From 1:07:03 to 1:11:54. I wanted a transcript I could analyse, because they were clearly being tactful and avoiding mentioning specific beliefs that had changed, and so I made one myself. It’s not perfect though. I left out a lot of filler words (like um) and times they repeated words to make it easier to read.
Source: https://soundcloud.com/earbiscuits/eb-145
Rhett: “So far in my life the way that I view the world has gone through very drastic upheavals and changes. I’m less certain about a whole host of things than I ever was when I was 20 years old. When I was 20 I had just a very particular understanding of so many things and I was so sure that I was right. I remember sitting around and actually having the thought of that I pretty much I think I know the right thing about the most important things.”
Link: “Yeah, I was there for that.”
Rhett: “I was like, I think I understand the basics of the most important truths of the universe. That’s a very fortunate position to be in, I said to myself. I did not actually say this out loud, but I remember having thoughts like that. And then in over the past 20 years I look back at that 20 year old and I’m like, what an idiot, you know?”
Link: “Let’s not even keep it in the 20′s, because I’ll say it’s something that it’s part of both our experiences, it’s not something that just shortly after that we’ve checked out of. It’s been quite a process between 20 and 40.”
Rhett: “Yeah, it continues to this day. That’s a weird place to be, to feel like you are entering into your forties. Now, there is a lot of stability in my life, you know with even the soft of unpredictable nature of what we do as a career. There is a lot of stability in what we’ve kind of built up, and that stability has increased exponentially just in the past 5 years. In a way that it did not. There was a lot of uncertainty, there is still a whole lot of uncertainty, but there is a reasonable certainty that we’re going to be OK. We don’t know exactly what our job is going to look like 5 years from now, but probably going to be OK. Probably not going to be like thumbing down the road. You know what I mean?
Link: “Unless it makes for a good video or...”
Rhett: “...as a character. But I’ve never been less certain about a lot of different things and more open to like different peoples perspectives and like can hear somebody say something and be like ah that’s a good point, ah that’s a good point as well. This is difficult to parse. And I think that in some ways that I think that this next generation, like our kids, are growing up in the midst of that. We kind of grew up in a place where you were not exposed to anything that challenged your worldview and it was very tight and it was very tidy. And then we were this generation that got introduced through the Internet to all kinds of different thoughts about different things and it began to kinda change the way that we thought about that foundation. But I think that our children” (Link cuts him off)
Link: “Which made our initial reaction to it something that was more about maintaining the tidiness in the face of the Internet, basically.”
Rhett (with Link joining in): “Batten down the hatches”
Link continues: ‘Whereas our kids, you know,”
Rhett: “There are no hatches.”
Link continues: “when you grow up in an environment where there is no way not to be exposed to almost everything on Earth just by virtue of the Internet. As much as you know you put up healthy boundaries and things like that. Yeah absolutely, it’s a different world. Oh he sounds old. But it’s uh, what are you getting at? Maybe you are getting at...”
Rhett: “I’m just saying it’s another observation I’ve made about myself.”
Link: “...The one thing we can have, that a 20 year old poker player can’t have, is wisdom. Now, you don’t automatically have it, and I’m not saying that we have it but I aspire to that, and that is the advantage that old farts can have, right?”
Rhett: “Yeah, and I’m also trying to fight cynicism, actively.”
