Advice to Grads?

I get Andy's point, but I think he's totally missing the whole reason behind why people do what they do. He seems to be assuming everyone is starting with a kind of utilitarian question: "how do I most effectively change the world for the most people?" If everyone (or even most people) started with this question, then yes, scale would be the key advice to give.

But most people are not like that. I am extremely happy running the small business I started 3 years ago. It makes me happy, because I get to work with every single client personally, and I get to make a difference to people I know in my town. That means a ton to me, because my connection with everything is personal and real. My goal is not to optimize the scale of what I do, it is to intensify the personal quality of what i do.

So if someone came along and said "but wait, if you found a way to scale what you did to a huge level, wouldn't you be impacting a ton more people?" I would say, "no, not really." I would be maximizing the quantity of my impact, but it would not nearly make me as happy as what I do right now. My goal is not to take my small company and eventually make it a huge company. That would not make me happy.

There are certain industries that Andy is probably thinking of: Google, GE, Starbucks, whatever. And yes, scaling something small to something large in order to Save The Planet or whatever is a goal. But I don't think that's why young people are going overseas and working personally with some local community. They are doing that because they are meeting real people and putting their personal time and effort into it. I don't think they are sitting back after it's done and saying "okay, one community down, 50 million left to go!"

I'll be honest, I sort of experience a viscerally negative reaction when I hear guys like him talk. Not because they are wrong, but because they live in their own type of bubble, and don't seem to understand people outside of it.

Icarus213 (View Comment):

I’ll be honest, I sort of experience a viscerally negative reaction when I hear guys like him talk. Not because they are wrong, but because they live in their own type of bubble, and don’t seem to understand people outside of it.

And then, there's the fact that most of us newly minted 33-percenters don't face a choice between Goldman Sachs and the Peace Corps; we face a choice between flipping burgers and flipping burgers . . . or, if our grades were high enough, delaying the inevitable with graduate school.

Yes, all work benefits someone, somewhere. But the notion that any more than a fraction of a fraction of college graduates will "change the world," by any means, is simply mistaken. Becoming valued members of our communities -- "making a difference" locally -- is all that most of us can hope for.

Good show, interesting guests. I really would like to hear the "micro-dosing" show. Probably need to bring in one of the scientists working on the subject. Rob mentioned New York and, I believe, California. The last time I saw an interview with Graham Hancock, I believe he mentioned some scientists in London also looking into the subject.

"We have undergone massive demographic change," said Professor Chua.

I guess it's kind of like an act of nature, demographic change. It just happens and then we have to adapt to it.

Demographic change such as we've seen in America isn't the result of a policy. Americans have no agency over it. Nobody caused it, promoted it, accelerated it or prevented opposition to it from succeeding. No massive amounts of money were spent to make it happen, nor did anyone consciously and premeditatively plan and profit by it.

No one should ever believe that. Such talk is "conspiracy thinking" and is very bad. Don't even mention such things.

Be like Professor Amy Chua here on the center-right Ricochet podcast.

Massive demographic change just happens.

Deal with it.