Welcome back to my channel and welcome if you're new here It is time for a new series here on my channel We started this with our points versus calories video So many of you asked me to take a look at the number of points that you get in a day And we looked at the minimum number of smart points and how that relates to calories Depending on the foods and the quantities of food that you're choosing throughout the day So we did that video. It was a huge hit. I'll make sure to link that down below for you guys But from that video there has been so Many additional questions on how calories and points play out How do you figure out how many calories you need a day? Where do you track those calories? Can you use the WW app? What about macros? What should my macros be? How do I figure those out the list goes on and on so I thought that it would make sense to start a little mini Series where I walk you guys through some of the most asked questions when it comes to calories versus points Your starting point should absolutely be the video I've already put out points versus calories and again that is linked down below That will help make the rest of this little series make a little more sense So today we're going to talk about Calories we're gonna talk about how to figure out how many calories you need in a day Where can you find that information? Where can you track that information? Is that something that you can use the WW app for and all the things? So if you're here for finding out about calories how to figure them out where to track them and more just keep watching What is a calorie? I'm gonna go ahead and put the definition of a calorie here on the screen for you guys And I don't care what anybody tells you the only way to lose weight is to be in a calorie deficit No matter what plan you choose to do whether that be WW or keto or a Nutrissystem or whatever you choose those plans put you into a calorie deficit and that's how you lose weight There is no other way around it. It's very black and white cut and dry calories in versus calories out So what does that mean as far as WW goes as I showed in the points versus calories a video? Depending on the foods that you're choosing during the day on WW you can really be Under-eating your calories. We're talking a thousand to twelve hundred calories a day Which is honestly despite the myth not enough for any human being most of us burn that Without even moving during the day So we're gonna talk about what is the number of calories that you should be eating and why should you look at calories and Smart points in the video that I put out points versus calories a few people said why are you tracking calories if you do? WW just do WW and I agree with that That is WW does take calories into account when they're determining smart point value So yeah, it makes sense to think just do WW However through trial and error through talking to so many of you you guys thought that maybe you weren't eating enough You were feeling a little hungry throughout the day. You weren't feeling satisfied You were seeing weight come off and then you were seeing weight say the same or gaining weight And you don't know what you're doing wrong because you haven't changed anything You're staying within your smart points and a lot of you even eat the same foods every single day So it prompted you to take a look at the number of calories that you were eating and a lot of you were Absolutely shocked with the number of calories that you were consuming during the day versus the number of calories That you should be consuming during the day You were eating all of your smart points and maybe even over your smart points, but you were Substantially under your caloric goal for the day. And what does that mean? Who cares if you're under your calorie goal, you have to lower your calories to lose weight, right? Right in a sense. Yes, you will see your weight fall off as time goes on with lowering the number of calories again. Remember calories in versus calories out is what's going to help you lose weight However, if you are eating under your caloric goal for a substantial amount of time What happens is your metabolism becomes affected your body gets used to that really really low low low number of calories So your body if you eat any more than those low low number of calories Your body is going to reserve that and save that and you're going to see your weight loss come to a screeching halt But the worst part about really under eating calories is the long-term effect of doing that and that is lowering your Metabolism to that really low number of calories that you're eating Which then causes you to have a low metabolism and no matter what you do If you don't if you eat above the calories your body is used to it's going to affect your weight loss Nobody wants to lower their metabolism or have their metabolism negatively affected because they're not eating enough Calories so that's kind of in a nutshell what this video is going to be about. That's the reasoning behind making this video I am not a doctor. I'm not a nutritionist I'm simply someone on YouTube who does WW and hat who has done a ton of research when it comes to calories I have really done the research to figure out my caloric goal Now my caloric goal is going to be different than your caloric goal But I'm going to give you the tools in this video to figure out how many calories You should be eating for your body type and I'm going to give you a ton of information and resources So let's jump right in so in order to figure out what your calories should be in a day You need to first figure out what your bmr is. This is your basal metabolic rate So essentially this is the number of calories that you burn in a day doing absolutely nothing These are the number of calories that you need every day just so your body can function This doesn't include any activity and we're talking activity like brushing your teeth This caloric number is not included with brushing your teeth or doing any type of activity at all This is the base number of calories that your body needs just to function to pump your heart to function your liver to function your Lungs all of that is what comes into your bmr now There are a ton of bmr calculators on the internet some of them you have to pay for some of them You have to enter your personal information in I usually skip those ones And I go to the ones that are legit free where I enter my information and walla it pops up my bmr My favorite calculator to determine your bmr is the bmi dash calculator Net now I will link this down below for you guys But this one I find to be extremely user-friendly. It's very accurate I do encourage you to test out a few different calculators online I will link a few that I've come across ones that I've used to figure out my bmr I'll link those down below for you guys because they're all gonna give you just a little bit different numbers So what I did is I jotted down the numbers from the four or five calculators that I use And I took the average of that to determine. What is my bmr? There isn't a doctor that's telling me this I'm not taking any type of blood or exercise test in a medical facility to determine this So logic would tell me to take the average of the numbers that I'm receiving from these online Calculators. So first and foremost is determine your bmr once you have your bmr. You can determine your td EE which is your total daily energy expenditure So this includes the calories that you burn every day just with your body function But also includes calories that you'll burn on the daily with basic basic movement These are things such as brushing your teeth cooking your food using the restroom walking to your mailbox that type of thing This doesn't include any activity at all Whether it's just a simple walk around the block or a jazz or size workout or lifting weights in the gym Those are not included in your td EE This is just the number of calories that your body needs to Function and to do basic things throughout the day once you have your bmr You can use that to determine your td EE and again You can use that same calculator online to do just that and again I'll list several calculator resources down in the description box This is going to give you an accurate overall take the numbers that you're given Take the average and that's going to be your td EE You can also determine your calories field fashion way and there's a fancy name for this formula I'll put that here on the screen for you guys, but without using an online calculator This is a very accurate way to determine your td EE So what you're going to need in order to do this is for women. You're going to take 10 times your weight Adding 6.25 Timesing that number by your height in centimeters So you do have to figure out your centimeters of your height minus five times your age in years minus 161 now this is also going to give you your td EE so there's several several ways to determine that But your bmr is the basis of your td EE and your td EE is the basis of how many calories You should consume in a date with no exercise Once you determine your td EE you can then add any exercise that you do throughout the day So sedentary to lightly active to moderately active to very active what you're going to do is take your td EE Number and you're going to times that by the equation here on the screen based on your activity level Whether you're slightly active moderately active or very active or completely sedentary I recommend that you err on the side of caution and choose one that maybe is a little bit lower Just in case there are weeks that you aren't as active as other weeks or days that you're not as active as other days And that way you're then going to have a little bit more of a deficit Those are the overall calories that you need to eat in a day to maintain your weight Now if you're wanting to gain weight you would obviously add some additional calories to that if you want to maintain your weight That is the number of calories that you should be consuming every day to maintain your weight And if you want to lose weight This is where you deduct calories from that bank and that puts you in a calorie deficit So a couple of examples of calorie deficit numbers If you are looking for about a half of a pound weight loss per week you would want to deduct about 250 calories each day and that should put you at about a half of a pound of weight loss each week now If you want a little bit more moderate of a weight loss for one pound to maybe one and a half pounds You would want to deduct at least five hundred calories from your daily calorie total And if you want a little bit more of an aggressive weight loss more like one and a half to two pounds a week You would then deduct a thousand calories from that number and that will put you in that calorie deficit Enough to give you a moderate weight loss an Aggressive weight loss or a very mild weight loss just kind of depending on what you want to do now remember weight loss is not a race You guys it's a journey So there's no need to necessarily take the aggressive weight loss route unless you think number one That is something you can sustain Throughout your weight loss if you don't think that you can eat a thousand calories a day less than you should then you Probably want to aim for 250 to 500 calories less a day and have a little bit slower weight loss The slower you lose the weight generally the weight stays off a lot better That's not necessarily the case for everybody There are people that can take that aggressive approach lose two pounds plus a week Maintain that throughout their entire weight loss and when they get into maintenance completely rock it and keep all their Weight off, but the majority of people struggle when they lose weight so fast to maintain that weight So I for me like to take the more modest approach to weight loss So the one to one and a half pounds a week. I'm happy with that So I usually will take anywhere from 500 to 750 calories off of my total Amount of calories that I should be eating every day and that's how I lose weight in a moderate fashion So I want to give you guys an example We're gonna take just your average woman average height average weight that needs to lose a little bit of weight That would probably get the minimum number of smart points on ww and let's figure out what her BMR is what her TD EE is and the different number of calories that she should be eating Based on whether she wants a mild moderate or aggressive weight loss. This is my favorite website This is that BMI calculator net so let's go ahead and enter Susie Smith's Information here to figure out what Susie's BMR is so she's five foot four she weighs 165 pounds and she is 40 years old and she is of course a female So all you have to do is click calculate BMR and right there is her BMR. So her basal Metabolic rate is one thousand four eighty five fifty five Determine our TD EE we can go here to this website We're also going to do it with the Harris Benedict formula, which is even more accurate But let's in put Susie's information right here. So Susie again is 40 years old She is a female. She is five feet four inches She weighs 165 pounds now see here It's asking for activity because that is taken into TD EE So let's say that she is sedentary little to no exercise because remember we want to err on the side of caution We're gonna go ahead and hit calculate There is her TD EE for body weight maintenance is one thousand six hundred and eighty four calories a day So Susie wants to maintain her weight.  It gives you some information here If you want to lose about a half of a pound a week You should knock your calories down to fourteen thirty four now that we've determined what Susie's BMR is We've also determined her TD EE now. We're gonna determine the number of calories that she needs in a day It's very very simple. So remember we said Susie is sedentary little to no exercise So we're going to take her BMR number, which was one thousand four eighty five fifty five And we're going to times that by one point two and that is going to give us her total calories needed every day and that number is one thousand seven hundred and eighty One forty six so you can see that we took fourteen eighty four fifty five times one point two for sedentary So in order for Susie to maintain her weight. She needs to eat one thousand seven hundred and eighty one forty six a day Now we want to talk about Susie losing some weight So Susie wants a mild weight loss of roughly half of a pound per week We take seventeen eighty one forty six and we minus two hundred and fifty calories because that is what we need for a deficit To get us to about half a pound a week and that means that Susie needs to eat one thousand five hundred and thirty one Fort point four six calories a day. So basically fifteen thirty one now What if she wants more of a moderate weight loss so one pound to one and a half pounds a week? We're gonna go ahead and deduct five hundred calories like you see right here That means Susie needs to eat one thousand two hundred and eighty one calories every single day about 1282 actually every single day and that is to lose one to one and a half pounds a week now for Susie to take the Aggressive weight loss route isn't feasible for her because remember she's only supposed to eat if she wants to maintain her weight One thousand seven eighty one forty six So there's no way that we could deduct a thousand calories from that because that would put her at 781 calories a day which is totally not something she should be doing and even at 500 calories She's only eating 1281 which is still pretty low in calories So if you don't have a lot of weight to lose it's recommended that you go with a mild weight loss So more around 250 now you could take the difference between 250 calories and 500 calories and maybe eat around 13 to 1400 calories and you're still going to see some weight loss on the scale So it's a very simple once you know your TDEE and your exercise that you're doing in a week to adjust your calories for weight loss So by seeing the example of little miss Susie Smith You can see exactly how to determine your caloric needs and remember everybody's calorie needs are completely different It's based on so many things your age your height your weight your activity level So just because myself or another person on YouTube or a friend of yours eats this number of calories Doesn't mean that those are the calories you should be eating It's highly highly encouraged for you to take these formulas these calculators online and figure out what your calorie needs Are every day to maintain to gain and to lose weight So now that you have this information, how do you track your calories? I get a lot of questions on whether or not you can track calories in the WW app Yes, and no unfortunately the Weight Watchers app doesn't have what's called a secondary metric So some of the apps out there including iTrackBytes will give you the option to have a secondary metric So you can track your points, but you can also track calories or macros or whatever you choose is your secondary metric WW does not give us this option However, there is a little bit of a workaround in the WW app whenever you log of food So let's say that you're logging an egg into your WW app if you click on the egg once it's logged It gives you all of the nutritional information. It's going to tell you calories fat protein everything So you could use this as the workaround to track your calories now This is going to little be a little bit of a time intensive Activity you're going to have to open up every food that you've tracked for the day and plug those calories into a Calculator write them down on a piece of paper and then figure out how many calories you've eaten that day versus how many points you've consumed So this is doable in the WW app If you're not looking to track in a secondary app or track a secondary way And you really just want to stay in the WW app. That is your workaround to figure out your calories So what if this is just too much work for you and you don't want to have to manually add up your calories There are a couple of free apps out there that track calories and macros now The next video in this series is going to be how to figure out your macro Nutrients the percentage and grams that you should be eating each day to achieve the weight loss and health goals that you have set out for yourself In these two free apps, you can track calories macros everything. I love the lose it app This is the app that I've been using to Secondarily track my calories now I double track I track in the Weight Watchers app and I go in and track in the lose it app as well So I can compare my calories to my points for me using the WW app I'd rather just use the lose it app and see it at a glance than having to do all the math But you do what works for you in order to track your calories But in the lose it app you can use it their free portion of the app and easily track your calories Every food you can think of is in there You can build recipes in the lose it app if you want to know the calories of a recipe You can also add in your own food if it's not in the actual app when you go to search for it It basically works the same way as the WW app, but instead of tracking your points It tracks your calories. There's also a premium version of the lose it app I decided to go ahead and invest in this because I use this app to not only track my calories But also track my macronutrients and it just made sense for me to take advantage of the premium service It is 39.99 a year for the premium I don't find that to be bad at all and it well worth it to have your calories at a glance You can adjust your calories you plug your weight in your calories will automatically adjust You can have more of a calorie deficit less of a calorie deficit and again you can track your macros in this app as well So this is definitely my go-to app for tracking calories and macros the other app is my fitness pal all of you I'm sure have heard of my fitness pal again They offer a free portion of their app as well and it does the same thing as lose it you can track calories You can track macros you can track activity basically all the things you do in the lose it or WW app You can also do in my fitness pal They also do offer a premium portion of their app, which is 49.99 a year So it's about ten dollars more than the lose it app and in my opinion They both basically have the same function, but for me, I know this is gonna sound ridiculous I just like the looks of the lose it app better. I think it's pretty I think it's more aesthetically pleasing and I find it extremely user-friendly a little bit more for me than my fitness pal So that's just my preference, but those are a couple of free apps You can find these on your phone your tablets and even on your desktop I'll link these down below for you guys where you can track your calories also both lose it and my fitness pal We'll give you a calorie goal as well I recommend that you take advantage of that and compare that to the calorie goal that you're getting from the other Calculators and figures that you're doing for yourself to figure out your calorie goal for the day And again take the average and use that as your calories You can simply go into the lose it or my fitness pal app and change your calorie goal to the one that you want to go with So it's a very very user-friendly The only thing is you are doing some double tracking now If you're somebody that generally eats the same thing every single day Then you probably only need to double track once a week to see kind of where you're falling Calorie wise versus point wise But if you're somebody that changes up your food your snack even if you're having something for dinner every day You may want to go in and plug that information back in to see where you're falling in your calories Now when I enter a food in to the lose it app or than my fitness pal It saves that food so it shows up when I click on breakfast It shows my most recently tracked breakfast So now that you've figured out your points and you've figured out your calorie goal What happens if you are finding that you're using all of your smart points? But you are extremely under your calorie goal. What should you do? So there are a few suggestions that I have for you number one Suggestion is eat more zero-point foods even though those foods have zero points. They still have calories So add a chicken breast to a meal add an egg or a hard-boiled egg to a snack pick some zero-point foods that have a decent amount of calories Protein fat and fiber and add those in to your meals have an extra snack during the day To get yourself to your calorie goal another thing that you can do is use your weeklies I found that when we are given a set number of smart points on the daily So whether that's 23 24 30 40 50 whatever your smart point goal is for the day That number is going to put you at a severe calorie deficit. It doesn't matter What you're eating it doesn't matter How many points you're getting in a day based on the minimum number of points that you're allowed during the day without using any Weekly's you are going to be at a severe calorie deficit WW gives us our weekly so that we'll use them and the whole purpose behind those is by adding those weekly points Slash calories into our day our week once a day on our cheat meal or our cheat day That is what's putting us at the calorie goal that we should be to lose weight If we're not eating our weeklies, we are very very much under eating our calorie goal every single day So people are scared of weeklies thinking that it's gonna prevent them from losing weight. Now, every body is different So there are people that if they eat their weeklies it affects their weight loss There are people that eat their weeklies every single week and don't even see an effect on their weight loss every week When they weigh in it depends on your body, but the weeklies are there to be used So if you are finding that you are eating all of your points But you are still severely under your calories use your weekly points But use them wisely use them to add some nut butter to your toast in the morning Use them to have a serving of full fat dairy during the day Maybe instead of having your Dan and light and fit yogurt for two points have these ciggies full fat whole milk It's amazing and creamy and divine have that for five points instead Use your fit points wisely if you're going to use them now for me I have a cheat day once a week my husband and I go out to dinner breakfast lunch Whatever suits our fancy every single Saturday. So that is the day that I use my weekly points So I've chosen to use them all in one day a lot of people will add a few here and add a few there Some people will use them for special occasions. It just depending on what works for you WW is all about personalization That's why there's three plans So do how it works for you when it comes to using your weeklies But take advantage of those weeklies use them wisely and I highly encourage you to plug those calories Into your calorie app whatever one it is that you choose I think you'll be pleasantly surprised that you can stay within your blue dot range because remember you can eat above Your smart points and still be in a blue range.   Feel free to dip into your fit points now When we're given fit points, we're not given all the points for the activity that we're burned WW takes our entire activity the calories the points that we've earned doing that activity and gives us back a portion of Those so again if you choose to eat all of your fit points You should still see a loss on the scale because that is how the program is designed So those are my tips for figuring out your calories Using weeklies zero point foods fit points to get yourself to your calorie goal every day and still seeing a great loss on the scale Every week the bottom line is calories in versus calories out if you eat more calories, then you're burning You're going to gain weight. That's just science. That's a fact. That's the way that it works So hopefully this video really helped you guys Determine your number of calories and give you some resources to attract those calories and compare those to the points That you're eating every day. I am going to be doing another video on macros We're going to talk about how to figure out your macros and different macro balances As far as protein fat and carbs go to see what works best for your body Definitely check out that points versus calories video that went up about a week ago And in the next few weeks, I will be filming on what I eat in a week points versus calories So i'm going to show you guys exactly how to put all of this information Into action in that video. So stay tuned for that But I thought that I would share the calorie information the macronutrient information with you before that video comes out So that it all kind of comes full circle when that is put out here on my channel So speaking of my channel, if you're new, welcome. Thank you for stopping by I hope that this is helping you out in your weight loss journey Your w w journey and just giving you some tips tricks and hints on how to track calories versus smart points Make sure that you hit that little subscribe button and that bell So you're notified when new videos are uploaded Check out the description box down below for all the links that we talked about today to lose it My fitness pal the calorie calculators all of that information will be down in the description box for you As well as how to manually figure out your tde for both men and women Also in the description box is the link to head over and join my facebook group We'd love to have you guys over there. I do zoom calls every couple weeks It's just such a wonderful supportive place to be so we'd love for you to join our community over there Also, all the links and discount codes to my favorite things are down in the description box as well And my website where all of my recipes can be found if you loved this video, please give it a big thumbs up It really helps out my channel and I greatly appreciate it. Thank you for sticking out with me through this video It's probably a long one and I hope that it really helped you guys out Please leave any additional questions that you have down in the comments I am here to help you and answer your questions. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today And I'll see you all in my next video. Bye guys


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Hey guys, so in this video, I'm going to be talking about how you can bounce back from a blown account. Yes, I'll give you an example, let's say your account is this close to being blown. We've all been there before, I've been there before and you know, you're just stressed and just tired.  So guys, in this video, I'm going to be discussing realistic strategies that you can use to recover from a blown account or at least an almost blown account. So guys, if you're interested in finding out how you can go about bouncing back from a blown account, I suggest you stick around to the very end of this video. Hey guys and welcome back to my YouTube channel. My name is Dapo Willis Yoastrile and it is amazing to catch up with you guys. Yes, I know I have been off the YouTube for a while making this kind of videos and this is because I have been busy with my life.  My job is not to always be on YouTube. My job is to actually trade the foreign exchange market and run my other businesses. However, I am back and I am back for good. Not going to be good anywhere anytime soon, I hope. Anyways guys, so like I was saying earlier in this video, I'm going to be discussing strategies that you can use to bounce back from a blown account. Now the thing about blown accounts is a lot of traders don't really like to discuss this. If they tell people they've blown an account, they have failed, nobody wants to be associated with a failure. But the honest truth is we've all been there. I remember myself many, many years ago, probably about seven, eight years ago blowing accounts because I just didn't know exactly what I was doing. The thing about blowing your account or just taking your account for instance from maybe $1,000 to maybe $200 to $300. Guys, your emotions start to play with you. You start feeling scared, you start panicking, you start being stressed out. You're like, Jesus Christ, what exactly am I going to do? Okay? And the truth is this is absolutely natural. Okay? I want to tell you that you're not alone. A lot of traders go through this as well.  You're not a failure.  You're just going through a phase. Okay? And you need knowledge. You need the skill. Once you have the knowledge and the skill, you will most likely be able to overcome this challenge you're facing at this time. So guys, like I said, I'm going to be breaking it down for you guys. I'm going to giving you guys a strategy that you can use to overcome your blown account. All right guys, so the very first step is to identify that, yes, I messed up. Okay? That's absolutely fine. Yes, I have taken this account from $1,000 all the way to $2,000. Sorry, I've taken this account from $1,000 all the way down to $200. Now at this point, I want you to stop looking at your account as a $1,000 account. Okay? I want you guys to listen to what I'm saying very carefully. I want you to stop looking at your account as a $1,000 account because the money is gone. Now I want you to change your mindset as to, I have a $200 account. Now I have a $200 account. Now I'm going to say to myself, okay, based on the $200 I have, what is my goal? My goal is $1,000, which is the original principle, right? I'm going to say to myself, okay, listen, based on the $200 I have, because the reason I'm saying this is a lot of people, because they've taken the account from $1,000 down to $200, their risk at $200 is the same at $1,000. What does this mean? Let's say I have a $1,000 account and I'm risking 3% per trade, which is $30, right? So for every trade I place, I'm risking $30 at $1,000. Now once you've taken your account down to $200, you cannot keep risking $30 per trade. So your risk now needs to correspond with your current account size, okay? So this is one thing you have to put into consideration. So I have a $200 account now, I need to cut down on my risk. So the very first thing it is you want to reduce your risk by at least 50%. So what I usually advise people to do is, if you're taking your account down to maybe $200, start risking 10% of whatever your capital is at the moment, which is 20 bucks, you'll find out that as you start to make profitable trades, usually the way I trade, I usually aim for a 3 to 1 risk to reward ratio. Forex Mastery students, you already know this. I only go for trades that are minimum 2 to 1 or 3 to 1. So once you're able to achieve trades that have a risk to reward ratio of 3 to 1, you find out that for every trade you're going to, you're making about $60 back. And then you say to yourself, so if I make $60 per trade, how much or rather how many winning trades is it going to take me to go back to status quo? Now guys, listen, what I'm telling you guys is very important. If not, you're going to fry the money. It's going to be gone. Everything is going to be gone. Now I'm talking about people who've blown from $1k to $200, right? Now at least you have a chance, okay? You have a chance. All hope isn't lost. So at $200 now, I'm going to be risking $20 per trade and looking to make $60 to $80 back, okay? $60 to what $80 back?  How many winning trades is it going to take me to get back to status quo? According to my calculation, it should take me about 10 winning trades for me to get back to status quo. So now I know that, okay, I need 10 winning trades to get back to status quo. Now 10 winning trades in a row is not realistic, okay? Forex mastery students, you guys know this, 10 winning trades is not realistic. So what we're going to do is this. We're going to go into the market and we're going to aim for two winning trades and one losing trades, two winning trades and one losing trades. Because realistically, especially for the fact that you've blown your account this much, chances are that you're not that skilled and that's fine. That's fine. Now for those of you guys who want to learn how to do this trade market in the most profitable way possible, the link to the forex mastery course is going to be down below. It will literally help you solve all these blown account problems, okay? One of the best courses ever. Not because I put it together but I feel like it's one of the best programs out there. So this is what you want to be aiming for, two winners, one loser. And then this is exactly how you systematically grow your account back to the principal capital.  Don't be stressed.   I'll recap this video really nicely, right? You've blown your account from $10K for $1,000 all the way down to $200. The first thing you want to do is you want to really adjust your risk profile.  And guys, I know for you to blow your account from $1K down to $200, you will probably risk in 30, 40% of your account. You guys are taking your account down now at the moment. Look at your current account size. Maybe it's at $500. Look at your current account size and say, I am going to start risking only 10% of this account. It's going to take me 10 winning trades. I can't do 10 winning trades in a row. So I'm going to strive for two winning trades and allow myself a losing trade. Now you can hit three winning trades in a row. You might hit four, five. But the reason I'm saying this is, if you give yourself the avenue, the space, the room for you to have that losing trade, the stress and the pressure is less on you.  We're not robots. Things happen. If you think you're going to come into Forex and be that guru who never has a losing trade, you're joking, then never going to happen. It's never going to happen except you've been in this market for a long, long, long time like myself. Even I myself, I'm right nine out of 10 times. If you scroll to the previous videos on my YouTube channel, we have trades whereby we've made a lot of money and we have trades that have actually hit break even. So it's just the way the game goes. So guys, like I was saying, if you want to stand any chance at succeeding at this thing called Forex or even stand any chance at reviving your account, I encourage you guys to go ahead and grab the Forex Mastery course. The link is just $99, guys. Stop blowing your account. On the Forex Mastery course, there's a module called risk management. I preach very highly.  Try as much as possible to stick to 3% risk per trade. It will save you all this up and down. Look at now. You most likely have to take the account size back up. It's going to be stressful. It's not going to be easy. But imagine if you could have avoided this in the first place. This is what I'm talking about. But like I said, I'm not here to condemn anybody. We're down. We need to have a strategy in place. Okay. We've got 200 bucks left. What do we do? Like I said, once again, guys, like I said, you need to revaluate your risk profile. It's going to take you 10 winning trades to get back to the top. 10 winning trades in a row is not realistic. Two winning, two winners, one loser. So when the losers come, because another thing that I noticed that really, really messes with a lot of traders' minds is when they're trying to take their account back up and they're still experiencing losses, it can be very hard. It can be very daunting. I know this for free. It can be. It can be really stressful. But with this strategy, it's going to take me 10 winning trades. I need two winners, one loser.  Okay. You're giving yourself a little leeway for the market to take advantage of you from time to time. So guys, once again, I wanted to say a special shout out to all my Forex Mastery students. For those of you guys who are on the course, I want to say I love you guys very much. Thank you for believing in the program. I've been getting a lot of positive feedback from people who have never had a redrawal before. People that have been training for nine, 10 years finally taking the course and actually starting to see their trading accounts grow and not just grow, make redrawals. I'm happy. It's making me happy unless why I'm actually back on YouTube because it seems like my teaching is actually starting to help a lot of people. So guys, once again, there you go. It's a very simple strategy. I'm not going to speak for long. I'm not going to hear him blab around. I said, oh, this is this best indicator and this best strategy to take your account, to unblow your account. It's all in the mind. Accept what it is. I have $200 capital. Risk profile, 10%. 10 winning trades is what I need.     Until you work your way all the way back up and then you can breathe. And don't expect it to happen next week or the following week or in a month. Give yourself time, at least six weeks. Give yourself time. And I want to leave you guys with this little message. You're not a failure. Everybody, every professional trader has gone through this before. So ladies and gentlemen, I want to appreciate you guys for sticking to the very end of this video. My name is Dapo Willis once again. If you haven't already subscribed, go ahead and smash the subscribe button right down there. Drop me a like. And for those of you who haven't signed up for the Forex Mastery course, do yourself a favor. Do your trading account a favor. The link is going to be down below and I'll see you guys in my subsequent videos. Take it easy and peace out. Bam!


Even if you had a video of you creating the invention with documented evidence of having created it first, that's not going to help you in court if somebody else follows the application first. So no more writing a sketch and mailing a letter? Yeah. I still have clients today that say, well, I mailed myself a letter. You can't do that anymore. Right? It used to be proof, you know? Yeah.


I think what inspires me is knowing that the students that I'm teaching are going to be decision makers and keep people in Australia and the rest of the world in the future. So knowing that I'm molding these students is pretty exciting really. I want to provide an environment where students can actually explore, try things out, not be afraid to make mistakes, but learn by making those mistakes by having appropriate frameworks in place where they can get feedback from me, from their peers, from other members of faculty. As a way of background, we have a professional accreditation arrangement with the Actress Institute, but it's very, very technical in nature. The material we're required to teach by the Institute is very mathematical. And so we saw a bit of a gap there in the fact that our students weren't really prepared to apply this technical material to the workforce. So we developed this new course, or by developing this new course, that's actually not part of the accreditation arrangement at all. The Institute's not involved and it's purely designed to give students the opportunity to apply this technical material in realistic practical situations. He's worked really hard and he's really trying to push the boundaries on and improve actuarial teaching. We get a lot of feedback from the employers that sort of says, well, these students are great technically, but they're not so good at putting that technical work into context or working together in a team because all of these sort of non-technical skills that you need to be successful in the workplace. So a lot of the innovations that I've brought into the Actuarial Programme here at ANU have been trying to bring these two sides of the argument together. Yes, we give them the technical skills in other areas of the degree, but the course that I've developed, Actuarial Techniques, is actually trying to be a bridge between that technical material and the workplace. It's very, very practical, so it gives the students experience in the sorts of areas they're going to be working in when they finish their degree, which prior to the development of this course didn't really exist in the Actuarial Programme here or anywhere else in Australia for that matter. This new course is unique in Australia. There's nothing else that I'm aware of that's taught like it at all in Australia. The Actuarial Area, the area is so limited because of the institute decides what has to be taught and we have such strict standards that it's very easy for lecturers, I think, to rely on it and just say, this is what I'm going to do, get it done, instead of trying to push the boundaries and do that, plus more. And it's really working quite hard to do that. What I'm really doing as empowering students to show them where this technical material and the learning is actually going to be useful as it is at the absolute highest possible level of what I want to do as a teacher is actually teach students to be able to learn for themselves, so I'm not necessary. Yeah, it's really about creating the Actuaries in the future, rather than just drawing them so you can repeat what they've been taught actually thinking of that stuff, so I think that's really good.


I want the chair So we're obviously gonna play musical chairs with the drones But what we're gonna do is instead of just like flying around the chairs with our drones We're gonna actually fly around a little bit of a racing course So you can be going really fast or really slow It's just up to pilot strategy when the music ends It's pretty simple You got to go land in the chair if you fall out of the chair it doesn't count So you have to actually get the drone to stick in the chair the last pilot Unfortunately is out You'll never believe what we're gonna do at the end. Let's say we're at that end of the chorus Do we have to get to the core? No, you just go straight to the chair You could just be hovering near the chairs Because the musical chairs you can't just stop Going for the same chair we both drop in and the person who's ever is on bottom right whoever's on bottom is the one who keeps I'm in Here's the thing though is there's an empty chair and since Eric didn't land in one I guess you guys move on Yep one chairs gone Whenever You're trying to make sure you get it lined up and you're like you're fighting for chairs too. She's like oh that one's Yeah, I forgot they I have to spot which one has no quality. I forgot the music by the way was the trigger I was just going to music stop and I was like all the jam stuff Let's see what's awesome. I don't know if I actually made it in or not I think you get one. I'm not in the chair though. I'm like stuck to the chair. I came in too hot I knocked over the chair. I don't know what this means. I'm worried. I might be eliminated But we sounded really excited. I'm in the red one.  Oh, yeah I'm right here man. We're doing to this guy's chairs here That's air-conditioned But then who's out well Inside of a chair structure.  I mean my arm is on the fabric I mean, I think you're still in I think There all the chairs were taken by the time I tried to land Mine was like I'm out. I just figured if there were two quads on the ground There might be some ambiguity about who was less in the chair Doing the laps is really fun I forget how much fun it is just fly without the people like kind of in sync in sync Synchronicity yeah together. I don't know I thought it was stopping for a second Chairs I forgot I'm in good. I'm in good. I'm in good. I'm in good. Someone's not in I think it's true You almost had me I fell off of it and I saw you sneaking up and then bro I was like right next to like I was just crawling and the music when I was like walking the park, baby Catch me like a glove and then I just Plop out of it. All right chair gone. I Hesitated I has I had the chair in my sights. I hesitated went back around and by then it was too late Hesitation is defeat I'm in I'm in good. I'm in I'm in I'm in Kids man, I just wanted to win musical chairs. They never let me win So the problem is I was coming downhill And you're coming downhill you're pointed up over and so I like came up on it and slowed down Maybe because I did the exact same thing and I focused the turn on the red chair So you just went for it post for the best. All right, so we're done with the finals top three captain ran over It's like FPV and me Sorry Shane porcelain out for the homie man, bro. Did you see me win that music? Oh, I did the fastest I Did the fastest one I said so I figured for the last challenge just to mix things up in a not be one chair Instead of doing chairs we have these awesome perched elements up here in the FPV park And so I think for the last one we do the same course. Yeah, and then we got to go perch I think it'll be awesome We'll add like another element of challenge because you know with this one I can kind of just go eat and stop it here.  Yeah, I suck at lending so I think we use the perch that's right up there on that trip. I think that's the best too probably that one right there We're gonna do a shortened course since we have the perch element kind of in the corner of the current track I did that's so much adrenaline now.   Remind him where his place is. Oh, I'll try Can't forget a person. I mean you have to ask true for that You But you won while being wearing a Bubby FTV shirt


Hello, welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs, and today I am absolutely thrilled to have a phenomenal world-leading philosopher and a dear friend, Brian Van Norden. Brian Van Norden is the James Monroe-Taylor Chair in Philosophy at Vassar College. From 2017 to 2020, he was also a professor at the Yale National University of Singapore College in Singapore, so I want to ask about that, Brian, but welcome to the Book Club. Today we're going to be speaking about a manifesto of yours, a multicultural manifesto called Taking Back Philosophy, so I'm absolutely thrilled to do so. And let me say for listeners that in recent years I've tried to begin to understand Chinese philosophy, Confucianism, and other major bodies of thought, and when I started that I asked a mutual friend of Brian and mine, Owen Flanagan, a great philosopher at Duke University, what should I do to get started? And he said, of course you have to listen to Brian Van Norden's introduction to classical Chinese philosophy. And I say listen, by the way, because I can't show the book because I listened to it walking in audio book form, and walking in philosophy actually has a long history together, at least in Western tradition, because the parapetetic philosophers Aristotle in his school walked and talked. So I listened, I walked and listened, and the book was so good and so fascinating. I asked Owen, well, what next? And he said, well, you better look at a manifesto. So this was how I got to know Taking Back Philosophy, a multicultural manifesto. So Brian, it's really wonderful to be with you, and what is this manifesto for people listening in today? Well, thank you so much for having me on the show, Jeff. Like many people, I'm a great admirer of you and all that you've done for the world. But the manifesto came about because my friend and colleague Jay Garfield and I were at a conference together, and we were bemoaning the fact that there are very few philosophy departments in the West in general, and in the English-speaking world where they actually teach Chinese philosophy, or Indian philosophy, or Africana philosophy, or indigenous American philosophy. And Jeff just, we were just having coffee, and Jeff said, you know what, these departments, if they're not going to teach anything outside the Anglo-European canon, then they should just call themselves departments of Western philosophy instead of pretending that they actually have a cosmopolitan approach. Or I think he also might have said they should just call themselves departments of white boy philosophy instead of actual philosophy. And I said, that's a really great point. Why don't we write an op-ed piece about that and get the word out? So we co-wrote one and we thought, well, let's just give it a shot and see if the New York Times wants to post it. And to our pleasant surprise, the Times did post it, and it came out as if philosophy departments won't diversify, let's call them what they really are. And it got a lot of attention, some of it very positive, but also some people complained that we were failing to recognize the intrinsic superiority of Western civilization, or we were, you know, watering that, trying to water down the curriculum. Or the claim that you mentioned that philosophy is intrinsically only Western, that there is no such thing as Eastern philosophy, for example. Exactly. And several people actually said in print, they said, well, the thing you guys don't understand is that philosophy is from a Greek term, philosophy, the love of wisdom. And therefore, the only real philosophy is the philosophy that goes back to Plato and Aristotle.  So anyway, we got all this attention with the op-ed, and it caused a lot of controversy. And so Columbia University Press invited us to write a book based on the op-ed. And Jeff, sorry, Jay was too busy to help with it, but he agreed to write the forward to what became Taking Back Philosophy a Multicultural Manifesto, which has gotten a lot, again, a lot of positive attention, but also a lot of critics from ethnocentric people who want to believe that the only philosophical traditions are the ones that go back to Plato and Aristotle, which just isn't true if you merely look at other parts of the world. And Taking Back Philosophy addresses some of the fallacious arguments that are given against teaching Chinese or Africana or Indian philosophy. And it talks, gives examples of some of the ways that non-Western or Western philosophy can be brought into dialogue. It also looks at some of the political implications of how philosophy is taught and the politics of philosophy, not just in the US, but around the world. And now it's been translated into Chinese and is available in China. And there's also an Arabic translation in the work as well. So we're getting the word out at least. Yeah, some of the data that you present right at the beginning was stunning to me that how little Chinese philosophy is actually taught in the United States, even among the major universities with large philosophy departments. And the same with the Indian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, very little coverage actually. And I was rather shocked at that. It's utterly amazing. So there's about 100 doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States. And only about 13% of those have anyone who could plausibly supervise a dissertation on Chinese philosophy. And certainly Ivy League universities are not the be all and end all of academia. But there's no Ivy League university that has a philosophy department that has a regular faculty member who could supervise a dissertation on Chinese philosophy. How can that be? I know, isn't it amazing? It's how important China is in the world today. You know this, I know this. And it's actually worse for South Asian or Indian philosophy. And this is kind of an interesting historical tidbit. I always tell my students if they always want to ask me, well, is this philosophy or is it religion? And I say, well, what do we get by labeling something a religion as opposed to a philosophy? And part of the reason that Indian thought was labeled as religion is it gave imperialists a way to ignore Indian philosophy. And in a way that became very successful. And so now it's even rarer to find someone in a philosophy department in the English speaking world who teaches Indian philosophy or South Asian philosophy, even though anybody who looks at Indian or South Asian philosophy immediately recognizes it as philosophical in a fairly familiar way. And then Africana philosophy is a sometimes useful label for both indigenous African philosophy and the philosophy of the African diaspora. So it includes both people who are from Africa, but then people of African descent in other parts of the world. So it's hard to categorize how much coverage there is of actual African philosophy, very few places, even fewer that you can study African philosophy. And the last time I checked that there were, I think, two doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States where you could study indigenous American philosophy. It's so extraordinary. I turn to your introduction partly because I really love visiting China and admire Chinese civilization. Second, I was curious because after much too long a time, I really wanted to understand so what did Confucius actually say and the Confucian school. But the third very practical point is as an international development economist, China's everywhere. China is nearly 20% of the world population. The economy when measured at what we call purchasing power parity is larger than the US economy. China is the leading trade partner of most of the world now, much more than having the US as the lead trade partner. So you'd need to know something about it. If you add in India, which has the same population as China, now just a little bit higher, supposedly 1.4 billion in each, add in Africa, which is the same size coincidentally, about 1.4 billion people over 55 separate countries in Africa, but 1.4 billion in the African Union. We're talking in just those three places, more than half the world population and the West, as we call it, which I take to mean the United States and Canada, let's say, and Western Europe, Britain and continental Western Europe, that's 10% of the world population. So you would think naturally, there would be a lot of intellectual curiosity about what's happening in the much bigger part of the world. And this is rather striking. And one of the fascinating points that you discuss is the change actually it seems from the Western curiosity about China and Asia centuries ago to a kind of disdain. And if you could explain how that happened and some of the characters in that, I found that completely fascinating. Yeah, well, yes, exactly right. So as you know, when Western philosophers first learned about Chinese philosophy from Jesuit missionary accounts, the Jesuit missionaries who are themselves highly trained in Western philosophy immediately recognized Confucianism, for example, as philosophical. And Confucius is a Latin term. Exactly. Confucius, our word Confucius, is a Latinization of kung fuza, which is a rare form of kung za, which is the Chinese name for Confucius. Right. So even how we call him, that's from the Jesuits. Exactly. They brought it back. They gave him a Latin name. Exactly. They were that impressed with him. They wanted to write about him in Latin. So and then when the Jesuits reported this back in Europe, Western philosophers like Leibniz, who's a standard figure on any history of modern Western philosophy curriculum, very admiring of Chinese ethics. And Leibniz also thought that Chinese thinkers had independently discovered binary arithmetic, which Leibniz also discovered and became the basis of computers. And there was kind of a synophilia of this kind of like a great admiration for what people understood Chinese philosophy to be in the Enlightenment. And then there's a very, a really good book by my friend and colleague Peter K. J. Park, Africa, Asia and the History of Philosophy, where he documents how attitudes towards Chinese, Indian and African philosophy changed over time. And I'm a great admirer in some ways of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, but the fact is that Kant bought into notions of white racial superiority. And in his, he lectured on anthropology, which is not as well known today, but in lecturing on anthropology, Kant ranked the races hierarchically with whites at the top. And then people of South Asian and East Asian descent underneath them and said they would never be capable of philosophy. They weren't the right race to produce philosophy. And then he ranked people of African descent beneath that. And then people, indigenous American people, he ranked even at the very lowest level. And because of Kant's influence, his later followers rewrote the history of philosophy in European textbooks and they wrote out Asia and Africa and the indigenous American traditions so that people later could take it for granted without argument that there never was any philosophy beside the tradition that went back to Plato and Aristotle, even though the standard views before Kant were that philosophy began in Africa and from Africa it came to Greece or philosophy first started in India and from India philosophy came to ancient Greece. And again, Peter K. J. Park's book demonstrates this with a careful study of European philosophy textbooks. So it's not just a claim, you can actually document this. So it's really an amazing demonstration of how even high philosophy, because it can't get higher than Kant. And supposedly the ultimate in understanding the basics of practical reason and understanding the most fundamental characteristics of human nature and so forth reflect the changing power structure of the day. Because when the Jesuits first make contact with China, which is in the 16th century, early 17th century or late end of the 16th year, early 17th century, there's no sense that China is a backward society, you know, hopelessly outpaced. Of course, when Marco Polo had visited centuries earlier, it was the unbelievable splendor of what he reported back. But by the time of Emmanuel Kant, which is at the end of the 18th century, and then certainly into the 19th century with the industrialization of Britain first, and then Europe and the United States, this sense of superiority taken to not only cultural superiority, but a pervasive belief among some of the most hallowed of our thinkers in racial categories is absolutely a stunning change. It really is. And as I think you're hinting, it's connected with things like changes in economics. And so people needed a rationalization for economically exploiting India. They needed rationalization for economically exploiting East Asia and China in particular. And arguing that people in these cultures were intellectually inferior to white people and white people were their natural masters provided that kind of rationalization. And I always say, I think that the majority of my colleagues in contemporary philosophy would reject the explicit racism of Kant's approach, but they accept the tainted fruit of it, which is the assumption that you can just say, oh, no, there isn't any philosophy outside the tradition that goes back to play to an Aristotle, even if you haven't tried to read any of the philosophy and the other traditions. That's one of the things in your book. You quote people who say themselves, well, I haven't actually read it, but I know that it's worthless. Exactly, exactly. And people sometimes give me flack. They'll say, well, why do you have to bring racism into it? Why can't you just appeal to ignorance? Ignorance is if you say, oh, I didn't know there was philosophy in China. That's really interesting. Tell me more. But something else has to be appealed to when people say, I haven't read this, but there isn't any philosophy or I'm sure it's not any good. How are you sure of that? And you wouldn't be sure if I were talking about a European thinker. It wouldn't occur to anybody. If I said I was studying this understudied Swiss philosophical movement, no one would say, oh, well, don't get me wrong. I like Swiss cheese and the cuckoo clocks and everything, but come on, those guys never did philosophy. No one would say that, but they feel very comfortable saying it about Indian philosophy or East Asian philosophy. So I want to ask you just on your biographical level, you're a great and deep translator as well, which I want to ask you about because the challenge of translation in this case is profoundly interesting. But I read, I don't know if it's correct, that when you expressed an interest in studying Chinese philosophy as a student, your advisors said, why would you want to do that? Is that accurate? That is a true story. And so, you know, I'm very grateful to my mentors as an undergraduate. You know, filial piety extends to being grateful to your teachers and all they did for you. But my teachers on the philosophy side said, well, I don't really know if there is such a thing as Chinese philosophy. Maybe philosophy is just parochial to the West. I was encouraged to pursue graduate work because people said I had a talent for doing philosophy, but they said, well, I don't know about Chinese philosophy. But then some of my sinological mentors, people doing Chinese history or Chinese culture said, well, why would you want to do philosophy? That's a silly discipline. So ironically, from both sides, I was discouraged from doing it. But yeah, translation is one thing that's worth mentioning. There are, of course, interesting problems of translating from Chinese into English. But I'd like to point out there are plenty of good translations now available. We can always use more. And there are some understudy thinkers I'd like to see more translations of. But sometimes people use that as an excuse. They'll say, oh, well, I bet there are no translations. Well, you know, I'm one of the co editors and contributors to readings in classical Chinese philosophy, which is now in its third edition as a textbook. And I've also edited and contributed with my colleague, Justin T. Wald, to readings in later Chinese philosophy, which goes from the Han dynasty up to the 20th century. And again, P.J. Ivanhoe and I did readings in classical Chinese philosophy, which includes these seminal early thinkers like Confucius, Laozi, the supposed author of the Dao De Jing and other movements that aren't as well known. And I was going to hold up another with a wonderful translation and commentaries. Fantastic. But this also brings out that, you know, we need more doctoral programs to train people because we have a vicious circle where there are very few doctoral programs that can train students to be experts in Chinese philosophy. And then people say, well, it's so hard to hire someone. It's hard to hire someone because you don't train anybody, you know. And by the way, of course, students should go to China to study. This would be one way to bring back a lot of knowledge and a lot of wisdom and a lot of linguistic skill as well. Even that seems to be challenged right now because of this general tension at the geopolitical level, which you and I both bemoan. But it seems to be having its effect on the flow of students. I think that's right. And, you know, I have friends, I sometimes teach at Wuhan University in China. And, you know, they've done a very good job about ringing foreign students over when possible and being inviting to foreign students. So there are great opportunities there. And I don't know how much you want to go into this, but I've been warning my students saying there are a lot of forces in the U.S. that are pushing for a war with China. And there are people who, although that would be disastrous for both the United States and China. Unimaginable, by the way. So horrible. But it's really in the rhetoric and in the air. Absolutely, absolutely. I show my students videos of some of the clips from things that people are saying on talk shows now. And we just saw with Senator Cotton cross-examining someone from Singapore acting like he doesn't know the difference between Singapore and China or between being ethnically Chinese and being a member of the Chinese Communist Party. And this is part of a kind of a desire on the part of some people I think, really, they want to have a race war. And even a member of the Chinese Communist Party. So what? So many of my former students are. Exactly. Because they are officials in the government. It's the most natural thing in the world. Exactly. It's this weird, Stalinistic view of what it would mean to be a Communist Party member.  Exactly. And these same people who are bemoaning it, if Tom Cotton lived in China, he would be a proud member of the Communist Party. No question. In your manifesto, you have a wonderful chapter about what would actually happen with real dialogue between these traditions. And I wanted to ask you about that, because you make some very, I think, very important comparisons of Hobbes versus Menchus, for example, and the differences of... The similarities that I always think that Aristotle and Confucius would have a lot to talk about, because they both believe in virtue. They both believe in personal excellence. But then you describe... They, of course, have different perspectives on that. So it would be a pretty rich discussion as well. So can you walk us through what do we learn by putting Aristotle and Confucius on stage together, as it were, to help us understand their respective points of view and to shed some light on our cultures? Great question. When I first started studying Chinese philosophy at the dark doctoral level at Stanford, and by the way, the Stanford Philosophy Department no longer has anybody who teaches Chinese philosophy. But that's where I did my doctoral work. And when I first started studying there, nobody thought there were interesting similarities between Confucians and Aristotelians. But one of my mentors, Lee H. Yearly, wrote a book Menchus and Aquinas, Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage. And Menchus, that's another Jesuit Latinization of the name Mungza, who's sometimes called the second sage of Confucianism, meaning second in importance only to Confucius himself. And I often tell people, if you want to start learning about Confucianism, a good place to start is reading the eponymous Mungza, M-E-N-G-Z-I, which I've translated, but other people also have some fine translations as well. And so what you find out is that Confucians like Confucius himself and Mungza and Aristotle and Plato, they disagree about a lot, but they're very concerned with what is the best way to live, what character traits are you going to need to live that kind of life, how do you cultivate those character traits, and what is human nature like such that it is possible for you to cultivate those traits and live that kind of life. And that's a distinctive way of formulating ethics, very different, for example, from the way Kant formulates ethics. Yeah, and I personally really like it. Kant is about rules and duty, but this is about character. And as the Greeks translated in Latin, I guess, also the virtues or excellences, the Greeks said arete for excellence, but it's an excellence of character. And then the question is, well, how do you get to be an excellent person? And that's really what Aristotle is trying to say in his ethics, and it's what Mungza or Confucius is trying to teach in that tradition. Yeah, and I find that as soon as students get a handle on what this is about, this is really exciting for them because they're like, well, this is what I thought philosophy was going to be about. How should I live, and how can I get to be a better person? But you mentioned Hobbes. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, I think you and I have kind of a similar take on Hobbes.  And it is representative of a way of thinking about human beings that's become dominant in the modern West, where Hobbes thinks about individuals as radically independent, almost like atoms, you know, that are just self-centered. And for Hobbes, you form a society just because life in the state of nature is not his phrase, but it becomes a common phrase later. The idea in this life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And so we work together in society just because the alternative is that we're going to kill each other.  But I think a much more realistic view is the view you get either from Confucians or Aristotelians. Aristotle famously says a line that sometimes translated man is by nature a political animal. I read Greek and I think the Greek would be better rendered as humans are by nature social animals. And Confucians agree with that. We are born into a society. We are creatures that would not survive as an evolutionary fact unless we were members of a community that worked together. And we are born with obligations to other people and other people because of the way in which we help them get obligations to us. And so we have to learn how to live together and to cooperate as a society. And I think at a fundamental level, I don't want to over-generalize because there's great diversity in both the Western and Eastern traditions. But I think there's a general way in which we tend to think of ourselves as self-actualizing, separate individuals in the West who are competing for finite resources. And in many parts of Asia, they recognize that no, human beings are part of a larger whole. And we're only going to survive if we learn to work together for common goals and see the common humanity in each other. And I, of course, trained in economics. And the way that Hobbes got translated into economics is that by the time I studied in the middle of the 20th century, a little bit after the middle, let's say, so I'm not that old, but whatever, the idea was you have your preferences, they're given, and they're yours, and they're basically egoistic. But two things wrong with it fundamentally, and they're interrelated, and they're related to this conversation. One is that, of course, egoism is assumed that you're out for yourself. But the other is, those, whatever you want, it's just given. There's no idea of cultivating your character or improving your character. So you are what you are. And that's Hobbes. For Hobbes, you're not only egoistic, but it's insatiable. It's implacable. You'll kill each other over this. You won't think twice about it because you can't help yourself.  You don't like them, but you don't even have an internal reflection. Whereas Mungse or Confucius or Aristotle or Plato or Socrates is saying, reflect on it. Think about it. You can be a better person. And that cultivation is a common feature, it seems to me, of these virtual ethicists. I think that's exactly right. And to me, one book that was really helpful was Aleister McIntyre's book After Virtue. And one of the things McIntyre points out, I thought this was very insightful, he said that with the rise of modern science, one of the things that early modern science rejected was the Aristotelian notion of potentials, which then achieved actuality. And so the notion of explaining things in terms of potential was mocked in terms of like a Virtu Dormitiva explanation. It's like trying to explain why opium puts you to sleep. Oh, because it has a Virtu Dormitiva. It has a sleep inducing power. Well, that explains nothing. And the rejection of Aristotelian potentials, at least at the beginning of modern science, was very productive. But at the same time, people rejected the notion of having a potential which can be actualized as a feature of human character. And so part of the weird genius of Hobbes was to think, well, if you have a political philosophy where your motivations are basically fixed, you can't transform yourself. And most people are kind of selfish to start out with anyway. So if you can't change that, what would the political implications be? That's what Hobbes was developing in the Leviathan. Exactly. And we're taught in the first day, the tastes are what they are, and don't ask questions about them. It's amazing. That's actually the first day of economics is that you have individuals, they have their preferences, you're not to question that. And now let's move on. So it's Hobbesian, although by the time Adam Smith got to it instead of a Leviathan, he said a world market economy would be the solvent in which these individual interests would operate. Yeah. And it's so strange because you think about it, we realize we can get better and we can change it so many things. You can get better at playing tennis. You can get better at being a connoisseur of appreciating wines. You can get better at playing poker, one of my favorite examples. Yeah, I want to come back to that by the way. There are, oops, sorry, just dropped my mic. There are all these things that we know with practice and learning we can get better at. So why not get better at being a person? Why can't we get better at that? Exactly. Now let me move on in the book because there are two more parts that I think are absolutely wonderful that I want to ask you about. One is you take on Marco Rubio says we need more welders and less philosophers. Any misstates the actual situation of the marketplace because you point out a lot of philosophy majors go on to become top business people, politicians and so forth. So it's a training. Yeah. Exactly. So I wanted to ask you about what you call the practical benefits of philosophy. And then towards the end you ask a basic question which I think our listeners would love to hear. So what is a philosopher? What do philosophers actually do? So tell me about welders and philosophers. Right. So in that chapter part of what I point out is that in fact philosophy majors go on to a wide variety of careers and my students have. I sometimes tell my students when they're trying to decide what to major in. I say well look what you majored in is going to be interesting first date conversation five years from now and that's about it. So don't worry what you major in. There are a lot of things major in what interests you. But in fact philosophy is very good at teaching what I sometimes call the three Rs of a liberal arts education reading, writing and reasoning. And so because what you get by studying philosophical text is skill at reading challenging works carefully and not having a superficial reading writing with precision and care and clarity and reasoning your way through complex problems all of which are extremely valuable tools in any career you pick. And that's why as I say philosophy majors go on to a variety of different careers. And among the people who've talked about the value of philosophy are figures as diverse as Admiral James Stockdale who said that studying philosophy helped him to survive being a prisoner of war in the Vietnam conflict and surviving that experience. And Martin Luther King Jr. who said that next to the Bible the most meaningful work to him was Plato's Republic and the ideas of Plato reverberate through his work. Interesting Malcolm X I only discovered recently also was a huge fan of Plato and he said that his school system failed to teach him how to read but he learned to read by getting a copy of a translation of Plato's Republic out of a local library and just reading it until he became the very eloquent spokesperson that he eventually became. By the way I came to adore Plato more and more although I consider myself more an Aristotelian than a Platonic follower but one nice thing for me about Plato is that like many philosophers and this is something that is not so well understood he was very practical interested in very practical issues really what should the laws be but he wanted to apply them just like Confucius did. Confucius was talking to policymakers and he wanted to affect the policy of the kingdoms of his time and Plato went to Syracuse in Sicily on three occasions it's said to try to advise the the rulers he failed all three times one of the times he was imprisoned and then had to escape from what would have been a forced slavery but I rather like the fact that Plato was a failed advisor because as an advisor myself if Plato can fail it kind of gives you a license to you're not always going to succeed in this business so I found that I found that very human for one thing but also it it's really true that so many of the philosophers not Kant who really was a thinker in Koningsburg and never left and you know operated by the daily schedule with precision it was said you could you could set your clock by the time that Kant walked by in the afternoon but the other philosophers so many of them were very down to earth practical would be politicians saying can't we do better can't the world be you know a little bit smarter than killing each other and so they're really trying to appeal to the the people in power to think better so that we actually get some better outcomes. Absolutely and occasionally people will give me a hard time and say well why do you have to bringing politics into the discussion of philosophy and I said philosophy's always been political Socrates was executed as a result of a show trial which was deeply connected with the politics and Athens at the time and as you point out Plato was deeply involved in politics and was trying to affect practical change so were Confucius and Mungza the the second sage of Confucianism they were very involved in practical political activities so this is always one can add Aristotle of course was the tutor of Alexander the great absolutely and also had to flee Athens in 323 BC when when Alexander died Aristotle was a Macedonian in in Greek Athens and said I'm not going to let Athens do again commit a second crime against philosophy exactly and he left in his last year and then and then died the following year but very political yeah and I was just to interject a fun book like a kind of not a you know a scarly book but a fun book that I think a lot of people would enjoy is The Murder of Professor Schlick which is about a member of the Vienna Circle who was assassinated by one of his students and the student got a very light sentence because he said and pardon my language but this is the case he made at his trial the students said I was my mind was destroyed by the Jewish philosophy whoa this professor was teaching me and the this professor was part of the Vienna Circle and I learned about the Vienna Circle as an extremely abstract epistemological movement right and the philosophy of science the positivism and exactly which it was but I learned from this book that the the logical positivists were very political and they saw their project as an effort to combat fascism yes by finding foundations for knowledge and showing that fascist movements were not based on real science and I was never taught that in graduate school how political the Vienna Circle was that that is fascinating and it comes to the final and wonderful chapter of this book which is what is philosophy you call it the way of Confucius and Socrates and I want to quote your definition in the end which is dialogue over important unsolved problems I love that by the way because one of the I think one of the points of that I have come to feel as a you know reading a lot of philosophy later in my career is it's philosophers are trying to solve really hard problems that that science has not given an answer to so there's no rigorous answer and so you can look back and say well why did they believe this and that but what they were trying to do was to posit solutions to very important issues that need practical solutions but where there isn't an off-the-shelf answer to these questions yeah exactly and I mean I think people sometimes forget that all of natural science grows out of philosophy and so when a but then when we figure out the right methodology for doing say physics or chemistry it spins off as a separate field and then what's left in philosophy are the problems that we consider important but we don't know that we don't agree on the methodology for resolving them so the best we can do is engage in a productive mutually respective dialogue and I point out and I think it's it fits exactly that and it's very important when the normal science breaks down what we call a paradigm change according to Thomas Kuhn and there's a new emergence of science immediately the scientists become philosophers again they have to because suddenly they're grappling with something that again they just can't categorize in an old language and they're grasping for a set of principles and an organization that doesn't yet exist and that's philosophy in its way it's a very hard challenge that's exactly right and the fact is that if you look at great scientists like Einstein Einstein said that he thought physicists should learn philosophy if they want to be great physicists and Einstein said he was indebted to Hume because reading Hume had given Einstein the insights that he needed to formulate general relativity Dalton referred back to the ancient Greek atomists in developing the basis of modern chemistry Galileo was open about the fact that he was inspired by Plato and Plato's model in the Thameas that through the mathematician of the universe it's that we that's the way in which we find the key to understanding physical phenomena and I think it's unfortunate that there's a trend and in some ways I think this goes back to Richard Feynman who was a great physicist and a real character as a person so people often kind of liked him but he was a real Philistine when it came to philosophy and I think too many American scientists that's their role model the kind of like just missile of the humanities and the dismissal of philosophy that you find in Feynman but you don't find in the really great physicists like Heisenberg and Einstein who are very clear or Bohr Niels Bohr who was very influenced by Daoist thought and has the Yin-Yang symbol on his coat of arms Niels Bohr one of the founders of quantum mechanics and of course we've all learned this year about Oppenheimer and his attraction to Bhagavad Gita and the Eastern philosophy exactly very very much now I need to get to the bottom line with you if I'm correct you are a champion poker player so is that correct by the way? I'm a winning poker player let's put it that way so I'm I keep very careful records I'm a long-term winning poker player yes. Wow now what is the relationship of philosophy and poker if there is one and I ask seriously because poker is not a game of building relations with the other it's a game of deception of bluff of trying to of course you need a theory of mind of the other but how do you see as a master philosopher and a master poker player what is the relationship between them? Well that's a great question I think one of the things you learn again it's an interesting similarity between the Aristotelian and the Confucian traditions is that true wisdom is not reducible to rule following so there are mathematical principles and rules in poker that are important but you're not going to be a winning player at least not in say no limit hold them if you just try to follow mathematical rules you have to learn a kind of wisdom that goes beyond simple rule following in order to be a success and that involves things like being a good read of the having a good read of the character of others a good situational awareness how is this different from other situations I've been in and so even things that might seem like absolute rules there are always going to be exceptions to them and for me that's a real insight that both Confucius and Aristotle had well I think your poker success as well as your intellectual not only success but the compelling compelling manifesto is going to bring a lot of people to philosophy it is really I can't tell you how grateful I am Brian to you for opening up a whole new world for me in in understanding and of course we have the joy I have the joy to be working with you on our Aristotle Confucius symposium which will have its third edition this year in Confucius is a birthplace of Shufu Shandong province this summer so that is absolutely wonderful now people listening are going to say what do I do next how do I get involved how do I learn of course they should get the manifesto but alongside it my recommendation would be to get your introduction to classical Chinese philosophy is that is that a good way to start I think so yes so this is my introduction to classical Chinese philosophy is it's written for a beginning undergraduate student so it does not assume a lot of background and then like as I say if you want to read some more PJ Ivanhoe and I have edited readings in classical Chinese philosophy Justin T. Walden I've edited readings in later Chinese philosophy both available from Hackett Publishing and so those are good places to learn more and get a sense of the great richness of this tradition and you have made a long reading list alongside the manifesto is that right oh yes thank you yeah on my website brianvan.com b-r-y-a-n-v-a-n-n-o-r-d-e-n.com I've got a bibliography which has readings on not just East Asian philosophy but South Asian philosophy Africana philosophy and indigenous American philosophy along with sample syllabi reading lists and other things people can use to self-teach and also teachers who would like to incorporate this into their undergraduate courses I'd be honored to have them use my syllabi and handouts and things well we're going to post all of this information we'll post the titles the links the links to your website I am absolutely sure many many listeners will get involved and become interested in and I'm sure deeply attracted to new thinkers that they have not studied before and and all of the wisdom and the richness of really bridging cultures which is something of unbelievable importance in a world today that is so fraught with tension but there's so much richness comes from appreciating the diversity and benefiting from the diversity so I really thank you for that to my mind your approach is not only intellectually inspiring but it is also very much peacemaking because it's finding a way for a word you use often dialogue and I think dialogue is the essence of mutual respect and cooperation so let me thank you brian for your wonderful work thank you for joining book club today thank you for this dialogue which is for me an ongoing dialogue with you and and the dialogue that you're opening up with these rich traditions to all the listeners thank you for joining book club with jeffrey sacks we've been with brian van Norden professor vassar taking back philosophy a multicultural manifesto thanks so much for joining in today bye bye thank you so much for all that you've done jeff i appreciate it great to be with you