Ian Hu

2How you doing, Pulat? Happy to be here.

4Practicing estate law these days. You never know what I'm going to be practicing next, I guess. But that's what I'm up to.

6Yeah, yeah, I did sort of my first career in philosophy. I thought I was going to be a prof and I studied a master's. I was halfway through my PhD, Albert dissertation, and I guess one that you could say one day I was, you know, going to bed and I was thinking to myself, I'm never gonna be able to get a decent job and make a good living. And so It finally dawned on me that, you know, less than 50% of PhD grads end up with, with a tenure job in a good university. And I was just like, I can't do this. So that's—

8Yeah. Yeah.

10Yeah, I did my undergrad, did my master's.

12Western.

14I did my master's at U of T. It's an interesting story. I wanted to do it so bad, and the first time I applied to like 10 schools, all 10 rejected me. So the next time around, I applied to 20 schools and I got into one, which is U of T. So I went into U of T for master's, and again for PhD, I applied to like 40 places and I had 2 or 3 offers.

16For sure, I'm a huge fan of the existentialists: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, those folks, and wanted to study those guys. And in fact, one of my offers was to study under Meryl Westphal, who was then a very famous Kierkegaard philosopher. So that's what I wanted to do, that or ethics. And so I ultimately did choose to go to Rice to study ethics.

18in Texas? Yeah,

20No, I finished my master's at U of T and then I went to Rice for PhD.

22I thought you

244 years into my PhD program, 10 years in philosophy.

26Well, you know, he's Danish. I don't think I'm going to be able to pronounce it properly either. But I like him a lot because he's I think he has a deep understanding about what it means to have faith or to be religious. And for him, the main thing that he says is if you're gonna have faith in a God, you have to— and if you're gonna take it seriously, you have to have doubt. Anyone has to have doubt. To believe in someone that you don't see and someone that doesn't communicate with you in the typical ways and someone that supposedly is looking after your best interests in a world where there is evil. To have all of this, you got to have doubt.

27And the cool thing about faith is that even though you have doubt, you still believe. That's what makes it faith. In other words, it would be naive to say, I don't have any doubt that God exists, and I have faith, I have complete faith. That just doesn't make sense for Kierkegaard. And I agree with that. So that's one thing that really struck with me. And one of his favorite phrases is subjectivity is truth, which I also deeply agree with, namely to say, which, you know, namely that What counts is your relationship with God, or to put it another way, your relationship with people, your relationship with things, and your relationship with the world. And you got to understand that first before you, you go and think about other things.

29That's exactly what it means.

31Yeah, I think the answer to that is subjectivity is truth. It means it's true for you and nothing else counts when you're talking about yourself. It just, it just doesn't. And if the world treats you in a certain way and, and, and let's say, you know, we, we like to think about objective truth, right? Especially in law.

33Yeah. I mean, what he says isn't a philosophy of law, you know, it's a philosophy of living for, for each of us as individuals. It's a, I think of it as advice on living.

35Subjectivity is truth. Means you have to absorb things and understand that whatever someone's relationship is with you, it's up to you to dictate that. It's up to you to define, to think about it, to understand it, to conceptualize it. That's your relationship and yours alone. So for example, your relationship with— my relationship with you, Pulat, my relationship with God, my relationship with, with, with my wife. Those are one-on-one relationships which nobody can define and nobody can conceptualize other than me. And I think that's, that's what I take from Kierkegaard.

37Well, I think it's exactly this kind of thinking that led from Kierkegaard to Hegel. Hegel was a huge— he's essentially the anti-Kierkegaard. And he looked at Kierkegaard with the same questions that you had, and he said, look, there's obviously some objective truth out there that— or intersubjectivity is what Hegel calls it, right? And it's the intersubjectivity that comes into play. And another thing that Hegel says is there's an interplay between these two ways of living, right? Yes, on the one hand, we all understand as individuals these are unique relationships that we, we have that only we understand. Nobody can go into our heads. But on the other hand, it's also clear there are many other individuals who are of the exact same mindset, and that's intersubjectivity.

38And so in this intersubjective world is how we, you know, we come to create civilization.

40Yes.

43Yeah, I say that to litigators in regards to the anchoring effect. Right. Which is the— someone throws a number at you and that number is in your head and you're stuck with that number. So if you want to settle something for, you know, a million dollars, and you say to the opposing lawyer, I want to sell this for $2 million, the opposing lawyer is just going to say whatever number he's thinking of next is going to be based on that $2 million. And so you're going to get to your $1 million. But if your first number is $1.1 million, your lawyer's next number is based on that, and he's going to not come potentially as high.

44That's just the way it works for anchoring effect. No, so it's true. Our perceptions are colored by these physical brains we have.

47Racialized I define racialized as, as self-identifying yourself in a group that, that's racially discriminated historically.

49I think most people consider it to be subjective in the sense that you have to identify yourself and put yourself in that, in that group. There might be people For example, I consider Chinese or myself to be racialized, but that doesn't mean that someone else might consider themselves to be racialized.

51Exactly.

53yeah, racialized only, it only applies to the historical treatment and frankly the present treatment of certain groups.

55No, I think I agree with you. I think it is a movement. It's clear and it's becoming an industry. So,

57Yeah.

59it wasn't just in America, it was throughout the world in the '60s.

61You know, that's a terrific question, and I got to say, you're spreading, you're at the edges of my knowledge, Pulat. We're pushing

63We are. Because look, we, you and I and people watching this probably live in North America, right? This is the world that we know. But we all, but there's no question, you know, I went to China a couple years ago where, and that's where I was born. And it's clear that there's, there are racialized people there too. And of course, being racialized depends on the country that you're in. If you're Chinese in China, you're not historically discriminated against.

65You might look at other, other native peoples in China who are, or people of other groups. And same thing in India, right? If you're in, if you're from India then, and you're an Indian person, then you're not discriminated against. But if you're, if you're not historically discriminated, but if you come to North America, I think you can count yourself as racialized. So that's— it depends, of course, on the context.

67It is. It is.

69It's Western, and especially right now, it's powered by the Black Lives Matter movement. That's the true push behind it.

71Yeah, it's certainly an interesting way to look at it. I mean, slavery is, I think, the— yes, I mean, there's the foreigner coming into the native land and displacing the natives. Right. That's the story you're telling. But there's also slavery, which is bringing over Black people from Africa and enslaving them. And I think that is just as hard to swallow. America has a double whammy, right? We've got the foreigner coming into the native lands and displacing the people that live here, the indigenous.

73And you've got slavery, which is an incredible, unacceptable way of living that was around for decades, many, many decades, and which built America. You know, Thomas Piketty says— does an analysis of this in his book Capital in the 21st Century. And he basically says, look, you want to know one of the reasons why America built so, so much wealth so quickly? This is how. This is why. And when we talk about systemic racism and its historical roots, right, there's violence, there's economic inequality, and so on. That in the, you know, 100, 200 years since then. I think the problem now, the real problem now, is the growing inequality. For me, the economic inequality is the real problem.

74And because I ask myself, what would it be like if everyone had equal wealth, equal income. Let's just hypothetically think like that, right? Or if there's the same number of people in this income bracket and this bracket in the various racialized groups, I think it would be hard to say that there's a problem then, right?

76Yeah, I think that that's the main issue. But yes, of course, there's the political problem. There's no political power. There's, there's the violence that's happening now and before. There's the fact that, you know, more Black people are incarcerated now than any other race or racialized group, and so on. And those, those are huge problems too. But I would love to see the economic problem solved, and I, and education. And I feel like that those Those are the— would put a big solve on things.

78You know, one of the things that occurred to me when I read Piketty, and I can't believe it took me 43 years to understand this, I'm 42 years old now. Is philosophy and literature and writing takes place in certain eras and takes place and it's typically written by people in certain income and wealth brackets. And so it may not be surprising that they don't have anything to say about such things because they were not in the discriminated or suffering classes, you know, they weren't thinking about those things. And so Kierkegaard, I don't think he would have much to say except that he did value intersubjectivity. And so I would say, how are you going to connect authentically with people if you have all this other stuff that's standing in the way?

80Well, I'm not a huge fan of the contemporary analytic philosophers for the reason that there's a lot of nitpicking over the language and logic, and sometimes you get lost between semantics and meaning. So I'd I don't find that, and I don't find that the questions they ask about language and intentionality and so on have a big practical role to play in how we live our lives. And so that's why I like the existentialists. They give you a formula to live your life. The formula, by the way, is simple. For Kierkegaard, your soul is infinite. You live in a finite world, but because you are undefined, you can be anything you want at any time.

81That's what Kierkegaard says. That's what Sartre says, but in a different way. That's what Nietzsche says when he says you know what is it? Like, life has no meaning or something.

83that's what they all say. And it gives you the freedom then to create yourself.

85Think about how we— sorry, Pulat, I know you're about to go on an amazing thread there. I shouldn't have interrupted you. I was just gonna say, look, I'm sorry, I'm just gonna say, think about how people tend to identify themselves, right? Who am I? Well, who are my favorite musicians? What do I like to listen to? What are my favorite movies? What do I like to wear? What's my— what car do I like? What do I like to— where do I want to live? Are those really questions that give us meaning? Are those really questions that identify you as a human being? But— and I would say the answer is no. But they are identifiers in terms of where you are in society.

86They are identifiers in terms of your socioeconomic class, in terms of what, you know, the, the where you stand in the world and how you spend your money in the world. That's

88job. Your job doesn't matter.

90Yeah, so the path of least resistance just means it's the path that society puts us into, right? In other words, it is extremely hard to do, to do something else, right? It is what our parents expect of us, what our neighbors expect of us, our friends, our co-workers. You know, if you go to university, if you do well in university, all your friends are going to have similar desires, right? They want to go to law school, they want to build wealth, They want to have high income, or to put it another way, they want to go on great vacations and stick them on Instagram, right? They want to, they want to put their kids in private school.

91All of this is, is what is expected of whatever socioeconomic standing where we happen to be in. And then on top of that, the music that we listen to, what society celebrates, and on top of that, what the world and governments spend money on. You know, I just wrote a post on Slaw the other day. We spend money on big buildings downtown, we spend money on Starbucks, we spend money on Netflix, and we spend money on the police, and we spend very, very little on the courts. So where does justice lie in society's value system? If you just looked at the budget of any government and you looked at how much goes to defense and how much goes to business and so on and how much goes to justice, you'll see that justice doesn't take a huge huge role, right?

92In other words, don't think— you don't need to think and ask yourself or guess how important something is to you. You look at where you spend your money on, right? And I think people— and I think that's true of the government, it's true of ourselves too. And if you look at your own finances and you think, oh, I spend wisely, You know, I spend only on things that I need, but then you, you sit down and you do an analysis of the last 12 months of your spending life and you have spent half your money on food and clothes and shoes. You need to think then about what, about what your perception of yourself is and what the reality is.

93So I don't know where I was heading with that, but yeah,

95You want to do it exactly. You want to do it Intentionally, if you're going to go on deliberately, deliberately, exactly. If you're going to spend money on this and that, if you're going to spend your time doing things, it's something that you have chosen to do, that you are taking responsibility to do, right? If instead you're just going with, with the flow and you're doing it because this puts food on your table and so on. Well, There are many ways to put food on your table. This is the path that you chose, right? And if you don't do that, then you're just according to existentialists, you're not living a life with true meaning and authenticity.

97Yeah, yeah. So yeah, we deal with end of life and we deal with the repercussions, right? One thing that, that, that I've, I've been realizing as I do this is you know what, you know what, what stops What, what prevents estate litigation? It's not a good will. A well-written will doesn't do the trick. A good family prevents estate litigation, right? The law, the law is the law, whatever. But you could have a terrible will, but nobody would, nobody would litigate it if the family gets along.

99You know.

101it's— and families get along badly in so many ways. It reminds me— oh, what's that book? Is it Dickens? Every family is the same but breaks down?

103Is that— that's Karenina. Yeah,

105what a great beginning to book, by the way.

107these are all like— unhappy families are different.

109Yes.

111Oh, okay.

114Yeah. You know, the longer I do estates, the more, you know, every practice here has super interesting things that boggle the mind, right? So I'll tell you one just interesting thing that I've been— that I've done recently. The Public Guardian and Trustee, you know, they, they have a duty to the public. And so one of the things they do is when they get reports that someone is potentially incapable of managing their finances, or incapable of managing themselves, they have to investigate. And And sometimes they do an investigation and they find that, you know, they think that someone has no capacity, right? So they're going to start an application to take over this person's finances and this person's ability to take care of him or herself, which is huge, right?

116The government is going to step in and take over your life. Isn't that a scary thought? The PGT can do that. And so one of the things they have to do is they have to look for a lawyer for that person if that person can't, can't do it. So I got a call from the PGT, and, and I did a case. And it's funny because this person had, had no, no money, okay, or had very little money is how I would put it. And the funny thing is this: If I, if I won, then my client is deemed capable and my client goes in and lives their life, okay, and disappears, hopefully. And my client, I said I will send my client a bill and I won't get paid in all likelihood, right?

118If I lose, if I lose, the PGT seizes the assets and pays off the debts, of which one of them is my bill. So it's a really strange situation. Here I was fighting for the capacity for my client, and my self-interest in this case would be to lose, right? So that's a strange, strange situation for a lawyer to be in. You

120Yes, yes.

122But And I was a lawyer for a long time, so yeah, I'm familiar with that.

124Yeah.

126Exactly.

128Yes,

130that gets messy now because of after the event insurance. So if the lawyer is insured,

132the lawyer loses, the lawyer can collect the insurance. But if the— if the lawyer tries to win or tries to settle for a very small amount that doesn't cover the disbursements, then the lawyer has actually lost, even though the client has not

134Yeah.

136Yeah.

138Well, that's exactly right. I mean, we have certain wide freedoms up to a point, you know. But let me say, we have the freedom to go into as much depth as we want, right? The state can't interfere with that. Right? Now, if you declare bankruptcy, fine, then the state comes in. But, but there's a difference between capacity and, and, and freedom, right? If you have— if you lack capacity, then the state will come in and take your stuff. But, but if you have capacity, you're free to do as many stupid things as you want. So long as it's not within the bounds of the rules, within the bounds of law. So, so the state really is just concerned about capacity, not about doing stupid things, at least in this instance.

139The PGT is concerned about just capacity.

141Exactly. The state— I guess what we're really asking is, to what extent does the state protect these vulnerable people, right?

143And then when you think about that, you have to ask, well, how hard and how often should the state be looking for vulnerable people? And then you get into what defines a vulnerable person, because if that's a broad definition, it covers you and me. That would upset us, right? So it's a very difficult line to throw.

145For adults, yeah.

147Yeah. Children are vulnerable by definition.

149Minors. So the PGT has a harder, harder job to do because they have to assess who is vulnerable. And in doing that, they're looking at medical reports and community reports. And all that kind of thing.

151I have no idea. I have no idea.

153But I would say with all justice-related things, probably not as well-funded as they could be.

155Thanks, Pulat. Well, for your viewers, my property is probably the same price as your property or anyone else's property, except I'm in a rural environment, right?

157Yeah, or less. Actually, I'm sure it's less than Toronto properties. That's why I moved out here. You know, the quality standard of living is is amazing, and you don't have to be stressed over your finances even though you may not make as much.

159Well, for us, it's the outdoors. So I—

161man, dude, in the winter I snowboard. And Hardwood Hills, where they do cross-country skiing, is 15 minutes away. I do that. I can cross-country ski on the lake downtown, which is 10 minutes away when it ices over, you know. I can go mountain biking, you know, 10 minutes away that way. And I've got space where my kids can grow up. And we get along with our neighbors, probably because they're farther away. We're not all squished together.

163I

165Yeah. And so I think that those are pluses, you know. Some of the minuses, it's, you know, there isn't as much diversity out here. But at the same time, there isn't as much tension because there's less diversity. So, you know, there's pluses and minuses, but I would like to give my children exposure to every aspect of life, which is why we travel and why, you know, we volunteer and do things. But there's pluses and minuses for, for me, the huge plus is just being able to live a less stressful life.

167I think you have to think about, about what you want to do in life. And I don't mean now, but I mean what you want to achieve. Do you want to achieve financial independence? If so, then you got to start educating yourself and taking steps toward that. Do you want to become a partner? If you really want to become a partner, you need to take steps toward that. And that doesn't mean showing up to work every day from 9 to 5 or 9 to 9 and doing a good job. That means talking to partners, figuring out what they do, asking them what it takes to get there, and achieving it. So you have to find, you have to set these goals, and then you have to find out how to achieve those goals, and then you got to do them every single day.

168And doing something every day is hard. If you want to be a Rainmaker, you're probably going to be having lunch every day with different lawyers or people in the community. You're probably writing emails every day. You're probably thinking about marketing and rainmaking every single day. And that is hard to do if you want to. And that's true of, I think, everything. If you want to build wealth, then you have to be frugal every day, which means you're not spending time on amazon.com or amazon.ca. You're not, you know, going shopping when you're bored. You're going to do something else that takes less money or that's less tempting, which means you're not on Instagram and you're not on Facebook and so on.

169You have to resist those things every day at every moment. And you have to find habits that support that goal. If your goal is to be healthy, that means that you're going to the supermarket every day and you're buying and you're, and you're making, you're cooking your own foods every day. You're not going out. All of these things have, have required commitment on a second-to-second basis. And it's, and God knows it's extremely hard to do all of them, right? Because I want to do that. I want to be healthy. I want to, I want to be financially independent, which is why I'm using these as examples, you know? But guess what? If at the same time I want to be a Rainmaker and I'm taking people out to lunch, every day, go out to dinner every day.

170Well, I'm not cooking for myself on those meals, right? So it's going to be hard for me to watch my weight. There's some trade-off has to be done here, but, but I think the goal is that the key thing is to understand your goals what the trade-offs are, accept those trade-offs, and, and go, go for it. Malcolm Gladwell has a podcast which he has one episode which he calls his 12 Rules of Life, you know, named after I forget his name,

172Jordan Peterson. And Gladwell says in his podcast he only has one rule of life, and his one rule is to be disagreeable. In other words, not to let other people's opinions or other people's values infringe on your values.

174Yeah.

176Oh, it's amazing. Thank you very much, Pulat. I hope people enjoy this.

178Welcome. You too.