11 - All Too Human: Ambition

Transcript

hello and welcome to intimate discourse my name is jason this episode is the second in a series

examining some of the singular attributes that define us as a species you'll also note how these uniquely

human characteristics must be fundamentally incompatible with any artificial intelligence

while this series will mostly focus on us human folk and the various ways we instantiate these carbon-centric

attributes it will also initiate a wider debate into the logical ethical and philosophical implications of agi

artificial general intelligence this second episode in the series all too human deals with ambition

it was recorded on august 28 2022 in toronto canada

thank you and enjoy the show

hi everyone welcome to the show uh my name is jason uh here with dimitri good morning

just right on in a shot of espresso like put it down good morning i'm in here um

we're going to be talking about ambition today another human attribute uh which we're trying to spotlight through the

this series um ambition is one of the um lesser

celebrated attributes i think sort of especially these days tends to come with

a lot of negative connotation um i don't know in my head i i think of and

not this is necessarily negative but i think of like gordon gekko or like you know like a stock broker or an 80 stock

broker or it's like greed is good and everything like that or you know julius caesar um

but you know just this idea of uh of um

putting your yourself before others and i don't think that that's necessarily accurate even

but it is um that is sort of i think how a lot of people perceive ambition

um i guess you have like some something like macbeth where it's like it was sort of the archetype of negative ambition

where um he uh what would you call that blind

ambition i don't know like he sort of knew what he was getting into like it was prophesized that he was going to be uh

the king of scotland and and then his his [ __ ] wife decided to keep

pushing him along in that direction and then alexander the same you know the child of hercules

yeah alexander the great yeah oh there is only one oh well i didn't i

don't know much about that it wasn't like a problem his father wasn't his father his father was hercules

oh yeah there you go daddy you know what to live up to yeah um

okay oh yeah i didn't know that like it's interesting it's kind of the person has to you know you can always have the seed

there and then it's like well do you want to like how ambitious do you want to be um and um and somebody like macbeth it's

like obviously end it all in um and again sort of about the spoiler but it has been a while

um you know it all ended in uh bloodshed and um but um you know there's positive

positive um it can be a virtue ambition i think it sort of drives a lot of society in many

ways um you know if it weren't for ambitious um entrepreneurs or ambitious companies

uh you know we would still sort of be treading water in many avenues yeah but i think from

since the beginning of time you know we've been we've been very aware of the duality of this one particular

vice emotion you know yeah yeah there are a few of these like that i mean there's always sort of the the

mirror image right like um you know pride uh which we'll do that soon but it's um it's sort of another one where

there's like sort of a good side and a bad side um do you know um do you know the story of

the the sort of democracy i know it vaguely yeah like it's hanging on a string and yeah yeah how does it

play out it's the way i know it and i you know i'm just sort of like um

um i don't i don't i i know the story vaguely but i could have some details wrong but it's just that uh somebody's

somebody said um hey we want do you want to be um i think it was like

was it like jester or something or somebody who was hanging out with the king and the king's like what dude do you want to be king for a day or and

the jester or whomever it was said uh like yeah of course like just thinking like of course that's like the best

that's the highest so would one post yeah exactly like a meme you know right

right if i were king for a day um and uh so he he was king for a day and

he was like loving it like he was going out in the streets and like everybody started bowing before him and then he has all

these um uh you know he's having these big sumptuous feasts with his like subjects and uh

then the people in his court and um they're all really having a great time he's like this is great this is amazing

and then he sort of looks above him and there's this like sword hanging above him which is like hanging hanging by a

string and it's kind of like oh there's the rub like at any moment that string can like you could get you know your

head cut off um i'm not sure if that's the sure i just made up a story here i think

it's something to do with that but uh but but you know the precarious nature of what you ask for

yeah be sort of be careful what you wish for there's always sort of a downside there's always a um like if you want the highest post in the

land it comes with the highest risks in the land kind of thing yeah i've always the one that stuck in

my head as a child was the archaic myth of icarus where failing his father's advice

you know icarus was on an island he wanted to be the first person to fly and so he had ambition and the ambition was then to

take uh feathers and use i believe it was honey and created wings and i'm going to get off this island and i'm

going to see what else yeah a little bit like the truman show get off this island what's really out there and um so he had

you know all the and i think the fact that he was youthful versus the advice from the father is an interesting sort

of duality of course wisdom you know um to temper and temper sort of that

ambition down and the father of course people know the first part of the story like don't fly too high to the sun

because the sun will melt the wax and the honey on your wings and you're going to crash into the ocean

so you're like okay so don't fly too high in life you know keep your your head on your shoulders

but the second half i think is even more interesting because you can't have really one without the other the father also told the sun don't fly so low to

the ocean because a spray is going to come up from the ocean and hit your wings and weigh you down

and you're gonna also fall into the water and so the idea was to have your ambition but find that middle ground the

golden mean don't fly too high don't fly too low right you know and it's it's it's you know father-son sort

of metaphor in there too you know youth versus wisdom and how do you how do you use your ambition to your advantage

yeah yeah that's my favorite i mean i mean basically it's probably how i run most of my life

i think yeah with a lot of these um um

it really seems to be a theme throughout uh you always hear like well all life is

moderation or whatever and i've never really what does that even mean more veggies on my plate what are you

talking about yeah yeah everything in moderation but there is a um uh i mean certainly

something to be said for that and if you're if that's the kind of life if you're looking for sort of a good quality life that's probably good advice

like i think that it doesn't necessarily suit everybody's temperament but um like i don't know to me that seems a

little like watered down um but i guess it just depends on what you

want you know so would you argue that people who do follow that healthy advice are not the people that change the world for the better

yeah um i wouldn't i mean we need the people that actually break the rules in general yeah it all comes back to caste systems

like i you know well think of like a brave new world and you have the different like you know we sort of need everybody

right you can't just have all like intellectuals to be acting like that yeah exactly like

you but you have to have an elon musk you know what i mean you have to have like um

uh like henry ford thomas edison like you need those people that are going to be sort of the torchbearers or the

bringing us well we talk about diversity all the time today and we always do it on the superficial level like skin color

and stuff like that religion but we forget about diversity of thought you know like what school did you go to

what was your in this case what was your background and how do people have your culture rank such things mentally and how does

that add a different element around the dinner table as we're talking compared to everyone just being from the same homogeneous sort of way of thinking

right even if you look different like that's just crazy right so yeah i've always loved especially in the last two years watching the world

play out and being under different stressors seeing that diversity of um opinion

well to be trampled on by by the powers of b you know in sense you're really trying to create that um standard

deviation where you're squishing everybody to the middle so you don't have any outliers but that that um that diversity was so important to um

probably get us to where we are today and be exiting the pandemic relatively unscathed

and by unscathed i don't mean through virus i mean through like just like social cohesion right so yeah you need

you need your yahoos is what i'm trying to say you know in moderation of course but there's a moment where they're going to

be called on and then that's the moment they have to stand up yeah so know thyself like you know well yeah

and and that that is the most important thing so this is you know now you're that you're saying that i'm sort of thinking of it's interesting because it

goes back to our state power episode where it's like there are um

forces that seem to be driving the world toward you know like a one world government or a more at the

very least socially um uh everything is sort of converging

tends to be converging toward like you know everyone's watching hollywood movies the values from the west seem to

be um at least in a lot of countries seem to be sort of propagating there and they

seem to be being adopted by a lot of countries um and

we sort of assume that that's a good thing but uh is it really like what some of those values are but no we're not

perfect we've discovered a few things that have really propelled the planet forward we definitely the east has so

much to offer too but yeah in those um i was you're talking about democracy or economics or um

law and meritocracy like the west knocked it out of the park but it wasn't an easy birthing process right it took a long

time to get to that point it was an evolution yeah and that's why that's why like coming back to like ai and psychological

nudging like are you going to be crushing those outliers through powerful subconscious psychological

coercion of sorts where you don't actually get diversity like you used to yeah yeah and who dictates such a way of

thinking instead of organically like i said happening over centuries right it's like ambition in the to the ancient

greeks was different to the ambition of the romans which was different to the ambition of the middle ages and is it different to you know at one point the

flight admission was a mental illness in the middle ages yeah yeah i was doing some research on it like it's incredible um the romans

had a negative connotation towards it in the legal realm the greeks were like i said they had the understanding

that it was a duality and only i think from the last 150 years ago it sort of became a positive force again so then if

you were to program like going back to something like we were talking earlier about ai in different human attributes

which style of ambition are you going to actually program into the ai yeah and will it be ever evolving and if so we'll

be evolving at the pace of society and which society canadian society indian society south african society

right you know so you can really then nudge people whoever does the centralized programming into a certain pattern of behavior

right and the more ai the more it's going to just keep um

like prop like propagating that same kind of value system that it was instilled with

who so now we say eastern culture western culture is this are we going to start saying centralized culture well presumably they'll have well that's

that's the thing like presumably you know china's developing their own um ai systems and this and that but like

um and what value systems are they going to put in there compared to ours and who runs the show at the end of the day and

is it subconscious or conscious like for instance we'd watch commercials growing up in the 70s 80s they'd be like um

you know clean up after your dog when you walk around it's the right thing to do for your neighbor message brought to you by the ontario government but they

will at least tell you where the message came from and it was to psychologically nudge you into a better behavior pattern

nothing i mean you could argue good or bad but at least it was a little more upfront about what they were trying to

do and if you didn't like it you could vote four years later vote someone else in get rid of the commercial say la vie

but if we start to install this sort of centralized um lack of diversity value system based on

what the moment we programmed it would have society is it going to keep evolving with society right you know

what if what if it got programmed in the 60s and the aa is like we're not having no seasons ers but the society's like actually we think

we want would society even evolve past the original programming yeah if it could like it's really

infinitely complicated and i think it's pure hubris to think that we can

we can may be able to program traits that seem imperceptible that it's conscious or not not conscious now

but it will not evolve the way humans evolve yeah and therefore it's just not real and and to be fair there are ai

researchers um uh max tag mark is one that i know of that

are saying or sort of calling for more people to be involved in the discussion as opposed to just the coders you know

like so that there's more um opinion like there is that sort of diversity of okay so what are what do we

want this intelligent life then it becomes like a homogeneous thing too because it becomes a very like a centralized

culture like maybe the easter just do what the east likes to do and pick up some stuff with the west and the west does what the west like to pick up a few things yeah

this really is like a centralizing round table of thought in a sense i do think that the

diversity really is important because if you just look at like for example like biodiversity like that's obviously important like you need there's so many

little aspects of the system that if you take them out you may wouldn't even notice the repercussions of that until like you know years later but um but

having it in you know if we're going to do something as monumental as starting to program like artificial intelligence like

uh we need the we need the the i don't know like the the diversity of

um what what other people bring to the table but isn't also that diversity enhanced through isolation isolationism

so you have like you know darwin and the finch is on the island but if they were just like centralized in some sort of uh bio you know sphere of things they would

have never had the centuries to develop on their own in their own way right so in some ways you almost want to create like multiple ai systems around the

world that are completely independent from one another and they organically grow based on the culture around them

yeah you know again it's it's like totally decentralizing the process yeah yeah i think the important sort of

takeaway is that the the idea of converging into one world

government you know maybe that would make sense if there were a ton of other planets out there that we were speaking

with and everything because we'd have to unite but like right now uh you know as long as we can cooperate on things like

climate change and you know synergies yeah like interpol and things like that one world anything i don't see it as

diversity right right i really don't you just increase the size of your round table you know but it's still one table

yeah i think to have diversity i think you have to develop your ideas in isolation that's why i think you know brexit kind of made sense to me you know

yeah unfortunately i agree i i was a big fan of the eu when it first started but watching how we interact and react to

such things diversity and freedom to be able to um regulate the

small zone in which is uh relative to those who are voting for you really yeah exactly the more local you can get with

that kind of thing that's why you know even i i don't know if you vote in like municipal politics like i don't but i

would like to i kind of started voting everywhere these days yeah yeah didn't before you know but it's like the local

government really is usually more relevant to what you're doing than the federal government

picture versus small pictures yeah yeah like they're like it's important to kind of have that or they're and it's more representative of the area that you're

living in um so it knows about like the potholes it knows like i drive over that pothole too so yeah we are going to do something

about that um but you get like somebody in ottawa and washington is like you know what are they or even like you know

in brussels and like what are they like that it's just something that could be like the algorithm might be like there's less potholes per capita

right yeah because one city therefore the problem the algorithm says is a sudbury even though you know no one

ever actually hits the pothole because everybody talks to one another knows where the pothole is yeah like it's just it's i don't think

it's the way we have evolved and so coming back to like ambition um it is such a fluid

all these traits are so fluid like you're gonna have to build in like fluidity into these sorts of algorithms

in the future yeah well and what rate of fluidity and like is it gonna like how do how quickly do

humans change and our rate of change has been changing just in the last hundred years over civil rights a gay rights you

know what i mean you went 2000 years with no change in the 100 years rapid change yeah you know and we've had our

struggles but we found our way through you know through dialogue through talking i i don't i don't know an altruism can you really program a

computer to be altruistic well you can program it to be to display altruism like you can get

a computer to sort of um do something um

for example like uh you know for this this room of 12 people to stay alive the

ai has to like turn itself off like i'm sure you can program that in where it's just like you know absent-mindedly

switching itself off but the genuine genuine altruism yeah i don't think that

um that kind of thing do you know there's um a talk in

like i've been reading recently about um

how so you know how this this is a little bit of a um diverging from our topic but

not so much um you know how there's um you know what is life right like so we have we're

able to like there's we're talking we're obviously each consider ourselves being

conscious and each consider ourselves like um you know feeling like oh we're real everything

like that but we are composed of the same material that like all this

other inanimate stuff or like this table this microphone everything is composed of so what is the thing in us that is

the life part right like and you can say well our brains like we have stuff in our brains but it's like okay that's still just composed of the same stuff

right so i've heard recently that there's people sort of there's these proposals of

uh well maybe it's that each individual atom has

there's sort of a um it's not atom maybe it's the like proteins or something but like it's

something that builds on the atoms but they all have their own slight bit of intelligence and if you

add up all of those you know when you have a bunch of them and they're sort of focused then they can have like this kind of

display this more kind of meta intelligence or mega intelligence um

it's interesting because there is the question of you know i always i always think like i don't i don't believe in

again we go back to belief systems like i don't believe that you can ever have a sentient ai because i don't think that i

i do think that there's a soul and i think i think that that's where that life comes from i don't think it's like something we can scientifically prove

and uh or maybe not now but i i do think that that's that's sort of my belief system but like if you're

but i can understand how you know if you don't have that belief system you're like okay well then we have this big question of where did life

come from because it's so mechanistic though i know but but if you but you have to

so if you're just looking at it from a scientific point of view it's like okay if you forget about the soul sure and you're looking at like okay i'm composed

of molecules and i'm composed of a bunch of atoms and so is this table what is the difference like what is the

um like is it like is it the way that they're structured is it the the way because

they all i mean i guess you could say dnas but i mean dna it's like you said it's so micro

nanoscopically tiny that like all these small little changes you know that create you to be

you there's just that that's why there are no two u's and therefore you didn't infer a soul to use

and that's why you infer a soul in yourself because it feels absolutely unique right

yeah you know it's that uniqueness that makes you just you so you're right if you could then create

like um computerize something that was absolutely unique because i guess when we say mechanized and ai it sounds like

a stamping process you can make it over and over and over but what if in that process whatever you make once can never

be remade exactly the same right now you're getting into something a little more organic in that sense

mechanically organic yeah but there's still for me the it needs to be endowed with

uh like i guess what i'm saying was with this whole thing is like um

i can understand how some people would think that ai could be sentient in the sense that if you start adopting this

um i think it's called like proto-consciousness or something where it's like each individual you know it isn't about some

ex some um external like um [Music]

trait that we just or some external like uh thing that we haven't identified yet it's actually like all of

the intelligence is in in each individual atom and it's just a combination of them so it's like at that

point then it's like okay then in theory i can see how they would people who would think this would think that

you know ai could somehow be endowed with life at some point and could be like

basically should have rights and should uh but we're saying each one every time it's created is different from any other

is that what you're saying i'm saying that if you're trying to get light if you're trying to figure out where

life comes from and um like how do you get life out of a material object uniqueness

it has to be one and a one-off uniqueness and then free will okay i think you need to have those two

things okay so if you have yeah so where does free will come from though right like you you have to

like this is what this is what i'm talking about this whole idea of like a like an intelligent life or like that is actually conscious of

itself and it's like okay i'm alive and they want to do things and they have ambition right right so they so to have

that you know if you don't believe in the soul you could sort of look at this other theory and be like okay well

maybe it's the structure of the proteins and if you if if the because they all

have these proto-consciousness in in the atoms like it's a bit of a far out obviously like you know but if it's

repeatable to the exact carbon copy then i would say it's not not alive

well do you think like the clone clone sheep are alive like you can clone a sheep is it exactly the same like

like are we able to exist i don't know the level of detail where that's exactly i don't know why why are you so stuck on

the fact that it's like has to be unique because i think that you know what about identical twins what we infer the soul

from yeah that's a very good point do you have an organic again are they they're never identical they are they are always you can tell

them apart to a degree one eye is different from the ear and something like that yeah i don't know yeah they're identical in the sense that

the eggs split but the way that egg got represented over right you know the lifespan you know was

still has some variation in it right but if it was completely carbon copy stamp there's no difference whatsoever and the

way in which that clone then absorbs information and utilizes it and has the same level of

ambition and all these other things going on like do identical twins have the same level of pride or ambition or envy like it'd have to be exactly the

same maybe you'd say there is no difference because we say identical as if there's

no difference when there's twins but i think there's just us being sort of just looking at the you know the superficial in a sense

um yeah i i don't know i don't know how much uniqueness necessarily plays into it like for well at least in terms of

like i don't see why you couldn't have two things that were both alive and both exactly the same i guess if they're

you know because if that were the case yeah it's not like they would uh

they would each be doing the exact same things the same thought would occur to them at the same time but there would still be like

um you know like once you get the environment involved you know you'd get uh variations but

but yeah anyway as a um i i don't know i find it i find it interesting because i'm always

interested in people who are trying to like i find this idea that ai could ever

actually possess some of these attributes to be like very dubious and i'm always interested

in hearing what people's sort of theories are that kind of can can um

challenge that but um i think it'll be a tool and a tool that you respect you know you use your car

and you respect your car you you wash your car you clean your car you love your car you give it a name you know there's a lot of these you know we can

give it to these human attributes but the other day it's a tool well you can i mean if you had an ai that was to the

point where like could have this conversation like if it passes the turing test so it's like you're having a

conversation and you might as well it's like having a it's like kind of having a conversation

keep going without any human involvement like between two ai and it actually creates something you know mutually

agreed upon yeah i don't know but i mean if well if

you but if you had if you did have somebody that you're talking to and it was an ai like and you kind of woke up in the morning they were there and

they're like good morning uh dimitri it's like what's uh and it was like how about that game last night

and you're like and you know so you have some sort of and you're like well how are you feeling like you start asking questions they're

like i'm okay a comforter keeps you warm at night it's a tool like there's something that gives you a certain amount of you know in this

case emotional or informational warmth like it's giving you something but it's still not alive no but it would still

affect um like i agree with you it's still not alive but you but you um but some people think that they would be

um but i would say like look at even the emotional impact remember that uh movie cast away with tom hanks where it's like

and when he lost the ball and it's like and he was like just trying to swim after it and there's still an emotional

attachment which is bizarre but there is you don't cry when you sell your car and it was like your

favorite car you know like something many people do you know they go back and they want to relive their life yeah that's just us

being quirky humans i think okay that ball was not alive right right

mr hanky what was his name oh yeah uh wilson wilson yeah mr hanky that's south

park i think let's look at some of this difference

between uh animals and humans okay with ambition so we've got um

you know if you wanna if you wanna talk about ambition just sort of as a straight up thing it's like um

what is that it's the idea of wanting to like do better or like do more and it probably evolved out of like if you

think of animals like in their kind of dominance hierarchies like it's always survival of the fittest it's always like

you know which like i just think of these nature videos and you ever see the one where it's like this bird is like trying to do up its like nest

and it like takes forever to like meticulously grab all these different colors and it's like oh she's gonna love this and like um

but you know what i mean they like they even find like those like tinsel and sparkly things because it like reflects

the light better it's really interesting but um you know he's doing all that so he can procreate

and like pass on his dna and that's like to some extent you know there's some bird out there that's just like i'm not gonna put on all that effort like she's

gonna like me for me and like just has like a uh you know a shitty nest and they end up just not mating and not

passing on ambition and then evolution takes care of that right yeah yeah exactly exactly so i think it's

programmed in like it but over eons over eons yeah but yeah so then you had

those i think that that's a lot of these attributes like ambition i think that's the way it was sort of programmed in and

now we sort of um you know you go back to like maslow's hierarchy of needs and like there are a lot of

people in the world today that that's they're still sort of almost at that stage where it's like um you know

they're trying to basically just keep keep alive and they're trying to um put enough food on the table and like

provide for their families and everything like that so it's like when you have um so when you've had have that all

settled you move into something else like then you get into this like you know i guess

a higher level ambition or whatever or i you know it's more just a different kind of ambition where you're

for example um you know people a lot of people want to leave a legacy like is sort of like you

like it's like what do you go for if you have if you've already satisfied you know the basic needs it's like okay then

what do you want a bigger house what do you want like more money so you can go on better vacations or desire is the itch that could never be

scratched right right yeah and and that's yeah that's sort of ambition in a nutshell um

and then once you get to be uh big enough like you sort of or you're sort of satisfied in all of the other aspects

and it's like oh what is the legacy i want to leave like the i think of like the stuff they're so ego driven too though you know it is it

is different form of immortality well think of like the pharaohs of egypt for example who would who would um they

had everything so it's like well how do i like i still want to be big in my death or whatever

bill gates and i want to win a nobel prize because i've got everything else money can buy and i yeah respect you

know yeah i guess global respect you know yeah i wonder what the highest thing is there in the the highest level

once you've achieved all the basic things you keep moving up the levels it's like you want to hear an interesting quote charity cures greed by

putting the desire to help others above storing up treasure for oneself can you say it again yeah it's pretty

wordy yeah charity so this is how you want to counter because ambition can turn into greed and

so how do you counteract this this thing when you hit that level where you're at the upper tier of the

strata of society charity cures greed by putting the desire to help others

above storing up treasure for oneself right okay yeah and so charity would be the

ultimate form when you've reached the very top of maslow's hierarchy yeah which is a buddha or a jesus or religion

sort of thing really well or even like you know um like for example warren buffett like uh

you know and to some extent bill gates i know a lot of people don't uh you know

assign sort of diabolical purposes to him but um we'll stick with warren buffett but like

he he has you know he has all the money he could want the guy is you know a genius in his own right and um but he

gives a lot of money to charity uh so it's kind of like i can see where that would be a bit of a

a balm to some extent to your soul or you're like okay like now i share the

wealth and there are a lot of other people who will just give and if you're doing it correctly you really i would think you want to do it anonymously

that's why i like warren buffett because i don't really know much about him and i'm sure like you said he's doing a lot of these things yeah other people like

the affirmative bill gates you hear them every day in news articles and that alone for me is a big red flag yeah but

like he in defense of that like i mean he can't control who's writing news articles about him and like

yeah news articles written about them you know i always think it's for take the bill gates situation and it's like

he's not um like isn't it isn't it enough that he's giving billions of dollars you know like

can he be i mean why does he need to do more than that like that is a lot like that is you

know what i mean like the people who are receiving that money don't really care most likely whether he's like you know

um telling the world that he's doing this or not um or whether he maybe slipped a story and that his foundation

is doing it yeah no those are more peripheral things but when it comes to somebody like kim if it's like the centralization of

power through creating donations to organizations which didn't allows him to have more power within said organizations even

those organizations are supposed to be benign and helping the world it still helps him get to places he wouldn't have gotten otherwise yeah that's a different

story yeah i agree with that but i mean i i guess i guess what it is is like um

so if somebody and this is a another conversation i had at a dinner table once there was like um if you're

paying a lot of money for taxes if you make a good amount of money and you're paying a lot of money for taxes

you know like the argument is i'm trying to put it in a way where i don't like um be

careful yeah you're saying you should get more no i i think that like people who are fairly paying their taxes yeah and and

if they're so like i'm not talking about people who are like hiding you know their money or whatever but um they're they're actually doing more for

sort of the downtrodden in society than somebody who just like goes to you know just like i goes on twitter and it's like oh you care about like this group

or whatever and it's like yeah but this person whether they like it or not i'm sure they don't want to be paying those kinds of high taxes they're still at the

end of the day the downtrodden are benefiting more from the people who are paying the high taxes 100 i i don't know

what the cutoff was but here in canada it was something like if you make a hundred and fifty thousand a year or maybe even higher or lower it's 200 like

yeah the amount of taxes you contribute is like 80 percent of the entire tax revenue pool or something like that from

the uh from our income taxes you know like the top i'm going to make up a number it's not real but like the top 20 will pay 80

of all taxes yeah when it comes to income tax so yes you need the rich yeah because if you don't have the rich

and you push them away through you know demonizing them or over taxing them or creating legislation which makes

it hard for them to make money in the first place they have the economic mobility to be able to move on right so

yeah you you need the rich for sure and i guess this kind of comes back to what we were saying before with the stratification and i like it's not that

like i obviously don't think anybody like you know in terms of caste systems like nobody should

uh like i'm not thinking of it like oh there should be like you know the upper class and the lower class and this and

that like that sort of tends to happen naturally anyway but like um if you have like i'm just thinking of

the best thing for society is that people know for example sort of know their selves and what

they're happy with like me you might be the smartest person in the world but if you're if it makes you more happy to like you know maybe you love cooking and

you just want to own a restaurant like then do do what you love it comes back to ambition again like how do you how to

utilize that ambition yeah ambition for your family for yourself right how

do you want to utilize it well ambition should come after you've sort of done that uh assessment right

like if you're if you're like for example like elon musk like he's he's very driven uh like incredibly

driven but like he has like he wants to save the world you know what i mean so like but to the detriment of hurting his

own family yeah but that's maybe that's more important to him like you can never say that but like but that's

but but maybe that's his mission right so it's like you like some people just have different drives yeah i mean that's

his death could an ai ever recreate this one-off kind of you know our weirdos that we need are rebels or joan of arcs

yeah yeah like homogenizing everything to the middle ground again right now i'm a big fan i'm a big fan of my weirdos

and outliers you know i'm my friends tend to be that type of nature my my wife is an outlier my family are all

quirky in that sense like we don't we don't do normal in a sense you know but um so it's just more interesting more

creative and um inevitably that's it's the more rare spark that pushes the narrative forward

yeah yeah so you know i'm a big fan but um yeah i guess if he decided if he decided that saving the planet is more

important than his family and i don't know but i know he's he's just had like two more children do you see that elon musk

was somebody who works there yeah yeah like just like like didn't even have sex like you're just like i'm gonna just make two more

children like i don't know what the numbers at but it's it's probably double digits you

know like it's like getting up there yeah i know he well he goes on about i'm having babies out of people i don't even meet you know like is this crazy he's

worried uh i i know that he he's sort of laid the groundwork with this like he's worried that the world will be underpopulated yeah um so maybe that's

his way of you know he's doing his small part i guess um but yeah that's pretty

crazy but i guess if you give the money you know when you of course so i'll be taking care of and um i know i'm not going that but his father was

into the they're a strange family that way too they've been into the whole technopoly sort of thing you know like

uh have you did we talk about this i we'll leave that for another one because it's a huge but yeah the family

definitely is an outlier in the way of thinking and you can see it exhibited in the way he even raises his own family yeah let's put it that way

yeah right interesting guy though yeah and you want boring people like you know we need we need your boring people

too you know well that's the thing so they're heroes in a different way the person that gets up and works nine to five and slogs through a hard work day

and comes home and raises the kids like society needs those people tremendously yeah and i feel like when people say

that it's like some people think that those comments would be said only

to be like yeah they've got their like they're there kind of

they all um their place to play just i guess the key is to know who you are and what will be better

for in this one chance at life you know what are your best attributes and how to best utilize them question then for you

um then if if that's the case and if they're all truly equal like and we're

just trying to explain the value equal in value not necessarily rarity you know i'm quantity

right because i was going to say then should they just all sort of be paid the same and

you know as we get into that uh supply and demand and if you know your

standard deviations got a higher quantity they're going to make less money because they are in high supply and you can replace them so no no no i

guess you don't well because then if if the idea is just to do what you're sort of born to do like if you you know like

for example like somebody might say like well i would really like to be like a a seamstress but there's just no money in

it like i don't know either might be even i don't know but um um so they're like i'm instead i'm going to go to

business school and try to compete in this like world of like um you know or just to make it even

simpler it's like maybe you you just want to be sort of raised like a bunch of kids right maybe your elon must swipe or something and you're what you want to

have like just a you know a ton of kids and just raise them right and like and that's your ambition so like

but but because we live in the capitalist society then you want to um you're going gonna have to make it a

choice between like well you know society yeah society values like high earners so like try to find something

close to your seamstress seamstress skills doesn't have to be like in the business world but maybe something relatively that you can lean on but yeah

to be able to monetize i guess it's a dream to be able to monetize that what you're best at is really location specific culture

specific and what time in world history specific would michelangelo have a job today maybe not

you know god yeah like it's it's you know da vinci you know maybe at google you know like i think davinci would find

something yeah you know but they're just saying you know these different attributes have their place in time and you may get

lucky or you may not based on the time and place you find yourself yeah it sucks inside that sense but

that's we have to be adaptable as humans right right pragmatic adaptable have a loving family

around you a good sense of humor and just roll with it like i don't think you can take any of this too seriously

and in that sense going back to ambition and ai could it an ai just never take itself too seriously and just enjoy just

being alive well or does it have to be like making something at every second of the

day and is that how we've been configured as humans to even want to have our planet will it just turn into

some metal planet you see in some cyberpunk movie 2000 years from now because it was a more convenient and

efficient way to run the planet because it's just that's that's what the ai is supposed to do create more efficiencies

and conveniences for us right or just simply be and let humans just be like a crutch to lean on when you need it once

in a while yeah so like just circling back just like the history of ambition like i kind

of just chunk it i mean you can look at many different points in history but you go back to you know four or five

hundred bc to the ancient greeks of the aristotle and you know his his school of thought had you know ambition is like the wind

that moves humans from being inertia into action like so it's it's it's uh

not all that dissimilar to where we find our value system based uh around ambition today

it's right somewhat you know in a positive thing it got you to get up and do stuff right yeah and that that's

i think how the average person thinks of the word ambition today but around that same time too not much further on you get into the stoics who

saw you know like uh perceived that your ambitions as violent destructive currents within your

human spirit you almost wanted to like just step away from such emotions and you see that in a new age thought

today too which also still exists like these ideas we're still wrestling with them right you know that's why i kind of

do like going back to icarus and the golden mean just trying to find out how to balance these two ideas

and then you know it's um you don't forget that you know the stoics in aristotle were you know several well no

this would be old testament but um you know as christianity rolled around and you got like the story of adam and eve which have been

new testament new testament old testament you know from you have adam and eve and they ate from the apple

uh which the tree of uh forbidden knowledge right yeah you know they literally

uh that was god's most important decree that they ate said that not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil

right and they did it was ambition yeah you know his ambition that got them kicked out of the garden so in that

sense they fall sort of underst god was a stoic he's like put these destructive currents aside young man yeah woman

yeah you have um well i just also think of prometheus right so it's like um you know that whole it's funny how there's

such a negative connotation almost right off the bat where it's like oh why would humanity want fire or technology it's

like well and prometheus is just kind of like well you know why wouldn't i bring you the light you

know yeah they call it the lights you know sort of the light of uh take over ignorance you know would you say

then lucifer was probably the best angel well you get lucid you know the root word is

light no i know right right like it's quite incredible so within which is the false god the false light right but so

and are we then going back is aristotle wrong in that sense and the storks are right that our ambition can move us from

being inertia into give us inertia to move out of uh static behavior patterns into being more productive but is that

going to lead to our destruction as a human species and the stoics and we're like you got to temper that because that will lead to

war and you know proliferation of you know just egos and um destruct destructive powers

yeah i think it's interesting oh this has always been kind of interesting how like you know god

or the biblical god will say or whomever like the titans like whoever you want to say uh the

um the archetypal god of old would be um sort of wanting to restrict humanity's

um knowledge almost and and then you know it's like bad if they get that but then

sort of a lucifer or whatever you know it's kind of such a bad rap um you know

over the centuries um but um you know where they act you know in theory it's like okay well they're actually trying

to give us knowledge sound like the prometheus thing it's like trying to um sort of bring us the light um but is

that knowledge sort of like the universe so ever expanding that it's a trick in itself because you'll never actually get

to the end maybe maybe the idea is god is in god is saying don't even go that route man because you don't even know

what you're getting into right right right like let me tell you i'm god the universe is big don't even try right

right like you're just gonna drive yourself look within and just ignore the whole thing yeah yeah yeah maybe that's i mean to think that it's like

so simple that it's like just um you know prometheus and you know lucifer are all it's like hey like they're like like

obviously there would be more to it right so like the gods like yeah like i'm not you know i'm not an [ __ ] like

i'm just trying to be um save you from yourselves kind of thing or like focus you on what's

important it's almost like god is giving you a hack he's like just don't don't even try to play this game the coding is

too long what lucifer's giving you right there's billions of line of code you're never going to get to the end right yeah

you're basically an ape like yeah just just deal with it be happy with your figs and your um

yeah fig leaves yeah is there something you know in the mediterranean climate's pretty warm you don't need too much to

survive and if these religions came out of that sort of zone you can see how the everyday need like for like

technology to increase your life was nowhere near as important as it was like in like northern europe right you know

you just yeah you didn't need you didn't need much that's why the whole idea garden of eden like it's quite tranquil

you don't need to do much to survive but then i mean really but that

this really is a you know when we started this i think i thought ambition is like well it's sort of one of the lesser attributes like it but but it

really is important like it really is something that you know what kind of a life is it that you know

just sitting around in a garden all day like wouldn't you want to do something when you want to create something or like sort of

uh create that legacy for yourself or have something that is like you know like the

united states has become proof positive of ambition's massive constructive

potential like giving the individual that amount of freedom and autonomy yeah to be able to create

uh unhindered from bureaucracy and taxation has led to the greatest amount of personal freedom and economic growth

the world has ever seen you know do we live a better life in america um you could debate depending on how you

quantify a better life but it's certainly in a materialistic realm unleashed something we've never

seen before and many would say that was positive well yeah and i mean you just have to compare it to the soviet union to see

which country which style of um you know because i guess the idea there

i certainly wouldn't say that there wasn't any ambition in the soviet union but the idea of communism is to kind of

quell the ambition to some extent yeah it's like it's a little more stoic and maybe ideological

ideology matters more than truth right well it's yeah and it's this idea like you know you're going to do the job

that you're good at and uh this is best for everybody and it doesn't really matter what your

desires are in terms of maybe you want to accumulate more wealth maybe you want to go to paris and it was the first

centralized algorithm because you know like in the schools you have like these aptitude tests there and oh we you have

a math mind you're going into the maps and you didn't have a choice yeah like here you can basically there's obviously the tier of marks to get in

and either you have the ability or not but there's a certain amount of free will in the process there you didn't have that right so it was very

centralized very you know in their rudimentary form ai driven you know we determined that this is the best thing

for you and we're going to slot you into this part of the machine you know yeah and in that sense takes

away a bit of your individual need for ambition right just be your

just do your part for the machine yeah yeah it's um it is a good uh sort of you know in that

sense you know certainly for all of its faults america you can say it is

the greatest country in the world in many respects um america brings out our greatest

attributes as a species in terms of trying to create and survive in a materialistic world

the to give them their due the communists um brought out our best attributes maybe in

theoretical ideological um destinations and goals yeah it's just it's

you know communism is sort of a naive philosophy that's a thing like it's like having it's kind of like you know wokism

or like some other philosophy where it's um you know ostensibly very good

like it like it has all the right things yeah of course you know the workers you want the workers political correctness

comes out of communism yeah totally a communist thing yeah yeah because it's just the ideology's there

completely but can they actually practically make use of it in a in an efficient way in the world today history

is showing us no yeah and people tell you well that wasn't real communism so where did it actually happen correctly

yeah yeah like you're gonna create the one that never you know well there's inherent problems with it the inherent problems are

the fact that this for example this we're talking about these fundamental human values like ambition you can't like the communism is

built around the idea that you have to set your ambition aside to do it for the whole like it's it's

completely it goes against evolution it's kind of like being a family member though you know when your father or mother

tells you you can't go tonight we need you to shovel the driveway you know it's better for your family but maybe not better for you

yeah there's something to be said for that but i think that if you if you build a philosophy around

um uh pushing away or like denying the sort of

fundamental attributes that make you a human being and i don't know if it does it for all

of the but it does you know i i i don't know in terms of like love and passion like i think that there are certain

things maybe that still flourished in in the soviet union but um certainly ambition i i would have

been quashed to some extent for sure so because i think in this sense ambition and individualism come hand in hand

yeah right yeah like your your ambition your personal what what no this is communal right

right well even even pride to a certain extent like it gets deferred like um you know we'll talk about this more in

another episode but like uh pride in your yourself and in your work like you

can be proud of the work you do but wouldn't you be more proud of the work that you cared about and did like if you're a widget maker in soviet union

because you're really good at making widgets and that's what the state said you should do like how much pride are you gonna take in that as opposed to if you have this

thing where you also like to paint and you paint in your spare time or whatever like that's where you're gonna have the pride and for sure you know so it's um

yeah i think that that's really i think that that's why i think communism is just incompatible with human

like basic human drama it's a wonderful philosophy like you said i think it's just naive overall and um doesn't work

it doesn't work in the real world yeah the really real world you know yeah but you're right when you see those images even from soviet propaganda where

they're all marching off into a factory to work right um you sit there and just dwell like is that individual feeling

like a certain amount of personal self-satisfaction today not in an individual sense maybe on a collective

sense that's why they all see them in one large line going into one big building right but as an individual the

factory yeah yeah but as a john ingles on your farmstead sort of thing little house on the prairie couldn't be more

opposite right yeah yeah which is really interesting because you know the farmer culture of america and the farmer

culture of the ussr i think that the same type of like strong hearty ambitious type a

man and woman uh full of into like there was russia could have easily gone the america route yeah the spirit was there

in the people right you know well think of the think of the space race too right like that's that was an ambitious thing

you know for uh kennedy to say okay we're gonna by the end of this decade we want to have a man on the moon yeah and

um you know the soviets try you know they try to do the same thing of course they're up in space

first yeah yeah so give them their credit where credit's due but it's like um so you know in that sense it's like

does i think you're still going to get a few wins you know if you have that kind of state power

yeah for sure well there's a certain efficiency and you see that through china too right right like you know maximize uh uh capitalism capitalism's

best attributes through like a totally centralized you know right um

mechanism where they don't have to go through council meetings and where to build the next condo or something here end of story you know yeah they

could just steal our intellectual property so yeah there's 100 well it just makes it certainly more

efficient right like why do all the why do all the hard work when you can just like hack into somebody's company and do

it um do you so would these days

i i wonder if there is a trend have you heard of this whole quiet quitting phenomenon i've seen a few titles but i

haven't read an article on it yet uh so it's it's like um a lot of people these days there's sort of like a i guess uh

tradition in companies um in western comp countries where

uh there's this idea of sort of the ambitious go-getter where it's like okay

like well who's that guy that's been standing here for 14 hours a night and like burning the midnight oil and he's

always trying to put in the extra time and always doing taking on more and more responsibility like uh there's this kind of idea that that's

the um sort of a laudable attribute in companies i mean those people will get promoted and this and that

um but i think there's been a lot of um a bit of a trend these days and i think it came out of the pandemic and um you know

i think it's a lot of millennial and maybe gen gen ziers or jen zetters

are are doing this thing called quiet quitting where they're basically doing the bare minimum

that their job requires and saying and they're not taking on more responsibility they're not working extra hours you know

five o'clock kids the reasoning for that feeling because uh they're trying to achieve like when i first when i first

i'll admit when i first read about this i was like those lazy millennials like are lazy like um but

it makes sense they're trying to achieve a work-life balance and like i've read various quotes on this i think people

take it in different ways some people are like you know they'll um taking it too far where they're like

like whoa five o'clock i'm out of here or like you know maybe just trying to just keep their job enough to not get

fired or whatever which i don't know what was the expression we had growing up 75 percent of work is just showing up

maybe it was just me yeah yeah 75 percent of work is just showing up right i used to say that growing up you know

um yeah i don't know maybe that maybe this is something that's always gone on but they're just sort of putting a name to

it but it's um they're not getting raises anymore is that maybe they're like well because going back to your communism stuff like

they used to have this expression in ussrt like they pretend to pay us i pretend to work

right right so why would i really what is the ambition if i'm a dentist in the ussr to do 12 people today instead of

four i'm getting the same page yeah no i agree but you know these people aren't in the ussr so it's like i wonder if i

wonder if this is like just a lack of ambition you know or is it part of like are we taking on some attributes from when we say socialism and wokism and

political correctness and work life balance and blah blah blah are we taking on some of the emotional attributes of

what was communism in our own personal lives and it's dictating how we actually approach our our jobs now yeah i think i i think

maybe they i think maybe they are we are communists living in a capitalistic society now yeah which isn't a good

recipe because it's like you know eventually these bosses um the

bosses of these companies or whomever will uh will just lay off the people totally so all this

work from home stuff right yeah i don't like commuting it's one of the things i i hate the most and base my

career around like how to not have a big commute yeah um yeah my parents never spent more than

five minutes in a car driving in the mornings and it was wonderful because they put all their time into their job instead of actually commuting

and yeah so people who didn't decide to you know let's say um are allowed to stay at home

and work remotely are they just shooting themselves in the foot because eventually like you said the bosses are gonna make well why do i need to pay a

canadian salary for that person when they're at home and i can just outsource it to somebody else in a different part of the world

like you actually could be like you know you're taking um the forbidden fruit yeah and it will only come around to

bite you in the butt later why would they not outsource you're already in a sense outsourced because

you're not in the office you're at home so when you talk about globalism and you know um

even like back to centralized forces and what is a nation if you can get somebody in thailand that's going to do the same job for 1 8 the cost and they're working

remotely what is the obligation for the company to hire you yeah well also it really fits in with

the ai because like you know i've noticed more and more of these days

going into the grocery store where like i now find myself opting for the

manual checkout me too even even if the other one's free 100 and it's just like i don't know why i just i'm like you

know what i don't want to have to deal with the per like and i think a lot of the reason is and like you know with all due respect i know there are people who

are putting in oh sorry you said you go to the manual checkout yeah no i actually go to the person oh do you

really try yeah yeah actually cleaner you know they don't have to touch a screen and all that sort of

stuff but isn't it nice look at somebody smile especially when the masks are off now you're like good morning how are you

no i well i don't that's the thing i don't see the smiles i maybe they just don't like me so i guess that guy again uh no i i find

it look like there are some good people that are doing good jobs there i certainly don't want to cast uh you know

all into the same bin but like i find that a lot of people and again maybe i'm just

older but there's there i find that i go into places like this or into you know

not starbucks for some reason starbucks seems to be a completely um um

they've they've somehow figured this out because i never have seen a disgruntled starbucks employee strangely of all the

times i've gone in there but like virtually everywhere else i i'll find somebody who's making maybe minimum wage

or around that who is has a big frown on their face like is not interested

they're slow they're talking to somebody they're on their phone and you know i get it they're not making a lot of money like i wouldn't be like

thrilled either but like they're kind of program they're kind of like um

like programming pro programming themselves out of uh out of yeah i think they've picked on i honestly i'm

going to sound older too but i feel like you're right when i go through a drive-through and as a kid i worked at

i'm at mcdonald's and i used to do the drive-through job and i was happy to give people their food and smiled and folded the bed correctly and made sure

the straws were there and the wrapkins and there was a certain sense of pride even though at the time it was a 375 per

hour you know like it wasn't it had nothing to do with the pay it was you wanted to do a good job and see that person reciprocate back to you and i

find now when i go through a drive-through you they the bag is crumpled uh maybe the napkins are in there but here's your paper straw

because we're going to do what's right for the universe right right nothing wrong with a paper straw i like the

paper straw yeah it's fine and the other the cutlery not so good but the paper straw is fine but um

uh yeah like i mean the point is that i feel like they don't you're right they don't seem to

they've been programmed almost to think this is you're better than this and therefore don't try so hard at this

level of job whereas the way i was raised like whatever job you do you do it to your absolute best ability because

you're representing yourself and your family mm-hmm and yeah no i agree it went beyond money you

know it and then it went beyond like again this communism almost inflates the ego in a sense because you're like well

then i don't need to participate in this because they're just basically here to steal money from me because i'm just a

unit of labor and all that sort of stuff yeah it's interesting to see the trends and how it all sort of fits in like how

it all affects each other dry through workers are throwing down their chains right but in a process they're also

eliminating themselves out of a job yeah yeah it's it's unfortunate and i would also you know i want to note that it's

like um i think that it is like you know it's no different than the job we used to have and by the way just

as a quick little um um side note i'm going today for the first time in decades back to a place that i used to

work for three it was like 3 30 and then 375 an hour when i got my big raise back

when i was like and i'm going there uh with my dad to we're just doing a little trip down memory lane kind of thing and

um yeah it is it's the guy it's remember the guy the malacca back to this yeah i told you

i told you that story that's the guy i didn't know i i know that story i didn't know you had that job so early in your life yeah yeah oh yeah i was working i i

worked since i was like 10 10 10 o'clock 10 10 years old like i was delivering like newspapers what a greek i would do

you have two arms leg don't worry come it's okay i pay you cash

yeah always with the malacca i love him he's like mean good friend

potentially from a certain point of view right right it would be like oh that's funny because you only call me that when

you're angry at me it's like stupid okay that's how i stop from hitting you don't do it i just call

it's it safety mechanism um the uh so

anyway but like i do get that so it's like the same job that they're doing but they've been imbued with all this like

kind of nonsense about how they're a special flower and like how they have all this you know it's like oh the world is yours

and everything but at the same time i would say that they're going into a marketplace that is not as

fertile as the ones we went into like their ai is coming and it is taking out all these smaller jobs they can't afford

a house you know what i mean like this way and from from their point of view why try harder if the effort's never

going to get me into the lifestyle i even yeah i think is minimal to my needs yeah you know and i understand that

there's a massive um problem with housing costs and inflation in general right but being bad at your job isn't

the right way to go about it it's just the wrong mental attitude in life yeah and that's being fostered by media

and i think schooling i don't know if the parents are actually putting i don't i don't know i can't speak for the parents i know i wouldn't raise my kids that way and i i think that this is

where this this quiet quitting i think you're i think you hit the nail on the head it's like it isn't the right attitude in general

and uh but but i also do understand where in their minds it's like you know what like what am i doing this for like

what am i just like a worker bee now like um it's the golden mean again back to icarus like i understand your

complaint but don't go so hard with it right the golden you know the the soft sweet spot here yeah

and uh but it is hard i you know i guess these days like it's like what are you oh you know what at the same time though

i always hear especially since the pandemic how there are all these opportunities you know i know a few people that i've

uh offer offered jobs to or could have gotten jobs that were fine fairly low

you know at this place i used to work um it was a an internet service provider but anybody that would be interested in

sort of i.t if you know as a starting to kind of start getting into it there

were jobs available there to do stuff and you'd learn it and you wouldn't get paid a lot but you'd sort of that that was the stepping stone right and it was

kind of like everybody that i offered it to was like and they were all kind of millennial aged at the time um but they

were all um or you know 30 or younger or whatever i don't know what millennial is anymore of the dates or whatever yeah but um but it was all like oh no thanks

or whatever and then they i just see that they would just remain unemployed for like another like you know 12 months even and it's like okay well i

mean that is the field you're trying to get into this is a stepping stone yes the pay is not great it's not it's not

my company you know i'm not offering you the pay or whatever but it's like i think there is a certain amount of like

you've got to do it for almost the education like you're getting paid minimally but for an education back to

inertia and aristotle you know where's the ambition to actually get you moving a little bit yeah

something something forward is still forward yeah and it's it's i think one thing

like i i think of like a lot of kids these days it's like what are you like i mean if you have something else going on

then sure like if you're building something else then okay it makes more sense but if if you're just kind of

throwing up your hands and being nihilistic about it and it's like well i'm just going to like but see i think we're playing i think we've stumbled

into something here jason because in a sense when we were saying how america was you know it was proof positive of

ambition being like such an amazing driving force but that's probably in historical terms

not 2022 right right and then when i kind of then just had this sort of like

intuition well maybe perhaps we've just become a bunch of we've taken on too many communist traits living in a capitalist society capitalistic society

and that has then brought with it the more ussr version of ambition

like why should i even bother yeah you know the system is rigged against me this is ridiculous right or when in

doubt and i have anxiety trust the experts because i just want to defer because i don't actually want to take on any ambition myself and actually figure

things out yeah you know to the point we have like words like dude you're doing your own research that's like anti-ambition right and

that's coming from the top down yeah like don't have ambition to figure stuff out yourself listen to the experts or

you know just be grumpy about your life because you're doomed anyways right so we might be on the precipice of something really

changing fundamentally in our country here no i i think that we might be yeah like we are transforming while the

system is still staying in a sense like capitalistic so are we becoming are we becoming then

like you know uh an outlier like a colony of china in that sense like in a sense we

have this sort of like you know capitalistic economy but with a much more uh communal

you're just one clog in the machine don't speak out because you might be like a whack-a-mole and get hit by the media or social media and uh you know

less diverse and more homogeneous in thought yeah there's there's a lot to there's a

lot to unpack and a lot going on um did you hear this a bit we don't celebrate individualism anymore

not as much we don't celebrate somebody who's like the weirdo well look at elon musk i know i keep bringing him up but it's like he he's castigated a lot in

the media you know what i mean like yeah he says a bunch of uh like flipping things on twitter or whatever but it's not his job to like

well it's not his job yet or any more of what goes on on twitter but i'm just

saying like he when he says something on twitter it's like that's not his response you know what we need to do is for all these outliers of thought who

are like the individuals of society that we are not so um promoted anymore the john wayne's elon musk's whoever you

want to call the bert reynolds like what are these renegades that just went into themselves throw them out there whatever is your ambition whatever floats your boat you

know these like strong individual people back in the day right mary tyler moore like who are like the

amazing individuals right um so when we talk about the lgtbq maybe

we need an extra letter now for the person who's just like i'm a freaking individual right you know like no this

is my my weirdness my individuality is part of who i am and i need my own little letter to be part of this group

too because if not what we're doing is kind of like like the gay people we're kind of just regulating them like oh well you know it's it's a fringe element

of society instead of actually bringing them front and center right why should why should that kind of

personality be like you know like demeaned yeah yeah yeah no i i

i agree and if anything they should be celebrated and if anything

they would be celebrated for they should be celebrated more so than others because they're the ones that are

bringing uh something of value to the world onto

on the table right like everybody's special in their own way everybody's got their own thing i'm not saying like like like anybody is a less of a person or

whatever but somebody like an elon musk and i um you know or a henry ford or any

anybody who has these grand ambitions in her and the and the the drive to continue to persevere and

like um you know i think of this uh this old boss mine is so inspiring it is inspiring and and like i had this boss

it was actually the same place the isp and it's like he was he was a real you know we didn't

get along very well um and i left on relatively bad terms but he was a really

hard worker he was up early in the morning and he was a really smart guy and i was actually inspired by his work

ethic like i didn't want to put in the same hours he did because he owned the company and i was you know just a kind

of a worker there but like at the same time i was like you know he's really like like he's building something he's got

the ambition he's doing it and that's impressive to see so like those people you know they're they're founding

companies they're employing people so like you know they might not have the best uh you know i know elon musk and also uh

uh zuckerberg now have gotten in trouble for like some some things they said to their employees where it's like you're not you know basically anyone's

expendable kind of that kind of a vibe and the employees are like whoa like how like what are you saying it's like yeah times are tough you know i can fire you

yeah it's like like that's his like like he owns the company or you know he runs the company you know so that's how

communist we've become right right it's shocking when you hear that it's like well how can you say that to your employees like what is hr going to say

about this it's almost like that's like a communist head alter right that's the politburo the hr

what is your bidding my master yeah it's elon musk that we're after

you know um yeah true like you know in a simple way as a child when you played like a sport like hockey or something there's only one person on your team

that's captain you know and there's a reason why they're captain yeah you know and not everybody can be captain and maybe this

you know your moment will become captain later on in life a couple seasons down the road but they're they have those attributes like the boss that you were

saying that you know they have something you that inspires the entire team to be better and these elon musks of the world and

mary tyler moore's and all the archetypes of those sorts of characters and there's been you know lucille ball

like you can go through so many amazing individuals in the last 100 years they were the captains of their teams

all right did we have to add a letter c to the lgtbi queue i was going to say i would probably be a better letter sure yeah well this is

like iphone imac give me a c it will be a capital i

i dimitri um that's my pronoun

uh okay so yeah i know i i think that's i think that's quite interesting actually the um

um i wonder where uh society will go from here like i wonder if this

you know it's almost that this whole quiet quitting thing was sort of named and given given a moniker that it was like i don't know if it's just because

of social media and these things trend or whatever or if it's like um [Music] you know it's almost because you could

say like well this has always been going on or what the media is saying the media is saying it's okay

because that's not a bad way of writing it it's okay to feel like crappy or job that's when you write quiet quitting

quiet it's calm it's like rage it's not like violence right it's quiet think about the adjectives they're giving it

like i look at those things from a psychological point of view sometimes so like they're i think they're endorsing that type of behavior

so jason would you would you consider yourself how ambitious would you consider yourself

oh um good question you're certainly ambitious but how ambitious i i don't know if i am that ambitious i think in

my mind i'm ambitious but like in action i'm not um

like in many ways i don't know you know i i

in a very i say this very modestly because i'm not trying to big myself up but i am i am an

ending by in many ways and to myself most of all like i don't know why i do a lot of the things i do

but like uh you know i work i i've always worked hard i've always had a good job but it's never necessarily

like been you know so it's funny like i'm a hard worker but i'm not like ambitious

necessarily like i look at for example i'll use my brother as an example um i don't think he would mind me using him

but like he's really good at sort of negotiating like really good at negotiating he's in sales but he's like

very good at like he has no problem like going to his boss and being like you know what i'm worth more here's how much

i value myself at that's a real skill and it's like a really valuable skill and

assertive assertive and like not not content with like sort of staying at a certain level

politely disagreeable yeah you know he's like i disagree and he's you know yeah attributes

and like i'll all disagree but i'll like whine about things like i'll you know and it's not a it's not like an attractive quality it's just like um or

it's not even like a wine i sort of commiserate with my my fellow workers like um

uh but but not necessarily um try to

you know there's been times where i've kind of gotten fed up with the job but i'll leave the job before i'll kind of try to negotiate a raise or anything

like that and it's a really valuable skill that i think needs to be taught i

mean if i you know um because i look at where i am in my career uh and

where others are and the money they're making and i really should be making about twice as much money as i'm making right okay so so you you know you know

the um yeah sure like if that's if that's the goal yeah i do have a good job now so i like i actually like my job so i'm

willing to sacrifice some money for the the sort of the benefit of the freedom the people like everything that

i'm i'm comfortable with where i am so do you think you could you could have doubled your salary i i think if i

really wanted to i could find a place to almost double it yeah okay but but like um but it would be i'd be working a lot

more or i'd be and that comes at a cost exactly so but there's also a middle ground like i should be making more than

i'm making but i just don't want to have that awkward conversation and also you know risk-wise why don't you want to

have that awkward conversation i don't want to risk losing what i have now and in my mind

my work is not my number one thing like for example like this podcast for example is is something that i would

consider you know i'm i'm ambitious about like i'm trying to get it working you know

and uh uh my writing is something that i i'm very passionate about and we care very

much about it's like very sacred to me so that's another thing that i'm i'm quite ambitious about as well but you

know that being said like it's not i haven't really written much i just kind of think of stories right so like um

well in psychological terms there is like the difference that when they come to one spicy meatball but one of the

reasons why there's paid differences as you're indicating between even genders is not so much always just the gender although that

certainly does exist is that between the genders there's a difference in psychological attributes one of which

which is linked to a high degree of correlation to how much pay you get is the amount you are

willing to be disagreeable and the higher degree of disagreeability

the um if you know how to handle that correctly the better you will do in the job force

yeah and as a result men tend to be better at being disagreeable than women yeah

so you're saying a woman not that there's anything wrong with that right you know we need everybody

but but but this particular attribute you may skew you know towards that side of the things

more yeah like we all we all skewed one way or the other different attributes yeah i probably i can be honest with myself enough to think that um to think

that i do like that would make sense like my um like i can see where that

comes from uh hereditarily and uh i'm also

um you know i i can see that being displayed like it's not that um

yeah there's a certain go along to get along like there's other factors that go into it where i sort of justify my mind like it's like oh yeah i'm happy here

and sometimes you take the higher road because you know it's actually the right way to be and you don't be like in the trenches at all i'm disagreeable where

you know staff room where you put the coffee or something like that like you got to pick your moments right

um but yeah i think that's some one attribute that just you can either develop or just acknowledge where you

are in that and like you said if it's even worth that battle yeah yeah exactly like you know when you look at doctors

and or any high-paying job but just to stay in doctors a moment and the type of money they make um the reason why they

get that pay though is because it comes at a very high cost to their lives right the time the education the

responsibility and you have to ask yourself do i want to pay that cost and if so then you got to get you know

paid back you know appropriately you know yeah but um not everybody wants to have the not everybody has it's not just

intellectual capabilities and everybody has the desire for the life to go in that particular direction

right right you know well i think that's why um yeah doctors are interesting lawyers are another interesting case

where i was just reading recently that it's like um you know because normally their

hourly rate like the hourly rate of the average person is like 38 bucks an hour or something in canada or or maybe less

i don't know but it's it's around i think in the 30s um or yeah i guess the average like professional or whatever um

who has professional services but lawyers you know they'll build like 400 bucks an hour 500 bucks an hour or

whatever and you're like whoa like what's with the discrepancy but they're paying for like things like insurance they're paying for things like you know

for them to bring on a new client it's there's a lot of paperwork that's involved in that and supply and demand yeah supply and

demand knowledge you're paying for like you know their schooling to some extent you're you know it's a lot of stuff to

learn the law right like um so you know yeah there's i guess what am i trying to say like

there's there's it really starts with you and what kind of life you want to have and like how

much you know what is your if you have ambition what is the ambition for is it for more money or is it for a better

life you know like because you can make like half a million dollars a year but if you're living in squash you know if

you're living in a third world country and you're just like you know avoiding gunfire every day then that doesn't really do you think this amount of

disagreeability that as advantageous in the workplace has been sort of bred out of us a bit and the entire as you were

saying earlier millennial generation and younger are just not as disagreeable and therefore it's going to hurt them in the

occupational workforce going forward and this is that is exactly what corporations are trying to breed

that's an interesting yeah maybe do you want a bunch of john wayne's and john ingles and lucille

balls in your offices you know like you're driving you nuts as a manager because they're all demanding more out of you or do you want somebody that's more like no i don't know why i'm using

the kind of voice but you know less less disagreeable right and just more go along to get along kind of crowd and

then you have a more malleable workforce that will only benefit the company in the end the company's bottom line on payroll who

knows about the results i i don't know it's an interesting theory i i would have to see some evidence like i don't i don't know if

necessarily like i mean this quiet quitting thing kind of sounds like this because exactly that area and yeah think

about the standard deviation again you're squishing everybody back to the middle you're actually you're not promoting the outliers

you're getting like again like a whack-a-mole you're knocking the outliers like the elon musk's down and promoting like the good person will be

the one that's quiet it stays in the middle right like how many people believe in all these new social narratives that we

have today but they're simply afraid to speak out for they're gonna be reprimanded by whatever and you're just training a

whole population to be like well i'm not to quit i'm just going to quietly quit like it's really like just avoidance of

conflict i guess and i'm not promoting conflict but you know i am i am politely

disagreeable a lot well it's sort of like this whole phenomenon with ghosting and like you know you know i i remember

what the hell is that right no i know i know you i had a um a job interview um several years ago

and um but but recent enough that it was um i'm just trying to think of how long um

anyway i i went to it everything went fine like it didn't go great but it went good

enough and i had been told by the guy that um that i was kind of interviewing with one of the

three people who interviewed me like they took me this was a big like you know they they took they had a room and one of those startup things down they

were looking for somebody who's fairly crucial to their uh infrastructure but i had been sort of assured it's like no no they'll they'll get something for you

they want like by a friend of mine that knew the one guy there and then um so i was did the interview i'm like okay i'm

gonna have a decision to make because i have a nice job now do i want to then take this one because it's gonna be a lot more risky but it'll be more

exciting and this and that more money potentially um and uh they just ghosted me like they

just didn't respond to me like and i was like well you know and it was kind of like yeah we'll get back to you in a couple days we'll figure out blah blah

blah next steps and it's like and then just nothing i was like and this is my sort of first encounter with this whole

ghosting thing and i was like like that's rude you know it's like you can't just like yeah the passive

aggressiveness has become like the new norm but when you really analyze it it's so cowardly and rude

yeah yeah no i agree i agree like exit interviews are nice some people like you didn't get the job but let me tell you why like that's wonderful yeah like but

just like just like just brushing people off yeah like how like snobby nose in the air like you're not even worth my

time to respond right like no wonder people feel like crap about themselves these days they're getting ghosted all over the place i would say though the

exit interviews if you if you are let go um from a position it's um

you know there's legal yeah you know what i mean the liability like i don't know much about that world because the nature i know but yeah it's

out there i would see how from an hr perspective it's like just better not to say anything which is unfortunate but it's like that's now how the the world

is like you you know because if you say the wrong thing it's like well that's you know that was one of the forbidden reasons that you weren't allowed to like

unbelievable like how can you have a free conversation going forward again going back to ai and ambition and everything but like you know imagine a

future where everything's just miked and recorded and alexa and like well actually you said this word yeah oh my

god like even as we're having this podcast i think about your words a lot i'm like if i was writing this down it would come out so differently and so

we're gonna start holding people to that standard like whatever comes out of your mouth is like you meant it to the fullest degree forever and ever more

right yeah exactly really an impossible standard to hold people to well that's why i always think like more it will

only shut people up in the future and again push them to that standard deviation of normality in the middle where no one's going to want to speak

out at all yeah but you see it like when you put something on that facebook post and you know the silence can be deafening sometimes and i love it

because you're like people are seeing it right they're reading you just see your friend count go down

actually surprisingly in my case not and you get all kinds of messages through different platforms um which offer all

kinds of support and then occasionally you'll put a post up there that is much more in the same vein but more benign

and all of a sudden boom it populates right whole bunch because it's acceptable to put an i like on there yeah that's what those people weren't

around when they saw the other posts they obviously more or less agree with what i'm posting that they won't touch

the one that will stain them yep yeah so again we're crushing the outliers

yeah it it it's uh where's the ambition yeah yeah it really gets down to uh

boils down to sort of the boring averageness where it's like everybody just wants to say the the

non-controversial thing and just kind of like check all the boxes of course we have social responsibilities but i'm

just saying that social responsibility should be deferred to like how on on average the average person sees

how you behave and on an individual basis decides how they want to interact with you not through some centralized mechanism again yeah that's the part

that i think is really terrifying i think it's important i think we're living in an age where we kind of happened where um

we had all that public um visibility and we're still sort of in the spotlight of that but i think it'll

wane i think it's like this is the first kind of era where yeah well it's a transitional era yeah

where you have people you know what they said in some you you know in some video like 20 years ago is now being brought

up and they're being canceled so like people are naturally very cautious now but i think that once that becomes so normalized it's like there's literally

nobody else trump effect i've said so many dumb things yeah or just or just

even just everybody like there will be enough people that will be like well

my friend was canceled and i know he's a good guy and he was just canceled because of the stupid thing so then more and more people will just be like okay

this is just all [ __ ] like it's kind of like you know how many doses do you want today yeah you got four but i'm stopping you

anti-vaxxer you know like where where is the line of delineation between you know

acceptable behavior or when you're you should be recommended yeah yeah i think that people will start to i think there

was this idea of what you could get away with in public before and maybe people didn't know everything that

was going on so like some of the stuff that came out of me too it was like okay some of those pretty bad stuff and i think that was a bit of a real a bit of

an awakening for a lot of people but then it kind of went on too long and it's like but but i think you get this i

think you get this point where now people are finding that new balance where it's like okay because we live in

this sort of new era certain other things like we're going to widen what is acceptable now because otherwise we'd

all be canceled and as long as a pendulum doesn't swing too far back the other way too yeah like when we were talking earlier and i mentioned about

the cast system i i was conscious of the fact that i'm like okay like this could be taken out of context or like somebody just listening to this clip is gonna

think like who is uh you know cast systems very challenging talking yeah so it's but it's like you know what like who care

like first of all it's like it's not like we have millions of people listening to us but like um if we have you know if

like it's like what's the point of being alive right like you have to say some stuff like that is like like you have to

express your opinions right like and if you can't if you if i have to be careful in a five minute segment that that's

gonna be taken out of context then i'm gonna only say like short little snippets i'm not gonna have a longer

with context you don't have the ability to be wrong how on earth can you ever know if you're

right yeah and we're eliminating the ability to be wrong in public view

right right and so i think you're shutting down free thought free thought yeah the ability to be

wrong but not only that the ability to um implantability survive your your thing you won't get

fired you won't get excommunicated for the right job like you will still be the jason and dimitri we all know and love

you're just wrong on this one topic no problem and you grow from that and we're not in that we're very much in a tribal

you're in the in crowd or completely outcasted these days i hope it doesn't swing too far i would

say it's gone beyond that where it's like if i'm questioning whether like i don't think i'm wrong about the cast system for example i think that if i i

think it would be perceived as wrong so i'm now kind of trying to formulate my con my

the whole context of what i'm saying i'm trying to boil it down a smaller amount so i make sure that i don't say the you

know so that if you're listening to only a five minute clip there's still enough in there that kind of um uh

balances that all out balances it all out yeah like justifies that i was trying to think of the word but you know that's that's the problem too because

you're going back to technology and you know like what percentage of clips on youtube are just ten minutes long versus a two and a half to three hour podcast

like who really has the time anymore because there's just so much quantity out there it isn't like 13 channels like

we were children and you knew every episode word for word there's literally billions of channels these days and you

know hours and hours of i don't know how we're going to parse through that other than when you find something that

is a questionable you have to take the time to do your own research and dig deeper into what is the actual nature of

jason what did he actually mean by this sentence i think you know people don't want that they want quick judgments yeah yeah this is getting a

little off topic but look but i think that there's there's a real need for a the generalist kind of

um information like i think it's what you're talking about like going down like like really investigating something

that's important but that's one that's one side like you also need the generalist where it's like here are the

news stories here's the basic stuff and uh because we don't really have that as much anymore without getting the same

the biases that we see on like cnn and cbc um i think we need a new kind of

um like even something like daily wire like i think that you get the sort of the straight goods but it's obviously slanted you know like it's slanted more

right so it's like if you just want to get the stories and want to get like okay what's a relatively balanced

opinion um you can go to yeah you know i think we need that i think we need

that and then also we need to do our own research more diligently i think there was a nap i might get the name wrong have you

heard of it i think it was ground news and what it basically is is you um i believe that was the name you can

check it out and you put in all the different newspapers you like to listen and like read and watch and it will put

a spectrum there left center right where they fall okay because it's unfortunate that it's no one like

things that you think of things would all be center-ish yeah and i never knew growing up that things could be so slanted as

as a corporate ethos sort of thing and then what it does is it will indicate you've been reading lots of uh

news articles from one side like say 70 30. so then you can go aha

and then you can go try to look at something from the opposite point of view so then the goal is at the end of the month you've read kind of like a 50

50 mix the key for me here is that you decide looking at the ratio as opposed to just

curating a list that will i will make sure you're balanced and again push to the standard deviations you know middle

ground you know well but that's also assuming that what right and left mean to you is what

right and left means sure but you have to have to have some sort of general accepted uh rules of the game but i completely agree

i don't even take i take a classical you know a classical education point of view and all this i don't consider

myself left or right anymore at all completely untethered to all of this it's just such a

there's no solutions are very dependent on time and place and context you know like here in

north america i might be now somehow skewing to the center right i don't know how that happened but it seems to be

where i find myself but certainly if i was in russia i'd be probably pretty darn leftist

very progressive very progressive you know like sure gays can get married wonderful no problem you know and

everything else that goes with that sort of package yeah so it's really time so who am i right it actually changes

depending on where i am yeah you know uh

yeah yeah it's um yeah just always you know as long as you know thyself right and and um

but going back to ambition like when i had asked you like are you ambitious like from myself like i'm just very aware i got one

one shot to live so you think and if i have more

there's very low chance of me being consciously aware that it's my second or third or fourth chance right so

therefore it is kind of like the first chance over and over yeah at least consciously yeah maybe you find yourself like being born in canada was something

i did good in a previous life and therefore i got a blessing in this life i don't know but i'm not aware of that so for all intents and purposes this is

my one shot at life um and as such it's it's always been trying to balance that

that uh it's always been like work-life balance from the beginning and you know

there's a lot of work in there and there's a lot of life in there and i do struggle with this a lot and i chat with

my wife about it often because the potential to do more certainly in my point of view

academically and financially it's certainly there and i have the ambition to do it and sometimes i feel like am i cheating myself out of

my talents by not utilizing them to their fullest extent

because they're there and like why why did nature or god weren't called give you all these talents if you're not going to maximize them

is it really good to take these talents and just use them to a minimal work-life balance amount i don't know like

something tells me you've got the ability use it to its fullest right i don't know so i struggle with that

versus don't let your ambition turn into greed and make sure you treat with all your ability

turn it more towards the your loved ones and make sure they're all cared for as well too and you know if you take your other

talents that you're saying earlier to the max it's something's going to have to give you you're not going to be able to spend time with your mother your

father your spouse your children as much so trying to balance all that has been my life's uh i shouldn't say challenged

but like mentally challenged because like i can see myself like really like oh my god like i did great in university and i had all these high academic uh

ambitions of which i turned off the valve to that rather than like the doors

all being closed right right yeah it's a tough one i i do struggle with it i don't know it's just my no once in a

lifetime debate with myself you know well one thing when i think of you i always think of mentally challenged so i

know kind of threw that one out there but you know i'm sure people when they get to know us will understand better what i mean but um

yeah it's just it's it's it is a challenge man like you just you just wrestle with it i don't know yeah is it well it does go back to the whole icarus

thing and you just have to find i mean i hate the idea of moderation because i think it kind of like um

it it i don't know there's a certain like like multiplication where it's like

like oh you don't want to have i don't know it's like easy does it like you're sort of denying life or something

you're denying that drive or that like wish to kind of reach for the start there was the point like icarus got off

the island like that that's maybe that sounds like a song title but like like you he didn't

just sit there and go wow this is really overwhelming and i don't understand and i may go too high and i may go too low i better not do anything like you don't

want that right yeah yeah that's true right and perhaps you know like um you know you're gonna

make your mistakes but you need to get off metaphorically off your own island yeah you know i think for me that's that

that probably is the point of life and then the mistakes are just part of doing that correctly right

um yeah i think that's a probably a good point to end on get off that island yeah get off the island just like the tv show

lost you know the islands are nice like that's well they paradises though yeah yeah because they

are absolutely beautiful but by by definition it is sort of a prison because you're isolated from the rest of the world

very seductive yeah um it's like the odysseus yeah i was good

man you just took my leg uh okay but even he only spent seven

other ten years there he had to get off eventually he got the seven year rich right right he's like i love this island

but i gotta go yeah yeah i gotta go man that guy had a little life wasn't it called calypso the island i believe oh

yeah i think it might have been which in greek means the um the uh uh the uh the covered the hidden

oh okay is that the same island where the sirens were beckoning them no i think that might have been a different one oh that

was the one that just the ships would have yeah and they put wax in their ears and tie themselves right right yeah but

did odysseus put oops did he put wax in his ears or did no

everybody else did i believe he had himself tied to the mast but he wanted to hear oh yeah interesting so again

he's cheating a bit he's got ambition the man yeah he found himself on a prison prison

paradise island got the seven year itch and finally had to leave yeah back to penelope on ithaca he was the elon musk

of his day truly all right uh let's uh call it a day thanks for listening folks um please

spread the word if you like this podcast tell your friends and

hope you have a great day always a joy bye [Music]

[Music] you