Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Well, almost every day I’m totally dissatisfied with everything on earth. It’s just that old man, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What are they talking about? My grandchildren are talking to me. I don’t understand a word they say. What are they … What? And who are they talking about? I never heard of this. It’s like that. And who’s running for office? Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It’s everything like that. But then almost every day I meet somebody, just one person who gives you some hope. You just see somebody doing something nice or they do something nice for you. And I do find in Asia, that happens a lot, that people just do nice things for old people every day. And so, then my dissatisfaction with all the big things in the world and the way my grandchildren talk and the way young people are, and then I see something like that. And often, it’s something with the young people, something that the young people do. And in Asia, they’re always bringing me things. They bring me dried curds. They bring me strawberries that they picked in the forest in the summer, or they bring the pine nuts that they found, or they bring me the milk in various forms or yogurt. Oh, yeah. Everybody thinks “You got to eat the yogurt. This is from my grandmother and all the other yogurt in the world is not good but my grandmother. She knows how to make the best yogurt ever and all.” And so, over and over and over, I’d find despite my all intentions to be in a bad mood, somebody spoils you with these little nice acts that are really very touching, very touching. Yeah. And it reminds you that there’s that little flame of goodness that burns in everybody. I believe that that on the whole will keep humanity flourishing and keep evolving and changing towards something better with every generation. Yes. The people in Mongolia take such good care of me all the time, all the time. And I think my wife had MS. I’ve talked about this before. Sometimes she had MS and slowly declined for many years, becoming paralyzed, not able to speak, not able to control her movements or anything. And we lived half the year still in Mongolia. Part of it was because the climate and the altitude were better for her situation. It was very helpful for her. But also, the people. There was a poor country. The sidewalks are broken, everything’s not working. But I would go out with her in a wheelchair alone, and I knew that every bump, some arm would pick her up and pick up the wheelchair and lift her over that and not make me do it. We could go to the opera and you had to go up this magnificent set of Soviet stairs to get to the opera. We would go and I had no worries. I knew two guys would come from one side, two guys from the other side. They would carry up and they do not say, “Excuse me. May I help you.” They do not wait for you to say thank you, nothing. They just do it and they walk away. They have such respect. Singers would come there all the time to sing, to warm up the house for my wife. And even dancers would come sometimes to dance or play the horse head fiddle, morin khuur, to play that, to warm up the house for her, to see how they treated a totally disabled person. And if I was feeding my wife and anyone, anybody saw it, they would come and immediately take over and start feeding her in their place. Children would come up to her. In America, they’re often afraid that she’s somebody in a wheelchair. They just look, they don’t know what to do. But over there, the children would always come to her, always. They were very kind. You just learn something about the people. And living there in a country where out in the countryside, you come to a gare, you never ask for permission to go in. You certainly don’t knock on the door frame. That’s no. That’s hugely offensive. And you ask, it’s like insulting the people like, “What? You’re not a hospital people. I have to ask you for something.” No. You walk in and you sit down and they fix food for you. It’s an incredible thing. And these are the things that give me hope. It’s no institution in the world, not the big things, and not the pop culture and not all the platitudes. Oh, my God. Save us from the platitudes of modern life.…

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