Tonight, we went out to Jersey to see Trevor Noah perform live at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. It was a bleak, rainy, and windy day, so although Chris arrived pretty much soaking (I had my trusty long rain coat, rain boots, and umbrella), we both enjoyed the show a lot.

It’s hard not to enjoy a comedy show when the comedian is coming from South Africa to the U.S. and has a completely different perspective on everything from government to racism to “what is considered a normal experience.” He joked about the time when he first moved to the U.S., specifically to Los Angeles, and his roommate, who is American, asked him if he wanted to go out to get tacos. Trevor had no idea what tacos were, and his roommate was in shock, so much in shock that he repeatedly kept asking him, “You’ve never had a taco? You seriously have never, ever had a taco?” No, dude, he hadn’t. “You seriously cannot understand when other people have had a different life experience than you?” Trevor asked us, half serious and half joking. I get what he means, though, and I think we’re all at least a little guilty of that.

Another point he made during the show that resonated with me was when he expressed frustration at how people on the right like to say, “I don’t see color,” when it comes to different people’s skin color and ethnicity. I always wanted to grind my teeth when I’d see or hear that in the news by people on Fox News or young blonde conservatives like Tomi Lahren. “So, you don’t see colors when you reach the traffic light?” he responded. But the main point really was this: “There’s nothing wrong with seeing color. It’s about how you treat color.”

Well, there it is.

Tonight, we had dinner with one of Chris’s friends, who is also his colleague and someone who attended our wedding. On average in the last three years, although the two of them get along very well, I’ve only seen him three times, so on average once every year. Last year, it was at our wedding! So I was excited to see him again and be exposed to his more pronounced Australian accent (I guess everyone’s Australian accent is more pronounced than Chris’s at this point…), as well as to his many opinions and recent life developments.

Chris’s friend has a lot in common with Chris; both are Australian who have relocated to the U.S. for work; both are extremely ambitious and confident, have intense work travel schedules that take them both all over the world, and have a huge passion for technology; both are also extremely opinionated, political, and charismatic; they both love a heated (but intellectually stimulating) debate. It doesn’t happen very often, but very occasionally in life you meet those people who, when they engage with you, they make constant eye contact with you and draw you into their conversation seamlessly, and make it feel as though you’re the most important person in the room. This friend is one of those people. He’s like Barack Obama in that way based on what I’ve read about how engaging our former and missed president is.

We had dinner at a cozy restaurant in West Village, followed by a very long night cap at a nearby watering hole that served $16 cocktails flecked with gold, leaving real gold flakes on all our lips by the end of the night. Chris’s friend brought a female friend along, and the four of us talked about everything from cooking to travel to politics to more politics to a relationship breaking down to theater and even dogs. Topics were on everything from “how do we define ‘snobby’ when we are discussing food?” to “what does it actually mean to be ‘racist’?” to “am I really being an asshole by doing X action?” What always gets me excited when I am around people like this friend is that he never shies away from the controversial or the offensive; again, he’s like Chris in that way. Except when he and Chris are in the same room, they will battle it out, and it’s so stimulating for me to watch the debate and occasionally interject and see others, like our new friend at the table, participate, as well. I rarely get these meals where extremely smart and opinionated people put their personal feelings aside and debate for the sake of pushing intellectual curiosity and thoughtfulness and don’t feel like they’re going to make the other side cry or even cry themselves. These conversations are really important to have. It helps with understanding better those we care about, and it allows us an opportunity to explore others’ opinions, which in most of these cases, are really just extensions or stretches of what we already think (because frankly, none of us here are conservative or rooting for the end of women’s birth control or right to choose, or for the breakdown of Meals on Wheels, and none of us believe that “color” doesn’t exist). It did get to a point in the night where our new friend said she had to take a break from even listening to the debate because “sometimes some nights, you just want to go out and have fun and enjoy yourself, and not discuss politics or question whether we’re really all racist bitches!”  It’s a fair point, but it’s sad when there’s zero nights when you and your friends can have that opportunity to debate and be provocative and push buttons. If you never expose your vulnerable side, you will never truly know another person. And in turn s/he will never know you.

It was a rich and fulfilling evening.

After his performance last night, Ronny stuck around and greeted guests to thank them for coming. The venue was quite small, so it was easy to approach him and chat for a bit. I’m always so surprised when I find that people who perform for a living in front of crowds of hundreds or thousands of people are shy in real life. They’re happy to have millions of eyeballs watch and critique their every word, but when one-on-one time comes, they almost clam up. That’s kind of how Ronny was. I got behind another couple to say hi to him while Chris was paying the tab, and he seemed almost embarrassed that I wanted to talk him to him beyond just saying thank you. The more questions I asked and the more I wanted to engage with him on everything from his time in Australia to Malaysian food outside of Malaysia and Singapore, he seemed more and more awkward. It was kind of cute. There’s no way I’d ever be able to do what he does for a living; it’s even more exciting that he’s an Asian comedian in a white/black dominated comedy world.

We’re all biased. We all have our self interests, the things that make us feel self-righteous. We all judge regardless of what we say. But what always throws me off is when people are so marred by their own biases and disgust for humankind that they cannot see the positives in the world.

We were at drinks late tonight with two of our friends, and one of them goes off politically about welfare like unemployment insurance, educational funds for army veterans, and Medicare. Basically, the gist is that he is implying we’re all naive to think that these are truly “benefits.” “Do you really think that the government provides all of these things to us to really ‘benefit’ us? They do it because people protested and revolted and demanded this stuff, otherwise they’d burn everything down and kill others!”

Well, no one said that people never protested to demand their rights. Hello, Civil Rights Movement and women in the late 1800s and early 1900s demanding their right to vote, which was denied to them merely because of their vaginas. After visiting the Civil Rights National Museum twice, I realized that JFK probably gets far more credit for being supportive of civil rights and black people in general than what he really deserves; it was purely political, unlike what they taught us in school. JFK was never going to participate in any “Black Lives Matter” type protest for sure. But at the end of the day, the origin or the reason for these laws or benefits is irrelevant to what positive benefits they provided to people then and now. Was my friend going to reject or deny taking his unemployment insurance when he was between jobs, or was my mother, who looks at the world just like he does and thinks “the government doesn’t give a damn about anyone,” NOT going to take advantage of Medicare and her monthly social security payments? Of course not.

It’s always fun to see people enjoy their “welfare” benefits but complain that the government “doesn’t give a shit” about anyone. Maybe they don’t really care about you, but you still get things from them. Don’t be the person who blindly and happily takes but doesn’t want to give a single thing in return, even if what you are “giving” is merely a little credit or one kind word.

In yesterday’s world, we applied to hundreds of jobs (or at least, I did), and if we were lucky, we’d hear back from maybe 10-20 of them. Companies would make you wait and squirm during interviews, asking you one question after another in an attempt to stump you or make you feel stupid. Then, after whatever phone or in-person interview, the worst of the worst ones wouldn’t even get back to you to let you know they turned you down until two to three months later. Those days really sucked.

Today, there’s LinkedIn for recruiters, internal and external, to reach out to you to ask you if you want to work for them. Recruiters are incentivized to find the best talent for their companies, and many will stop at nothing. I had one person I met say that a recruiter reached out three times, acknowledging all the previous outreach, until he finally responded to her and took her up on the interview request. I’ve had internal recruiters at some of the most prestigious technology companies in the world keep me in their back pocket in the event that a relevant opening comes up that might be to my liking.

And what really shocked me today was when I went in for an interview just past a normal lunch hour, and the interviewer offered to buy me lunch. You want to buy me lunch? Really? Can we be friends now? You’re kind of amazing even for just offering. Thanks so much, but I ate before coming. What a sweetie.

And then later tonight, to set up another interview with another company, they offered to provide a ride to and from their office because “we want you to arrive to your interview stress free!”

I told my friend this, and he responded, “Who is this — Exxon or Goldman Sachs?”

Neither, dude. Neither.