A (21:56)
Yeah, yeah. Whatever money I had, I would spend on, you know, bars and pizza and whatever, and it was all right. But. But, yeah, they were really upset, I think in part because if you go back to our discussion earlier about how sort of doctor lawyer was the thing, here I was like, I already went to law school and then pivoted away from it, and they're like, what the fuck? You're at the one yard line and now you're not going to do it. I kind of had a feeling that if I ever wanted to really focus on making money, I would somehow figure it out. Which, luckily, is exactly what happened. But, you know, that's really, really hard to do because society, even back then, was so insistent that you had to take the specific path to be successful and that without that, you couldn't be happy. Right. And so, you know, I think the people who do chase resume virtues kind of know this. But the problem is eulogy, virtues don't usually offer the same kind of dopamine hit the same kind of immediate validation, the same kind of immediate attention. It's like when you buy something or you do something that people find prestigious or whatever it is, you can shrug it off and look, even in my own sort of eternal quest to get external validation, I brag way too much about all the good things that we do. And I'm turning eulogy virtues, ironically, into resume virtues. But when our kids see us prioritizing wealth and status, they do the same. So the third is the tribal economy, another topic we talk about a lot on this podcast. And it's the belief that we validate and elevate ourselves by condemning others. And this happens both by looking down on others because of their race or their gender or ethnicity or religion orientation. And so for those of you on the left who are saying, right on, I'm better by looking down on people because they don't ascribe to the exact political values you espouse. Condemning someone for not parroting the words you want to hear or for their race or gender or anything else is exactly the same, in my view. And like, to me, like, who gives a shit, like, what religion or nationality you are? Like, when you're born into something, like, that's not an achievement and it's not a flaw, right? It had nothing to do with you. It's what you do after that that I think the same thing is true for those who think that somehow actual service and actual eulogy virtues come from, like, tweeting and ostracizing and complaining. Right? All of that is irrelevant. All that matters, in the way I see it, is how you tangibly help people who are in need. And that could be someone who lives on the streets. It could be helping your elderly neighbor with their groceries, right? But our kids, I think, hear the opposite from their parents, from their teachers, especially in the school that our kids went to, right? Very much. Sort of this constant preaching of sort of intolerance, I would argue, and from so much what they see online. So that gets into their heads. And then the fourth and final category would be AI itself. And, you know, you can't write a 23 states of banned writing columns that don't mention AI, so I had to include it. And I mentioned some podcast, I think, a week or two ago. But I asked Lyle, my son the other day, what kind of what his greatest societal concern is. And I really thought he would say climate change tyranny, the kind of stuff that I thought that a kid in his position would be. And he said limited job opportunities in a time of AI. And this is a kid who goes to an incredible high school. Wherever he goes to college in a year and a half is going to be a great school. He's always going to have a strong kind of safety net because I've been fortunate. And yet he's still really worried about what AI means for his future. And unlike the first three categories, where I can at least say, or we can say, attention is not the same thing as meaning and status and wealth does not lead to happiness necessarily. And elevating yourself through identity politics or just flat out racism and discrimination does not make you a morally superior person or superior in any way. I didn't really know what to tell Lyle. There was an interesting story in the Times this morning about how economists are now really worried about the impact of AI on the job market. And one of their things was, well, policymakers need to do better. And I was kind of like, but with what? Right? Like, you can't tell companies they can't fire employees they don't need, and everyone just has worker training. Everyone's not going to become an H Vac person. Right. So I'm an early stage venture capitalist and I don't know what the jobs and industries of tomorrow are going to be. Yes, there's some jobs around knowing how to use AI fine. And I do believe, like every major economic transformation in history, there will be all kinds of new jobs industries that we don't know about today. But, like, I don't even really know, you know, other than obviously, universal basic income, which is something that I think we should do. And we've talked about it a lot on this podcast before. Like, I don't even know what the job market's gonna look like when Lyle's out of college, let alone in 10 or 20 years. And so if you're facing all of this, the question is, what can parents do? And if there's a definitive answer, I certainly don't know it. But at least to me, the lesson is show, don't tell. I'm sure that you took a bunch of writing classes in college, like I did too. And that was what you. If there's three words that all of your writing classes basically amounted to, it was show, don't tell. Right.
