch of messages with typos to correct from what he had so he's still he's still finding tables and when i go through it i find commas i want to move and stuff like that too so i'm trying to make it perfect which wasn't the original parent book um anyway yes in no more manifestos i don't talk about pseudo-democracy i talk about the way in which our system of democracy has produced the opposite of democracy i introduced this concept that basically hasn't existed in political science before of the society without polity so it's a lot of the book it's a critique of democracy but an in-depth meaningful critique it goes back to ancient athens in ancient rome it goes back to the writing of the american constitution the american revolution you know it goes back to ancient china talks about lord shang and sunse and confucius so there's a lot of philosophical depth and breadth and also a lot of the book is talking about police brutality in the united states where in the united states american how that relates to our system of education our system of law and so on and so forth so book means a lot to me i hope it means a lot to you yeah it's just uh it's just um okay this is this is my point it's easy to visualize your ambitions in terms of things in terms of palpable things it's not just easy to be honest you i think that's a pretty reliable sign of stupidity if you ever meet someone and talk to them and you say oh well what's what's your ambition i mean however it comes up in conversation naturally presumably it's not like a survey and you're just asking you meet someone and they say oh every day they get up and they visualize a red sports car that's made in italy you know this this is their ambition their ambition is to drive this red sports car and you know we see these kinds of cars on the street here every so often depending on where you live it's probably because of the climate here there are a lot of people with expensive cars here because there's not too much snow and whatever and i i always make you make jokes about it they're not even really great jokes but i always kind of joke around with most oh this this is the meaning of my life i can't be happy until i'm driving a bright red jaguar like this [ __ ] you know like oh yeah this is what i'm this is what i'm looking for this is what i'm motivated by you know so it's not just that it's easy i think it's a pretty reliable sign of stupidity that you have aspirations and ambitions defined in terms of simple palpable things there's another kind of aspiration or ambition that's maybe more impalable but it's something like writing a book it's something like making youtube videos it's something maybe it's an art form maybe it's not creative maybe it's a status or social position you want to attain in life i was reading the other day about a guy who was lamenting that uh his father's dream was to become a chief petty officer in the in the us military and his father never achieved that dream because he uh he chose to take care of his own kid he kind of dropped out of the military to spend more time with his son and this is really well gee you never made you never made cpo you never made the rank of chief it's just kind of ridiculous to me but no i mean it's a step up it's a step up from wanting to own a red sports car so you have some idea you want to be a doctor you want to be a dentist you want to be a pilot you want to be a chief petty officer in the military there's some rank there's some status to some role you want to play i think that kind of ambition and aspiration almost inevitably leads to tragedy and self-hatred and certainly my professors uh here at the university of victoria my professors before the university of toronto most people i knew with phds whether in england or france or in china i knew a lot of people with phds in in asia most of them were trapped in the nightmare of having lived out their dream and discovered that it wasn't worth living wasn't worth dreaming either you know they found out what it really meant to be a university professor and have a phd and they were they were horrified by it and discussed it with themselves and a great deal of self-loathing and disappointment as as a result okay that's another kind of ambition and aspiration but you know what the most powerful and most effective form of ambition and aspiration is to have of all it's people all right you know what swords can't accomplish a whole hell of a lot having a hundred men who are willing and able and motivated to make use of those swords changes the course of history right you can own a lot of pencils and pens i mean i do i don't collect them or anything i've always got a lot of them around you know you notice that about me if you come to my apartment you know it's good partly because i've studied so many languages you know what having a hundred pens it's not gonna change the world it's not gonna accomplish much if you have a hundred authors if you know a hundred writers who are motivated positively somehow to make the world a better place there's something they wanna change there's something they have in common with you where you want to you want to work together if you have a salon of talented people that can change the world you know and obviously we think we think of shakespeare as one person right but his significance arose out of many people working together at every stage including the writing right shakespeare alone a shakespeare in a vacuum would resemble a vacuum and all of his efforts and artistry would disappear into a vacuum he needed a critical mass whether it was 20 people 40 people or 100 people to work together to make shakespeare matter to make his writing matter you know to change the world when your ambitions are not based on things and they're not based on a rank like you know a job title or certification or something when your ambitions are based on people it's not just that they're more powerful they're also more malleable they can change right if you have 100 people who are motivated to work together to get you elected in government sorry it doesn't have to be i don't care if i knew 100 people here i'd be totally happy to be some of the brains behind someone else's campaign i could ghostwrite their speeches you know i don't that doesn't have to be my face in the front i'm not an egomaniac like that i really don't care i can contribute in other ways to other political causes and or whether it's a political cause as blatant as participating in elections or it is something more like humanitarian work it's political and changing the world but not not in an electoral uh way you know if you have 100 people who are motivated and eager and willing and organized to help you participate in an election and let's just say it's an election you cannot win you cannot win but you can get up there on the podium and you can eloquently speak for whatever the issue is that unites these guys maybe your anti-war maybe your pro-war maybe your anti-torture maybe your you know anti-vivisection or you i don't know you want to save the cows you want to save the whales you want to save something whatever it is that draws you people together if you have those people and they don't just know you they know one another right there are bonds of mutual trust and mutual respect there aren't it's not like a whole bunch of points united in the middle just one point you have a hundred points that are all connected in multiple ways to one another all of them have been out to picnics with one another maybe not all at the same time you know they're all they're all connected one way or another okay once you've done that you could turn around and you can mobilize those people to instead take on a humanitarian project you can mobilize those people to instead make a film you can mobilize those people to make change in the world in so many different ways to do something creative to do something politically significant right once you have people you have the potential to do anything when you have a job title you have the potential to do one thing and when you have an object like an expensive car you have the potential to do nothing okay talent is scarce i know i have people in the audience of all different ages i have some people watching my channel who are 17 some of them started watching like five years ago you know and i have people in my audience who are probably more than 70 years old i i can't remember seven-year-olds at least i have people in their 50s if you're over 70 send in more fan mail i don't i don't get that much fan mail for people their 70s probably because they don't write a lot of email but they don't participate they don't support me on patreon that's the problem if you're over 70 you should be surprised up here anyway i have people um i've people of all ages you know now i am not asking this in a generalized or abstract way when you think back to your own time in university how many of those people that you knew in university do you wish you still knew today you could still cooperate with today you could still collaborate with today uh whether that's you want to make a film together whether it's you want to open a bakery together so it's another good example someone has some long-term commitment to it you want to organize to do something politically or creatively or in terms of business you know you want to do something how many of those people that you knew in university do you wish you you still knew today now i have a further question like if you actually got out a pencil and paper and wrote down their names if you looked them up on facebook you just managed to find the name you just searched how many of them do you think you'd still want to meet up with just after looking at their facebook growth just seeing what they've been doing in the last five or ten years talent is scarce and as we get older it gets scarcer there are very few people who were politically active when i was in high school there was one girl i mean i can tell this whole story it's burned into my memory forever and you know things changed i was a teenager myself um i think the second last year of high school this was for me doesn't it could have been third last year but no i wasn't it wasn't really in high school it was more like the middle of high school you know there was this girl i didn't really perceive her that way at the time but i could now recognize she was stunningly gorgeous at the time you just you're not an adult you don't you know like you're a teenager you can't even distinguish like good chocolate from bad chocolate you don't have a refined taste in life you know i knew she was good looking but i didn't really think of it that way i didn't think of her as an extraordinarily you know good-looking person and you know i was a good talker for my age and you know like all these people i didn't regard her as a celebrity or a or a model i didn't regard her as anything i i regard her as a real person and i talked to her like a real person i talked to her the same way i talked to a man and you know i didn't i didn't ever have a class with her actually uh it was an usual thing i had a really brief window of opportunity where i think just for two days she and i were in the same classroom it was like a special orientation thing it wasn't a normal classroom together so we were gonna be in the classroom for two days and i made the effort i remember i really kind of lined up so okay so on the first day i'm going to talk jordan i'm gonna take it this far and then on the second day i'm gonna seal the deal and i'm gonna take this girl out you know um anyway look sorry you know so uh honestly it's one of the only women in my life i've made that kind of before i'll just be agreeing with you it's pretty it's pretty rare i had to get up and i had to get up and hustle to make this make this connection happen and we didn't have a whole lot in common and you know you know we we spent a certain number of hours talking to each other and getting to know each other [Music] you know um i didn't hear after that i didn't hear anything about her for years i had a couple conversations that we had some degree of contact i heard years later that her parents had been fundamentalist christians she got pregnant with some guy who only slept with her once and never talked to her again her parents said no no no they don't believe in abortion she was gonna have the baby and raise the baby and uh i mean i sorry i didn't stand touched her i didn't know so that was that was that might have been the last year of high school to be honest with you something like that if it was you know you're pregnant for nine months but like i think maybe she got pregnant during her last month in high school and the baby was right after that you know her life changed and you know i mean the main thing i remember about her of course are her political pretensions at the time and you know i was looking for someone who was interesting and interested in politics and trying to make the world a better place and i could sit here now and ridicule what her political beliefs were and her political projects i really could but of course i was somewhat ridiculous myself as a teenager in my in my political aspirations and you know um today i wouldn't i literally would not be able to remember her name today absolutely not but at some point like like 10 years after or 15 years of driving someone said her name to me under some kind i was like oh yeah right and i you know i just i just did that bare minimum everything i just went to facebook and put in her name and like there were a couple people with the name and you know but oh yeah that's the one you know fine if you say so you know obviously no that is not someone i wish i could i never thought i wish i could meet up with her again i never thought oh i wish that person was still in my life i never thought that was someone i could still be working with in politics or someone i could get together with romantically never i never had that kind of nostalgia over here not even not once not even for five minutes but my point is in my whole high school experience that was maybe the one person who cared about politics who had any kind of spark of potential or ambition or wanting to change the world make the world a better place and you know i guess i did kind of wonder if her political beliefs and aspirations had mutated or progressed past that very primitive stage and i had no idea her parents or at least her mother was some kind of crazy christian fundamentalist i had no idea that was part of her part of her backstory has she how she came into this you know scenario um you know not to put too fine a point on it melissa and i have talked about moving to different parts of the world it's been a long list in the last couple years what do we want to do where do we want to live what kind of ambitions we have and you know one of the differences in different places is to ask could we have any friends here if we moved to this place would we just live totally alone it would just be the two of us and we'd be regarded as kind of a hated outsider an unwanted eccentric by other people if we move to that place or is this a place where there'd be enough people who have a lot of things in common with us that we could really have colleagues we could really have friends even if it's just five you know five 10 15 people who want to share your life and have some of the same ambitions and you know want to make something positive happen um now you know one of the possibilities in the list was moving back to the state of michigan i'm saying the state of mission specifically i'm sorry none specifically because there were several different cities in michigan we could move to each with different yeah each entailing different advantages and disadvantages you might say um but something i said to melissa again again about michigan was look you know there are disadvantages to moving to michigan it's cold in winter it's awful it's not paradise nobody wants to retire there nobody wants to live there at some you know what i mean i said but that is the one place in the world where you melissa can be involved in politics and you can stand for office and run for elections and you can really say you grew up here anywhere else if we moved to oregon all your life in oregon people are going to say you're not from around here you're not one of us i know it may seem like the cultural difference between michigan and oregon is not worth talking about well that's not how or oregonians see it you know they'll say you know you ain't from around here stranger you're some weird eccentric from detroit you know and you're you're never going to be one of us you can never be part of our political struggle and every part of our our culture so on and so forth now i think it is needless to say just to put this in the sharp relief some of you guys remember some of you don't i considered formally and permanently moving to israel i considered applying for israeli citizenship which i'm entitled to because of my jewish ancestry and then permanently living in israel for the rest of my life i think that's a very good illustration of the kind of invidious isolation you could live in politically you know think about someone like me living in israel think about someone like me at least hypothetically having a child and raising a child in israel by the way i don't i don't have to have another kid i already have one kid i'm perfectly fine living the rest of my life without having another kid but hypothetically you know um i'd be a member of a subculture within a subculture within a subculture my status within israel would be that all of the jewish people would hate me for not being jewish enough i'm an atheist kissing us and of course meanwhile the muslim people palestinians and so on and so forth arab israelis they would hate me for being jewish you know you're excluded both ways i would never be part of the russian community i'm not russian enough you know i am somewhat russian there really isn't any community there i'd be a part of i would be part of a tiny tiny sub-community of you know aggressively atheist modern secular intellectuals in a country that's basically a theocracy you know a country that has you know state mandated religion state mandated military service and that is you know constantly struggling on the on the brink of destruction you know it's a it's in a struggle for its existence at all times so as as unreasonable as israeli politics may be they seem reasonable when placed in that in that dire context um but i live with the same kind of invidious isolation here and now it's less extreme it's less obvious but i mean when i made the youtube videos talking about how everyone who lives in this apartment building hates me and i did that for a reason i was trying to show a broader point and it's it's hard to show the significance of an absence in your life what i'm trying to indicate to you right now with this video is there are a hundred people out there who should still be in my life and they're not all right there were a hundred people i knew when i was doing humanitarian work in vienchen the capital city of laos and none of them are with me today there were 100 people i knew in bangkok thailand there were 100 people i knew in chiang mai in various faces including the vegans the vegan activists i knew which my people who spoke english surely there were 100 people in kunming china you know there weren't a hundred people but maybe there were 10 people in dahong china it was a small town you know there were 100 people when i lived in cambridge england and when i took the bus back and forth between cambridge and oxford you know so we could count more people i knew people at cambridge i knew people at oxford i knew people at the university of london right any of those people could still be a positive part of my life today and they're not there were 100 people i knew in france sure sure including some vegan activists by the way at every phase of my life at every stage of my life there were these people i reached out to and that i who i shared my life with and showed that i was warm and encouraging and and positive to right and each and every one of them for various specific reasons you know they did not give that warmth and positivity back in every single one of those places there were women women who tried to [ __ ] me okay and i know i mean it's so different the way we see these things with the genders right i described to you before the beginning of this video i knew this guy was a male bodybuilder and a male stripper and he was all alone there were women offering to have sex and some of the women did have sex he did he did have sex with women some of those women were married there were married women who went and met him at a strip club or met him in a nightclub or something and they were cheating on their husband with them but you know there were women some of them were women who were like teenagers they were like 19 years old or something and met him and wanted to have sex with them even though he was an older guy so they weren't married but again they were young women who really just regarded him as a one-night stand as a very shallow sexual interaction now the women i'm alluding to i didn't have sex with any of them i don't play hard to get i actually am hard to get but in all these places there were women coming at me and i think you know we have to be really open to looking at male and female sexuality equally in these things like i think those women who were coming at me their interests and their intentions and how we should morally characterize this it's really it is neither more black nor more white it is neither more evil nor more good than you know men looking for fundamentally kind of exploitative disposable sexual relations in the same situation like if the genders were reversed we should regard the same way so you know i am not saying i was ever alone in this sense i'm not even saying i was lonely you know you know famously i once um i once sat down and wrote a german exam a german assignment and i wrote that phrase and i remember the prophet being honest so it was a it was a good-looking young female german professor and she was trying to sleep with me she tried to repeatedly sleep she tried to have a sexual affair with me [Laughter] i was over 18 but not much i forget how young i was but i remember i wrote uh as the answer to this question on a german uh assignment in class knee einstein immoralign so this is kind of untranslatable play on words where it's like you know there's a difference you know i'm not lonely uh i'm alone you know but you know in all these places um i was neither lonely nor was i alone and look i mean you can look at my life as a succession of tragedies series of strategies and failures you can look at my life basically just being kind of wonderful i mean it's not like there is any particular triumph for a commercial but it's wonderful it's wonderful that i've been able to live in all these places and have these experiences that i've you know been able to become the person i am today and have the education i've acquired and then i'm able to now write this book and make these youtube there is a sense in which it's kind of wonderful even if it's just as a gestalt you know the whole is greater than the sum of its parts like even if you add together failure and failure and failure and failure somehow it becomes this kind of wonderful success it's this life that's worth living and meaningful rewarding for me you know you can look it that way um the point is i'm trying to really draw attention to the significance of that absence there are a hundred people missing there and in a lot of ways that's much more than 100 people that are missing and the only the only people this comes back to the title of this video in terms of in terms of talent is scarce the only people who even get back in touch with me after not talking to me for years it's always women trying to have sex with me always it's women who remembered me they remembered me as an option and then they think something like oh i heard that guy got divorced or they don't even know maybe he's single now like years have gone by they're single now like maybe when i knew them they were married and now they're divorced or whatever their situation is or something's getting to them uh dude that that does happen to me and it does creep me out i'm i'm just being real with you and you know with all those things too it's like well i'm sorry you know where were you when i created leviathan where were you when i was going through all this stuff in my life well what you're you're interested in me now for this reason for this narrowly selfish self-serving reason you know that you think you can fit me into this position in your life now that you've broken up with your husband or broken up your boyfriend or whatever it is you know i i whenever i mean i'm just being honest with you the the only people from my past who get who get back in touch that way it's always it's always women where something clicked something reminded they they reached out to to get and touched me that way you know i'm just going to take a moment to look at your comments guys thanks for writing him thanks for joining the live stream so yeah um ron sims comments he's referring back to when i said you know if you can remember the people you knew in high school you remember people with new university and then you take a look at their facebook profiles how many of them would you want in your life today so ron sim says most of them are either alcoholics druggies or just don't care about the world and it's sad okay so ron this is the only question ask you is how many of them really display that to you on their facebook profile like i'm agreeing with you but i think the problem is way worse like i think there are so many people who are alcoholics but if you look at their facebook profile they look sober you know i mean i think there are people whose lives are a disaster but you look at their facebook profile and you think their life is wonderful like they think i just say there's there's a natural misrepresentation there that creeps in so i'm not disagreeing with you with you at all ron but um to be able to pierce the veneer of respectability and know what someone's really done with their life and and who they are today you know that's that's quite another matter um [Music] okay one of the only times i was ever at a party it was frankly it was a cocktail party it was a cocktail party in a loft one of the only times i've been to a party like that and there were people there who knew me from high school so this this happened once in my life ever so melissa i think you've never heard this it's not that great a story but i think you've never heard the story it's not the kind of thing i do ever and i didn't know that was the situation i was walking into i was like go to this party i was told i was gonna it's not worth saying why i was at this party but i go to this party and there were actually a bunch of different people who knew me uh from high school there you know and you know they didn't they didn't but they didn't freak out but it's kind of like oh oh there was a little you know mutual recognition uh and surprise when i walked into the room and um anyway the party had i think two hosts maybe three they were roommates who had rented this loft it was a big space big post industrial space you got to split the rent up between a few people and this guy comes over to me and i'm standing there on this very self-confident i'm much taller than him silently but i'm quite still you'll see why this matters the story and he's very jumpy and agitated and he's saying a bunch of things to me in this kind of um excitable aimless way he's kind of i'm standing there perfectly still staring at him and again my the seriousness of my demeanor is part of what made this so hilarious and then i snapped my finger saying i was certain i knew we i'm screwing up the joke now i'm sorry i was certain i knew you from somewhere you and i have the same coke dealer and the guy he's all jumpy he's all screwed up he looks at me and he's like oh oh you know you know tom and i said um no i was joking you weren't i don't know tom i don't know tom at all oh you know uh and the the funny thing was his roommate was there rumor was a very unusual character she was a very she was a very bossy very self-confident person she would not she was not a mousy pervasive person she had no idea this guy was a cocaine addict she'd been living with the guy and i think she had attributed his behavior to something else you know what i mean i i saw him and i basically thought i diagnosed this as a cocaine addict and i confronted him she'd been living in the same so it's kind of an interesting little moment at a host party that had long-term implications to people involved um that's who you're living with that's who this guy is he knows tom so my point is that moment pierced the v and you could see it in terms of the other people reacted it pierced the veneer of respectability this guy had maintained even with his own uh roommates or housemates and it appears the veneer he was trying to maintain with the other people at this party so all i'm saying is to what an extent so pardon me to what extent do people intentionally or unintentionally create an alter ego whether it's on facebook on instagram or whereby they would not admit to you these things they would not you know so yeah um okay so so so ron i'm still replying to you in in a deeper sense not replying to the wording of what you said but replying to this point your face okay i said before there's this absence in my life i'm trying to draw attention to right there are a hundred people who should be here with me now should be sharing my life and they're not i think the single most important reason is that those people are ashamed of themselves and they don't feel that they have a life worth sharing now i'm a warm person and i'm a caring person you might not always get that impression of me on youtube but if you see the way i actually am with people i know and care about in real life i am but that kindness comes from a kind of strength when i meet people and talk to people whether they're a complete stranger or there's someone a known for 10 years or 20 years right i have so much to share like there's so much in my life i feel is worth talking about and meaningful and then i want to share with you you know like absurd but just just talk about like a normal kind of crappy conversation with a friend of yours if you have a friend and they're complaining about breaking up with a girlfriend or they're complaining about a conflict at work with their boss or something you know i'm someone who can be caring and engaged even on something that's shallow because i really feel i have a lot to share from my own life and i want to share that with you and so on and so forth and of course obviously i am even more willing to share if we're going to talk about politics or history or matters of real substance but you can see that even on my youtube channel i mean i'm willing to i'm willing to talk about tourism with a kind of philosophical real oh you want to talk about tourism in thailand okay i can talk about that for an hour you know there's something i have to share there and i'm willing to talk about gossip and i'm willing to talk about your sex life in a profound and meaningful and seriously engaged way right but it's not you know it's not because i'm needy you know what i mean it's not because i'm nosy i'm not i really don't ask questions of other people in my life i really let them tell me whatever it is they want to tell me and sometimes they get pissed off me for that because i'm not asking i'm not asking the kind of intrusive questions that they expect their friends to ask and that i guess their other friends uh ask that's come up in a few of my a few more relationships but i go into it with this kind of context that i have a lot to share i'm not ashamed of who i am i'm not ashamed of what i'm sharing all right i gotta tell you the people i've known in life including the people who got phds especially the people who got phds they don't want to talk to me and they don't want to hang out with me because they're ashamed of themselves because they've accomplished so little in the last five years of any substance and what they have accomplished they're not proud of they feel stupid when they're around me they feel like they've been wasting their time when they're around me they feel like they haven't been living up to any of their own hype like the last time they talked to me they told me they were doing x y and z and then here they are five years later and then you know like you know and i'm just be honest i have had people tell me that like do i've had people not indirectly i've had people directly tell me that whenever they talk to me or remember one guy said whenever he hears someone else talk about me uh behind my back saying about what i've been up to he said he felt ashamed of himself he said he felt he was living in slow motion that i was out like living in fast forward i was doing all these things and you know he uh here he was years going by and and not accomplishing anything and nothing changing and not not taking any risks and not living up to his own hype now that was mostly intellectually not living up to their own height and by the way i'm not saying the state you may know people right now who say they're going to write a novel and years go by and where's the novel at they even say they're going to read a book you guys come by haven't read the book let alone you know writing a book whatever their projects are or whatever their aspirations are and look so again i was just saying when it's something like alcoholism or cocaine it's hit him right so i had that moment at a cocktail party where you can break through the surface and expose someone it's kind of horrible i doubt it i doubt it motivated him to get sober um but you know um i knew i knew i recognized you from somewhere [Laughter] how can you have that moment how can you have that snap in your fingers moment and reveal that someone's a video game addict right and i'm not i'm not saying everyone accomplishes nothing in life because they're a video game some people accomplish nothing because they spend their time uh on reddit reading gospel in other people's lives they spend their time watching reruns of the simpsons tv show of the family guy watching situation comedies watching movies like it's not always video games you know what i mean video games are kind of a convenient way to get this a lot of people spend years of their life doing absolutely nothing in particular just self-indulgent miscellaneous waste of time with no ambitions and again if they tell people they have ambitions then they feel ashamed of seeing those people again because they haven't been you know i told i told uh i told melissa about one of these women and when she got back in touch with me years later she probably was trying to sleep she got back and touched me right after i got divorced right after i split up with mag's wife so it probably was what she had in her what she had in her mind but i remember that it was like she hadn't talked to me for like six years it's like oh yeah six years ago you said you were almost completed your phd like you're at the end of your phd program at the dissertation stage and like oh here we are six years ago and you haven't you haven't finished your phd and in her case i i would guess marijuana was a factor or just whatever something like this lackadaisical hippie lifestyle you know whatever it is so look i'm just saying um people share their lives with other people out of strength not weakness and when people tell me that they're shy i say no you're not you're ashamed of yourself we have this full stereotype that someone who is gregarious and self-confident is a psychopath i see this being said even about salesmen that like a good salesman as a psychopath or a sociopath because he's willing to walk up to a stranger and say hey i'm gonna sell you a pair of car tires that's better than the car tires you have four no he's not no he's not he's positively motivated he's motivated because he actually believes he has a good product to sell you he actually believes these car tires are to save you money in the long run or something and he actually wants to make the sale he actually do when you're positively motivated to do something you're not shy you know who's shy people who are ashamed of themselves people who feel like the product they're selling isn't really any good anyway and you shouldn't really be doing this job oh now you're starting to now you're starting to get shy okay now it's not that direct it's not that easy it's not that simple but there is a connection between the fact that you are playing video games for 20 hours a week and the fact that you're shy that you don't want to share your life with other people you know you don't want to spend time with other people or that you're only willing to share your life with other people when you already know in advance that they're wasting their time in the same way that they're not going to judge you that they're not going to make you feel bad about yourself that when you meet up with them even if you just meet up for coffee with no other no ambitions to run in an election no plans to make a film no plans to to to save the world then when you meet up with them for coffee and say so you know what did you do this week where you won't feel embarrassed and you won't feel bad about yourself at all when you say oh well didn't really do anything you know the new version of that video game came out so i played that a lot so guys just you know most of you okay you know me if this is the first time you've ever seen this youtube channel but you've watched the whole video up to this point you know me how do you think my friends feel when they're in that situation and they talk to me that way whatever the project is whatever the aspiration is whatever including i've known people who were aspiring youtubers i knew one guy who was a complete [ __ ] such a piece of crap that guy he was he was in a phd program that he dropped out of he dropped out of a phd program to make youtube videos full time and when he talked to me we had this long skype call he was a hundred percent confident he knew he understood youtube better than me and he understood vegan activism better than me and he had all these aspects he was telling me how to do my job and i was laughing at him he didn't know what he was talking about he dropped out of a phd program to have a career on social media and make youtube videos and i wrote to him like it was like two years later minimum i remember which was like hey bro where are the youtube videos at you know like i remember used to having youtube channels like you know you you made all those posts you made those comments you you were gonna leave me in your shadow you were gonna totally eclipse what i've accomplished on youtube you ain't even got five views bro what happened all that you know oh gee you actually dropped out of your phd program and you just became a self-pitying piece of [ __ ] huh gee you know you know what happened what happened bro you know whether it's that you're talking to someone who's a friend of yours about what did you do this last week what did you do that what are you going to do next weekend or you're looking back at the last two years of your life last five years of your life you're looking forward to the next five years of your life you're like hey bro you know where's it at i make people feel bad about themselves precisely because i feel good about myself okay you think i have any regrets about what i did during coronavirus do you think i feel like i wasted the last 10 months of my life not a goddamn bit of it i am so grateful i was stuck in this apartment reading books for 10 months reading reading books and writing books and sharing my life with you you people on the internet through youtube you know are you are you kidding me the value of what i did stuck in this apartment for the last 10 months compared to what i did in university like you know actually taking classes in universities it's no no comparison it's been absolutely wonderful it's been tremendously meaningful it's been tremendously rewarding you know who gets real shy around me you know who's shy people who took the last 10 months and they you know they played the legend of zelda on nintendo switch for 200 hours and then maybe they played animal crossing for 400 hours you know um [Music] having ambition involves failure you know it involves being willing to fail again and again and again not having ambition involves shame and shyness it's a totally self-serving delusion to think that self-confident gregarious warm people who go out and share their lives with others are egomaniacs or psychopaths or sociopaths or trying to manipulate you this is the shy people of the world trying to justify their own shyness trying to claim that human nature is always shy unless there's some ulterior motive unless this person is a con artist unless this person is a salesman unless this person is a cult leader the ultimate example of a so-called sociopath or psychopath unless this person is a charismatic cult leader trying to recruit you this is the dominance of the shy in the 21st century okay you're not shy you're ashamed of yourself you're ashamed of who you are you're ashamed of the extent to which you have squandered your own potential okay those of us who are out here willing and able and trying to share our lives with others we do it out of strength not weakness and there are so few people who are strong enough to reciprocate that warmth and just share their own life in return even if their life has you know struggles and disappointments and tragedies and setbacks and failures even if you have to fail 10 times before every one project that succeeds there's still a difference between whether you fail with other people or if you fail alone if you share your sorrow if you share your suffering with others or if you're in a state of sorrow and suffering alone it still matters right and everything worth doing everything worth doing involves cooperation with other people even learning a language you can't even learn chinese alone um talent is scarce you can be strong you can stop being ashamed of your own life you can stop being shy you can get ready to share your life with other people to collaborate and work with 10 other people or 100 other people you can even make that your conscious goal right the problem is you can't be strong for anyone else you can only be strong for yourself and then you get to see you get to see just how alone you are because your strength makes other people aware of their weakness ladies and gentlemen whether we're talking about your personal life your professional life or your political life in this sense talent is scarce