Speaker 1: If you stand up and do something correctly, people who
Speaker 1: care about that sort of thing will notice. They will notice,
Speaker 1: and they will open doors for you. That's how the
Speaker 1: world works. Don't underestimate the utility of proper action. The
Speaker 1: goal for young people is to turn themselves into someone.
Speaker 1: For each person to turn themselves into a person who
Speaker 1: stands up straight and who pays attention, and who can
Speaker 1: think and who can speak, and who can act in
Speaker 1: relationship to the highest good they can conceive of. And
Speaker 1: that I believe that that's a way of being that's
Speaker 1: noble enough so that if it's enacted, it also takes
Speaker 1: the sting out of the tragedy of life. There's something
Speaker 1: noble about bearing up under a heavy load, and human
Speaker 1: beings have a heavy load, there's no doubt about it. Now,
Speaker 1: the question is, can you build yourself up into something
Speaker 1: that's strong enough to lift that without complaint and without corruption. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a noble goal. That's what young people should be doing.
Speaker 1: They should have a conception of who they could be,
Speaker 1: and that conception should be something like, if I could
Speaker 1: be like that, everything would be worthwhile. That's what you
Speaker 1: want to aim at, because you want to make everything worthwhile,
Speaker 1: and so do it. Money has done as much for
Speaker 1: you as it can do by the time you can
Speaker 1: pay your bills. It's like, well, define wealth, all right,
Speaker 1: that's easy heat in the winter, air conditioning in the summer,
Speaker 1: running water right, reliable shelter, and the provision of high
Speaker 1: quality food. Once you've got those, and then we could
Speaker 1: add to that access to all the world's information. Everyone
Speaker 1: has that virtually unless you've fallen right out of society.
Speaker 1: Maybe we could add reasonable access to healthcare to that,
Speaker 1: although for most people, especially if they're young and healthy,
Speaker 1: that's irrelevant. But once you have those first six things
Speaker 1: indoor plumbing, for example, you're already overwhelmingly rich by historical
Speaker 1: and even worldwide standards. You're already in the top one
Speaker 1: tenth of one percent of all the human beings that
Speaker 1: have ever lived. And incremental movement past that just doesn't
Speaker 1: make that much difference, you know. So maybe you have
Speaker 1: a ten year old Hayundi Sonata. I have one of those.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, I could have a McLaren. But the
Speaker 1: incremental difference when we're stuck in a traffic jam is zero.
Speaker 1: So the radical left is overestimate the utility of wealth
Speaker 1: in relationship to its capacity to solve the fundamental problems
Speaker 1: that beset human beings. Rich people get cancer, rich people
Speaker 1: get divorced. Rich people get estranged from their children. They
Speaker 1: develop drug and alcohol problems, like they're sued constantly for
Speaker 1: what they're doing, they're engaged in legal battles, and their
Speaker 1: lives tend to be extraordinarily complex because it's not easy
Speaker 1: to handle money. It disappears, man, if you don't keep
Speaker 1: an eye on it, if you're not watching it and
Speaker 1: monitoring it and earning it, generally speaking, it disappears. And
Speaker 1: that most family fortunes disappear in three generations, and most
Speaker 1: Fortune five hundred companies only last thirty years. And there
Speaker 1: is a one percent, but it churns. You know, the
Speaker 1: one percent ten years ago, they're not the same people
Speaker 1: that are the one percent now. People don't understand very
Speaker 1: well because they don't look into it at all. Is
Speaker 1: that most of the people who are in the one
Speaker 1: percent are old. So what do you want to be?
Speaker 1: You want to be young and poor, old and rich.
Speaker 1: You know, like what happens is if you're lucky, as
Speaker 1: you move through life, you trade your youth for security
Speaker 1: roughly speaking, but you know you're seventy five and you
Speaker 1: have five million dollars. Well, yeah, okay, you're seventy five.
Speaker 1: And of course the amount of wealth people have accumulates
Speaker 1: as they get older. Well, you know, if the person
Speaker 1: is fortunate and sensible, because they save up their money
Speaker 1: and they've had much more time to work. And so
Speaker 1: most of these things are multivariate problems, right, Why is
Speaker 1: there a one percent? Well, because the patriarchy is oppressive.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, okay, that accounts for five percent of
Speaker 1: the variants, or ten percent of the variance if you
Speaker 1: want to really like push your argument. But then all
Speaker 1: sorts of other things kick in. Health is a good one,
Speaker 1: and intellectual power and conscientiousness and good luck and social
Speaker 1: network and well and timing is a huge part of it.
Speaker 1: And a lot of that's just random. There's endless numbers
Speaker 1: of contributors to wealth disparity, not the oppression of the patriarchy. Jesus.
Speaker 1: You know, people who think that should be embarrassed at
Speaker 1: their stupidity. And the reason I'm saying that is because
Speaker 1: you don't really start talking that way till you've been
Speaker 1: educated a little bit. But to turn everything into a
Speaker 1: univariate problem like a one variable problem. Is it's the
Speaker 1: hallmark of a tremendously ignorant and weak mind because things
Speaker 1: are complicated and so are the solutions. Man, things are
Speaker 1: complicated enough, but the solutions are even worse. Money has
Speaker 1: its utility primarily as a tool for doing things. Really,
Speaker 1: you know, you can think about it as a means
Speaker 1: for obtaining luxury items, but that gets dull pretty quickly
Speaker 1: for most people that have any sense. It's like, I've
Speaker 1: been to the houses of very wealthy people, and some
Speaker 1: of them are quite remarkable, but most of them because
Speaker 1: they're creative people. But most of the time I remember
Speaker 1: going to a gated community, for example, in California, and
Speaker 1: it was a huge house. It was probably ten thousand
Speaker 1: square feet, but it was no different than a two
Speaker 1: thousand square foot house. It was just bigger, Like the
Speaker 1: stoves were bigger, the fridge was bigger, the wine cellar
Speaker 1: was bigger, the rooms were bigger. Who cares, it's more
Speaker 1: to take care of. It's not helpful for anything unless
Speaker 1: you're using it for a creative purpose. And you know,
Speaker 1: they also lived in a gated community, and you can
Speaker 1: hardly imagine anything duller than that. You know, like there's
Speaker 1: nothing there. There's no bars, there's no nightlife, there's no
Speaker 1: night clubs, there's no there's no corner stores, there's no churches,
Speaker 1: there's nowhere for people to hang out. There's not even
Speaker 1: any sidewalks. So so who cares. Males who occupy positions
Speaker 1: of power are much more attractive to women. So there's
Speaker 1: a famous Canadian psychologists team of Canadian coologists Margot Wilson
Speaker 1: and Martin Daly who worked out at Hamilton at McMaster,
Speaker 1: Canada's most outstanding evolutionary psychologists, did a study at one
Speaker 1: point showing that first of all, they established the relationship
Speaker 1: between inequality and male aggression. The correlation is like point eight.
Speaker 1: It's off the charts, man, It's like it's one of
Speaker 1: maybe it might be the most powerful relationship between two
Speaker 1: hypothetically independent variables that psychologists or social scientists have ever discovered.
Speaker 1: It's off the charts. So inequality fosters male on male violence,
Speaker 1: and it's because of competition for scarce resources, and it's
Speaker 1: driven by sexual selection pressures. Roughly speaking. One of the
Speaker 1: things that Dalian Wilson did, and I believe this was
Speaker 1: in Chicago as well. They did an ethnological anthropological study
Speaker 1: of the consequence of interracial murder in the gang setting
Speaker 1: in Chicago. So basically, what would happen is two gangs
Speaker 1: were vying for territorial dominance, let's say, and there was
Speaker 1: some kind of violent exchange, so let's call it a fight. Well,
Speaker 1: the thing is, if you're in one gang and I'm
Speaker 1: in another, and we engage in a violent altercation, one
Speaker 1: of us perhaps might die, But who's going to die
Speaker 1: is a toss up, right, So that means that I
Speaker 1: can plead self defense if I'm involved in that altercation. Well,
Speaker 1: and so generally what happened was that the plea was
Speaker 1: self defense, the charge was plea bargained down to involuntary
Speaker 1: manslaughter or to manslaughter. The person was thrown in jail
Speaker 1: for or sentenced for perhaps three years and served something
Speaker 1: like eighteen months. And then when they re entered the fray,
Speaker 1: they were back on the streets. Their credibility had increased substantially,
Speaker 1: and so had their probability of success. So the left's
Speaker 1: concern with inequality is a justifiable concern. The problem is
Speaker 1: we don't know what to do with it. We don't
Speaker 1: know what to do about it. It's very difficult to
Speaker 1: shovel money and other resources, because it isn't only money
Speaker 1: that this sort of process applies to. It's very difficult
Speaker 1: to shovel resources from the pile at the top down
Speaker 1: to the many at the bottom who were hovering around zero.
Speaker 1: So it's something that has to be taken into account
Speaker 1: because well, first it's not good for everybody to be
Speaker 1: stacking up at zero, and second it destabilizes the society itself.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean we know what to do about it.
Speaker 1: That's the critical thing. It also doesn't mean that the
Speaker 1: reason that the people at the top have most of
Speaker 1: the resources, regardless of what those resources are, it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that the reason they have them is because they're
Speaker 1: exploiting the people at the bottom. Now, there is an
Speaker 1: element of exploitation in any complex productive system, always because
Speaker 1: they don't operate completely fairly. Right. So, yeah, suffering is
Speaker 1: built into the fabric of human existence, and so you
Speaker 1: are vulnerable and you will die and you can you know,
Speaker 1: that's harsh, that's tragic, I would say, And tragedy is
Speaker 1: built into being. And so to the degree that you
Speaker 1: partake in that tragedy. You could consider yourself, although I
Speaker 1: think it's the wrong way of conceptualizing it. You could
Speaker 1: consider yourself as a victim among the universality of victimhood.
Speaker 1: I think that's not a helpful way of looking at it,
Speaker 1: because it leads to despair. But to think of yourself
Speaker 1: as a particular victim, or to think of yourself as
Speaker 1: a victim among the privilege, I think that gets dangerous,
Speaker 1: extraordinarily rapidly.