How Fake is My Youtube Channel? Politics as a Performance Art.

just to recap what i'm hearing or what
i'm taking from this is that the let's say semi-abrasive persona that you reflect online some of the time is partially by design it's 100 by design go on yeah yeah i've addressed that several times with the word theatricality even in the title of the video i have talked about that um and like in a sense i'm almost flattered like if you think the reason why that video about jacqueline glenn is so hard-hitting is that i lack self-control and that's who i really am that really tells you how great an actor i am right like if that's how you read that video as opposed to you watch that video and you go this is a kid who grew up doing classes in the theater this is a kid who won an award for playwriting when he was 15 or something you know this is a kid who came out of the theater and who knows how to take a complex idea in politics or philosophy and then put together an on-camera performance that dramatizes it with no special effects no costume no script not much in the way of lighting or makeup you know and makes something dramatic and impactful out of it because that's what it is it is theatrical in the in the truest sense of the word if you were to ask the question how did this start how did i start having this design uh you know for what i do on youtube it is in large part a reaction against the university professors i've known i knew all these people who took the measure of intellect and imagination they had in life and went into a library and they lost their soul you know when they came out of the library it wasn't a man anymore it was a bureaucrat and it's this rejection of the real world reality of academia of who those professors were of the men they became reacting against all that um i came out of the gate on youtube yes with with this design as you put it that this is how i'm gonna broach these issues so that's why i come on the mic in the way that i do and i say hey you know you might think this controversy about an issue is meaningless but it's not it's really meaningful to me and here's why and you know some of my videos on an issue and i do think are really profound philosophically some of them i think are interesting politically and and what i've i actually i actually think i have something meaningful to say about abundancion and sure about aristotle communism veganism about a million other topics sometimes more self-evidently profound [Music] my [Music] what you're positing fundamentally would be that having a kind of emotionally neutral delivery would be advantageous in all situations or maybe just most situations and uh you know i think that has very real disadvantages also i understand your concern i understand your concern but i mean i think another another kind of criterion to bring to this would be to ask so this isn't the question you're asking this would be a stronger question to demand to me you could ask isil your theatrical behavior do you think it makes you more friends or makes you more enemies or like is this a good way to make friends so i just say that would be your same kind of objection but more forcefully stated and my answer to that is you know by being really honest with people i make the right friends because if i came on if i were phony or i really pretended to be someone i'm not then the people who might want to be friends with me they wouldn't be the right people so people get to see hey i'm really passionate about this issue i'm really indifferent to this other issue i'm pissed off with this or that and then you know the right people will respond to that in the right way and you know i i really accept that you know i can't be friends with everyone and that you know i'm going to alienate some people that way it's true but like to give a very real example i would have more friends if i pretended to be a socialist or even if i pretended to be a communist sympathizer or communist supporter i really would and you can look at veganism is very left-wing you know within my lifetime it would have been a as a winning strategy i could have been a phony far leftist of one kind or another whether i was an sjw or a socialist or whatever even now there's pressure on me to just be an uncritical supporter of bernie sanders and i'm not i don't really see how it can be coherent even like on a psychological level for me to dissimulate being someone other than i am and feeling something other than i am for the value of an abstract friendship that i don't i wouldn't value myself the right people people who look at that performance and can see my feeling and see what i feel what i feel as well as what i think the right people will become my friends and by being phony or being insincere i don't think i don't think that would lead to those positive outcomes as i say it's true if you took a more insincere approach you'd make more friends but they would be the wrong friends i suspect that if somehow it was the exact same information but just tweaked and this maybe doesn't matter we're just tweaked in a way where they don't get that vibe maybe that would be not a video of yours but maybe there would be more people because it just is there are people responding to your video game criticism yes yes so we covered that last time in the edited version i had screenshots of people writing into me saying how this changed their lives yes and i think one of the most telling examples of how this more raw authentic confrontational style of how effective it is is the people who saw a video like that once thought this can't be true i can't believe it this is wrong kind of slunk away for a few months and then came back a few months later and said wow you're right you know i've changed my whole life it opened my eyes but where they didn't accept it right away and by the way another great example of that was uh communism i have a video forgetting the title right now but it's it's something like can you deprogram a brainwashed communist and i'm doing this dialogue i'm talking directly to someone who is basically a brainwashed commerce i later learned more about her life because she talked to me more and during that dialogue during that discussion she's a hundred percent pro-communist 100 brainwashed not willing to take on any of the arguments i presented this very confrontational just like you're describing the same way i'm confrontational about video games saying look this is good this is evil let's face up to it so i'm really giving it to her raw and during that conversation it doesn't get to her later she heard the video back a few months go by she watched my other videos about the history of communism and marxism she starts doing some reading she starts going back like i think she took books off her shelf that she read years ago and it's like reconsidering how did she you know how did she kind of brainwash herself into this step by step she's looking back and she got in touch with me a couple months later she had completely lost faith in communism and it basically become a mainstream democratic person so yes it works yes it works and you know i've been confronting people across a huge range of ideologies you know not just christianity buddhism communism uh meat-eating but i mean also neo-nazis right-wingers and racists i've taken on those issues i've taken on black lives matter but have taken on a huge range of things and yes it gets results and yes i get emails letting me know that it works and here's the other thing i mean it's totally reasonable that you ask the question of would you reach more people what what kind of person do you want to reach right i've never been catering to the stupidest 80 of the audience i think it's debatable whether or not i'm even catering to the stupidest 90 of the audience i am only and exclusively catering to the people who have the most initiative the most intelligence the most ambition the most imagination like i'm really looking for the best of the best and those are people who are capable of hearing that argument whether it's about video games or communism whatever and maybe not in that moment thinking about it you know um all these debates where i've gotten so much pushback so much hatred and response where i stood up and said hey look if you're an atheist stop celebrating christmas you have no idea how many atheists made hate videos against me like how dare you say that i'm an atheist but i still celebrate christmas and i still go to church and i still like you know people come back to you in the stupid way but those are the stupidest people right that's that's the eighty percent or whatever it is of idiots and now the people who get in touch with you and say wow you know what man that video you made about the notre dame cathedral in paris i really had to think about it for a while at first i was defensive and now i realize you're really making an important point you really open my eyes like even my experience than veganism was like that sorry great example real quick my critique of gary yourofsky that was really hated people were shocked i said gary yourofsky is pro-violence and pro-terrorism and i'm anti-violence and anti-terrorism here are the facts right and i really laid it down yes i got emails saying how dare you you know why don't you just do the same kind of namby pamby content all the other vegans do on youtube let's just use navy bambi for the sake of simplicity why don't you just cheerlead what but yes i also got those emails from people saying wow this was invaluable some people said it opened their eyes to something they didn't know about other people said you know what after watching your video a couple times over a couple months i had to admit to myself this was something i did know about and i was choosing to ignore it they're like they were people writing me saying they've been to those vegan meetings that were endorsing violence and terrorism and they were lying to themselves about it you know they were telling themselves okay then they see this video that really confronts them and says no this is terrorism like face up like think about what you're making you're saying it's non-violence but it's not you know so no um you know if you say you're gonna alienate part of the audience by confronting the other part it's completely true it's completely reasonable criticism what percentage of chinese people are willing to listen to a critique of the communist government of china what percentage of americans are willing to listen to me really say that i think the american constitution is so awful that it should be completely torn up and rewritten that america should have a new constitution like my position as a dissident necessarily alienates me from a mass audience but i can still have a really meaningful relationship with a minority of the audience and you know one percent of the population of the united states of america would still be an enormous audience just to recap what i'm hearing or what i'm taking from this is that the let's say semi-abrasive persona that you reflect online some of the time is partially by design that fits into your your it's 100 by design go on yeah yeah yeah well i say partially because it seems like part of it is just you it's not like something you need to design it's just who you are and then there's an element of kind of channeling that in a particular way i gotta i gotta answer that this is a great statement we're gonna answer it as if it's a question um i'm also someone who went and researched buddhism and did humanitarian work in southeast asia right so it's 100 by design it's not if you were to ask the question how did this start how did i start having this design uh you know for what i do on youtube it is in large part a reaction against the university professors i've known i've known so many people with phds and they wrote books that like 10 people read i used to work in the non-fiction publishing industry also where we took the books and essays written by those people with phds and published them with books and you see the numbers you see how many copies a year sell and it's shockingly close to zero i knew all these people who took the measure of intellect and imagination they had in life and went into a library and they lost their soul you know when they came out of the library it wasn't a man anymore it was a bureaucrat i know those are the professors i've known in many many many different fields within buddhist philosophy and buddhist scholarship i knew these guys they'd never even been asia you know they're talking about cambodia they've never seen the poverty in cambodia they never saw the war they never and they lived through the war i mean these guys older than me you know like you know um you didn't go you didn't meet the you didn't do humanitarian work you also just didn't witness it or interview those people you know and it doesn't have to be cambodia it could be tibet it could be india it could be all these other things you know you say you're an historian but the history in your own life has unfolded and passed you by and you didn't make a difference and the saddest part of all is they pour years of their life into writing these essays and publishing these books that nobody cares about they don't make any difference in the world so you know it's a hundred percent by design it's taking the background i already had in the theater starting in high school and in some ways i was raised in a theatrical family someplace i grew up with the theater no the credits to get to but yeah i had a background in the theater had a background in performing arts including playwriting i'm an award-winning playwright player or not you know it took my experience with going to city hall with being involved in politics in real life face-to-face the theatricality of that the background had an ancient greek philosophy all this stuff and it's this rejection of the real world reality of academia of who those professors were of the men they became and how fruitless their efforts were that their struggles were for another even if they really did have expertise like even if they knew something meaningful from their their years of research that it goes nowhere doesn't matter so you know reacting against all that um i came out of the gate on youtube yes with with this design as you put it that this is how i'm gonna broach these issues so that's why i come on the mic in the way that i do and i say hey you know you might think this controversy about an issue is meaningless but it's not it's really meaningful to me and here's why and you know some of my videos on an issue and i do think are really profound philosophically some of them i think are addressing politically and and what i've i actually i actually think i have something meaningful to say abundian and sure about aristotle communism veganism about a million other topics uh sometimes more self-evidently have you ever experienced that like by being calm and relaxed and not using theatricality to prove your point that you will have nothing to lose so why do you need to use theatricality okay so i think there is something to lose i think there is a real disadvantage to not being theatrical and you see that in democracy in ancient times and still today so you know in american government in the american system of congress in the senate when people were arguing against cigarettes that cigarettes caused cancer they brought in heartbreaking examples of people whose lives have been destroyed by cigarettes and they stood there in front of congress and they broke down weeping this is a significant form of theatricality seat belts trying to get laws about seat belts uh even the debates legally about the side effects of certain medicines that bring in people whose lives have been destroyed or father whose daughter was killed and they give really passionate voice to that another infamous example by the way in putting together the case for the iraq war they brought in someone who had allegedly you know was talking about suffering in the iraq war and it was later revealed that this was to some extent a phony or misleading instance there just within modern american politics the vietnam war iraq war and so on the theatricality is a really significant part of democracy now could i come on youtube and talk about vegan activism in a completely dispassionate or even robotic way i could it's a choice not to could i talk about my own divorce or my own personal life in a dispatcher but i could it's a choice not to so you know i'm just saying i'm someone who's consciously aware of that and there's a certain level of theatricality in my in my youtube videos and there is in real life also i would i would say as a very real example that many people in here will have experienced what if you are begging with a police officer or a border guard someone who has real direct power over your power of life and death and power to [ __ ] up your life what if you have to convince someone in that position to do the right thing or the truth being robotic or dispassionate or something or not expressing your case emotionally is not is not in your favor so i think theatricality is is an important part of public life uh including youtube and including you know formal democracy and informal situations worldwide sure the other consideration is the audience what the performance means for the audience i i don't think living i'm gonna just one more sentence i don't think living a lie is good for me i don't think it's good for him and i don't think it's good for the audience either i don't i think that authenticity and really sharing how you feel about things i think is good for me is good for him and is good for the audience that's how i honestly feel that