speaker-0: Welcome back to episode forty one of Occasionally Philosophical. ⁓ this is the show where a father and son sit down with a couple of microphones with then ⁓ you know, way too many questions about the world. ⁓ we're we're not experts, we're not gurus, professors, nothing like that. And we're not trying to be. We're just trying to figure some stuff out and maybe help some other people along.
speaker-1: Yeah. And enjoy a good cup of coffee. Or a reasonably good cup of coffee. So what's on the agenda today, Mark?
speaker-0: Yeah, that too. ⁓ so I kinda wanted to just talk about the whole idea of just being self made, I guess. Self made billionaire, but just I guess more self made in general. I mean, I think the initial the initial idea was self made billionaire, but
speaker-1: You know, the funny thing is is that you mentioned that. ⁓ well last week we talked about the fact that we weren't preparing as well so that this week we did it. I actually reached out to you and asked you. So you know I kinda knew what you were gonna bring up. But one of the things that I saw after we exchanged our text messages to kind of set up what we wanted to to touch on was the fact that there was another article that came up on Fortune magazine or one of those things, you know, on the Google news feed. Where some like twenty two year old kid had launched some business and he was a new billionaire. You know, and I'm like, all right, but it's some AI related, whatever, you know. But being a billionaire is not is different from like creating yourself, right? So you have like the self made billionaire versus the self made man, or nowadays that would be politically ⁓ incorrect. So we'll call it the self made person. Right. Or the self made human, right? So what does that mean to you when you when you hear something like that, when when it says, Well, I'm self made, what does that suggest to you? Whoa.
speaker-0: What I hear is that, you know, I did this on my own. You know, I worked hard and through, you know, hard work and perseverance I was able to make this company, for example. Whatever. You know.
speaker-1: ⁓ And what do you find problematic about that? Well
speaker-0: I mean, depending on I guess how granular you want to get, it's nobody's I just don't believe that anybody's really self made in general. You know. you know, on the anti capitalism level, like, you know, you can't become Yeah, you can't become a billionaire without exploitation. So you're making that money off the backs of other people, ⁓ for one. But then
speaker-1: Again, Mark.
speaker-0: Besides that, the more just I guess philosophical aspect of being self made, other than that extent existential you were talking about. But, you know, we're we're a very dependent species, you know. you know, from the time we're born, you know, we're dependent on our parents and, you know, ⁓
speaker-1: Easy for you.
speaker-0: Just various people are friends in our lives. I mean, you, you know, you had mentioned in our talks ⁓ the you know, Elizabeth Warren had brought up a few years back about government infrastructure. You know, yeah, you made your company, you know, Amazon is this huge company, but one of the reasons why they're able to mail stuff to people is because of the post office.
speaker-1: Well yeah, I mean it was the postal service, you you know, and the roads that the packages were driven, you know, and the maintenance of those roads and all that other kind of stuff.
speaker-0: So there's a lot of the point is, I guess, is like, you know, on we're a very social species, we're all dependent on each other in some way. You know, so that's I kind of reject the whole self made in that aspect because
speaker-1: All right. So you're you're more focused on the relational aspects of life. You know, so that we're not nobody's in this alone alone. Right. You get to be where you are. You may not know who's supporting you, but you won't get anywhere without those people doing the stuff that they do.
speaker-0: Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean and there's a million examples. Like I mean, you get sick, you go to the hospital, there's a person there that's a doctor or a nurse or whatever that's helping you. You know, it's like there's you know, like I said, it just depends on how granular you wanna get. We could have a hours long episode just talking about different examples of people that are helping you along the way. Well
speaker-1: it's I mean, but that's like direct help. You go to a doctor, right? That's a person who provides a service. You contract with that service. They go, Yeah, I'll I'll treat you as long as you you know, as long as your insurance company or you have the ability Yeah. You know, and then you get into your anti capitalism right like healthcare should be free, you're you know kind of thing. ⁓ healthcare is a right, not a privilege, you know, if you're a Bernie bro. ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah. You or your insurance company pays.
speaker-1: Well, I I that I mean I I I agree with the the principle. I d I do believe that healthcare should is a right. It should be a human right. We shouldn't have to ⁓ it shouldn't be tiered access. If you get sick, you should be able to get treated for whatever it is that you have regardless of how much wealth you possess. Now I know that sounds almost communist and I apologize to any listeners who just lost their minds.
speaker-0: But anyways.
speaker-1: But you know just ⁓ you know, we're we're collecting topics, Mark, you know. Right. And eventually we'll figure out what we really want to do with this thing instead of just bouncing around like we do. But anyway, ⁓ back to the self made thing. So I was thinking more in terms of like the the services that you take for granted that you never see the person doing them. Right. You know, like, ⁓ you come out of the you come out of the grocery store
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: And you've got maybe a a paper towel that you were using to make sure that you didn't get, you know, touch anything icky in the store. And now you walk out of the store and there's a trash can there. You throw the thing in. Somebody empties that trash can all the time. Right. Right. It's not overflowing. You never see that person. But yet their activity makes your life easier.
speaker-0: Even the grocery store the the food getting there, you know, you don't see the truck I mean you might see the truck driving around on the street, but y you know, but to your
speaker-1: Yeah, but the people that are, you know, loading it on the truck, the people all that stuff, all those conveniences, right? So yes, you might be self made in some limited sense, right? As far as making certain choices where you focus your energy. Like, ⁓ all right, you're not working, so what are you doing? Are you reading a book or are you doom scrolling on TikTok? Right. ⁓ That's a choice. Now that's the self made part, right? And I think a lot of the discourse ⁓ online in the online noise machine has to do with that. Right. Well, what are you doing with yourself? Right. What are you doing with your time? Hey, there, you know, young young man or woman, you know, and that you're sitting there complaining about the lack of opportunities for you.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. But what are you doing with your time? ⁓ you're you're a apex predator, number three in the world. Well, congratulations, Johnny. You know, are you playing ALGS? If you're not, so what? Right? You're not making any money at it. Right. Where whereas Billy is spending those same four hours every night after he gets home from work.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, with his head in a book trying to learn coding. He's at, you know ⁓ you know, boot camp or whatever, boot dot you know, whatever that that website is.
speaker-0: Yeah. Cold right food camp, code camp, whatever.
speaker-1: Yeah, codecamp.com or something like that. He's there, right? That's what he's doing. Now, in five years' time, you know, Tommy is still playing video games. Now he's the number one apex predator in the world, still not playing ALGS, but you know, he's you know, he's got props, he's got, you know, maybe some YouTube followers or something like that, and he's making a little bit of money. But the other kid who spent four, you know who spent those those four years with his head i at you know in code camp dot com is suddenly, you know, a quarter of a million dollar year software engineer.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: You know. That you know, that's part of the self made thing. It's like what are you doing with your time to improve your lot in life? Right. Right. You know, and that then you get into the other aspects of our online life with all the older white men wagging their finger at Gen Z kids saying, Well, you shouldn't be spending twenty five dollars on lunch.
speaker-0: Yeah. I yeah, I saw that. It's like that's how much lunch costs. Like nowadays.
speaker-1: I I sh I I took a picture of that thing, right? Yeah. Burrito, twenty bucks for a burrito. Get out of here.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: I don't think I ever pay you know, at least out in Cal I don't know what it is in California. But I don't remember paying more than like seven, eight bucks for a burrito. I'm sure it's like it's I'm sure it's gone up twenty years later and stuff. But the point is, it's like twenty bucks for a burrito and then you got, you know, some guy on some financial show on TV wagging his finger at you going, Well, you shouldn't be, you know, going out to lunch.
speaker-0: ⁓ yeah, it's been Much it used to cause, yeah. Or now.
speaker-1: You should be investing that money in an index fund. Yeah, I'll go hungry until I'm old and white like you.
speaker-0: Or just old you know, or just eat beans and rice all day. Like, I mean, I don't know. Like no e yeah, yeah. I mean I should you be spending twenty five bucks a day you can find cheaper
speaker-1: I I I grant you that if you're going out every day and spending twenty five dollars a day on lunch, you're not thinking very well.
speaker-0: If you're not now you don't have the means, yeah.
speaker-1: Telling someone that they should never, you know, do that because they're o they're making seventy five thousand dollars a year. Right.
speaker-0: Right, yeah. Well, you know, I can't treat myself sometimes. I got
speaker-1: It's like I'm making seventy-five thousand dollars a year. I should be able to go out to eat once in a while. Right? You know, and without being without having some old fart, you know, wag his finger in my face and say, Well, the reason you're not successful is 'cause you eat.
speaker-0: Yeah. Right. But yeah, so ⁓
speaker-1: Get out of here. So what are you doing with yourself? That's the real
speaker-0: That's part of the, yeah, what are you doing with yourself? And it's like, yeah, and then so a lot of people work hard, you know, because P there's some people are working two jobs, you know. Now they're probably both, you know, like for example, in my case when I was younger, you know, I was working at I was working at a gas station convenience store and delivering pizzas. Yeah, I mean, I was working hard. Or you know, all day, you know, I was working from six AM to three o'clock.
speaker-1: And you think about the kind of work that is, right? Where where is that going to lead you? Right. Where like you you take the other story, which is, okay, you have one job working at a convenience store, but your second job, right, is not just delivering pizzas. It's something where you're you're actually learning something, you're training. Yeah. You know, where, okay, this one, this second gig is gonna get me somewhere. This one is survival. This one is also survival, but it's survival plus.
speaker-0: That's leading me somewhere, yeah.
speaker-1: Yeah. And so that that then you would be able to say, Okay, when you're looking at two people, right? Person one, w in your younger days when you were like nineteen, twenty, whatever, you know, you had a job at a convenience store and you delivered pizzas. Okay, fine. You're a young man, you still don't quite know what you want to do with your life. You got two jobs because you you needed the money. Right. Now
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: you fast forward some time. Now if that second job is still delivering pizzas when you know now you're not you know, you're not like late teens, you know, young You know, you're you're firmly in your adulthood now. Now if you're taking that second job just delivering pizzas and you're not trying to improve yourself. Now you fall into that category of, Well, what are you doing there, young man or young lady? Are you trying to improve yourself? Or are you just like shaking your fist at the system?
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: And that's a tougher one, right? Especially today, right? Because what are what is, you know, again, what is a young person gonna study right now? Right? When you've got for the last thirty years it was all, you know, the STEM, right? Science, technology, ⁓ education, math, whatever it was, I I forget. Engineering. That education. Engineering. Engineering and math, right?
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: And all of that was the you know, you go in, you get your degree in that and you'll be set. And now it's like, ⁓ no, AI's gonna do all those jobs. Right. And now you've got a and this is this is crazy because now you've got these billionaires that are telling all these young people, hey, you know what's a good job for you guys to, you know, plumber, carpenter, electrician. Right? Now, granted, some of those, you know, like the better ones, yeah, make some decent money. Right.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: But again, if every young person is going out to be a carpenter, electrician, plumber, H V A C, there's gonna be a glut and the prices come down. Yeah, what you can charge. Well, why should I pay you ten thousand dollars for this kitchen remodel when that guy over there will do it for seventy five hundred? Or, you know, a seventy five hundred, I I'm I'm living thirty years ago. But you know what I mean. But it's it's that you know, because as soon as you have a glut of available talent, the price per goes down. Now, obviously if you're you know, cream of the crop, you're still gonna be able to to charge, you know, top dollar. But I think that's kind of a weird ⁓
speaker-0: Whatever, yeah.
speaker-1: thing to be happening too. You know, ⁓ well now the people with all the money aren't even saying, well, study the same things that we studied, you know, to make no, study this other stuff that we that we we won't even touch. You know, our hands are too dainty to touch toilets, except to flush them. And we probably hire somebody to use to touch the handle to flush the toilet for us. I'm sorry, that's just cynical, but you know what I mean? But you know what I'm saying? It's like, all right, well, are if are these people going to be able to make money? Then you get into well, what are they going to do with all the surplus of, you know, universal basic income and blah blah all this, you know, related crap, right? But you're trying to make something of yourself.
speaker-0: Yeah. You know, and no one's saying like you're not working hard, you know, a lot of people work hard. You know, I'm not saying like Jeff Bezos or whoever, you know, didn't work hard. You know, there's lots of story, you know, they they work hard, but they also, you know, back to it's like they weren't self made because it's like Jeff Bezos, for example, got what is it, $250,000 from his parents to start Amazon. You know, you didn't have $250,000 to give me, you know, to start a business. And even and and see, and that's why it's like I'm not saying they they didn't necessarily like earn a reward, right? Because You could have maybe you could have given me, I'm sure there's a lot of parents that maybe gave their kids a quarter million dollars and they didn't start Amazon, right? Maybe they squandered it, maybe they gambled it away, they made bad decisions, they invested in the wrong thing, you know. So it's the hard work and the the you know, having an idea, like I do think that like, yeah, you can do that. You know, but there were people that helped you along the way, especially to like reach that billionaire status. You know, even millionaire status, people are helping you either way, you know. ⁓
speaker-1: So is it the fact that, you know, he got a leg up, you know, two hundred and fifty thousand dollar loan, you know, from parents that were well to do. He said, Hey, I got this idea and his parents said, All right, give it a whirl. See what happens. Right. Right. Here, here's some seed money to get started. We expect it back. I don't know if that was the conversation that they had, but whatever. Right. And so then he did it.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: And you know, I've told you the story a dozen times, like when you know, out there at the Cerritos Town Square, you know, sitting outside of the the borders in the Barnes and Noble and people and this new company, Amazon, you could buy books online. And that was during the whole dot com boom too. Right. So it was like pets dot com. All you had to do was slap dot com on the end of something and people were throwing millions of dollars at you, right? Right. And That was all all of that hype was going on. And I I've told you the story number of times that me and these other consultants, we were all consultants meeting at Starbucks and hanging out for a while before we went on to, you know, the companies that we were consulting at. And, you know, one of the guys there, who's a salesman, ⁓ selling phone cases for the the Nokia phones, the leather phone cases for those Nokia phones. That was his thing, right? And ⁓ and he mentioned Amazon. And that, you know, when Amazon first went public, right? And he we he was considering whether he should invest or not. And I did one of the stupidest things I've ever done. I had the money at the time. And I just said, Books online, there's borders right there. Talk about lack of vision. Right. I had no but if had I invested the money that you know, just a little bit of money that I had available at that time.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: my I wouldn't be having the the situation that I'm facing right now. You know, I'll put it that way. But you never know, right? I just didn't know, I didn't expect it. Right. But again, I I blame my family and I go the rich dad, poor dad, because my parents were poor. Right. So they didn't they didn't know how to my mother knew how to put money in the bank. Right.
speaker-0: Yeah. So
speaker-1: You know, comb yeah, the beauty of compound interest. That was that was my mother's whole you know, financial education. You put money in the bank and they pay you interest on it. Not that you put it in the right account and you get a lot more interest, you know. A regular whole savings account, that's good enough. And my dad, my dad was I I think my mom, you know, he might have been alcoholic. I he didn't he wasn't like drunk around the house, but apparently when he was not home.
speaker-0: Yeah, so
speaker-1: That was an issue. I I d I have no confirmation. All I know is that the only the only story that came was one morning we woke up and they were fighting because apparently he had fallen asle asleep behind the wheel and his car had and like you know though you see those things where like the car goes through the storefront? That was my dad back in like 67 or something like that. But ⁓ now he said he fell asleep, my mother said he was drinking, right? But Whatever. May probably both. It was probably that he stopped at the bar on the way home from work, had a couple, and then, you know, nodded out. ⁓ but
speaker-0: But yeah, so that's but that's part of Yeah, and that's part of the you know, the self made myth part to me is that like so you didn't have the education, you know, it's partly luck.
speaker-1: Yeah, I didn't have the education and then being a single parent, you know, young, right, I I was barely having, you know, barely making ends meet for most of the time up until the late nineties when that started. So I didn't re I didn't even have like a strategy of investing. I had read a little bit about it, you know, over the years, but I never had enough To risk. That was the thing. There were a couple of times where I did have like a a s a large enough pile to start a small account, but the fear of losing it was so great. Cause I, you know, it took me a long it took me a lot of effort to get that pile. And to put it somewhere where it would be at risk of being smaller than than it was, and not understanding like
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: the the time horizons and you have to be patient. Yes, it'll go down, but if you just, you know, don't freak out, you know, it'll come back and all that co I I know that now. That's a strategy that's in my head now, but at the time it wasn't. So, you know, we're again On the self-made side, that that's something that I actually had to do on my own, right? I but again, how do I learn about that? Well, because somebody wrote a book about it. You know, somebody took the time to try to educate me either directly by talking to me, which there were people that I've met over the years that explained things about finance and that to me, or that people took the time to write a book.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: and explain things. Like the Rich Dad Poor Dad book. That guy you know. Now I r I grant you that that book has its critics and, you know, it's not all
speaker-0: Yeah. He's basically I think
speaker-1: You know, it's not all that, but as for someone with no experience, it gets you going. And so that effort, again, yes, I'm making the effort to educate myself, but someone else made an effort to give me something that I could educate myself with. So how much of that is self made?
speaker-0: It's it's a start. Yeah. You know, and it it just like I I think it's just when you you're fundamentally looking like I just look at the world. One of the reasons why it makes sense to me that this is a a myth, you know, where some people like, ⁓ no, no, it's not myth. You know, people are self-made all the time. It's like, no, the reason why it's I look at the world, I look at us as we're social, whatever, rational social people. animals, you know, dependent on each other for help. You know, you think about Amazon dot com is on the internet, you know, had, you know, what is it, Stanford and MIT not started doing, you know, making the internet and all that, you know. I b I'm pretty sure it was MIT and Stanford were the first two computers that were connected. The early, early back in like I'm I'm saying when they first started communicating with computers, it was Stanford. The that book Hackers that I read Okay. Memory's a little foggy. But anyways, my point being is that everything was built off the back of whether it's the generation before the people that are around us now, you know, and I just think it's like
speaker-1: So you know, what what is it what are what is someone trying to say then? What do you think? When they say that.
speaker-0: Well, it's like that the other things you hear, you know, the we've t I think we've talked about e American exceptionalism in the past, but it's like you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I think it's kind of almost like ⁓ it's a story to tell the the huddled and poor masses to kind of keep them in line, sort of. ⁓ like you too can be a millionaire. Like we're all like they're holding us down, you know, generally speaking, in my ⁓ perspective. ⁓ and it's like this story that you can, you know, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You're self-made. You can you can become a billionaire too, just like Elon Musk. if you just work hard and, you know, d I guess direct your
speaker-1: You know that that kind of works, but you know, part of it, like I said, I saw that story about this twenty two year old kid, you know, came up, you know, got some funding and now he's a billionaire. You know, I don't even know what the company is. I just I saw the headline and it was like twenty two year old, you know, new billionaire and I'm like You know, how hard did he work? You know, I mean you don't know as far as like
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: the mental effort, what did he design, you know?
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: You'd have to look it up, right, to f to figure all that out. But you're you're doing something, you're producing something of value, or at least you're trying to produce something of value that someone else is going to appreciate. Right. Well, we're trying to do that. We're trying to create something of value, right? Although, you know, I I'm not trying to create internet value. Right. I'm trying to get my goal is to get people off the internet.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. Which is odd because we're on the internet and then it's like, Yeah, well, life happens out there, you know.
speaker-0: Yeah. I think it's about balance too, or you know.
speaker-1: Well, it's it's sort of
speaker-0: I only say b
speaker-1: Over the last few weeks, Mark, we've been we've been touching dancing around like these these information environments that young people are living in, right? And what that's doing to them as far as their ability to have hope and faith in a future. You know. Do they want to grow up, keep growing up into the world that looks increasingly hostile, right, in a lot of different ways. You know, and and You know, this idea of you know, the self-made person, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you too can be a billionaire, all you have to do is have the right idea. And meanwhile, there are all these obstacles, you know, being erected. Right. You look at, you know, just what's going on in the world right now. I just whether it's the United States or globally, right? And all these pressures, you know, the financial pressures, you know. ⁓ gas, the price of gas, the price of food, all these things are weighing on people, right? And then I'm like I'm sitting there listening to this stuff, getting away from it as much as I can, you know, turning the turning the computer off, leaving the T V off, getting in the car, going for a drive, getting on the beach if I can, you know, sitting there for a bit. Now it the weather's nice so now I can go to the park too, you know, and ⁓ you know, go for a walk in the woods and all that just to to let things settle. But as I you know, then I come back and I start walking around and I'm looking at, you know, what I have to read. And we talked a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that book, Against the Machine, right? Yeah. About like He's writing in like two thousand and eight about what the internet was doing to us. Right. ⁓ you know, the and the collect of us, you know. and then and I'm walking around, ⁓ it's downstairs. ⁓ I thought I had it on the desk here. I found another book called it was written by like a neuroscientist called Virtually You. And this was written in like two thousand eleven, and he and This was one of those books that I bought. I read like the first two chapters and then I closed it and put it on the shelf. And now here I am like fifteen years later taking it off the shelf again because it's relevant again. Because now he was looking at two thousand eleven at the effect of heavy internet use and what it was doing to us. And now here we are fifteen years later where heavy internet use
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Then is like is like somebody who's really actively cut back now. Right. The amount of time that they spend online is cut back. And at the time when he was writing that was considered heavy.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, when I think about like two thousand eleven and how much time I probably spent on the internet back then was probably very little.
speaker-1: Yeah. Hour or two a day, maybe, maybe more, you know, depending. You know, but now that has completely changed. So any of the effects that he's talking about then are just going to be magnified now. Right. And so this is the information environment that people are living in, right? So you're sitting there and you told me you're just scrolling through TikTok, right? And this this random thing comes up. of a talk from Cambridge University from a professor or somebody who's talking about this concept of being self made.
speaker-0: Well, he didn't really he wasn't talking about being self made specifically. I don't know if he used those words, but basically, yeah, he was just talking about being successful 'cause he was using it in like this context of like, you know, the people that were attending Cambridge, you know, it's like forty percent or whatever the percentage are all like, you know, from upper class families or whatever. So his point was was that hard work, hard work and talent or skill is not the only thing that's part of the equation. You know, there's investment. Which is what which which that is what led me into the jumping board of the me thinking about being self made, right? Like and that how it's not
speaker-1: But now he was talking about an investment in ⁓ the investment in a person, not a financial investment. He is like an investment in their becoming the best version of themselves that they can be.
speaker-0: Right, 'cause they were able to go to school, go to Cambridge, you know, somebody invested in them for them to be able to get there to that point.
speaker-1: Right. But it's also you can t you know, I mean Cambridge obviously, you know, with all the history and and all of that, you know, ⁓ ca the cachet surrounding that name and all. But you're we're also talking about like early childhood education. Right. And this is one of the things that the Head Start program was supposed to address, right? Was making the investment in the early
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. Like really giving these kids the attention, the nutrition, and everything that they needed in order for them to be fully present for the education in school. Right. And make that investment early, and then that pays off later over time. Right. But we're not doing that anymore. I mean, I don't even know. I did do they still have Head Start? You know, so what kind of programs are we currently aiming at, you know, that particular segment of the population where intervention and investment really would make a difference. Right? You know, because by the time that kid gets to be fifteen, sixteen is a juvenile delinquent, any intervention at that particular point's just putting him in juvenile hall or jail.
speaker-0: Right. Where had you invested money in the beginning?
speaker-1: If you'd invested money in the beginning in education and if they had like early childhood traumas, giving them counseling and that kind of stuff so they could process their emotions better, you know, so that they're not acting out. All right, that's gonna be better for long term success. Right. But that's more expensive. Or it's it's harder to quantify, right? 'Cause you need longitudinal studies, right? You need to say, Okay, well we invested this much money in these kids here and you know, twenty years later, here's the outcome. Right. Out of those, you know, fifty kids in that program, forty seven went on to get PhDs and three of ⁓ are serial killers. Right. You know, it's like whatever. You know, I'm that that's extreme, but you get, you know, what I mean.
speaker-0: Yeah. Right.
speaker-1: But that's that's also, you know, you could almost go to the Hillary Clinton thing, you know, it takes a village to raise a child. You know, so are we, you know, even in that sense, you know, to your self made. How much of you is your activity or how much of you is a result of the traumas that I inflicted on you with a bad temper versus the ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, what you learned in school, what you learned from your friends, what you learned from your friend's parents? You know, what did they tell you that was different or conflicted with what you were hearing from me? Right? And how did you process all of that in order for you to become the man that you are today? Right? Was that all you? Did you pick everything? Did you make every single choice?
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, so how do you how do you take that, you know, all of those factors and roll them into this formulation that, well, I'm you know, I'm a self made. It usually only applies in that very limited context too in business. Right. You know, that's when people ⁓ make the most ⁓ strident claims, at least that seems to it's way
speaker-0: Yeah. Seems to be mostly
speaker-1: Striding claims are when it's I built this business. I did this myself. Or me and my partners. You know. Right. My my two my two co founders and I. Yeah. We did this. But we didn't have any help. Kind of thing. That it you don't see that so much in your artist, your poet, you know. The you know
speaker-0: Yeah. Right. Yeah.
speaker-1: Stevie Ravon, you know, the guitarist. You know, he'll just sit there. He, you know, I I was just reading a a a little essay on him the other day and it was like, Well, how much do you practice? And he goes, Well, I don't really practice. He goes, I just I play. He goes, When I'm awake, I have a guitar in my hand. He goes, If you want to call that practicing, I guess. Yeah, but you know, that was
speaker-0: Yeah. That's kinda how like ⁓ when especially, you know, when I was a teenager playing basketball, how I kinda felt about basketball. It's like, I'm just playing basketball. Yeah, I mean I had I was on teams and we did practice, you know, but yeah, no, I was just playing.
speaker-1: You know, so when it comes to this, you know, concept of making yourself, you know, it the the that framing, the way people talk about that is business. It's not in these other areas.
speaker-0: Well when they reach a billion dollars or their self billionaire, you know, with
speaker-1: I'm I don't talk about myself as being like a self made person when it's, you know, my hobbies or these other things. It usually gen tends to be along that business vector. So you can, you know, take that with the appropriate grain of salt as well. You know, what am I doing? ⁓ this guy's talking about ⁓ yeah, his business. And we already know that, yeah.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, a good chunk of that is stuff that you'd rather not acknowledge that were it not for the existence of those things, you would have never got your business off the ground. Yeah. You I mean, you and I can't do a YouTube channel without YouTube.
speaker-0: So yeah.
speaker-1: Yeah, I mean ⁓ what we're doing right now is dependent on the existence of this platform.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: Right. Now, are we defining our thing here? Yeah. It it's what we're trying to do is ours. So in that sense, you know, we're making it, but we're dependent on the platform.
speaker-0: The infrastructure that was there already. Yeah. ⁓ yeah.
speaker-1: And all of that other stuff. So you know, we can claim that if we ever get more than two hundred and twenty four subscribers, you know, it we can claim that we built this ourselves, but that would just be, you know, patting ourselves on
speaker-0: Yeah. And it's it's I I mean, I suppose like it it it just depends on like how you're framing it, you know.
speaker-1: Well that goes back to our, you know, the stories that we tell, the story that you live. Right. Now, should we congratulate ourselves if we get a little success? Of course we should, you know. Right. I mean you know, because we are working, you know, at it, you know. To the extent that we have the time and ⁓ the bandwidth to be able to focus on this particular aspect of life, then yeah, we're working on it. And as we get better at this. You know, or at least figuring out what we're doing and how to manage it better. You know, hopefully the production values go up. Whatever it is. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. But it's It helps to just Hmm, how do I put it? It helps to remember that we're all in this together. You know, at some at some level, at some point, right? You know. Even the people that you disagree with most vehemently, they got a right to be here too, and we gotta figure out a way to
speaker-0: Yeah. Figure it out.
speaker-1: Yeah, to figure it out. All right. You know what? Maybe, you know, the w the only way we can live together is if you stay way over there. And I stay way over here. It's not that you have to go. We'll just both move. And let's l and and create a buffer zone of some other people that w neither one of us are objectional to in between us. However, but you know, like organizing like things that way. ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: would be better. You know, we're all in this together, so let's focus on that. Right. And then these other things we you try to work out on an individual basis.
speaker-0: Yeah. We're all in this together. We all depend on people. ⁓ there was something in that I was listening to this ⁓ another YouTube channel. philosophize this and he was talking about like kind of this idea in American society specifically of like where I'm doing something for you 'cause you're doing something for me. You know, like the kind of I guess, you know, like you might be my Uber driver, but it's because I'm paying you, you know, or be serving me food but it's cause I'm paying you. There's like a lot of transactional or I'll I'll help you move but 'cause you're gonna buy me pizza or whatever. I don't know. Like there's always kind of this exchange.
speaker-1: He's talking about the transactional nature of most relationships today.
speaker-0: Yeah. So where, you know, that it kinda led back. I I thought about it when you something you said earlier about the, you know, helping like Head Start and things like this, helping people that are like less fortunate, that maybe didn't have the financial education, that didn't have the means, that had the poor parents, and, you know, were always cutting these programs. You know, that's one of the things they're always talking about cutting, like, ⁓ we're giving all this entitlement programs, we're giving these people money, you know, that just because they're not working hard. So it's like that. I feel like this whole idea of the self made that self made myth contributes to these type of attitudes where you're not gonna help your fellow human because you think that, like, ⁓ well, they could just, you know. make it on their own. They're not I'm giving them something that I I'm I'm sorry, the look on your face making
speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. I'm not making that connection. They I'm not I my brain's not making the same connection that your brain's making.
speaker-0: Well yeah, so Yeah, because I guess I just the I was just thinking about the transactional nature and right. And then now with you I think that if you believe the myth that someone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, then I guess it would seem to lead to, in my mind, an attitude more of I'm not gonna help people because you can just help yourself, right?
speaker-1: All right. Yeah. Well I I see that.
speaker-0: Yeah. Maybe I didn't articulate it well initially and maybe I still haven't articulated well.
speaker-1: Well again, this is one of those this is one of the things that I've told you often on, you know, and what helps me is that when I'm thinking through things like that, I write stuff down. You know, and I'll and I write it down until I can write a sentence down that makes sense to me. ⁓ okay, that's what I'm trying to say. Right. You know, so I I get where you're coming from. So in other words, this this concept of improving yourself, right? Whether it's self made or just it's your choices, right? That you're making these choices and this idea that ⁓ Stepping outside the physical impossibility of picking yourself up by your own bootstraps. ⁓ you know, this this idea is prevalent. It's part of the cultural mythology, right, of maybe American society, right? The Horatio Alger story or whatever it is. ⁓ Horatio Alger was more you start in the mail room and you work your way up to the C-suite kind of thing. Where ⁓ you're more ⁓ working along the lines of Hey, if you're in a bad situation, get a second job, save some money and invest that money and you'll eventually be better. You'll be
speaker-0: Yeah, I guess what it is is it's it's the myth of self made billionaire or millionaire.
speaker-1: Yeah, I I the the le You gotta leave the millionaire billionaire thing off the table 'cause that that muddies the that muddies the concept that you're trying to
speaker-0: idea of being self made leads to these attitudes of not wanting to help your fellow human, I think, is what I'm trying if is that more
speaker-1: Yeah, well that's what I'm getting. And I'm just trying to clarify it in my own head and maybe help you clarify it in yours. Yeah. is that Belief is you pick yourself up by your own bootstraps, you go out and you figure out you get that job, you take the retail job, you take two retail jobs. You, you know, even if you've only got ten bucks a week, you put that ten duck bucks a week in a index fund and eventually you're gonna build a nest egg and that nest egg is gonna be enough so that you can quit working retail. And hey instead of working two retail jobs, why don't you work one one retail job and go to school at night? Or hey, even better, you can sign up for classes online and you can get yourself an education. Get your maybe you're not going to get your MBA, but at least you can get your undergraduate degree online and then, you know, da da all that right and because you won't lift a finger to get a job at Walmart or anything like that.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah.
speaker-1: I'm not gonna I'm gonna refuse to pay taxes to fund food stamps and whatever. Easy fuck. Right? Sorry, ⁓ for the listeners. Right. It that's basically the point that you're making. Right? That in this society we've created an attitude that says if you don't have
speaker-0: Everybody, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: It's your fault because you're not working. You could be better. You're just lazy. Right? You've been programmed
speaker-0: Yeah, which I think we talked about on just a quick plug. I think we talked about on an earlier episode. Go back and listen to earlier episode. Anyways.
speaker-1: If he could give a number that would help him. ⁓
speaker-0: It was in the teens, I think.
speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just listen to all of them and if you can survive that long. all right.
speaker-0: Platform, yeah. Yeah. That if if you you're lazy, if you're not successful, it's your fault.
speaker-1: Right. Now, if that's the story that you're living in. then you're not gonna ⁓ any time somebody says I I need a hand to get going, ⁓ no you know. Now that's only some, that's not universal.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: So the you know, where now going back to our our larger theme, like where is that story coming from? And where are you hearing it? How is it being repeated? Right? Because obvious I mean, obviously you and I believe that that story is false. Right. So given that we believe that it's false, right? And yet we are surrounded by not everybody, but a a fairly significant number of other people who believe that story is true. So what reinforces that story, right? Where does that appear? And this is the thing that I always trip you up on, right? Because the voice of mother culture, right? It's never stated explicitly at this particular point. It's always image, it's background at this particular point. Right.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, I mean you see whether it's, you know, ⁓ the stories, like even the story you talked about, about this twenty two year old, you know, it's just a it's another story. There's a million
speaker-1: Yeah, but I I'm saying that in the in the in the broader you know, environment that you live in, right? Bill billboards, movies, TV shows, advertisements, you know, magazine ads, right? How is that portrayed, this idea of the pick yourself up by your bootstraps, move on if you're if you're looking for government, if you're looking for government assistance, you're lazy and you're stealing from me. Right. And and you're not you know, it's gonna be the the thing that you have to look for.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Because you'll see it in some way. If you're Okay. The the lazy, shiftless person, right? How is that mat how does that show up? Right. That that idea that you're that you're talking about. Is it is it something that you actually see in the world? Right. I I'm not gonna say yes or no because it's your hypothesis. So you're the one that's gonna say, Yeah, I see it out in the world. This is how this is how this story is promulgated. This is why people believe it. Right. And it's like, well, what am I hearing that's reinforcing that in my own mind?
speaker-0: Well, it's like I I mean I d I mean, I brought this up on previous episodes too, like and we kind of touched on it already, is the the these People that are like, you know, what are you doing with your time? You know, what are you ⁓ you know, T Paine said, you know, when you go to your nine to five, you come home ⁓ clock out of your nine to five, you come home and clock into your own job, whatever, whether it's this podcast or whatever. So like
speaker-1: Yeah, that's the obvious. Though those are the that's the that's smacking you in the face with this. But it's but that the thing that that we started our podcast on 41 episodes ago, right? The voice of mother culture underneath it all, right? The driving of the story. Now we know that that is civilization is the right way to live. The earth was made for man and man was meant to rule it. You know, that that's that underlying thing. And then I tried to get you to see that over the top of that is like the Western civilization white male patriarchy, you know, story. Right. That that manifests in all of the media that's being consumed. Right. And all of these ideas that people are fighting over are part of that background noise that get it's it's like you're familiar with the product placement.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. You know, you're watching a TV show, you know, some cop drama or whatever, you know, and on the table is a Red Bull. That's an advertisement for Red Bull inside that TV show. Right. You're not they're not saying drink Red Bull. Right. But you see it. Right. And that's the thing that I'm talking about. So, like when you're talking about this pick yourself up by your bootstraps, this is the symbol of success. How is that manifested? How do you see that in newspaper ads and and newspaper stories, headlines?
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: you know, kind of thing. Is it reinforced in that way? In that same cultural ambient noise that's just this is just how the world is. Cause that the it seems to me that the persistence of that attitude, this idea that anybody who's like looking to the government for a little bit of help, whether it's rental assistance or whatever it is, is somehow defective.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. That they're not a victim of circumstances that they, you know, a s a system or a structure that they are being exploited by, but it's rather a personal responsibility thing. Right. This is your systemic racism, your systemic, you know, whether it's racism or the LGBTQ or whatever community, right? All the structural shit that they run into all the time. It's always cast back at them as a personal responsibility thing. Right. And how is that story, you know, manifested to the over and over and over again so that if you're a cisgendered white person
speaker-0: It's the story. That's the thing. It's it's the it's it's the stories they choose to tell on the media. You know, it's the things they choose to talk about, right? I know that might be a slap in the face thing, but it to me it's like it is the, you know, the fact that you might see more ⁓ stories about successful billionaires versus you don't see stories about all these people that die from poverty.
speaker-1: No, y if that's that now you're getting into selection bias and things like that, right? As far as like you know, confirmation bias, the you've got the algorithmic feed of your your news thing, right? That's one thing, right? That's that's algorithmic narrowing of your vision and your your choice options, right? But I I'm I'm trying to get off of the algorithm ⁓ in in more just the ambient stuff that you're looking at all the time. Billboards, headlines, the stuff that's not being fed to you directly. You know what I mean? You know, that that there's a there's another there's a structure that's in those stories, whether it's a Netflix drama or you know, HBO Max, what I don't even know, all the streaming services, right? You're watching your must see TV, and within that story, all of these ⁓ social arrangements are being laid out and various people are being portrayed in various ways. You know, we talked about it ⁓ like back when I was a kid, right? The original Tom and Jerry cartoons. The original Tom and Jerry cartoons was the mouse would set the cat up to do something that would then have the maid whack the cat with a broom. That was the the joke. Right. But the maid was black. Right. When you got up into the sixties around the time of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and that, the the legs in the cartoon went from being the black maid to the white housewife's legs, still whacking the cat with the broom. And then eventually, you know, the human left the cartoon completely and it was just Tom and Jerry. Right. But
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: The fact that those legs in that cartoon were black told everybody that was watching cartoons that black people were butlers and mates and chauffeurs. They weren't homeowners.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. They were glorified slaves. They were paid slaves now. Right. And that's the thing that you know, so when you're like these these economic things and pull yourself up by your bootstraps and that that attitude towards people that are struggling, that's also Out there, right? It's being portrayed. And like I said, it's never gonna be directly. You know, it's not that's not how this works. It works by being this ambient thing that it's just the way the world is. You don't question it because you're seeing it everywhere. Right. And maybe that exists in the world. Maybe what you're saying about the picking up by the boot traps, maybe that is manifest out there. Maybe it isn't. But since, you know, you're you're you're keep encountering, right, this kind of framing Yeah. You encounter this kind of framing all the time. So how why does it have that that's like the deeper question for our podcast? It's why do certain of these things have such deep roots and are so hard to dislodge? Right. Cause like I said, you and I both agree or both think that that story is false, that the people who are at the bottom that are struggling are not necessarily some of them are. We're not saying that they all you know, it's just that this idea that they're all lazy. Right. How does that where does that get its purchase and why is it so hard to dislodge? And that's because, at least to my way of thinking, and I could be wrong, this is this is why I'm doing the research that I'm doing too, you know, ⁓ on my own, is to try to get a purchase on that. Am I really seeing it or am I reading more into it than than I should? You know, is there some other factor that's that's at play that's not part of this cultural story and the voice of mother culture? It does seem to be a good container, but again, you know, the details of how the pieces fit inside of it, you know, may or may not, you know, be the way that I think they are right now. Right. But that's why I'm like
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Asking you, say, okay, you you keep seeing this, like on you if you're on TikTok or whatever, this idea keeps coming up that that poor people are lazy. Poor people are lazy. Poor people are and so all right, why is that? Why does that story keep coming up? Is it somewhere else in the ambient atmosphere? Or is that the thing that drives it? Because that might be the thing that drives it. It might not be what I think it is. It might actually be the more direct algorithmic. Just beating you over the head with it.
speaker-0: 'Cause it's even like the you know, do you d ⁓ I don't know, I was just thinking about like movies they made, you know, they make movies about Steve Jobs and, you know, these people that supposedly were
speaker-1: They write books about him. Walter Isaacson wrote a book about Steve Jobs. He wrote a book about Elon Musk.
speaker-0: Right. You know, there's books about them, there's movies. And it's like, you know, it's it's I mean, I've always thought it was kinda funny because everyone like loves Steve Jobs, but it was really Wozniak. It was the other Steve that like
speaker-1: He wrote a book about Einstein too. That's a good one. Well, yeah, it was his I Steve was ⁓ Jobs was the ⁓ the showman, the you know, Wozniak was the nerd with the you know
speaker-0: Yeah. Compu who actually made the computer. But yeah. You know.
speaker-1: I do, right? Hey kid, anything else? No.
speaker-0: ⁓ I mean, well, d I'm sure we could keep going on. But yeah, I mean for now we've hit
speaker-1: And and it it I we're over our hour. We were over our hour.
speaker-0: Yeah. So ⁓ but anyways, ⁓ thanks again for joining us. ⁓ once again, hopefully we gave you something to think about. like, subscribe, do all the algorithm stuff. We got, you know, links in the description as everyone has.
speaker-1: Well, speaking of algorithmic noise, we like to think that our noise is just a little more pleasant. Not quite as not designed to make you mad.
speaker-0: Hopefully not, yeah. I'm sure it will.
speaker-1: Well it might. It might, but it's not designed to. Yeah. We're not trying to provoke an emotional reaction. What we well, at least what I want. I don't know about you, but what I want is better conversations that we're not screaming at each other. We'll actually shut up and listen for two minutes to let the other person finish. Anyway, this is I've been Doug
speaker-0: Yeah. Mark. Yeah, Mark. Yeah, like I said, listen to us on Spotify, whatever. Your vehicle of choice. ⁓ and ⁓ we'll ⁓ catch you. ⁓ yeah, Patreon. I didn't say Patreon. I gotta make sure I say all the words on the ⁓
speaker-1: Whatever. All right. We have a Patreon. ⁓ our episodes are uploaded there one day before they show up on YouTube and other places. So, you know, if you're if you're really Jonesing, hey I you know what? Jonesing, I'm a Generation Jones. Did you know that? ⁓ I'm still trying to figure out what Generation Jones is all about. I'm still reading on that. ⁓ so yeah, so all the all the normal stuff.
speaker-0: ⁓ wow.
speaker-1: You know, if you want ⁓ if you want this to show up in your algorithm, then you have to you have to click like, you have to be a subscriber. And apparently commenting drives things up as well. So we appreciate all of that. ⁓ once again, I'm Doug. That's Mark, and this has been
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Yeah. And enjoy a good cup of coffee. Or a reasonably good cup of coffee. So what's on the agenda today, Mark?
speaker-0: Yeah, that too. ⁓ so I kinda wanted to just talk about the whole idea of just being self made, I guess. Self made billionaire, but just I guess more self made in general. I mean, I think the initial the initial idea was self made billionaire, but
speaker-1: You know, the funny thing is is that you mentioned that. ⁓ well last week we talked about the fact that we weren't preparing as well so that this week we did it. I actually reached out to you and asked you. So you know I kinda knew what you were gonna bring up. But one of the things that I saw after we exchanged our text messages to kind of set up what we wanted to to touch on was the fact that there was another article that came up on Fortune magazine or one of those things, you know, on the Google news feed. Where some like twenty two year old kid had launched some business and he was a new billionaire. You know, and I'm like, all right, but it's some AI related, whatever, you know. But being a billionaire is not is different from like creating yourself, right? So you have like the self made billionaire versus the self made man, or nowadays that would be politically ⁓ incorrect. So we'll call it the self made person. Right. Or the self made human, right? So what does that mean to you when you when you hear something like that, when when it says, Well, I'm self made, what does that suggest to you? Whoa.
speaker-0: What I hear is that, you know, I did this on my own. You know, I worked hard and through, you know, hard work and perseverance I was able to make this company, for example. Whatever. You know.
speaker-1: ⁓ And what do you find problematic about that? Well
speaker-0: I mean, depending on I guess how granular you want to get, it's nobody's I just don't believe that anybody's really self made in general. You know. you know, on the anti capitalism level, like, you know, you can't become Yeah, you can't become a billionaire without exploitation. So you're making that money off the backs of other people, ⁓ for one. But then
speaker-1: Again, Mark.
speaker-0: Besides that, the more just I guess philosophical aspect of being self made, other than that extent existential you were talking about. But, you know, we're we're a very dependent species, you know. you know, from the time we're born, you know, we're dependent on our parents and, you know, ⁓
speaker-1: Easy for you.
speaker-0: Just various people are friends in our lives. I mean, you, you know, you had mentioned in our talks ⁓ the you know, Elizabeth Warren had brought up a few years back about government infrastructure. You know, yeah, you made your company, you know, Amazon is this huge company, but one of the reasons why they're able to mail stuff to people is because of the post office.
speaker-1: Well yeah, I mean it was the postal service, you you know, and the roads that the packages were driven, you know, and the maintenance of those roads and all that other kind of stuff.
speaker-0: So there's a lot of the point is, I guess, is like, you know, on we're a very social species, we're all dependent on each other in some way. You know, so that's I kind of reject the whole self made in that aspect because
speaker-1: All right. So you're you're more focused on the relational aspects of life. You know, so that we're not nobody's in this alone alone. Right. You get to be where you are. You may not know who's supporting you, but you won't get anywhere without those people doing the stuff that they do.
speaker-0: Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean and there's a million examples. Like I mean, you get sick, you go to the hospital, there's a person there that's a doctor or a nurse or whatever that's helping you. You know, it's like there's you know, like I said, it just depends on how granular you wanna get. We could have a hours long episode just talking about different examples of people that are helping you along the way. Well
speaker-1: it's I mean, but that's like direct help. You go to a doctor, right? That's a person who provides a service. You contract with that service. They go, Yeah, I'll I'll treat you as long as you you know, as long as your insurance company or you have the ability Yeah. You know, and then you get into your anti capitalism right like healthcare should be free, you're you know kind of thing. ⁓ healthcare is a right, not a privilege, you know, if you're a Bernie bro. ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah. You or your insurance company pays.
speaker-1: Well, I I that I mean I I I agree with the the principle. I d I do believe that healthcare should is a right. It should be a human right. We shouldn't have to ⁓ it shouldn't be tiered access. If you get sick, you should be able to get treated for whatever it is that you have regardless of how much wealth you possess. Now I know that sounds almost communist and I apologize to any listeners who just lost their minds.
speaker-0: But anyways.
speaker-1: But you know just ⁓ you know, we're we're collecting topics, Mark, you know. Right. And eventually we'll figure out what we really want to do with this thing instead of just bouncing around like we do. But anyway, ⁓ back to the self made thing. So I was thinking more in terms of like the the services that you take for granted that you never see the person doing them. Right. You know, like, ⁓ you come out of the you come out of the grocery store
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: And you've got maybe a a paper towel that you were using to make sure that you didn't get, you know, touch anything icky in the store. And now you walk out of the store and there's a trash can there. You throw the thing in. Somebody empties that trash can all the time. Right. Right. It's not overflowing. You never see that person. But yet their activity makes your life easier.
speaker-0: Even the grocery store the the food getting there, you know, you don't see the truck I mean you might see the truck driving around on the street, but y you know, but to your
speaker-1: Yeah, but the people that are, you know, loading it on the truck, the people all that stuff, all those conveniences, right? So yes, you might be self made in some limited sense, right? As far as making certain choices where you focus your energy. Like, ⁓ all right, you're not working, so what are you doing? Are you reading a book or are you doom scrolling on TikTok? Right. ⁓ That's a choice. Now that's the self made part, right? And I think a lot of the discourse ⁓ online in the online noise machine has to do with that. Right. Well, what are you doing with yourself? Right. What are you doing with your time? Hey, there, you know, young young man or woman, you know, and that you're sitting there complaining about the lack of opportunities for you.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. But what are you doing with your time? ⁓ you're you're a apex predator, number three in the world. Well, congratulations, Johnny. You know, are you playing ALGS? If you're not, so what? Right? You're not making any money at it. Right. Where whereas Billy is spending those same four hours every night after he gets home from work.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, with his head in a book trying to learn coding. He's at, you know ⁓ you know, boot camp or whatever, boot dot you know, whatever that that website is.
speaker-0: Yeah. Cold right food camp, code camp, whatever.
speaker-1: Yeah, codecamp.com or something like that. He's there, right? That's what he's doing. Now, in five years' time, you know, Tommy is still playing video games. Now he's the number one apex predator in the world, still not playing ALGS, but you know, he's you know, he's got props, he's got, you know, maybe some YouTube followers or something like that, and he's making a little bit of money. But the other kid who spent four, you know who spent those those four years with his head i at you know in code camp dot com is suddenly, you know, a quarter of a million dollar year software engineer.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: You know. That you know, that's part of the self made thing. It's like what are you doing with your time to improve your lot in life? Right. Right. You know, and that then you get into the other aspects of our online life with all the older white men wagging their finger at Gen Z kids saying, Well, you shouldn't be spending twenty five dollars on lunch.
speaker-0: Yeah. I yeah, I saw that. It's like that's how much lunch costs. Like nowadays.
speaker-1: I I sh I I took a picture of that thing, right? Yeah. Burrito, twenty bucks for a burrito. Get out of here.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: I don't think I ever pay you know, at least out in Cal I don't know what it is in California. But I don't remember paying more than like seven, eight bucks for a burrito. I'm sure it's like it's I'm sure it's gone up twenty years later and stuff. But the point is, it's like twenty bucks for a burrito and then you got, you know, some guy on some financial show on TV wagging his finger at you going, Well, you shouldn't be, you know, going out to lunch.
speaker-0: ⁓ yeah, it's been Much it used to cause, yeah. Or now.
speaker-1: You should be investing that money in an index fund. Yeah, I'll go hungry until I'm old and white like you.
speaker-0: Or just old you know, or just eat beans and rice all day. Like, I mean, I don't know. Like no e yeah, yeah. I mean I should you be spending twenty five bucks a day you can find cheaper
speaker-1: I I I grant you that if you're going out every day and spending twenty five dollars a day on lunch, you're not thinking very well.
speaker-0: If you're not now you don't have the means, yeah.
speaker-1: Telling someone that they should never, you know, do that because they're o they're making seventy five thousand dollars a year. Right.
speaker-0: Right, yeah. Well, you know, I can't treat myself sometimes. I got
speaker-1: It's like I'm making seventy-five thousand dollars a year. I should be able to go out to eat once in a while. Right? You know, and without being without having some old fart, you know, wag his finger in my face and say, Well, the reason you're not successful is 'cause you eat.
speaker-0: Yeah. Right. But yeah, so ⁓
speaker-1: Get out of here. So what are you doing with yourself? That's the real
speaker-0: That's part of the, yeah, what are you doing with yourself? And it's like, yeah, and then so a lot of people work hard, you know, because P there's some people are working two jobs, you know. Now they're probably both, you know, like for example, in my case when I was younger, you know, I was working at I was working at a gas station convenience store and delivering pizzas. Yeah, I mean, I was working hard. Or you know, all day, you know, I was working from six AM to three o'clock.
speaker-1: And you think about the kind of work that is, right? Where where is that going to lead you? Right. Where like you you take the other story, which is, okay, you have one job working at a convenience store, but your second job, right, is not just delivering pizzas. It's something where you're you're actually learning something, you're training. Yeah. You know, where, okay, this one, this second gig is gonna get me somewhere. This one is survival. This one is also survival, but it's survival plus.
speaker-0: That's leading me somewhere, yeah.
speaker-1: Yeah. And so that that then you would be able to say, Okay, when you're looking at two people, right? Person one, w in your younger days when you were like nineteen, twenty, whatever, you know, you had a job at a convenience store and you delivered pizzas. Okay, fine. You're a young man, you still don't quite know what you want to do with your life. You got two jobs because you you needed the money. Right. Now
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: you fast forward some time. Now if that second job is still delivering pizzas when you know now you're not you know, you're not like late teens, you know, young You know, you're you're firmly in your adulthood now. Now if you're taking that second job just delivering pizzas and you're not trying to improve yourself. Now you fall into that category of, Well, what are you doing there, young man or young lady? Are you trying to improve yourself? Or are you just like shaking your fist at the system?
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: And that's a tougher one, right? Especially today, right? Because what are what is, you know, again, what is a young person gonna study right now? Right? When you've got for the last thirty years it was all, you know, the STEM, right? Science, technology, ⁓ education, math, whatever it was, I I forget. Engineering. That education. Engineering. Engineering and math, right?
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: And all of that was the you know, you go in, you get your degree in that and you'll be set. And now it's like, ⁓ no, AI's gonna do all those jobs. Right. And now you've got a and this is this is crazy because now you've got these billionaires that are telling all these young people, hey, you know what's a good job for you guys to, you know, plumber, carpenter, electrician. Right? Now, granted, some of those, you know, like the better ones, yeah, make some decent money. Right.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: But again, if every young person is going out to be a carpenter, electrician, plumber, H V A C, there's gonna be a glut and the prices come down. Yeah, what you can charge. Well, why should I pay you ten thousand dollars for this kitchen remodel when that guy over there will do it for seventy five hundred? Or, you know, a seventy five hundred, I I'm I'm living thirty years ago. But you know what I mean. But it's it's that you know, because as soon as you have a glut of available talent, the price per goes down. Now, obviously if you're you know, cream of the crop, you're still gonna be able to to charge, you know, top dollar. But I think that's kind of a weird ⁓
speaker-0: Whatever, yeah.
speaker-1: thing to be happening too. You know, ⁓ well now the people with all the money aren't even saying, well, study the same things that we studied, you know, to make no, study this other stuff that we that we we won't even touch. You know, our hands are too dainty to touch toilets, except to flush them. And we probably hire somebody to use to touch the handle to flush the toilet for us. I'm sorry, that's just cynical, but you know what I mean? But you know what I'm saying? It's like, all right, well, are if are these people going to be able to make money? Then you get into well, what are they going to do with all the surplus of, you know, universal basic income and blah blah all this, you know, related crap, right? But you're trying to make something of yourself.
speaker-0: Yeah. You know, and no one's saying like you're not working hard, you know, a lot of people work hard. You know, I'm not saying like Jeff Bezos or whoever, you know, didn't work hard. You know, there's lots of story, you know, they they work hard, but they also, you know, back to it's like they weren't self made because it's like Jeff Bezos, for example, got what is it, $250,000 from his parents to start Amazon. You know, you didn't have $250,000 to give me, you know, to start a business. And even and and see, and that's why it's like I'm not saying they they didn't necessarily like earn a reward, right? Because You could have maybe you could have given me, I'm sure there's a lot of parents that maybe gave their kids a quarter million dollars and they didn't start Amazon, right? Maybe they squandered it, maybe they gambled it away, they made bad decisions, they invested in the wrong thing, you know. So it's the hard work and the the you know, having an idea, like I do think that like, yeah, you can do that. You know, but there were people that helped you along the way, especially to like reach that billionaire status. You know, even millionaire status, people are helping you either way, you know. ⁓
speaker-1: So is it the fact that, you know, he got a leg up, you know, two hundred and fifty thousand dollar loan, you know, from parents that were well to do. He said, Hey, I got this idea and his parents said, All right, give it a whirl. See what happens. Right. Right. Here, here's some seed money to get started. We expect it back. I don't know if that was the conversation that they had, but whatever. Right. And so then he did it.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: And you know, I've told you the story a dozen times, like when you know, out there at the Cerritos Town Square, you know, sitting outside of the the borders in the Barnes and Noble and people and this new company, Amazon, you could buy books online. And that was during the whole dot com boom too. Right. So it was like pets dot com. All you had to do was slap dot com on the end of something and people were throwing millions of dollars at you, right? Right. And That was all all of that hype was going on. And I I've told you the story number of times that me and these other consultants, we were all consultants meeting at Starbucks and hanging out for a while before we went on to, you know, the companies that we were consulting at. And, you know, one of the guys there, who's a salesman, ⁓ selling phone cases for the the Nokia phones, the leather phone cases for those Nokia phones. That was his thing, right? And ⁓ and he mentioned Amazon. And that, you know, when Amazon first went public, right? And he we he was considering whether he should invest or not. And I did one of the stupidest things I've ever done. I had the money at the time. And I just said, Books online, there's borders right there. Talk about lack of vision. Right. I had no but if had I invested the money that you know, just a little bit of money that I had available at that time.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: my I wouldn't be having the the situation that I'm facing right now. You know, I'll put it that way. But you never know, right? I just didn't know, I didn't expect it. Right. But again, I I blame my family and I go the rich dad, poor dad, because my parents were poor. Right. So they didn't they didn't know how to my mother knew how to put money in the bank. Right.
speaker-0: Yeah. So
speaker-1: You know, comb yeah, the beauty of compound interest. That was that was my mother's whole you know, financial education. You put money in the bank and they pay you interest on it. Not that you put it in the right account and you get a lot more interest, you know. A regular whole savings account, that's good enough. And my dad, my dad was I I think my mom, you know, he might have been alcoholic. I he didn't he wasn't like drunk around the house, but apparently when he was not home.
speaker-0: Yeah, so
speaker-1: That was an issue. I I d I have no confirmation. All I know is that the only the only story that came was one morning we woke up and they were fighting because apparently he had fallen asle asleep behind the wheel and his car had and like you know though you see those things where like the car goes through the storefront? That was my dad back in like 67 or something like that. But ⁓ now he said he fell asleep, my mother said he was drinking, right? But Whatever. May probably both. It was probably that he stopped at the bar on the way home from work, had a couple, and then, you know, nodded out. ⁓ but
speaker-0: But yeah, so that's but that's part of Yeah, and that's part of the you know, the self made myth part to me is that like so you didn't have the education, you know, it's partly luck.
speaker-1: Yeah, I didn't have the education and then being a single parent, you know, young, right, I I was barely having, you know, barely making ends meet for most of the time up until the late nineties when that started. So I didn't re I didn't even have like a strategy of investing. I had read a little bit about it, you know, over the years, but I never had enough To risk. That was the thing. There were a couple of times where I did have like a a s a large enough pile to start a small account, but the fear of losing it was so great. Cause I, you know, it took me a long it took me a lot of effort to get that pile. And to put it somewhere where it would be at risk of being smaller than than it was, and not understanding like
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: the the time horizons and you have to be patient. Yes, it'll go down, but if you just, you know, don't freak out, you know, it'll come back and all that co I I know that now. That's a strategy that's in my head now, but at the time it wasn't. So, you know, we're again On the self-made side, that that's something that I actually had to do on my own, right? I but again, how do I learn about that? Well, because somebody wrote a book about it. You know, somebody took the time to try to educate me either directly by talking to me, which there were people that I've met over the years that explained things about finance and that to me, or that people took the time to write a book.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: and explain things. Like the Rich Dad Poor Dad book. That guy you know. Now I r I grant you that that book has its critics and, you know, it's not all
speaker-0: Yeah. He's basically I think
speaker-1: You know, it's not all that, but as for someone with no experience, it gets you going. And so that effort, again, yes, I'm making the effort to educate myself, but someone else made an effort to give me something that I could educate myself with. So how much of that is self made?
speaker-0: It's it's a start. Yeah. You know, and it it just like I I think it's just when you you're fundamentally looking like I just look at the world. One of the reasons why it makes sense to me that this is a a myth, you know, where some people like, ⁓ no, no, it's not myth. You know, people are self-made all the time. It's like, no, the reason why it's I look at the world, I look at us as we're social, whatever, rational social people. animals, you know, dependent on each other for help. You know, you think about Amazon dot com is on the internet, you know, had, you know, what is it, Stanford and MIT not started doing, you know, making the internet and all that, you know. I b I'm pretty sure it was MIT and Stanford were the first two computers that were connected. The early, early back in like I'm I'm saying when they first started communicating with computers, it was Stanford. The that book Hackers that I read Okay. Memory's a little foggy. But anyways, my point being is that everything was built off the back of whether it's the generation before the people that are around us now, you know, and I just think it's like
speaker-1: So you know, what what is it what are what is someone trying to say then? What do you think? When they say that.
speaker-0: Well, it's like that the other things you hear, you know, the we've t I think we've talked about e American exceptionalism in the past, but it's like you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I think it's kind of almost like ⁓ it's a story to tell the the huddled and poor masses to kind of keep them in line, sort of. ⁓ like you too can be a millionaire. Like we're all like they're holding us down, you know, generally speaking, in my ⁓ perspective. ⁓ and it's like this story that you can, you know, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You're self-made. You can you can become a billionaire too, just like Elon Musk. if you just work hard and, you know, d I guess direct your
speaker-1: You know that that kind of works, but you know, part of it, like I said, I saw that story about this twenty two year old kid, you know, came up, you know, got some funding and now he's a billionaire. You know, I don't even know what the company is. I just I saw the headline and it was like twenty two year old, you know, new billionaire and I'm like You know, how hard did he work? You know, I mean you don't know as far as like
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: the mental effort, what did he design, you know?
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: You'd have to look it up, right, to f to figure all that out. But you're you're doing something, you're producing something of value, or at least you're trying to produce something of value that someone else is going to appreciate. Right. Well, we're trying to do that. We're trying to create something of value, right? Although, you know, I I'm not trying to create internet value. Right. I'm trying to get my goal is to get people off the internet.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. Which is odd because we're on the internet and then it's like, Yeah, well, life happens out there, you know.
speaker-0: Yeah. I think it's about balance too, or you know.
speaker-1: Well, it's it's sort of
speaker-0: I only say b
speaker-1: Over the last few weeks, Mark, we've been we've been touching dancing around like these these information environments that young people are living in, right? And what that's doing to them as far as their ability to have hope and faith in a future. You know. Do they want to grow up, keep growing up into the world that looks increasingly hostile, right, in a lot of different ways. You know, and and You know, this idea of you know, the self-made person, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you too can be a billionaire, all you have to do is have the right idea. And meanwhile, there are all these obstacles, you know, being erected. Right. You look at, you know, just what's going on in the world right now. I just whether it's the United States or globally, right? And all these pressures, you know, the financial pressures, you know. ⁓ gas, the price of gas, the price of food, all these things are weighing on people, right? And then I'm like I'm sitting there listening to this stuff, getting away from it as much as I can, you know, turning the turning the computer off, leaving the T V off, getting in the car, going for a drive, getting on the beach if I can, you know, sitting there for a bit. Now it the weather's nice so now I can go to the park too, you know, and ⁓ you know, go for a walk in the woods and all that just to to let things settle. But as I you know, then I come back and I start walking around and I'm looking at, you know, what I have to read. And we talked a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that book, Against the Machine, right? Yeah. About like He's writing in like two thousand and eight about what the internet was doing to us. Right. ⁓ you know, the and the collect of us, you know. and then and I'm walking around, ⁓ it's downstairs. ⁓ I thought I had it on the desk here. I found another book called it was written by like a neuroscientist called Virtually You. And this was written in like two thousand eleven, and he and This was one of those books that I bought. I read like the first two chapters and then I closed it and put it on the shelf. And now here I am like fifteen years later taking it off the shelf again because it's relevant again. Because now he was looking at two thousand eleven at the effect of heavy internet use and what it was doing to us. And now here we are fifteen years later where heavy internet use
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Then is like is like somebody who's really actively cut back now. Right. The amount of time that they spend online is cut back. And at the time when he was writing that was considered heavy.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, when I think about like two thousand eleven and how much time I probably spent on the internet back then was probably very little.
speaker-1: Yeah. Hour or two a day, maybe, maybe more, you know, depending. You know, but now that has completely changed. So any of the effects that he's talking about then are just going to be magnified now. Right. And so this is the information environment that people are living in, right? So you're sitting there and you told me you're just scrolling through TikTok, right? And this this random thing comes up. of a talk from Cambridge University from a professor or somebody who's talking about this concept of being self made.
speaker-0: Well, he didn't really he wasn't talking about being self made specifically. I don't know if he used those words, but basically, yeah, he was just talking about being successful 'cause he was using it in like this context of like, you know, the people that were attending Cambridge, you know, it's like forty percent or whatever the percentage are all like, you know, from upper class families or whatever. So his point was was that hard work, hard work and talent or skill is not the only thing that's part of the equation. You know, there's investment. Which is what which which that is what led me into the jumping board of the me thinking about being self made, right? Like and that how it's not
speaker-1: But now he was talking about an investment in ⁓ the investment in a person, not a financial investment. He is like an investment in their becoming the best version of themselves that they can be.
speaker-0: Right, 'cause they were able to go to school, go to Cambridge, you know, somebody invested in them for them to be able to get there to that point.
speaker-1: Right. But it's also you can t you know, I mean Cambridge obviously, you know, with all the history and and all of that, you know, ⁓ ca the cachet surrounding that name and all. But you're we're also talking about like early childhood education. Right. And this is one of the things that the Head Start program was supposed to address, right? Was making the investment in the early
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. Like really giving these kids the attention, the nutrition, and everything that they needed in order for them to be fully present for the education in school. Right. And make that investment early, and then that pays off later over time. Right. But we're not doing that anymore. I mean, I don't even know. I did do they still have Head Start? You know, so what kind of programs are we currently aiming at, you know, that particular segment of the population where intervention and investment really would make a difference. Right? You know, because by the time that kid gets to be fifteen, sixteen is a juvenile delinquent, any intervention at that particular point's just putting him in juvenile hall or jail.
speaker-0: Right. Where had you invested money in the beginning?
speaker-1: If you'd invested money in the beginning in education and if they had like early childhood traumas, giving them counseling and that kind of stuff so they could process their emotions better, you know, so that they're not acting out. All right, that's gonna be better for long term success. Right. But that's more expensive. Or it's it's harder to quantify, right? 'Cause you need longitudinal studies, right? You need to say, Okay, well we invested this much money in these kids here and you know, twenty years later, here's the outcome. Right. Out of those, you know, fifty kids in that program, forty seven went on to get PhDs and three of ⁓ are serial killers. Right. You know, it's like whatever. You know, I'm that that's extreme, but you get, you know, what I mean.
speaker-0: Yeah. Right.
speaker-1: But that's that's also, you know, you could almost go to the Hillary Clinton thing, you know, it takes a village to raise a child. You know, so are we, you know, even in that sense, you know, to your self made. How much of you is your activity or how much of you is a result of the traumas that I inflicted on you with a bad temper versus the ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, what you learned in school, what you learned from your friends, what you learned from your friend's parents? You know, what did they tell you that was different or conflicted with what you were hearing from me? Right? And how did you process all of that in order for you to become the man that you are today? Right? Was that all you? Did you pick everything? Did you make every single choice?
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, so how do you how do you take that, you know, all of those factors and roll them into this formulation that, well, I'm you know, I'm a self made. It usually only applies in that very limited context too in business. Right. You know, that's when people ⁓ make the most ⁓ strident claims, at least that seems to it's way
speaker-0: Yeah. Seems to be mostly
speaker-1: Striding claims are when it's I built this business. I did this myself. Or me and my partners. You know. Right. My my two my two co founders and I. Yeah. We did this. But we didn't have any help. Kind of thing. That it you don't see that so much in your artist, your poet, you know. The you know
speaker-0: Yeah. Right. Yeah.
speaker-1: Stevie Ravon, you know, the guitarist. You know, he'll just sit there. He, you know, I I was just reading a a a little essay on him the other day and it was like, Well, how much do you practice? And he goes, Well, I don't really practice. He goes, I just I play. He goes, When I'm awake, I have a guitar in my hand. He goes, If you want to call that practicing, I guess. Yeah, but you know, that was
speaker-0: Yeah. That's kinda how like ⁓ when especially, you know, when I was a teenager playing basketball, how I kinda felt about basketball. It's like, I'm just playing basketball. Yeah, I mean I had I was on teams and we did practice, you know, but yeah, no, I was just playing.
speaker-1: You know, so when it comes to this, you know, concept of making yourself, you know, it the the that framing, the way people talk about that is business. It's not in these other areas.
speaker-0: Well when they reach a billion dollars or their self billionaire, you know, with
speaker-1: I'm I don't talk about myself as being like a self made person when it's, you know, my hobbies or these other things. It usually gen tends to be along that business vector. So you can, you know, take that with the appropriate grain of salt as well. You know, what am I doing? ⁓ this guy's talking about ⁓ yeah, his business. And we already know that, yeah.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, a good chunk of that is stuff that you'd rather not acknowledge that were it not for the existence of those things, you would have never got your business off the ground. Yeah. You I mean, you and I can't do a YouTube channel without YouTube.
speaker-0: So yeah.
speaker-1: Yeah, I mean ⁓ what we're doing right now is dependent on the existence of this platform.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: Right. Now, are we defining our thing here? Yeah. It it's what we're trying to do is ours. So in that sense, you know, we're making it, but we're dependent on the platform.
speaker-0: The infrastructure that was there already. Yeah. ⁓ yeah.
speaker-1: And all of that other stuff. So you know, we can claim that if we ever get more than two hundred and twenty four subscribers, you know, it we can claim that we built this ourselves, but that would just be, you know, patting ourselves on
speaker-0: Yeah. And it's it's I I mean, I suppose like it it it just depends on like how you're framing it, you know.
speaker-1: Well that goes back to our, you know, the stories that we tell, the story that you live. Right. Now, should we congratulate ourselves if we get a little success? Of course we should, you know. Right. I mean you know, because we are working, you know, at it, you know. To the extent that we have the time and ⁓ the bandwidth to be able to focus on this particular aspect of life, then yeah, we're working on it. And as we get better at this. You know, or at least figuring out what we're doing and how to manage it better. You know, hopefully the production values go up. Whatever it is. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. But it's It helps to just Hmm, how do I put it? It helps to remember that we're all in this together. You know, at some at some level, at some point, right? You know. Even the people that you disagree with most vehemently, they got a right to be here too, and we gotta figure out a way to
speaker-0: Yeah. Figure it out.
speaker-1: Yeah, to figure it out. All right. You know what? Maybe, you know, the w the only way we can live together is if you stay way over there. And I stay way over here. It's not that you have to go. We'll just both move. And let's l and and create a buffer zone of some other people that w neither one of us are objectional to in between us. However, but you know, like organizing like things that way. ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: would be better. You know, we're all in this together, so let's focus on that. Right. And then these other things we you try to work out on an individual basis.
speaker-0: Yeah. We're all in this together. We all depend on people. ⁓ there was something in that I was listening to this ⁓ another YouTube channel. philosophize this and he was talking about like kind of this idea in American society specifically of like where I'm doing something for you 'cause you're doing something for me. You know, like the kind of I guess, you know, like you might be my Uber driver, but it's because I'm paying you, you know, or be serving me food but it's cause I'm paying you. There's like a lot of transactional or I'll I'll help you move but 'cause you're gonna buy me pizza or whatever. I don't know. Like there's always kind of this exchange.
speaker-1: He's talking about the transactional nature of most relationships today.
speaker-0: Yeah. So where, you know, that it kinda led back. I I thought about it when you something you said earlier about the, you know, helping like Head Start and things like this, helping people that are like less fortunate, that maybe didn't have the financial education, that didn't have the means, that had the poor parents, and, you know, were always cutting these programs. You know, that's one of the things they're always talking about cutting, like, ⁓ we're giving all this entitlement programs, we're giving these people money, you know, that just because they're not working hard. So it's like that. I feel like this whole idea of the self made that self made myth contributes to these type of attitudes where you're not gonna help your fellow human because you think that, like, ⁓ well, they could just, you know. make it on their own. They're not I'm giving them something that I I'm I'm sorry, the look on your face making
speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. I'm not making that connection. They I'm not I my brain's not making the same connection that your brain's making.
speaker-0: Well yeah, so Yeah, because I guess I just the I was just thinking about the transactional nature and right. And then now with you I think that if you believe the myth that someone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, then I guess it would seem to lead to, in my mind, an attitude more of I'm not gonna help people because you can just help yourself, right?
speaker-1: All right. Yeah. Well I I see that.
speaker-0: Yeah. Maybe I didn't articulate it well initially and maybe I still haven't articulated well.
speaker-1: Well again, this is one of those this is one of the things that I've told you often on, you know, and what helps me is that when I'm thinking through things like that, I write stuff down. You know, and I'll and I write it down until I can write a sentence down that makes sense to me. ⁓ okay, that's what I'm trying to say. Right. You know, so I I get where you're coming from. So in other words, this this concept of improving yourself, right? Whether it's self made or just it's your choices, right? That you're making these choices and this idea that ⁓ Stepping outside the physical impossibility of picking yourself up by your own bootstraps. ⁓ you know, this this idea is prevalent. It's part of the cultural mythology, right, of maybe American society, right? The Horatio Alger story or whatever it is. ⁓ Horatio Alger was more you start in the mail room and you work your way up to the C-suite kind of thing. Where ⁓ you're more ⁓ working along the lines of Hey, if you're in a bad situation, get a second job, save some money and invest that money and you'll eventually be better. You'll be
speaker-0: Yeah, I guess what it is is it's it's the myth of self made billionaire or millionaire.
speaker-1: Yeah, I I the the le You gotta leave the millionaire billionaire thing off the table 'cause that that muddies the that muddies the concept that you're trying to
speaker-0: idea of being self made leads to these attitudes of not wanting to help your fellow human, I think, is what I'm trying if is that more
speaker-1: Yeah, well that's what I'm getting. And I'm just trying to clarify it in my own head and maybe help you clarify it in yours. Yeah. is that Belief is you pick yourself up by your own bootstraps, you go out and you figure out you get that job, you take the retail job, you take two retail jobs. You, you know, even if you've only got ten bucks a week, you put that ten duck bucks a week in a index fund and eventually you're gonna build a nest egg and that nest egg is gonna be enough so that you can quit working retail. And hey instead of working two retail jobs, why don't you work one one retail job and go to school at night? Or hey, even better, you can sign up for classes online and you can get yourself an education. Get your maybe you're not going to get your MBA, but at least you can get your undergraduate degree online and then, you know, da da all that right and because you won't lift a finger to get a job at Walmart or anything like that.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah.
speaker-1: I'm not gonna I'm gonna refuse to pay taxes to fund food stamps and whatever. Easy fuck. Right? Sorry, ⁓ for the listeners. Right. It that's basically the point that you're making. Right? That in this society we've created an attitude that says if you don't have
speaker-0: Everybody, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: It's your fault because you're not working. You could be better. You're just lazy. Right? You've been programmed
speaker-0: Yeah, which I think we talked about on just a quick plug. I think we talked about on an earlier episode. Go back and listen to earlier episode. Anyways.
speaker-1: If he could give a number that would help him. ⁓
speaker-0: It was in the teens, I think.
speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just listen to all of them and if you can survive that long. all right.
speaker-0: Platform, yeah. Yeah. That if if you you're lazy, if you're not successful, it's your fault.
speaker-1: Right. Now, if that's the story that you're living in. then you're not gonna ⁓ any time somebody says I I need a hand to get going, ⁓ no you know. Now that's only some, that's not universal.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: So the you know, where now going back to our our larger theme, like where is that story coming from? And where are you hearing it? How is it being repeated? Right? Because obvious I mean, obviously you and I believe that that story is false. Right. So given that we believe that it's false, right? And yet we are surrounded by not everybody, but a a fairly significant number of other people who believe that story is true. So what reinforces that story, right? Where does that appear? And this is the thing that I always trip you up on, right? Because the voice of mother culture, right? It's never stated explicitly at this particular point. It's always image, it's background at this particular point. Right.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, I mean you see whether it's, you know, ⁓ the stories, like even the story you talked about, about this twenty two year old, you know, it's just a it's another story. There's a million
speaker-1: Yeah, but I I'm saying that in the in the in the broader you know, environment that you live in, right? Bill billboards, movies, TV shows, advertisements, you know, magazine ads, right? How is that portrayed, this idea of the pick yourself up by your bootstraps, move on if you're if you're looking for government, if you're looking for government assistance, you're lazy and you're stealing from me. Right. And and you're not you know, it's gonna be the the thing that you have to look for.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Because you'll see it in some way. If you're Okay. The the lazy, shiftless person, right? How is that mat how does that show up? Right. That that idea that you're that you're talking about. Is it is it something that you actually see in the world? Right. I I'm not gonna say yes or no because it's your hypothesis. So you're the one that's gonna say, Yeah, I see it out in the world. This is how this is how this story is promulgated. This is why people believe it. Right. And it's like, well, what am I hearing that's reinforcing that in my own mind?
speaker-0: Well, it's like I I mean I d I mean, I brought this up on previous episodes too, like and we kind of touched on it already, is the the these People that are like, you know, what are you doing with your time? You know, what are you ⁓ you know, T Paine said, you know, when you go to your nine to five, you come home ⁓ clock out of your nine to five, you come home and clock into your own job, whatever, whether it's this podcast or whatever. So like
speaker-1: Yeah, that's the obvious. Though those are the that's the that's smacking you in the face with this. But it's but that the thing that that we started our podcast on 41 episodes ago, right? The voice of mother culture underneath it all, right? The driving of the story. Now we know that that is civilization is the right way to live. The earth was made for man and man was meant to rule it. You know, that that's that underlying thing. And then I tried to get you to see that over the top of that is like the Western civilization white male patriarchy, you know, story. Right. That that manifests in all of the media that's being consumed. Right. And all of these ideas that people are fighting over are part of that background noise that get it's it's like you're familiar with the product placement.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. You know, you're watching a TV show, you know, some cop drama or whatever, you know, and on the table is a Red Bull. That's an advertisement for Red Bull inside that TV show. Right. You're not they're not saying drink Red Bull. Right. But you see it. Right. And that's the thing that I'm talking about. So, like when you're talking about this pick yourself up by your bootstraps, this is the symbol of success. How is that manifested? How do you see that in newspaper ads and and newspaper stories, headlines?
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: you know, kind of thing. Is it reinforced in that way? In that same cultural ambient noise that's just this is just how the world is. Cause that the it seems to me that the persistence of that attitude, this idea that anybody who's like looking to the government for a little bit of help, whether it's rental assistance or whatever it is, is somehow defective.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. That they're not a victim of circumstances that they, you know, a s a system or a structure that they are being exploited by, but it's rather a personal responsibility thing. Right. This is your systemic racism, your systemic, you know, whether it's racism or the LGBTQ or whatever community, right? All the structural shit that they run into all the time. It's always cast back at them as a personal responsibility thing. Right. And how is that story, you know, manifested to the over and over and over again so that if you're a cisgendered white person
speaker-0: It's the story. That's the thing. It's it's the it's it's the stories they choose to tell on the media. You know, it's the things they choose to talk about, right? I know that might be a slap in the face thing, but it to me it's like it is the, you know, the fact that you might see more ⁓ stories about successful billionaires versus you don't see stories about all these people that die from poverty.
speaker-1: No, y if that's that now you're getting into selection bias and things like that, right? As far as like you know, confirmation bias, the you've got the algorithmic feed of your your news thing, right? That's one thing, right? That's that's algorithmic narrowing of your vision and your your choice options, right? But I I'm I'm trying to get off of the algorithm ⁓ in in more just the ambient stuff that you're looking at all the time. Billboards, headlines, the stuff that's not being fed to you directly. You know what I mean? You know, that that there's a there's another there's a structure that's in those stories, whether it's a Netflix drama or you know, HBO Max, what I don't even know, all the streaming services, right? You're watching your must see TV, and within that story, all of these ⁓ social arrangements are being laid out and various people are being portrayed in various ways. You know, we talked about it ⁓ like back when I was a kid, right? The original Tom and Jerry cartoons. The original Tom and Jerry cartoons was the mouse would set the cat up to do something that would then have the maid whack the cat with a broom. That was the the joke. Right. But the maid was black. Right. When you got up into the sixties around the time of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and that, the the legs in the cartoon went from being the black maid to the white housewife's legs, still whacking the cat with the broom. And then eventually, you know, the human left the cartoon completely and it was just Tom and Jerry. Right. But
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: The fact that those legs in that cartoon were black told everybody that was watching cartoons that black people were butlers and mates and chauffeurs. They weren't homeowners.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. They were glorified slaves. They were paid slaves now. Right. And that's the thing that you know, so when you're like these these economic things and pull yourself up by your bootstraps and that that attitude towards people that are struggling, that's also Out there, right? It's being portrayed. And like I said, it's never gonna be directly. You know, it's not that's not how this works. It works by being this ambient thing that it's just the way the world is. You don't question it because you're seeing it everywhere. Right. And maybe that exists in the world. Maybe what you're saying about the picking up by the boot traps, maybe that is manifest out there. Maybe it isn't. But since, you know, you're you're you're keep encountering, right, this kind of framing Yeah. You encounter this kind of framing all the time. So how why does it have that that's like the deeper question for our podcast? It's why do certain of these things have such deep roots and are so hard to dislodge? Right. Cause like I said, you and I both agree or both think that that story is false, that the people who are at the bottom that are struggling are not necessarily some of them are. We're not saying that they all you know, it's just that this idea that they're all lazy. Right. How does that where does that get its purchase and why is it so hard to dislodge? And that's because, at least to my way of thinking, and I could be wrong, this is this is why I'm doing the research that I'm doing too, you know, ⁓ on my own, is to try to get a purchase on that. Am I really seeing it or am I reading more into it than than I should? You know, is there some other factor that's that's at play that's not part of this cultural story and the voice of mother culture? It does seem to be a good container, but again, you know, the details of how the pieces fit inside of it, you know, may or may not, you know, be the way that I think they are right now. Right. But that's why I'm like
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Asking you, say, okay, you you keep seeing this, like on you if you're on TikTok or whatever, this idea keeps coming up that that poor people are lazy. Poor people are lazy. Poor people are and so all right, why is that? Why does that story keep coming up? Is it somewhere else in the ambient atmosphere? Or is that the thing that drives it? Because that might be the thing that drives it. It might not be what I think it is. It might actually be the more direct algorithmic. Just beating you over the head with it.
speaker-0: 'Cause it's even like the you know, do you d ⁓ I don't know, I was just thinking about like movies they made, you know, they make movies about Steve Jobs and, you know, these people that supposedly were
speaker-1: They write books about him. Walter Isaacson wrote a book about Steve Jobs. He wrote a book about Elon Musk.
speaker-0: Right. You know, there's books about them, there's movies. And it's like, you know, it's it's I mean, I've always thought it was kinda funny because everyone like loves Steve Jobs, but it was really Wozniak. It was the other Steve that like
speaker-1: He wrote a book about Einstein too. That's a good one. Well, yeah, it was his I Steve was ⁓ Jobs was the ⁓ the showman, the you know, Wozniak was the nerd with the you know
speaker-0: Yeah. Compu who actually made the computer. But yeah. You know.
speaker-1: I do, right? Hey kid, anything else? No.
speaker-0: ⁓ I mean, well, d I'm sure we could keep going on. But yeah, I mean for now we've hit
speaker-1: And and it it I we're over our hour. We were over our hour.
speaker-0: Yeah. So ⁓ but anyways, ⁓ thanks again for joining us. ⁓ once again, hopefully we gave you something to think about. like, subscribe, do all the algorithm stuff. We got, you know, links in the description as everyone has.
speaker-1: Well, speaking of algorithmic noise, we like to think that our noise is just a little more pleasant. Not quite as not designed to make you mad.
speaker-0: Hopefully not, yeah. I'm sure it will.
speaker-1: Well it might. It might, but it's not designed to. Yeah. We're not trying to provoke an emotional reaction. What we well, at least what I want. I don't know about you, but what I want is better conversations that we're not screaming at each other. We'll actually shut up and listen for two minutes to let the other person finish. Anyway, this is I've been Doug
speaker-0: Yeah. Mark. Yeah, Mark. Yeah, like I said, listen to us on Spotify, whatever. Your vehicle of choice. ⁓ and ⁓ we'll ⁓ catch you. ⁓ yeah, Patreon. I didn't say Patreon. I gotta make sure I say all the words on the ⁓
speaker-1: Whatever. All right. We have a Patreon. ⁓ our episodes are uploaded there one day before they show up on YouTube and other places. So, you know, if you're if you're really Jonesing, hey I you know what? Jonesing, I'm a Generation Jones. Did you know that? ⁓ I'm still trying to figure out what Generation Jones is all about. I'm still reading on that. ⁓ so yeah, so all the all the normal stuff.
speaker-0: ⁓ wow.
speaker-1: You know, if you want ⁓ if you want this to show up in your algorithm, then you have to you have to click like, you have to be a subscriber. And apparently commenting drives things up as well. So we appreciate all of that. ⁓ once again, I'm Doug. That's Mark, and this has been
speaker-0: Yeah.
